lac4ygal

she/her┃writer enha ot7

[lac4ygal]

✦ LACEY.EXE LOADING...

✧. 𝕞𝕒𝕕𝕖 𝕠𝕗 𝕘𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣, 𝕡𝕝𝕒𝕪𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕤, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕓𝕒𝕕 𝕕𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕤𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤. ›. taglist is full

[lac4ygal]

Hi, i just wanted to tell u that ur my fav fanfic writer. The way u write each Enhypen member was truly devastating. I love the way u portray jungwon especially. So I just want u to know that ur my biggest idol and I'm ur biggest supporter. Love ur fanficz and pls never stop writing them. I hope this letter reaches u at the right time and i hope u reply to it. The moon will remember the moment u found this letter because u deserve to be remembered. Love u

THIS IS SO CUTIE I LOVE U! thank you for sending me this it actually has made my whole day and I’ve been feeling so stressed revelry so having someone reach out and send this is so meaningful🥰🥰 if you’re okay with not being anonymous I would love to mutals!! thank you for sprinting my work ILY ILY ILY

[lac4ygal]

⭒ THE MERCY OF FALLEN THINGS ≛ nm.r

NISHIMURA RIKI fell from heaven for refusing to destroy someone undeserving and ends up bleeding out on a Nevada trail in 1878 where you find him and bring him home to the only danger you’ve ever known. He isn’t a man — not exactly — and the scars on his back are proof of it. He is not a man known to the love of humans but his protective instinct for you is enough to love for a lifetime

𖤍 parings… Nishimura Riki x Female Reader

Fallen Angel AU | Historical Fiction | Slow Burn | Romance | Angst with Happy Ending | Dark Themes | Supernatural

𖤍 wc. 14.5k

[ warnings… depictions of domestic abuse, parental abuse, violence, character death, blood, period-accurate misogyny, supernatural elements, kissing, skinship, themes of grief and isolation,, emotional distress, ANGST with happy ending ]

🫕 angst and a Sunday evening go hand in hand, I’m working on kiss and tell part two I’m so sorry i didn’t get it finished for last week but exams have been consuming me and yeah! this has been in my drafts for like ages and it’s very angsty but a happy ending! thanks for supporting my work yall ily pls enjoy🫰

The order came the way all orders did — not in words, not in sound, but in the particular quality of the light. A shift in the gold of it. A direction embedded in the warmth the way iron is embedded in rock — not placed there, not added, but of it, native and irrefutable. He had felt it ten thousand times before, or a hundred thousand, or a number that made both figures meaningless. The light moved and he moved with it. That was the whole of his existence, distilled: the light moved, and he followed.

He had never questioned it. That was the truth he would turn over later, in the long unmeasured dark of his falling — that he had never, in all that incomprehensible span of time, questioned. Not once. He had gone where he was sent. He had done what was asked. He had been, above all and before all, obedient.

But he had also watched. That was his particular nature, the quality that distinguished him from the others, though he had never been told as much — he simply knew it the way he knew the names of stars. He watched. He learned the specific tremor of a human hand when fear moved through it. He learned the sound grief made when a person believed themselves entirely alone — that low, animal register, nothing like the weeping done for an audience. He had watched ten thousand years of human life unspool beneath him like a river seen from a very great height, and he had catalogued it all, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. It was not his place to feel. It was his place to serve.

The man they sent him to destroy was kneeling in a field of winter wheat. Praying. Of all the things he might have been doing in the last moments of his life — praying, hands laced together on his thighs so tightly the knuckles had gone the colour of bone, head bowed, lips moving in the particular quiet rhythm of a man who had done this every morning of his life and intended to go on doing it.

Praying to the very God who had signed his death. Because he did not know. He could not have known. The sin assigned to him was not a sin he had chosen — it was a circumstance, a thing that had happened to him the way weather happened, the way drought happened, indifferent to his character or his goodness or the particular devotion with which he pressed his hands together every morning in a field of winter wheat.

Riki stood at the edge of that field for a long time. The light pressed. It has been decided. Go. He thought about obedience. He thought about the word — the weight of it, the comfort of it, the way it had functioned as a kind of home for as long as he had existed. He thought about the man’s hands. He thought about the word mercy, which he had heard humans use for ten thousand years, which he had categorised and filed and never once applied to himself, because what would it mean for something like him to be merciful? He was an instrument. Instruments did not choose.

He looked at the man in the wheat. He put the judgment down. There was no drama in it. No declaration, no rebellion dressed up in bright colours. He simply — set it aside. The way you set down a tool you have decided, quietly and finally, not to use. And then he stood at the edge of the field with empty hands and waited to learn what that decision cost.

The answer came immediately. The light went out. Not gently. Not the way light fades at the end of a day, slow and amber and resigned. It left him the way a river leaves a riverbed in drought — all at once, and completely, and with a terrible indifference to what it left behind. Everything he had been, the vastness of it, the certainty, the sense of being held by something larger than himself — gone. Between one breath and the next. And then the wings, which went last, which was the worst of it by a measure he had no language for. The tearing began at the joint and finished somewhere interior, somewhere that had no name in any anatomy, somewhere that would ache for the rest of whatever he now was.

He had not known, until he lost them, how entirely he had lived in them. He fell for a long time after that. Or no time at all. He was no longer made of the stuff that could tell the difference.

The desert was red. That was the first coherent thing — the colour of the earth beneath his cheek, a deep arterial red, the kind of red that looked like something had bled into it long ago and the land had simply kept the stain. He lay with his face against it and breathed, which was new, which was strange, which his body insisted upon with a stubbornness that left no room for argument. In and out. In and out. The sun pressed down on the back of his neck like a hand.

His back was agony. The scarring — already scarring, already sealing over in the graceless way of mortal wounds — pulled across his shoulder blades every time his lungs expanded. He lay still and breathed anyway because there was nothing else to do.

He was thirsty. The indignity of it was almost impressive. That this body, this small and breakable and sweat-damp thing he now inhabited, would announce its needs so plainly, so without shame. Water, it said. Water and shade and rest. As though he were a horse. As though he were a field that needed rain.

He got up eventually, because lying in the dirt was not a solution to anything. The land around him was vast and red and smelled of sage and something beneath sage — something mineral, something that had been here before people had names for things and would be here long after. Scrub brush. A sky so blue it looked painted. The silence of a place that had never been required to be quiet for anyone, because no one came here to need quiet. It simply was.

He walked. He had always known where to walk before. The not-knowing was its own particular weight, something he carried in his chest alongside the ache of the absence of wings, and he did not examine it too closely. He simply walked, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping felt like a kind of surrender he was not prepared to make. The trail appeared the way things in deserts appeared — gradually, then all at once. A thin pale line worn into the rock by boots and time and the particular human insistence on going places. It led upward. He followed it because upward was instinct, still, even now, even stripped of everything that had made upward meaningful.

He did not make it far. His legs — unaccustomed, unreliable, apparently bearing some kind of grudge — buckled without much warning. He went down hard on the rock, gravel opening the skin of his palms, his back igniting with fresh complaint. He lay on the trail in the full weight of the afternoon and looked up at the sky and thought, with the detached clarity of something that had recently lost the ability to feel sorry for itself, that this was probably fitting. He closed his eyes.

Boots on rock. Light, practised, the sound of someone who knew every loose stone on this trail by memory. Then shadow — a mercy, small and immediate — falling across him, and the soft sharp sound of breath caught in surprise. He opened his eyes. You stood over him with a canteen in one hand and the particular expression of someone who had gone out expecting solitude and found instead a problem. Wide-eyed. Mouth soft with surprise. Your hair was coming loose from its braid in pieces, strands of it lifting in the dry hot wind, and there was red dust on your cheekbone and a worn canvas pack on your back and your boots were the boots of someone who covered ground in them regularly, scuffed pale at the toe.

You looked at him the way he had looked at the man in the wheat field. With your whole attention. Taking stock. Then something in your face settled — not resolved exactly, but decided — and you crouched down to his level and said, in a voice that was careful and unhurried, the voice of someone who had learned that stillness was its own kind of language: “You’re hurt bad.”

He said, “Yes.” His voice came out strange to his own ears — too much in it, or too little, calibrated for a register this body didn’t quite have the range for. He cleared his throat. Tried again. “I am aware.” Something moved in your expression. Not quite amusement. Something more careful than that. “Can you walk if I help you?”

“I believe so.” “Alright then.” You stood, resettled the pack on your shoulders, and got an arm under his before he had processed that you intended to. The warmth of you was — startling. Simply that. The solid, living warmth of a human body against his side, entirely unguarded, offered without hesitation to a stranger bleeding on a trail. He did not know what to do with it. He filed it somewhere new. Somewhere without a label yet.

“There’s a farm,” you said, already moving, already taking some of his weight with a matter-of-fact ease that suggested this was not the first time you had managed something heavier than you looked like you could. “Not far. My daddy’ll —” A pause, brief, weighted with something he couldn’t yet read. “There’s a farm. We’ll get you seen to.” “That is —” He searched for the right word, unused to needing to search. “That is very kind.”

You made a small sound that wasn’t quite agreement. Looked out at the trail ahead rather than at him. “Don’t go thanking me yet,” you said quietly. “Let’s just get you down first.” The desert stretched below, red and enormous and indifferent, and you walked him out of it as the sun began its long descent, the sky going amber at the edges, your shoulder steady under his arm and your voice low when you spoke — about the footing, about the path, about nearly there now, careful here, there’s a loose bit — talking him down the mountain the way you might talk something wild back from the edge of a very high place.

He let you. It was, he would think later, the first mercy anyone had shown him in longer than he could measure. He did not yet know he was about to walk into a house that needed some of its own.

The farmhouse sat low against the land like it was trying not to be noticed. That was the first thing Riki observed about it — not its size, not its condition, though both were notable, but the particular quality of its relationship to the earth around it. Most structures built by human hands reached, in some small way. Aspired to verticality. This one did not. It hunkered. It pressed itself into the red dirt as though it had learned, over long years, that drawing attention was not in its interest.

The wood of it had gone grey with weather. The porch listed slightly to the left. A barn stood some distance behind the house, in marginally better repair, and a vegetable garden occupied a patch of ground to the east, fenced against rabbits with wire so mended it was more repair than original. Practical. Relentless. The garden of someone who could not afford to let things die.

You had not spoken much on the walk down. Neither had he. The silence between you was not uncomfortable — it had a texture to it, a kind of mutual accommodation, each of you making room for the other’s quiet without requiring explanation. He had noticed that about you already. You did not fill silence for the sake of filling it. “Home,” you said, when the farmhouse came into view. The word came out level. No particular warmth in it, no particular coldness. Just — identification. This is the place. This is what it is. He filed that too.

The sun was low by the time you came down off the trail, the sky doing something extraordinary in shades of copper and rose that he observed with the distant part of himself that still catalogued beauty out of long habit, even now, even diminished. Your shadow stretched long ahead of you across the dust. His own shadow, beside it, was a strange thing to look at. He had not had a shadow before. You brought him to the porch and settled him against the railing with a care that was businesslike rather than tender — efficient, practised, the movements of someone accustomed to managing things on their own. Sit here. Don’t move. I’ll get water. You went inside without waiting for his acknowledgment, the screen door swinging shut behind you with a sound like a small argument.

He sat. He breathed. He looked at the land. Nevada in the last light of day was a different thing entirely from Nevada at noon. The harshness of it softened without becoming gentle — it was still vast, still indifferent, still the kind of landscape that would kill you without malice if you made the wrong decision. But the light turned it amber, turned the red rock gold, turned the scrub brush into something that almost glittered. It was beautiful the way difficult things were beautiful. Uncompromisingly. Without apology. He was looking at it when the door opened.

Not you. He knew that before he turned — the weight of the footfall was different, heavier, the particular tread of a man who had decided long ago that the ground owed him something. The man who came through the door was tall, broad through the shoulders, with the weathered look of someone the sun had worked on for decades and the eyes of someone who had decided, also long ago, what things were and saw no reason to revise his conclusions. He looked at Riki. Riki looked back.

The man’s gaze moved over him the way a hand moves over a fence line — checking for weakness, for threat, cataloguing. Then it moved to the blood dried rust-brown on Riki’s shirt, the state of his hands, the particular stillness of him, and whatever calculation was happening behind those eyes resolved into something that was not welcome but was not yet refusal. “Found him on the Hartley trail,” you said, appearing in the doorway behind your father with a tin cup of water and a cloth that had seen better decades. “He was down. Couldn’t leave him.”

Your father said nothing for a moment. Let the silence do something with its weight. “Couldn’t leave him,” he repeated, finally. His voice was the voice of a man who had learned that repetition was a kind of pressure. Low. Even. The tone of someone who had never needed to raise his voice because other methods worked just as well. “No sir,” you said. Your own voice had changed. Not much — you were careful, clearly practised at careful — but enough. A fraction quieter. A fraction smaller. The way a candle dims in a room where the window has been opened.

He noticed. He noticed the way you held the cup and the cloth with both hands, occupying your hands. He noticed the precise distance you maintained from your father in the doorway — not touching, never quite touching. He noticed the way your eyes moved to Riki briefly, checking, and then back to your father, and the particular quality of that check — not seeking reassurance, not quite. Something more complex. Something he did not yet have enough information to name. “He’ll need somewhere to sleep,” you said. “Just until he’s fit to travel. The barn —”

“I know where he’ll sleep,” your father said. Still that same measured quiet. “I make the decisions about this house.” “Yes sir.” A pause in which several things that were not words were exchanged. Then your father looked at Riki again, and something shifted in the assessment — still wary, but recalculating. “You well enough to work?” he asked.

Riki considered the question honestly. His back was a sustained misery. His hands were lacerated. He was thirsty in a way the cup of water you were holding was not going to resolve. He was also, he was discovering, possessed of a stubbornness that had apparently survived the fall intact, because the answer that came out of him was: “I am.”

Your father made a sound that was not quite satisfied and not quite dismissive. Somewhere in between. A sound that reserved judgment while implying judgment had already been made. “Barn,” he said. “You sleep in the barn. You earn your keep or you move on.” “That is agreeable,” Riki said.

Your father looked at him for one moment longer — something faintly unsettled in it, the look of a man who has heard a perfectly ordinary sentence and cannot explain why it struck him as odd — and then he went back inside. The door did not slam. That was almost worse, somehow. The deliberate quiet of it.

You let out a breath so small it was barely a breath at all. Then you crossed to the railing and crouched in front of him and held out the cup. “Drink,” you said. Back to that other voice now — the trail voice, the one that was unhurried and direct and entirely your own. As though the version of you that existed in the doorway with your father was a coat you put on and took off. He drank. The water was warm and tasted of the tin and was the best thing he had consumed in — he did not know how long. He drained the cup.

Something moved in your expression. Almost a smile. Not quite. “I’m going to look at your back,” you said. “There’s something wrong with it. I could feel it when we were walking.” He went still. “You don’t have to tell me how,” you said, already matter-of-fact, already reaching for the hem of his shirt with a clinical efficiency that suggested you were not going to make this strange if he didn’t. “I’m not asking. I just need to see what I’m working with.”

He thought about the scars. The twin masses of them, the raised and ruined topography of what had been taken. He thought about what they looked like to human eyes — whether they would frighten you, whether they would make you ask questions he could not answer truthfully without revealing things he was not certain you should know. He looked at your face. Your expression was open and patient and entirely without agenda, the face of someone who had asked a practical question and was waiting for a practical answer, the face of someone who was very good at waiting.

“Very well,” he said. You were quiet for a long moment when you saw them. He did not look at your face. He looked at the last of the light on the Nevada flats and felt the careful, impersonal touch of your hands at the edges of the scarring — not recoiling, not pressing, simply — present. “Does it pain you?” you asked. Quiet. “Yes,” he said. “Though less than it did.”

“Alright.” You exhaled slowly through your nose. Something in it that was not pity — something more careful than pity, something that took the fact of his pain and simply acknowledged it, made room for it, did not try to fix it into something more manageable. “I’ll bring salve. And something to eat, when he’s —” A beat. “When supper’s done.” When he’s settled, you had been going to say. When he can’t see.

He did not say that he had understood. He simply nodded. You stood, collecting your cloth and your empty cup, and you looked at him once more with that level, considering gaze — taking stock the way you had on the trail, the way that felt less like scrutiny than like a kind of serious attention, the kind usually reserved for things that mattered. “What do I call you?” you asked.

He thought about his true name. The sound of it, the weight of it, a thing made of frequencies this body’s throat could not reproduce and this body’s ears could not properly hear. A name that belonged to something he was no longer. “Riki,” he said. It was not his name. It was the closest this mouth could come to something that had once been his, worn down to something human-sized, something that fit.

You nodded like that was sufficient, like names were practical things and you had been given enough of one to work with. “I’ll be back directly,” you said. You went inside. The screen door said its small argumentative piece behind you. The Nevada dark was coming in from the east, slow and purple and enormous, swallowing the last of the copper sky, and Riki sat on the listing porch of a grey-weathered house and listened to the silence of a place that had learned to be very quiet, and understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with any power he had lost, that he had not walked into a house.

He had walked into a situation. And for the first time since the field of winter wheat, he felt something that was not grief and not confusion but something altogether more purposeful settle into the empty place where his wings had been. He was not certain yet what to call it. He suspected it was anger.

—

He did not sleep. This was not, he was discovering, unusual for him. Sleep was a thing this body was capable of in theory — he had felt the edges of it, that soft dissolution, the way consciousness went loose and unheld at the end of the previous night — but had not yet managed to fall fully into. He lay in the barn on a bedroll you had brought out without being asked, a folded quilt on top of it that smelled of cedar and something floral and faintly of you, and he looked up at the rafters and listened to the dark.

The horses knew he was there. They had known from the moment he crossed the threshold, both of them moving to the far end of their stalls with that particular animal precision that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the part of a creature that existed below thought. They were not panicking. They had made their assessment — strange, strange, not right — and had simply relocated themselves as far from him as the barn permitted and were pretending, with great determination, that he did not exist. He found this quietly respectful. He did the same for them.

The barn settled around him as the night went on, its old wood contracting in the cool, making small sounds of adjustment. An owl worked somewhere outside. The wind came off the flats and pushed at the walls and moved on, indifferent, the way wind in Nevada moved — not around things but through them, or past them, without acknowledgment. He thought about the way your voice changed in doorways. He was still thinking about it when the sky began to go pale at the edges.

You were already up when he came out. The surprise was his own — he had assumed, given the hour, that the farmhouse would still be dark and closed, and had half-formed a plan to be useful in some visible, unobtrusive way before anyone emerged to direct him. Instead he found you at the pump beside the house in the grey pre-dawn, working the handle with the mechanical patience of someone who had done this ten thousand mornings and would do it ten thousand more, filling a bucket without ceremony or complaint, your hair still in its night braid, your feet in unlaced boots. You looked up when you heard him. “You’re up early,” you said. Not accusatory. Just noting.

“I did not sleep particularly well,” he said, which was true enough. You looked at him for a moment with that level morning gaze — assessing, the way you seemed to assess most things, with a seriousness that was not unfriendly but did not soften the looking. Then you held out the bucket. “Chickens first,” you said. “Then I’ll show you the rest.” He took the bucket.

The chickens were housed in a low wire run behind the barn, twelve of them, with the collective opinion of Riki that the horses had expressed but considerably less restraint about voicing it. They scattered when he approached, a brief furious explosion of feathers and complaint, and then regrouped at the far end of the run and regarded him with the specific hostility of creatures that had decided something was wrong without being able to articulate what. He crouched and waited. After a moment, one hen — bolder than the others, or perhaps simply more curious — picked her way back toward him with the exaggerated caution of someone pretending they are not doing what they are doing. She got within a foot of him and stopped.

He held very still. She pecked at the ground near his boot. Then at his boot. Then she looked up at him with one orange eye and made a sound of uncertain conclusion and walked away. “Huh,” you said, from behind him. He stood and found you leaning against the fence post with the empty bucket in your hand and an expression he had not seen on you yet — something lighter than your usual register, surprised out of you, unguarded in a way that lasted only a moment before you collected it back. “They don’t like strangers,” you said.

“I gathered.” “They don’t much like anybody,” you amended. “But they especially don’t like strangers.” “I have been informed,” he said, “that I am unusual.”

The corner of your mouth moved. Almost. You turned away before it could become something more, and he watched you go and filed the almost-smile in the same place as the canteen warmth and the cedar quilt and the version of your voice that was entirely your own.

The day’s work was plain and it was relentless. He understood, by midmorning, the particular arithmetic of this farm — the way every task connected to every other task, the way the whole enterprise was held together less by prosperity than by the sheer refusal to let anything fail. The fence line needed mending in three places. The roof of the barn had a compromise along the eastern edge that wanted attention before the weather turned. The well mechanism was original and complained loudly about it. These were not the problems of a farm that was thriving. These were the problems of a farm that was enduring.

He worked. His back made its protests known and he ignored them with the same focused attention he had once applied to the light. The physical labour was strange — the way his muscles heated and tired, the way sweat gathered at his collar, the way thirst came back reliably every hour with the persistence of a creditor — but not unmanageable. There was something in it, even. Something in the simple physics of a fence post driven into red dirt, the satisfying solidity of a thing made more sound than it had been.

Your father watched him from a distance for most of the morning. Riki was aware of this the way he was aware of weather — peripherally, constantly, without looking directly at it. The man had a way of occupying space that was its own kind of statement. He stood at the edge of things. He observed. He did not offer assistance or instruction, which told Riki that the watching was not supervisory. It was something else. Assessment, perhaps. Or the particular vigilance of a man deciding whether a new variable in his environment was a threat or a resource. He had not yet decided, Riki thought, which was more useful to be.

You moved through your own work with an efficiency that was almost architectural — each task slotted precisely into the available time, no motion wasted, no pause taken that wasn’t functional. You cooked and you mended and you hauled water and you did it all with the same quiet matter-of-factness you had applied to hauling him off a trail, and at no point did you look like you expected acknowledgment for any of it. At noon you brought him water without being asked.

He was at the fence line, his shirt damp through, the Nevada sun doing its particular best overhead. You came across the flat ground with two cups and handed him one and stood beside him and drank yours and looked out at the middle distance and said nothing. He drank. “How’s your back?” you asked, eventually. “Improved,” he said. “The salve was effective.”

You nodded. Kept looking at the distance. “You don’t have to tell me where you came from,” you said. Quiet, and even, and with the care of someone constructing a sentence they have thought about before saying. “Or what happened to you. That’s your own business.” He looked at the side of your face. The dust on your cheekbone again — different dust today, paler, from the flour you had been working with this morning. The loose strand of hair at your temple moving in the slight noon breeze. “That is generous,” he said.

“It’s practical,” you said, with a slight correction in your tone that was not unkind. “People don’t tell you things when you push. They tell you things when they’re ready.” He considered this. “You speak as though from experience.” A pause. Brief, but present. “I speak as someone who lives here,” you said, and left it at that.

He did not push. He understood, now, the patience of that sentence — the way it answered him and closed the door at the same time with such practised ease that the closing of the door was almost invisible. You had been doing that for a long time. Opening just enough. No further. He handed you the empty cup and turned back to the fence. “Thank you,” he said. “For the water. And for — “ He paused, searching, unused still to the narrowness of this language, the way it made him reach for things and come up short. “For the previous evening. You were not required to do any of it.” You were quiet for a moment. “No,” you agreed. “I wasn’t.”

And then you walked back across the flat ground toward the house, and he watched you go, and the sun was enormous overhead and the land was red in every direction and somewhere behind him your father was still watching from the edge of things, and Riki drove another post into the Nevada dirt and felt that purposeful thing in his chest settle deeper. Not anger, he revised. Not exactly.

Something older than anger. Something that had been in him even before the fall — that quality that had made him stop at the edge of a field of winter wheat and put down what he had been sent to carry. The inability, when it came to it, to walk away from something that was not right. He picked up the hammer. He kept working.

It was late afternoon, the heat finally relenting by degrees, when he heard it. He was at the barn, seeing to a loose board on the eastern wall, when the sound came from inside the house — low, and brief, and with a quality to it he identified immediately and completely, because he had catalogued it ten thousand years of watching human lives and he knew exactly what it was.

The sound a person made when something hurt them and they had learned not to make noise about it. He went very still. The air around him changed. He felt it before he registered it consciously — that familiar internal shift, the power in him waking from its uneasy dormancy, the pressure dropping around him in a radius that made the horses shift in their stalls and the chickens go abruptly, completely silent.

He stood with the hammer in his hand and the board half-fixed and every part of him oriented toward the house. A long moment passed. Then the back door opened and you came out with a basket of washing and went to the line without looking at him and began to hang it with the same flat efficiency you applied to everything, and your movements were fine — deliberate, controlled — and you did not look at him.

He looked at you. At the way you held your left arm slightly differently than your right. He set the hammer down on the top of the fence rail. Carefully. Quietly. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth and he looked at the chickens, who had gone back to their pecking, and he looked at the sky, which was going that extraordinary copper again, and he did not go to the house, because he did not yet know enough, and acting without knowing enough was how things got worse rather than better.

But he picked the hammer back up and he held it, and he did not put it down again until supper was called.

The barn was dark by the time you came. He heard you before he saw you — the soft unlatch of the door, the particular hesitation of someone who has decided to do something and is still deciding, right up until the moment they do it. A sliver of lamplight preceded you, warm and unsteady, and then you came through the door with the lamp in one hand and a plate in the other and you looked at him sitting up in the bedroll and you said, by way of explanation: “I saved you supper.”

He had not been given supper. He had noted this without comment, the way he noted most things about this house — quietly, and completely, and without letting the noting show on his face. “That was not necessary,” he said. “I know,” you said, which seemed to be your answer to most things that were offered in the register of obligation. You crossed the barn and set the plate down on the top of the nearest stall rail and then you looked around, briefly, for somewhere to be, and settled on a upturned crate a few feet from his bedroll and sat on it and set the lamp on the ground between you.

The horses regarded you with considerably more charity than they had managed for Riki. The bolder one — a bay mare with an opinion about most things — stretched her nose over the stall door in your direction and you reached up without looking and scratched between her eyes with the automatic ease of long habit. “That’s Clementine,” you said. “The other one’s Job.” “Job,” he repeated. “Daddy named him.” A pause that had a particular texture to it. “He has a sense of humour about suffering.”

Riki looked at you. You were looking at the lamp. Your left arm, he noted, was resting in your lap rather than propped at the elbow the way your right was. Protecting it without meaning to, or meaning to so consistently it had stopped being a decision. “Eat,” you said, without looking up. “Before it goes cold.”

He reached for the plate. Beans and cornbread, simple and adequate, and he ate it the way he was learning to eat — with the genuine animal attention of a body that had requirements and was no longer above having them. You watched the lamp and scratched Clementine’s nose and said nothing for a while, which was its own kind of conversation. “How long have you been here?” he asked, eventually. “On this land.” “Always,” you said. “Born here. Mama too, until she wasn’t.” You said it plainly, the way you said most things — not inviting sympathy, not deflecting it, simply stating the fact as a fact. “Just us since I was nine.”

“I am sorry,” he said. You looked at him then. Briefly, assessing, as though checking whether he meant it. Whatever you found seemed to satisfy you. You looked back at the lamp. “It was a long time ago,” you said. “That does not always make a thing smaller.”

A beat of quiet. Clementine withdrew her nose and lost interest and went back to her hay. Outside the barn the Nevada night was doing what Nevada nights did — going enormous and cold and very clear, the stars coming out in their thousands, indifferent and magnificent. “No,” you agreed, softly. “It doesn’t.”

He set the empty plate on the ground and looked at his own hands — the cuts from the trail already healed more than they should have been, another thing to be careful about, another thing to manage. He laced his fingers together and considered the lamp between you and thought about ten thousand years of watching people talk to each other, all those conversations he had catalogued from a very great height, and how entirely different it was to be in one.

“Your arm,” he said. Quiet, and even, leaving space around the words. You went still. Not a flinch — you were too controlled for flinching, he was learning — but a stillness that had a quality of decision in it. Whether to acknowledge or to redirect. You looked at him. “I walked into the door of the pantry,” you said. Steady. Practised.

He held your gaze and said nothing. The silence did what silences sometimes did, in his experience — it made room for something that wouldn’t fit through a smaller opening. Your jaw shifted. Something moved behind your eyes, some internal negotiation he was not privy to, and then you looked down at your left arm in your lap and back up at him and you said, very quietly: “He has a temper.”

Four words. Flat, and sparse, and carrying the weight of nine years of just us. “Yes,” Riki said. “I am aware.” Something in your face changed at that — at the acknowledgment, perhaps, or at the lack of surprise in it, the lack of the particular uncomfortable scrambling that people sometimes did when a thing they had said quietly turned out to have been heard. He did not scramble. He simply — received it. Made room for it. The way you made room for silences.

You looked at him for a long moment. “You noticed,” you said. Not quite a question. “I notice most things,” he said. “Most people don’t.” You said it without bitterness, which was almost worse than if you had said it with bitterness. Simply an observation. A thing that was true and had been true for long enough that you had stopped expecting otherwise. “I am not,” he said, carefully, “most people.”

Your mouth did the thing again — that movement at the corner, the almost-smile, the one that lasted only a moment before you thought better of it. But this time you did not look away. You let him see it, brief as it was, and something about that felt like a different kind of door opening. Smaller than the other one. More deliberate. “No,” you said. “I don’t suppose you are.”

The lamp guttered slightly in a draft from the barn wall and you both looked at it and it steadied and you looked back at each other and the moment resettled itself into something quieter. “Ki,” you said, and then stopped. He waited.

Your brow pulled together faintly, that look of someone who has said something before they have decided to say it. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. Riki’s —” You shook your head slightly. “It’s fine. Never mind.” “Ki,” he said. You looked at him. “You may call me that,” he said. “If it suits you.”

The something behind your eyes again — that careful interior movement, weighing. Then, so quietly he might have missed it if he were less than he was: “It suits me.”

Clementine made a noise of vague equine commentary from her stall. Job ignored everything, as was apparently his nature. The lamp sat between you on the dirt floor of the barn and the night pressed at the walls and you sat on your upturned crate with your left arm in your lap and looked at him with those eyes that catalogued things, and he looked back at you, and the silence this time was not the silence of two people who had run out of things to say. It was the silence of two people who had said enough for now.

“I should go back in,” you said, eventually. You stood, collecting the lamp, and reached down for the plate. “Leave it,” he said. “I will return it in the morning.” You straightened. Looked at him once more in the lamplight, that level considering look, and he looked back at you and did not look away, and whatever was being communicated in that exchange was not a thing that needed words and both of you seemed to understand that. “Goodnight, Ki,” you said.

Something in him — something that had been falling, or wandering, or simply enduring the very long process of learning what it was to be this diminished and groundless thing — settled, incrementally, at the sound of it. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he said. The word came out without deliberation. Natural, and certain, the way things were certain when they were simply true. He watched you absorb it — the slight pause before the door, the almost imperceptible shift in your shoulders — and then you went out and the lamplight went with you and the barn was dark again.

He lay back on the bedroll. He looked at the rafters. He thought about the sound your voice made when it was only yours — unhurried and direct and entirely unguarded — and he thought about a left arm held carefully in a lap, and he thought about nine years of just us in a house that had learned to be quiet, and he thought about a field of winter wheat and the thing that had lived in him then, the thing he had not had a name for until he was standing empty-handed in the aftermath of it. He had a name for it now. He had always been capable of mercy. He was discovering he was also capable of something considerably less patient.

—

Three days passed. Then four. Then five. The farm absorbed him the way dry ground absorbed rain — completely, and without ceremony, closing over the fact of him as though he had always been there. He learned the fence line and the well mechanism and the particular temperament of each of the twelve hens. He learned that Job, despite his name, was not actually long-suffering — he was simply quiet about his grievances until he wasn’t, at which point he expressed them comprehensively. He learned that Clementine would work beautifully for anyone who asked her nicely and would make their life very difficult if they didn’t, which he respected.

He learned the shape of your days. The pre-dawn pump. The chickens. The kitchen, then the garden, then whatever the farm required, then the kitchen again. The way you moved through all of it with that relentless quiet competence, never hurrying, never stopping, the whole of it held together by the sheer consistency of your attention. He learned that you hummed sometimes, when you thought no one could hear. Low and tuneless and entirely unconscious, the sound of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else while their hands stayed busy. He never said anything about it. He simply noted it, and filed it, and found that he listened for it.

Your father watched. Your father always watched. But the watching had shifted slightly in character — less assessment now, more the surveillance of a man who has made his calculation and is waiting to see if the numbers hold. Riki was useful. Riki worked. Riki did not ask questions or make demands or give your father any obvious reason for the unease that lived, apparently permanently, behind his eyes whenever he looked at him. Riki was also, he was increasingly certain, the only reason your father had not escalated in five days. He did not examine this too closely. He simply noted it, the way he noted everything, and kept working, and waited.

On the sixth morning you appeared at the barn door while he was seeing to Job’s hooves with a bridle in your hand and an expression that was as close to tentative as he had seen on you. “Daddy’s gone to town,” you said. “He won’t be back until evening.” He straightened. “I thought —” You looked at the bridle. Back at him. “I could show you some of the land. If you wanted. There’s more to it than what you’ve seen. The orchard especially.” Something in your voice was carefully casual in a way that meant it wasn’t casual at all. “You don’t have to.”

“I would like that very much,” he said. The almost-smile. Present and then collected, but he was getting faster at catching it. You rode Clementine. This seemed correct, somehow — you and the bay mare had the relationship of two creatures who had come to a long and mutual understanding, and Clementine moved under you with none of the difficulty she occasionally manufactured for other people, her ears forward, her stride easy. You sat a horse the way you did most things: without fuss, without performance, simply and completely.

He walked beside you. You had offered him Job, with the diplomatic neutrality of someone who was not certain how the offer would land, and he had declined with equal diplomacy. Job had expressed his relief by looking in another direction. They had reached an understanding. The land opened up beyond the farmstead in a way that the farmstead itself obscured — flatter than the trail, wider, the red earth giving way in places to pale grass and the occasional determined tree. The sky was enormous overhead, the particular blue of a Nevada morning before the heat had fully committed, and the air smelled of sage and something floral he couldn’t immediately identify.

“The orchard’s my favourite part,” you said, after a while. “Mama planted it. Apple trees mostly, one pear that never does much of anything.” You paused. “She said if you were going to be somewhere a long time you ought to plant something that would outlast you.” He looked up at you on the horse. The morning light was doing something specific to your face — catching the line of your cheekbone, the loose strand of hair at your temple. “She sounds like she was wise,” he said.

“She was practical,” you said. “I think sometimes they’re the same thing.” He considered this. “I think sometimes they are.” Clementine picked her way along the track and he walked beside her left shoulder and the distance between his height and yours on horseback put you almost at eye level with each other, which he found he appreciated — not having to calibrate the angle of conversation, not having to adjust. Simply side by side, the way the trail had made you, the first time.

“Ki,” you said. “Mm.” “How long are you going to stay?” He was quiet for a moment. The question was plain and it deserved a plain answer, and he had been turning the plain answer over for several days without finding a way to make it smaller. “Not long,” he said. “I do not — belong to any one place. I am not certain I ever will again.” He paused. “I am sorry. I recognise that is not a satisfying answer.” You looked at the track ahead. “No,” you said. “But it’s an honest one.” A beat. “I understand it, I think. Some people aren’t built for staying.”

“It is not a preference,” he said. “It is a — circumstance. There are things I have lost that made staying possible.” He glanced up at you. “I do not say this to be sorrowful. Only to be truthful with you.” You absorbed this with the particular quiet of someone who is listening completely. “I understand,” you said. And then, softer: “I’m glad you’re here now.” He looked at the track. “As am I,” he said. “Sweetheart.”

The orchard was a green and improbable thing in the middle of all that red. Eight apple trees in two rows, old enough that the bark had gone deeply furrowed, their branches spreading wide and low and laden with fruit not quite ripe — another few weeks yet, you said, but close. The pear tree stood at the end of the row in the slightly martyred way of a tree that had been asked to produce in difficult conditions and was doing its dignified best. You slid down from Clementine and looped her reins over a low branch and she began to investigate the grass with the focused enthusiasm of an animal who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.

“Here,” you said, reaching up into the nearest tree and working an apple free from the branch — smaller than it would be at peak, still a deep green at the stem. You tossed it to him. He caught it. “Not quite ready,” you said, pulling one for yourself, “but they’re good now. Tart.”

He bit into it. It was tart — sharp and clean and cold in a way that surprised him, given the heat. He ate it and watched you do the same, standing in the narrow shade of the apple tree with the Nevada morning around you and Clementine moving through the grass and the pear tree presiding over everything with quiet dignity.

“Did she bring these trees here?” he asked. “Your mother.” “Carried the saplings from her own mother’s farm when she married.” You turned the apple in your hand. “Three days in a wagon. She wrapped the roots in wet cloth and checked on them every hour.” You smiled — not the almost-smile, a real one, brief and unguarded, aimed at the middle distance. “Daddy thought she was ridiculous. She told him some things were worth being ridiculous about.” He looked at your profile. The smile fading back into its usual careful lines. “She was right,” he said.

You looked at him. He was not certain, afterward, what made him do it — whether it was the smile or the apple trees or the particular quality of the light in this green and improbable place, or whether it was simply that it was the most natural thing, in that moment, in the way that true things sometimes arrived without announcement. He stepped close and pressed his mouth to your cheek. Not long. Not complicated. Simply — there, and warm, and certain.

He stepped back. You stood very still. Your hand with the apple in it had stopped moving. Your eyes, when you turned to look at him, were wide and very clear, and there was colour in your face, high on the cheekbones, that had nothing to do with the sun. He looked back at you with the particular steadiness of someone who is not going to apologise for a thing they meant. “Ki,” you said. Very quietly. “Yes,” he said.

A long moment in which several things were considered and none of them were said, and both of you seemed to understand that this too was sufficient. Then Clementine, with the timing of an animal entirely without sentiment, lifted her head from the grass and blew a long breath through her nose and looked at both of you with profound disinterest.

You laughed. He had not heard you laugh before. It was brief and soft and entirely real, surprised out of you by the horse, and it was the best sound he had catalogued in ten thousand years or however long it had been, and he thought he would remember it past the point where he could remember anything else.

That night you came to the barn again. No plate this time. No pretence of a reason. You simply came, and sat on your upturned crate, and he sat up in his bedroll, and the lamp went between you on the dirt floor, and you talked. About the farm. About the town half a day’s ride away, its general store and its church and its doctor who was also the barber, who you had not seen in two years because your father saw no reason for it. About your mother’s apple trees and your mother’s hands, which had been like yours, practical and capable, and the particular grief of inheriting someone’s hands without being able to tell them you had. He listened. He asked questions when questions were useful and was quiet when quiet was useful and when you paused he did not rush to fill it.

You asked him, at some point, where he had come from. He said: very far away. You asked if there was anyone there who missed him. He considered the true answer to this, which was complex, and gave you the simple one. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.” You looked at him. “I’m sorry,” you said. “Do not be,” he said. “I made a choice. I would make it again.” “What choice?”

He looked at the lamp. At the way the flame moved in the draft, small and persistent, unwilling to go out. “To refuse to do something that was wrong,” he said. “Even when I had been asked to do it by someone I had always obeyed.” A long quiet. “That took courage,” you said. “It took —” He paused. “I am not certain it was courage. I am not certain I calculated the cost before I paid it. I simply — could not. Some things, when you are standing in front of them, admit no other response.”

You were looking at him with that full attention, that serious and complete regard, and he looked back at you, and the lamp burned between you, and outside the Nevada night was enormous and cold and blazing with stars. “I understand that,” you said, quietly. “I think I do.” He thought about a left arm held in a lap. About a voice that changed in doorways. About nine years of just us and what that cost, paid daily, without complaint, without anyone to acknowledge the paying. “I know,” he said.

You stayed another hour. Maybe two. Time had not fully resolved itself for him yet — it still moved strangely, catching and pooling, running thin in places. But whatever measure it was, it was not enough, and when you finally stood and took the lamp and said goodnight he watched the light go with the particular feeling of someone watching something good move away from them and knowing, with a clarity that had nothing comfortable in it, that they cannot keep it. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he said. “Goodnight, Ki,” you said. And then the dark, and the rafters, and the sound of his own breathing, which was still new enough to notice.

He lay in the cedar-smelling dark and looked at nothing and thought about apple trees planted by women who understood that some things were worth being ridiculous about. He thought he was beginning to understand that too.

—

It happened on a Tuesday. He knew this because you had told him, some nights ago in the barn, that Tuesdays were the worst — that your father came back from town on Tuesdays with the particular mood that town produced in him, something compounded of other men’s opinions and the price of things and whatever he had found at the bottom of whatever he had been drinking. You had said it matter-of-factly, the way you said most things, and he had filed it and said nothing and had been watching Tuesdays since.

This Tuesday your father came back two hours earlier than usual. Riki was at the well when he heard the horse. He straightened and watched your father come up the track with the specific quality of stillness that preceded bad weather — not loud, not yet, but carrying it, the way the air carried rain before rain arrived. Your father dismounted without looking at him. Took the horse to the barn without speaking. The set of his shoulders said everything his mouth was not yet saying. Riki set down the bucket.

He did not go inside. He had no cause to go inside. He stood at the well and he waited and he listened to the land, which had gone very quiet in the particular way it went quiet sometimes — the chickens off their scratching, Clementine still in her stall, even the wind seeming to hold itself. The sound, when it came, was brief.

A voice raised — your father’s, low and controlled, which was worse than shouting, he had learned, because controlled meant deliberate — and then something that was not a voice, something that had no register in language, that lived below language, and he was already moving before he had decided to move. The kitchen door. He did not burst through it. He opened it the way you opened things in this house — without drama, without announcement — and he stood in the doorway and he looked.

Your father stood at the far end of the kitchen. You stood nearer to the window, one hand braced on the table, your head down, your hair loose from its braid and falling forward. The posture of someone absorbing something. Waiting for it to be over.

Your father looked at Riki. Riki looked at your father. And the air in the kitchen changed. He felt it leave him before he could stop it — that interior shift, the power waking from its dormancy with the sudden and total alertness of something that had been waiting for a reason. The pressure dropped. The lamp on the table guttered. The window glass made a sound like it was being pressed from the outside. The temperature fell by degrees that had nothing to do with the weather. He had not moved. He was standing in the doorway with his hands at his sides and his face entirely still and he had not moved, but the kitchen felt like the moment before lightning, and every animal on the property knew it, and your father knew it, and from the way your head had come up slowly, carefully, you knew it too.

Your father’s face went through several things in quick succession. Then it went to something Riki recognised, because he had catalogued it ten thousand times in ten thousand human faces. Fear.

Not the performed kind. The real kind. The kind that lived in the body before the mind had caught up, that moved in the hands and the jaw and the particular way a man’s weight shifted backward without him meaning it to. Your father said nothing. Riki said nothing. The lamp steadied. The pressure did not lift entirely — he could feel it still, that live and uncontrolled thing in him, wanting — but he held it. Barely. The way you held a door shut in a high wind. With everything available to him.

“I believe,” he said, very quietly, very evenly, “that supper needs seeing to.” It was not what he meant. It was not close to what he meant. But it was the sentence that fit inside the doorway without breaking anything irreparable, and he said it the way he had once delivered divine directives — with a certainty so complete it did not require volume. Your father picked up his hat from the table. He walked past Riki through the door without looking at him. His footsteps crossed the porch. The barn door opened and shut.

The kitchen was very quiet. You had not moved from the table. Your hand was still braced on it, your head no longer down but not quite up either, your hair in your face. He could hear you breathing — measured, controlled, the breathing of someone who has learned to regulate themselves through force of will alone. He came into the kitchen.

He did not go to you immediately. He went to the lamp and turned it up and then he stood a few feet from you and waited, the way you waited for things — with patience, and without agenda. After a moment you straightened. Pushed the hair from your face. And you looked at him, and he looked at you, and whatever had just happened was present in the space between you in its full dimensions, undiminished. “Ki,” you said. Very quiet. “Yes,” he said.

“What was that.” Not quite a question. The tone of someone who had seen something they did not have a category for. “I would prefer,” he said carefully, “to discuss it later. Are you hurt?” Something moved in your face at the directness of it. At being asked plainly. “I’m alright,” you said. He looked at you. At the specific way you were holding yourself. “I would like to believe that,” he said. “I am finding it somewhat difficult.”

Your jaw shifted. You looked at the table. Then, quietly, with the care of someone setting something fragile down: “My arm again.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Come to the barn later,” he said. “When he’s settled.”

You looked up at him. “Ki —” “Please,” he said. The word came out with more in it than he intended — not a request, exactly, or not only that. Something more unguarded. Something that had been accumulating across five days of watching you move through this house and compress yourself smaller and absorb things that should not have to be absorbed. You held his gaze for a long moment. Then you nodded.

He was sitting in the barn doorway when you came. Late — later than usual, the farm long dark, the stars doing their extravagant Nevada best overhead. You came across the flat ground with the lamp low and your coat pulled around you and you looked tired in a way that was not only the tiredness of a long day. The tiredness of a long time. He moved to let you through.

You sat on the crate and he sat across from you on an upturned bucket and you were quiet for a while, which he allowed. Clementine observed you from her stall. Job was asleep, or pretending to be. “Show me,” he said, finally. Gentle. You pushed your sleeve back. He looked at your arm. He had seen worse — had catalogued far worse, from a very great height, across a very long time — but the knowledge of that did nothing useful here, in a barn in Nevada, looking at evidence of something done deliberately to you by someone who had decided they had the right. He looked at it and felt that thing in him again, that live and uncontrolled thing, and breathed through it, and held it.

He reached out and took your arm very carefully in both hands. You went still. Watching his face. He was not thinking about what he was doing — not precisely. He was operating on something below thought, something that had survived the fall intact the way instinct survives most things. He felt the warmth move through his palms, slow and unsteady, the power in him fraying at the edges as it always did — but present. Still present. He held it as long as he could, which was not long enough, and then he released your arm and sat back and felt the effort of it in the spaces between his ribs.

You looked at your arm. Then you looked at him. “Ki,” you said. Barely a sound. “Do not,” he said, quietly, “ask me to explain that. Not tonight.” A long silence in which you visibly decided not to push. That practised restraint of yours, that ability to make room. He was grateful for it. He was not certain he had the words tonight, and what words he did have were not adequate to the thing. “Does it still hurt?” he asked.

You looked at your arm. Flexed your fingers slowly. “No,” you said, with a wondering quality that he did not examine. “No, it doesn’t.” He nodded. You looked at him with those eyes — that full and serious attention — and he looked back at you and did not look away and the lamp burned between you and outside the Nevada night was all stars and cold and the enormous indifferent dark. “Ki,” you said again. Softer.

“Yes, sweetheart.” “What are you?” He looked at you. You held his gaze with a steadiness that told him you had been building to this question for some time — not impulsively, not from fear. From the same seriousness with which you approached everything. You wanted to know. You were asking because you trusted him enough to ask. He thought about his true name. About the field of winter wheat. About the gold leaving him all at once, and the wings going last, and the long unmeasured fall into red Nevada dirt. “Something that was cast out,” he said. “For refusing to do what was wrong.”

You were quiet. “Are you dangerous?” you asked. He considered the truth of that. The full complicated truth of it — the unstable power, the thing in him that had made the kitchen glass flex in its frame, the fact of what he was capable of when he felt something strongly enough. “Not to you,” he said. It was the most honest answer he had.

You looked at him for a long time. Then you leaned forward from your crate, closing the distance between you, and you took his face in both your hands — your capable, practical hands, your mother’s hands — and you held it the way you held things that mattered, carefully and without apology, and you looked at him from very close and said:

“I trust you.” He closed his eyes. The barn was warm and smelled of cedar and horse and the faint sweetness of apple from the orchard, and your hands were on his face, and he was something cast out and diminished and still fundamentally unresolved, and none of that mattered, in this moment, at all. He turned his head.

His mouth found the corner of yours. Not quite — not yet, careful, giving you the space to decide — the barest brush, a question rather than an answer. He felt your breath change against his cheek.

“Ki,” you whispered. “Tell me to stop,” he said, very quietly. “And I will stop.” You didn’t. His mouth found yours.

It was — not like anything he had catalogued. Not like anything in ten thousand years of watching humans love each other from a very great height. It was immediate and warm and entirely real, and you kissed him back with the same directness you brought to everything, your hands still on his face, his own hands coming up to find your waist, and the lamp burned and the horses slept and outside the Nevada stars did their ancient indifferent work. He pulled back eventually. Not far. Your foreheads together, both of you breathing, the space between you warm. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “Tomorrow,” you said. Firm and quiet and entirely certain. “Tell me tomorrow.”

He looked at you. You looked back at him, close enough that he could see the lamp reflected in your eyes, and your expression was open and decided and unafraid, the expression of someone who has chosen a thing and is not going to be talked out of it tonight. “Tomorrow,” he agreed.

You stayed another hour. Neither of you spoke much. You sat close on the upturned crate and he sat close on the bucket and your shoulders touched and that was sufficient, and when you finally left he watched the lamp go the way he always did — with the feeling of something good moving away — but differently now. With the knowledge that it was coming back. He lay in the dark and looked at the rafters. He thought about tomorrow.

He thought about all the things tomorrow contained, all the things that would need to be said and decided and reckoned with — your father, and the farm, and the fact of what he was, and the fact that he had said not long in an apple orchard and had meant it and was no longer certain what meaning it cost him. He thought about your hands on his face. He thought: some things, when you are standing in front of them, admit no other response. He slept, for the first time.

—

He was at the pump when you came out. Earlier than usual — the sky still that deep pre-dawn blue, not yet committed to morning, the stars fading at the edges but present still overhead. You came through the back door with your coat on over your nightgown and your feet in your unlaced boots and your hair down, loose around your shoulders, and you looked at him across the yard with an expression he had not seen on you before.

Open. Unguarded in a way that had nothing careful in it. The face of someone who had slept and woken and found the previous night still true. He let go of the pump handle. You crossed the yard. You stopped in front of him and looked up at him and he looked down at you and the blue pre-dawn light was doing something specific to your face, to the particular quality of your eyes in it, and he thought about ten thousand years of cataloguing beautiful things from a very great height and how none of it had prepared him for this. For the way beauty looked from inside it.

“You said tomorrow,” you said. Quiet. “I did.” “It’s tomorrow.” “It is.” You waited. Patient, the way you were patient — completely, without performance. He took a breath. He told you everything.

Not all at once — it came in pieces, and you received each piece the way you received most things, with that full and serious attention, making room. He told you about the light, and what it meant when it moved. He told you about the order and the field of winter wheat and the man kneeling in it who had done nothing to deserve what had been decided for him. He told you about putting the judgment down and what happened after — the gold leaving, the wings going last, the long fall into red Nevada dirt.

He told you about the scars. He told you about the power — the way it lived in him now, fraying and unstable, the way it woke when he felt things strongly. He told you about the kitchen, the lamp guttering, the glass flexing, the thing in him that had wanted and that he had held, barely, with everything available to him. He told you he did not know how long he had been fallen. That time moved differently for him still, catching and pooling, running thin in places. That not long in the orchard had been the truth as he understood it, which was also not the whole truth, which was that he had not wanted it to be true at all.

You sat on the porch step while he told you and you looked at your hands in your lap and then at the horizon and then at him, and you did not interrupt and you did not flinch and when he finally ran out of words and went quiet you were quiet too, for a long moment. Then you said: “Show me.” He looked at you. “Your back,” you said. “Show me. Properly. In the light.”

He understood what you were asking. Not for proof — you had not asked for proof, you had listened to everything with the same gravity you brought to things that were simply true. You were asking because you wanted to see it. Because you did not want to look away from the parts of him that had cost him something. He turned. He pulled his shirt over his head. The morning light, coming now in earnest at the horizon, fell across his back. He heard you stand from the step. Heard you cross the distance. Felt the particular warmth of you close behind him, and then your hands — your careful, capable hands — resting lightly on either side of the scarring. Not pressing. Just — present. “It must have been unbearable,” you said. Low.

“Yes,” he said. “It was.” “And you’d do it again.” “Yes.” Your hands stayed where they were. He felt you press your forehead gently between your hands, against the space between his shoulder blades, and he closed his eyes and stood very still and felt the simple animal warmth of it move through him like the water had moved through dry ground. “Ki,” you said. Muffled against his back. “Yes, sweetheart.”

“I think I love you.” He went entirely still. “I know that’s —” Your voice was careful now, the care of someone saying something for the first time that they have only ever read about. “I know that’s a large thing to say. I’m not — I’ve never said it before. I’ve read about it. In my mother’s books. I didn’t know if I’d recognise it.” A pause. “I recognise it.” He turned.

You looked up at him. High colour in your face, and your chin up, and your eyes entirely steady — not performing the courage of it, simply having it, the way you had everything, plainly and without fuss. He cupped your face in both hands. “Sweetheart,” he said. Very quietly. “You don’t have to say it back,” you said, immediately. “I’m not —”

“I love you,” he said. You stopped. He looked at you. At the particular expression moving across your face — something he had no prior catalogue entry for, something that was not quite disbelief and not quite joy and was perhaps both of those things failing to contain each other. “You —” “I have watched human beings love each other,” he said, “for longer than I can measure. I know what it looks like. I know what it feels like, now, which I did not before.” He brushed his thumb across your cheekbone. “It feels like this.”

You made a sound that was not quite a word. Then you reached up and you kissed him. Not like the night before — not a question, not careful. This was an answer, full and certain, your hands in his shirt and his arms going around you and the Nevada morning arriving in amber and rose around you, and it was the most completely real thing he had experienced since the fall, and he thought, distantly, that if this was what was available down here, in this diminished and groundless and entirely unpredictable human life — then he understood, finally, what he had chosen. He would choose it again.

Your father came home at noon. He came around the side of the house and found you at the porch, sitting on the step with a book in your lap that you were not reading, and Riki beside you on the step, close enough that your shoulders touched, his forearms on his knees, both of you looking at the middle distance with the specific quality of two people who have recently found each other and are still adjusting to the finding.

Your father stopped. The look on his face went through its familiar sequence — assessment, calculation, conclusion — but faster this time, and landing somewhere that made the hair on the back of Riki’s neck resolve into something alert. “Inside,” your father said. To you. Only to you. You stood. The book closed in your hands. Riki stood with you, and your father looked at him with a look that said: this does not include you, and Riki looked back with a look that said: I am aware.

You went inside. The screen door shut. Riki stood on the porch and listened to the land and kept his hands very still at his sides and breathed, slowly, in and out, and held the thing in him that wanted with everything he had, because the time was not now, because he did not yet know enough, because acting without knowing enough was how things got worse.

He went back to the fence line. He worked until the sun went low. He did not hear anything from the house. This was not reassurance. He had learned, in his time here, that the absence of sound meant nothing in a house that had learned to be quiet. He worked and he listened and he held himself ready in the way that something trained for ten thousand years to act does not stop being ready, even diminished, even fallen, even here.

Supper was not called. The lamp in the kitchen went out early. He sat in the barn doorway and watched the dark house and waited. It was past midnight when he heard you. He knew the sound. Not the first sound — that was too quiet, the controlled register of your father’s voice through walls, the specific low evenness of a man who had learned that control was its own kind of violence. That Riki had heard before. He held himself and breathed and waited.

It was the second sound that moved him. A crack — flat and immediate and unmistakable, the sound of a hand meeting a face with force, and then the sound that followed it, which was you, which was the sound of someone who had been trying not to make noise and had been hit hard enough that the trying failed. Not a scream. Something more broken than a scream — a cry wrenched from somewhere involuntary, somewhere below the careful management you applied to everything, and then the sound of something hitting the floor.

Then your father’s voice again. Still controlled. Still low. Explaining something, in the tone of a man who believes he is owed explanation’s reception, while somewhere on the floor of that dark house you absorbed it. Then the sound of it happening again. Riki stood.

He went to the window first. What he saw: you on the floor of your room, one arm braced under you, trying to get up. Your face turned away from him, hair loose and fallen forward. Your father standing over you with his belt in his hand and the expression of a man entirely convinced of his own righteousness, which was the most dangerous kind of man, Riki had learned — not the ones who knew they were wrong and did it anyway, but the ones who had built a complete architecture of justification and lived inside it without windows. He went to the back door.

He did not go to your father’s room. He went to yours, and he opened the door, and he came in, and he crouched beside you on the floor where you had put yourself in the corner the way small animals put themselves in corners — making yourself as small as possible, which was the most unbearable thing, that you had learned this — and he put his hands on your face and he made you look at him. Your face.

He looked at it and held everything in him still with a precision that cost him more than anything had cost him since the fall. “Look at me,” he said. Quiet and even. “Look at me, sweetheart. Are you with me?” You looked at him. Your eyes found his. “Ki?” You said, broken in the middle. “Yes,” he said. “It’s me. I’ve got you.” I’ve got you — your words, from the trail, the first ones, and he meant them the same way you had meant them, completely and without reservation. “Can you stand?” You could. Barely, and with his hands on you, but you could.

He took you to the barn. He settled you on the bedroll with the cedar quilt around your shoulders and he crouched in front of you and he looked at your face again and the thing in him was not fraying now. It was not unstable. It had resolved into something very clear and very still, the stillness of a decision made completely. “Stay here,” he said. You looked at him. At his face, at whatever was in it that had no human register. “Ki —”

“Stay here,” he said again. “Do not come in. Whatever you hear — do not come in.” “What are you going to do.” He looked at you. He did not answer. He did not need to. The answer was in his face and you could read it, he knew you could — you who catalogued things, you who paid attention, you who had looked at him from the very beginning with that serious and complete regard.

“Ki,” you said. Very quietly. “I know,” he said. He stood. He pressed his mouth to your forehead, your temple, the corner of your eye. He held your face in his hands one more moment and looked at you and you looked back at him and the lamp burned between you for the last time in this configuration, and then he put it down and he turned and he walked back to the house.

Your father was in the kitchen. He had not gone back to bed — he was at the table with a glass and his bible open in front of him, which Riki observed with a clarity that had no heat in it. The heat had burned off entirely on the walk across the yard. What was left was something much older and much colder than heat, something that had existed in him before he had a name for it, that had been in his hands in a field of winter wheat and had made a decision and had never, in the long unmeasured time since, doubted that decision. He came through the door. Your father looked up.

And Riki looked at him — and did not speak, and did not move, and simply let what he was rise to the surface of him completely and without management, without the careful containment of the kitchen two days ago, without the held door in a high wind. He let it come. The lamp went out.

Not guttered — extinguished, as though the air itself had decided it was no longer necessary. The temperature in the kitchen dropped so severely that your father’s breath became visible, a pale ghost of it in the sudden dark, and the glass on the table cracked cleanly down the middle and the bible’s pages turned without wind, all of them, to the end. Your father did not stand. Something had communicated to his body, below the level of thought, that standing would not help. Riki crossed the kitchen.

He did it slowly. There was no need to do it otherwise. Your father pressed back against his chair and made a sound that had no language in it, the sound of a creature that has encountered something outside the category of things it knows how to respond to, and Riki looked at him with eyes that were not, in this moment, entirely the eyes he wore in the daylight — and he was very calm, and very certain, and he put his hand on your father’s chest, and he was not long about it.

It was not cruel. He was not, had never been, cruel. He had been made for judgment, once — true judgment, the kind that weighed carefully and arrived at precision, not the kind your father had practiced in this house for nine years with a belt and a bible and a voice kept deliberately low. He knew the difference. He had always known the difference. It was the knowing that had cost him everything and he did not regret it, standing in this dark kitchen, not for a single part of a second. He stayed until it was finished.

Then he stood in the dark for a moment, in the silence of a house that had learned to be quiet and was now quiet for a different reason, and he breathed, in and out, and he let the thing in him recede back to its fraying dormant place. He walked back across the yard. He came through the barn door. The lamp caught him in pieces — his hands first, then his shirt, the dark stain of it. His face, which was entirely still, which had the quality of something that has passed through a very great heat and come out the other side resolved. His eyes, which found yours immediately and did not look away.

He stopped a few feet from you. You looked at him. At all of it, in the lamplight, without flinching. You looked at him the way you had looked at his scars in the morning light — because you did not want to look away from the parts of him that had cost him something.

He had done this before. In a different form, in a different age. He had been made for it, once. But he had never done it for this — for someone sitting in a barn in Nevada with a cedar quilt around her shoulders and her mother’s capable hands and nine years of just us and an almost-smile that he intended to spend a very long time coaxing into something less careful. “Ki,” you said. Your voice was steady. He had not known what your voice would be and it was steady, and something in him came fully to rest at the sound of it.

“Yes,” he said. You stood. The quilt fell from your shoulders. You crossed to him and you took his face in your hands — the way you had in the barn two nights ago, that careful and unapologetic hold — and you looked at him from very close. “You’re beautiful,” you said. He looked at you. At the absolute sincerity of it, the plainness of it, the way you said it the way you said everything — directly, and without fuss, and meaning it completely.

Something broke open in him. Not badly. The way ground breaks open in spring — to let something through. You kissed him. He kissed you back with everything he had, which was not what he’d had before the fall, which was less and more complicated and fraying at the edges, and it was enough, it was more than enough, it was the most enough anything had ever been.

You took very little. Your mother’s books. A change of clothes. The small tin of money you had kept in the flour jar for nine years because you had always known, in the way people know things they do not say aloud, that there would come a morning when you would need it. He saddled Clementine. Job watched this process with the air of an animal that had opinions but had decided, on this particular occasion, to keep them to himself.

The sky was going grey at the east when you came out of the house for the last time. You stood on the porch for a moment — not long, a breath, the specific pause of someone saying goodbye to something that was never really home — and then you stepped off it and crossed the yard and he held Clementine while you mounted and then he handed you the reins and you looked down at him. “Are you going to walk again?” you said. The almost-smile, present and real, and he looked at it and thought: there it is.

“I find I prefer it,” he said. “It gives me something to look at.” The colour came into your face, high on the cheekbones. He took Clementine’s bridle and he began to walk, and she walked with him, and you rode above him in the early morning with the Nevada land going gold around you and the sky opening up ahead in every colour it had, and he walked and looked at the horizon and felt the sun on his face, which was new enough still to notice, which he hoped would always be new enough to notice.

“Ki,” you said, from above him. “Yes, sweetheart.” “Where are we going?” He looked out at the land. At the vast and red and indifferent and quietly magnificent land, all that open sky above it, all that possibility in the distance. “Away from here,” he said. “And then — wherever you like.”

You were quiet for a moment. “I’ve never chosen before,” you said. Wondering, slightly. The voice of someone holding something new, testing the weight of it. “I know,” he said. “You have time.” The sun came fully over the horizon. Nevada went gold. Clementine walked on, and you rode, and he walked beside you with his face in the light and his hands at his sides and the scars on his back that had stopped hurting, finally, or had not stopped hurting but had become the kind of hurt that was also the shape of a choice he would make again and again and again —

And the road ahead was open. And you were on it. And that was enough. That was everything.

(50/50) @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa @firstclassjaylee

[lac4ygal]

Hi queen, I just wanted to let you know that I still think about The High Life everyday and I don't think I've ever been so emotionally altered by a fic 😃. I also now permanently associate Jay's cover of "Say You Won't Let Go" with it because it feels like it was made for them.

Thank you for writing, I can't wait to read more of your work ❤️

AWWHHHH BABY ILY 😽😽😽

[lac4ygal]

are you planning to publish mustang and milkshakes anytime soon ? 🥰

I completely forgot about tha fic LOL but yes I have it done and dusted for like… a while I didn’t know people wanted it! But like ofc I can post it if people are interested in it??

[lac4ygal]

KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 002 - FASHIONABLY LATE | 5.5k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! murder, assassination, violence, blood, alcohol consumption, power imbalance, possessive behaviour, jealousy, fingering, oral sex, penetrative sex, choking, multiple orgasms, squirting, creampie, degradation, possession, jealousy, complicated relationship dynamics, attachment issues, obsessive/controlling behaviour

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LEE HEESEUNG

He is never on time.

This is not carelessness. Heeseung has not been careless about anything since he was seventeen years old and found a folder in his father’s study that he was not meant to find and sat on the floor of that room for forty minutes reading it and then put it back exactly as he found it and went to dinner and ate and said nothing. Carelessness is for people who can afford the consequences of it. Heeseung cannot afford consequences. He manufactures them for other people.

Being late is a choice.

It is a choice about information — when you arrive after the room has settled you can read the whole of it in thirty seconds. Who is talking to whom. Who has had too much to drink. Who is performing ease and who has it. You walk in and the room adjusts to you and in the adjustment you learn everything about it that you need.

He learned this from his father.

He has learned most things from his father. The useful ones he kept. The rest he filed under what not to become, which is a longer list and which he consults more often.

He wakes at seven. Lies there for a moment looking at the ceiling of the apartment that no one is given the address of. Not the penthouse — that one has the right address for business cards and the occasions when being findable is strategic. This one is different. Three people know it exists. This is not paranoia. This is arithmetic.

He thinks about the evening. The gala first. Then the other thing. He runs both through his head with the same flat attention he applies to all tasks and finds them both equally manageable and gets up.

Coffee. The machine that cost more than it should. He stands at the window with the cup and looks at Seoul doing its morning things and thinks about Kim Jungsoo, which is what he has been thinking about for six months with the patient accumulation of a man who does not move until moving is the correct thing to do.

It is now the correct thing to do.

Kim Jungsoo has been his father’s man for eleven years and has been working against Heeseung specifically for six months — the Incheon account, the Busan contact, the conversation with Park Dohyun on the fourteenth of last month in a restaurant in Yongsan that he chose because he thought distance from anything that mattered would protect him.

It didn’t.

Heeseung finishes his coffee. Sets the cup down. Sends one text to a number saved under no name. Puts the phone in his pocket.

Gets dressed.

He drives himself. There are categories of errand that don’t require witnesses and his driver is loyal but loyalty is a thing with a weight limit Heeseung has never been interested in testing. He parks three blocks from the address in Mapo-gu. Walks the rest with his hands in his pockets and his face doing nothing, just a man on a street, unremarkable, received by the morning without being registered by it.

He has a gun. It is not the first time he has carried one and he does not think about this the way most people would think about it. He thinks about it the way he thinks about a tool. You select the right one for the task. You use it. You are precise.

The building is a walk-up. Five floors, no elevator, the smell of other people’s cooking layered in the stairwell. He takes the stairs to the fourth floor and finds the door and knocks twice. Puts his hands back in his pockets.

Movement inside. A pause. Then:

“Who is it.”

“Old friend,” Heeseung says.

Longer pause this time. He counts the seconds. At eleven the lock turns.

Kim Jungsoo opens the door and sees him and his face does the thing faces do when your worst fear has materialised on your threshold — one fraction of a second of pure unmanaged response, all the guilt and the recognition and the specific terror of a man who has been waiting for the accounting and is now receiving it. Heeseung reads all of it in that fraction. Files it. Feels nothing in particular.

He smiles.

It is not a warm smile. It is the smile of a man who has gotten exactly where he intended to get and finds something in that satisfying in a way that is, he is aware, not entirely normal. He has been aware of this for years. He has never found it troubling.

“Jungsoo,” he says. “Can I come in.”

Kim Jungsoo sits in the chair by the window because Heeseung has taken the centre of the room and has left him nowhere else. The television is on low — a cooking show, someone folding dumplings with great concentration. The ashtray needs emptying. The room has the specific atmosphere of a man who has been waiting for something bad and has stopped cleaning in the meantime.

Heeseung looks around once. Looks back at him.

“Six months,” he says. “The Incheon account first. Then the Busan contact. Then Park Dohyun, fourteenth of last month, Yongsan.” A pause, easy, unhurried. “You thought you were far enough away.”

Kim Jungsoo’s mouth opens. “I was going to—”

“Don’t,” Heeseung says.

He stops.

Heeseung tilts his head slightly. Looks at Kim Jungsoo the way he looks at most problems — with the complete and patient attention of a man who has already solved it and is now simply executing. There is something in him that enjoys this part. He does not perform remorse about that. Remorse requires believing you should be different than you are and Heeseung has not believed that since he was seventeen.

“You made a calculation,” Heeseung says. “My father is ageing. The structure is shifting. You wanted to be on the right side of it.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “The miscalculation was thinking there are two sides. There’s one side. Mine.”

Kim Jungsoo is very still. “Heeseung—”

“You know what this is,” Heeseung says.

A long silence. The dumpling show continues behind them, tinny and absurd. Kim Jungsoo closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says. Very quietly. The voice of a man who has run out of moves.

“Good,” Heeseung says. “Then we don’t need to discuss it further.”

He does it efficiently. He has always been efficient. The sound is louder than he expects in the small room and then the room is very quiet. He stands there for a moment in the quiet and looks at what the situation has become and feels the same thing he always feels which is close to nothing, with one thin thread of something underneath it that might be satisfaction and which he does not examine.

The television is still going.

He turns it off.

Stands in the resulting silence for exactly five seconds.

Then he leaves. Down the stairs, three blocks to the car, drives back to the apartment. He showers because he is precise about these things. The water runs hot. He stands under it and looks at the tiles and thinks about the gala.

He gets dressed.

He looks at himself in the mirror for exactly as long as necessary.

He looks good. He always looks good. He is aware of this the way he is aware of most things about himself — as information, as a tool, as something that serves a function.

He picks up his keys.

He smiles at his own reflection. The same smile. The one that isn’t warm.

He arrives at the gala at nine forty-seven.

The room is at full temperature by then — the hour when enough drinks have been consumed that the performances have loosened slightly, the careful calibrations of the first hour relaxing into something more legible. He walks in and does what he always does. Thirty seconds. Full read.

Shim Daejung at the centre, which is where Shim Daejung always is. A cluster of promotions people to the left. The eastern circuit contingent near the bar. Jake Shim somewhere in the middle doing what Jake Shim always does at these things, which is be effortlessly the most entertaining person in his immediate vicinity while appearing not to try.

The new fighter. Jungwon — the name from his file, Yang Jungwon, Mapo-gu, underground circuit, clean record in every sense of the word. He is standing at the edge of a conversation with two men from the promotions board, listening with the stillness that his file had flagged and that is more notable in person. Young. Very good looking in the specific way of someone who doesn’t know what to do with it yet. Heeseung files this.

And then he finds her.

He always finds her. This is not a choice. It is something his eyes do before his brain has directed them to, something that has been true since he was nineteen years old and has not become less true in the years since no matter what he has done to make it less true. She is across the room talking to someone he doesn’t register because she is there and everything else is background.

Black dress. Dark hair. The particular way she holds herself in rooms like this — the ease that is not ease, the performance of belonging that has become so practiced it is indistinguishable from the real thing except that Heeseung knows the difference. He knows every version of her. That is the problem and has always been the problem.

Park Sunghoon is nearby. Also filed. Also dealt with in the privacy of his own chest in the flat affectless way he deals with things he is not going to act on. Yet.

He takes a champagne glass from a server and moves into the room.

He speaks to the people he needs to speak to. Does it efficiently, leaves each conversation with something he didn’t have before, moves through the room with the unhurried deliberateness that people mistake for ease and which is actually control. He shakes Shim Daejung’s hand and they exchange pleasantries with the specific quality of men who have been enemies for long enough that the civility has become its own language. Daejung’s eyes do the thing they always do when they find Heeseung — a flicker, quickly managed, that Heeseung reads as guilt and has been reading as guilt for years. Good. He wants it there. He wants the man to feel it every time.

“Lee,” Daejung says. “Your father couldn’t make it?”

“Prior commitment,” Heeseung says. Which means his father chose not to come, which both of them know, which neither of them will say.

“A shame.” The smile is perfect. “Next time.”

“Of course,” Heeseung says, and moves on.

He finds Yang Jungwon by the windows.

The fighter is alone for the first time in the evening, having been passed around the room by Daejung for the better part of an hour and apparently having found a moment to stand at the edge of it and simply breathe. Heeseung appreciates this. The room does not.

He stops beside him. Jungwon registers him without turning immediately — a peripheral awareness, the specific alertness of someone who keeps track of their surroundings as a matter of habit. Then he turns and looks at Heeseung with those still eyes and says nothing.

“Yang Jungwon,” Heeseung says.

“I don’t know you,” Jungwon says. Not rudely. Just accurately.

“Lee Heeseung.” He extends his hand. Jungwon takes it. The grip is what it was with Sunghoon — level, no performance. “Lee Corp.”

Something moves in Jungwon’s expression. The name has registered. Heeseung watches him file it and recalibrate and maintain his composure, which he does well.

“The other side,” Jungwon says.

“The other side,” Heeseung agrees. “How are you finding it?”

“The room?”

“The world you’ve walked into.”

Jungwon looks at him. The assessment in it is genuine — not performance, not posturing, just someone looking at a situation and determining what it is. “I don’t know yet,” he says.

“Honest answer.”

“Only kind I have.”

Heeseung looks at him for a moment. Considers him properly. The file had been accurate but files are flat and this person is not flat — there is something in him that is harder to categorise, a quality of presence that Heeseung does not usually encounter in fighters who have just signed with someone else’s operation. He is not intimidated. He is not performing confidence. He is simply here, in the room, looking at it as it is.

“A word of advice,” Heeseung says. “Freely given.”

“From the competition.”

“From someone who grew up in this.” He looks out at the room. “Watch who brings you into conversations and watch who they’re watching while they do it. The introductions in rooms like this are never just introductions.”

Jungwon follows his eyeline to where Shim Daejung is now speaking to the Matsuda CFO. “I know,” he says.

Heeseung looks at him sideways. “Do you.”

“I’m from Mapo-gu,” Jungwon says. “Not a different planet.”

The corner of Heeseung’s mouth moves. One small involuntary thing. He takes a sip of champagne and looks back at the room.

“Good luck in the ring,” he says. “You’ll need less of it than most.”

“That a compliment from the competition?”

“Call it an observation,” Heeseung says, and moves on.

He finds her between conversations.

She is moving from one cluster to another with the fluid ease of someone who has been navigating this current her entire life, and she clocks him before he reaches her — he sees it, the almost imperceptible shift in her posture, the half second of management that she does so fast most people miss it. He has never missed it. He knows what it means.

“You’re late,” she says, when he reaches her side.

“I’m always late,” he says.

“Hence the observation.”

She looks at him in the way she looks at him in rooms like this — level, composed, the full armour on. Under the armour is the thing he is the only person who knows. He does not think about this too carefully or too often because thinking about it carefully leads to places that compromise his timeline.

“You look well,” he says.

“Don’t,” she says. Same word she said to Sunghoon earlier. He knows because he was watching.

“It’s a neutral observation.”

“Nothing you say is neutral.”

He smiles. It is a real smile, which he allows himself because it is her and because the room will read it as the civility of two rivals’ children being civilised and will not read what is underneath it, which is something older and less civil entirely.

“Dance with me,” he says.

“No.”

“It’s good for the optics. Rival families, cordial.”

“We’re not cordial.”

“They don’t know that.”

She looks at him for a long moment. He looks back. The room moves around them. Somewhere across it Park Sunghoon is talking to someone and not watching, which is the only reason this conversation is happening at this register.

She sets her champagne on a nearby table.

“One,” she says.

“One,” he agrees.

The floor has a small number of couples moving through something slow and orchestral that the venue has piped in for atmosphere. He takes her hand and puts his other at her waist and she does the thing she does when he touches her in public, which is become very still and very composed and be in the exact way he knows she is trying not to be. He can feel her pulse at her wrist. He does not mention this.

They move. She is a good dancer. He is a better one. They both know this and she has never liked knowing it.

“The new fighter,” he says, into the space near her ear. “Jungwon.”

“What about him.”

“You spoke to him.”

“So did you.”

“I saw.” His hand at her waist adjusts slightly. “He’s interesting.”

“He’s my father’s,” she says. The words are flat and final and mean nothing and mean everything.

“For now,” Heeseung says.

She pulls back enough to look at him. “Don’t,” she says.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re always doing something.”

He looks at her. At the face he has known longer than almost any other face — the way it looks when the armour thins, which is happening now despite her, because it always does with him. He is the only variable she has never fully been able to manage and they both know it and she hates it and he has spent years not examining how he feels about that.

He turns her, smooth, brings her back in close. His mouth near her ear. He can smell her perfume and under it something that is just her, that has always been just her, that he filed away at nineteen and has never been able to fully retrieve.

“I have something tonight,” he says, very quietly. “After this.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Yes you are.”

She is rigid in his arms for exactly one second. “Heeseung—”

“Come after midnight,” he says. “You know the address.”

The music continues. They move through the last few bars of it and she looks straight ahead and does not look at him and he does not look at her and between them is fifteen years of history that neither of them has ever successfully put down.

The music resolves. She steps back. Looks at him with an expression that is composed and furious and underneath both of those things is the thing she never lets him see directly but which he reads anyway because he always reads it.

“Fuck you,” she says. Pleasantly, quietly, the way people say things in rooms like this when the thing they’re saying cannot be said at volume.

He takes her hand and brings it to his mouth. Presses his lips to her knuckles once, formal, the way you do in rooms like this. Over it he looks at her.

“Midnight,” he says.

He releases her hand and walks away.

He leaves the gala at eleven fifteen. Drives back to the apartment. Showers again because he is precise about these things. Changes into something easier. Pours a glass of whisky and sits in the dark of his living room and waits.

The apartment is spare and chosen. One painting on the main wall, small, something his mother made before his father made it so she couldn’t make anything anymore. He looks at it sometimes. He looked at it before the gala. He looked at it and felt the task and turned away.

At twelve oh four he hears the elevator.

He doesn’t move. Stays in the chair. Listens to her — the elevator opening, the pause in the entrance hall where she makes the decision again, the footsteps across the floor. She has been pausing in his doorways for years. She has been making the decision for years. She always makes the same one.

She appears in the doorway. Still in the gala dress. Heels in her hand. She looks at him in the chair in the dark and her face does what her face does when it’s just them — the armour present but thinner, the real edges of her visible at the seams.

“I hate you,” she says.

“I know,” he says.

“I mean it this time.”

“You mean it every time.”

She puts her heels down. Crosses the room toward him and he watches her come with the unhurried attention he gives to things he wants, which is patient and total and a little unnerving and she knows all of this and comes toward him anyway.

She stops in front of him. Looks down at him in the chair.

He reaches up and takes her wrist. Her pulse under his thumb, fast, the same as on the dance floor. He runs his thumb over it once, deliberate, and watches her jaw tighten.

“Sit down,” he says.

“Don’t tell me—”

He pulls her down into his lap in one smooth motion and she lands against him with a sharp breath and his mouth finds the side of her neck immediately, the place below her ear that he mapped years ago and has never forgotten.

“Heeseung.” Warning in it. Or the shape of warning.

“You came,” he says, into her skin.

“Shut up.”

“You always come.” His mouth moves against her throat. “Every time. You tell me no and then you’re in my elevator at midnight.” His hand slides up her thigh under the hem of the dress, deliberate and unhurried. “What does that tell you.”

“That I have poor judgment.”

“That you know whose you are,” he says, and feels her whole body react to it. He pulls back and looks at her and his expression is the one that has never once been warm. “Say it.”

“Don’t—”

“Say it.”

A beat. Her jaw tight. “Yours,” she says, and hates that she means it.

“Good girl.” He kisses her then — not careful, not composed, his hand coming up to the back of her neck and holding her there while he takes his time with her mouth, messy and unhurried, his tongue against hers until she makes a sound into him she couldn’t suppress. He pulls back and looks at the state of her mouth. Looks satisfied by it. “He had his hands on you all night,” he says, quiet. “Sunghoon.”

“Don’t start—”

“Did he kiss you.” His thumb presses to her lower lip, still wet from his mouth. “Did you let him put his mouth here.”

“No—”

“But you thought about it.” Not an accusation. A statement. His thumb drags slow across her lip. “And then you thought about this.”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.

He stands with her, lifts her, her legs wrapping around him with the ease of a body that remembers. Carries her to the bedroom and drops her onto the bed and steps back and looks at her — dress, dark hair against his pillow, chest rising and falling too fast for composure.

“Take it off,” he says.

“You usually—”

“I want to watch you do it.”

She holds his gaze and reaches back and unzips it and lets it fall and he looks at her in her lingerie on his bed and takes his time about looking because she is his and he is not in a hurry to pretend otherwise.

He moves to the edge of the bed. Crouches. Puts both hands on her knees and pushes them apart slowly and she lets him with the specific surrender she only has for him. His thumbs press into the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“He touched you tonight,” he says. “In front of everyone. His hands on your waist.” His thumbs press harder. “You let him.”

“Heeseung—”

“Did you like it.”

“Stop—”

“Did you.”

“No,” she says, and means it, and he reads that she means it and files it.

“Because you were thinking about this,” he says. “Every time he touched you.”

She looks at him and her eyes are dark and furious and fully honest. “Yes,” she says.

He takes the lingerie off methodically. Looks at her completely bare on his bed and the thing behind the locked door presses against it once and he closes it again. He lowers his mouth to the scars on her thighs — one, then the next, then the next. Methodical. His. She makes the sound that isn’t for anyone else and he feels it in his spine.

He looks up at her from between her thighs. “I’ve got you,” he says, which means possession and something else and both simultaneously.

He keeps her thighs apart with his forearm flat across her hips and puts his mouth on her cunt and she gasps — sharp, genuine — and her hand finds his hair immediately. He takes his time. Tongue flat and slow first, reading her, then focused, patient in the way he’s patient with everything that matters to him. When she tries to grind against his mouth he pins her down harder and doesn’t adjust his pace.

“Please—” she breathes.

He pulls back. Looks up at her. Her pussy is wet against his lips and her composure is completely gone, the real her all the way to the surface.

“Please what,” he says.

“Don’t make me—”

“I’m going to make you,” he says, pleasantly. “Every time. Say it.”

“Your mouth,” she says, jaw tight with the effort of it. “Please. I want your mouth.”

“Where.”

“Heeseung—”

“Where, babygirl.”

The word does something to her. He watches it happen. Files it. “My cunt,” she says, face flushed with want and something like fury. “Please.”

“Good girl,” he says, and puts his mouth back on her.

He works her with his tongue and two fingers and then three, feeling her stretch, feeling her clench around him, reading every sound she makes and using each one. When she’s shaking he pulls back and crawls up her body and kisses her — deep and messy, his tongue against hers, letting her taste herself on his mouth — and she makes a sound against him that is nothing like the composed woman from the gala.

“Sunghoon doesn’t know what you taste like,” he says, against her mouth. “Does he.”

“No—”

“No.” He kisses her again, slower, messier, his hand cupping her jaw and tilting her where he wants her. “He doesn’t know any of it. The sounds you make. What you look like like this.” He pulls back and looks at her face — wrecked, wanting, entirely his. “Only me.”

“Only you,” she breathes, and stops fighting it.

He reaches down and strokes her once and she arches up and he removes his hand. “Tell me what you want,” he says.

“You—”

“Specifically.”

Her jaw tightens. “Your cock,” she says. “Please.”

“Since you asked,” he says, and the smile isn’t warm, but underneath it is the thing he will never say.

He sinks into her slowly — all the way, deliberate, every inch — and the sound she makes when he’s fully seated inside her is the sound he would do anything to keep hearing, which is information he will take to his grave. He stills. Presses his palm flat to her lower stomach and feels himself there, the slight pressure of it, the faint swell, and watches her eyes go wide.

“Feel that,” he says.

“Yes—”

“Every time you go home to him,” he says, low, “you’re going to feel this.” He drives forward and she cries out and he does it again. “Every time he puts his hands on you, you’re going to think about whose cock did this to you.”

“Yours—”

“Say it properly.”

“Yours,” she breathes, breaking. “Only yours—”

He reaches up and wraps his hand around her throat — not tight, just the weight of it, just the reminder of him — and tilts her face to his and makes her hold his gaze while he moves. The rhythm is deep and relentless and she takes it with her hands braced against the headboard and her eyes on his because breaking eye contact with Heeseung has always felt like losing something.

“Sunghoon touches you like he’s asking permission,” he says, low, against her ear, his hand present at her throat. “Like he’s not sure he’s allowed.” He drives deeper and feels her clench around his cock. “You don’t want that.”

“No—”

“What do you want.”

“This—” Broken. Honest. “You. Please—”

He kisses her again — deep and messy, tongue against hers, swallowing the sounds she makes — and his free hand works between them to find her clit and she pulls back from the kiss to gasp and he chases her mouth and takes it back. Keeps kissing her while his fingers work and his hips drive forward and she is completely undone beneath him, no composure left anywhere.

His hand at her stomach presses flat again, feeling himself moving inside her, the obscenity of it, and she looks down and makes a sound that is not composed and not civilised and entirely real.

“You feel like mine,” he says, against her mouth.

“Say it again,” she says. Against everything. Against better judgment. Against fifteen years of reasons not to.

He pulls back to look at her. His hips still moving. His hand tightening fractionally at her throat, just enough. The fault line in the locked door.

“Mine,” he says, low and certain. His hand at her throat. His palm at her stomach. His cock buried inside her. “Mine.”

She comes apart.

Her pussy clenches around him and she makes a sound that fills the quiet apartment and he drives through it, relentless, and she soaks his hand and the sheets beneath her and makes a broken sound that he swallows with his mouth, kissing her through it, messy and deep, his tongue against hers while she shakes. He says it one more time against her mouth like it keeps escaping him — mine — low and rough and nothing like his usual control, the one crack he allows himself, the one fault line that has always been hers.

He follows her. It hits him in the base of his spine and breaks over him with her name in it, his face pressed to her throat, the controlled architecture of him coming apart at exactly one place. He fills her and stays there and her hands in his hair go gentle for the first time all night and it costs him more than anything else has.

He pulls out slowly. His hand at her throat loosens and becomes a palm resting at her collarbone, warm and still. He lies beside her and looks at the ceiling and then looks at her and then looks at the ceiling again.

She lies on her back, chest still rising and falling fast. The room is dark and warm and full of things neither of them will say.

He looks at the mark above her collarbone that she will have to deal with tomorrow. He looks at it without apology.

“Sunghoon will see that,” he says.

“I know,” she says.

“Good,” he says, quietly. And means it completely.

She lies on her back looking at the ceiling, chest still rising and falling fast. The room is dark and warm and smells like them and for a few minutes neither of them says anything and the silence is, as their silences have always been, full of things.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I’m not staying.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“I know what time it is.”

He turns his head and looks at her profile. The line of her nose, her jaw, the way her chest rises and falls. He has looked at this face for years. He will look at it for years more. He will use it and he will keep it and he will never tell her the thing that is true about it because telling her would compromise everything and he is patient and he is thorough and he does not compromise things.

Even things with her name on them.

“Sunghoon,” he says.

She closes her eyes. “Don’t.”

“Is it serious.”

“No.”

He turns his head and looks at her profile. The line of her nose, her throat, the mark he has left above her collarbone that she will have to deal with tomorrow. He looks at this without apology.

“Sunghoon,” he says.

She closes her eyes. “Don’t start.”

“Is it serious.”

“No.”

“Does he think it is.”

A beat. The pause of someone who knows the answer and doesn’t want to give it. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks,” she says.

“It matters to me,” he says. Flatly. Simply. The most honest thing he will say tonight and he says it like it costs nothing.

She opens her eyes. Looks at the ceiling. Something in her face moves. “Heeseung,” she says, very quietly. Not angry. Something else.

“I know,” he says. Which means he knows what she is and isn’t going to say. Which means he is letting her not say it. Which is the particular mercy he extends to her because she is the one person he extends it to.

She sits up. Finds her dress. Puts it on with the practised efficiency of someone who has dressed in this room before. He watches her. He always watches her.

She finds her heels. Stands in the doorway of his bedroom and looks back at him once, in the dark, with an expression he reads in full — the want and the anger and the thing underneath both that neither of them will name.

“Don’t,” she says.

He says nothing.

She leaves. He hears the elevator open and close. He lies in the dark of his room in the apartment that three people know exists and feels the fault line in the architecture of himself and closes it, methodically, the way he closes everything.

He thinks about the gala. About Shim Daejung’s flicker. About Yang Jungwon’s still eyes watching the room. About Kim Jungsoo in the apartment in Mapo-gu and the cooking show still going.

He thinks about her walking back to the car with his mark on her throat and going home and sleeping in a bed that is not his.

He thinks about the timeline. What it requires. What it will cost.

He closes his eyes.

He is patient.

He is thorough.

He smiles at the ceiling in the dark, the smile that isn’t warm, and goes to sleep.

A/N: and that’s the chapter of what is going to absolutely ruin everyone 😝. heeseung has been living in my head rent free and i’m not even a little sorry about it. if you made it to the end you’re just like me and we should talk. reblogs and feedback keep me writing — see you in the next one!

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KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 002 - FASHIONABLY LATE | 5.5k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! MDNI murder, assassination, violence, blood, alcohol consumption, power imbalance, possessive behaviour, jealousy, fingering, oral sex, penetrative sex, choking, multiple orgasms, squirting, creampie, degradation, possession, jealousy, complicated relationship dynamics, attachment issues, obsessive/controlling behaviour

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LEE HEESEUNG

He is never on time.

This is not carelessness. Heeseung has not been careless about anything since he was seventeen years old and found a folder in his father’s study that he was not meant to find and sat on the floor of that room for forty minutes reading it and then put it back exactly as he found it and went to dinner and ate and said nothing. Carelessness is for people who can afford the consequences of it. Heeseung cannot afford consequences. He manufactures them for other people.

Being late is a choice.

It is a choice about information — when you arrive after the room has settled you can read the whole of it in thirty seconds. Who is talking to whom. Who has had too much to drink. Who is performing ease and who has it. You walk in and the room adjusts to you and in the adjustment you learn everything about it that you need.

He learned this from his father.

He has learned most things from his father. The useful ones he kept. The rest he filed under what not to become, which is a longer list and which he consults more often.

He wakes at seven. Lies there for a moment looking at the ceiling of the apartment that no one is given the address of. Not the penthouse — that one has the right address for business cards and the occasions when being findable is strategic. This one is different. Three people know it exists. This is not paranoia. This is arithmetic.

He thinks about the evening. The gala first. Then the other thing. He runs both through his head with the same flat attention he applies to all tasks and finds them both equally manageable and gets up.

Coffee. The machine that cost more than it should. He stands at the window with the cup and looks at Seoul doing its morning things and thinks about Kim Jungsoo, which is what he has been thinking about for six months with the patient accumulation of a man who does not move until moving is the correct thing to do.

It is now the correct thing to do.

Kim Jungsoo has been his father’s man for eleven years and has been working against Heeseung specifically for six months — the Incheon account, the Busan contact, the conversation with Park Dohyun on the fourteenth of last month in a restaurant in Yongsan that he chose because he thought distance from anything that mattered would protect him.

It didn’t.

Heeseung finishes his coffee. Sets the cup down. Sends one text to a number saved under no name. Puts the phone in his pocket.

Gets dressed.

He drives himself. There are categories of errand that don’t require witnesses and his driver is loyal but loyalty is a thing with a weight limit Heeseung has never been interested in testing. He parks three blocks from the address in Mapo-gu. Walks the rest with his hands in his pockets and his face doing nothing, just a man on a street, unremarkable, received by the morning without being registered by it.

He has a gun. It is not the first time he has carried one and he does not think about this the way most people would think about it. He thinks about it the way he thinks about a tool. You select the right one for the task. You use it. You are precise.

The building is a walk-up. Five floors, no elevator, the smell of other people’s cooking layered in the stairwell. He takes the stairs to the fourth floor and finds the door and knocks twice. Puts his hands back in his pockets.

Movement inside. A pause. Then:

“Who is it.”

“Old friend,” Heeseung says.

Longer pause this time. He counts the seconds. At eleven the lock turns.

Kim Jungsoo opens the door and sees him and his face does the thing faces do when your worst fear has materialised on your threshold — one fraction of a second of pure unmanaged response, all the guilt and the recognition and the specific terror of a man who has been waiting for the accounting and is now receiving it. Heeseung reads all of it in that fraction. Files it. Feels nothing in particular.

He smiles.

It is not a warm smile. It is the smile of a man who has gotten exactly where he intended to get and finds something in that satisfying in a way that is, he is aware, not entirely normal. He has been aware of this for years. He has never found it troubling.

“Jungsoo,” he says. “Can I come in.”

Kim Jungsoo sits in the chair by the window because Heeseung has taken the centre of the room and has left him nowhere else. The television is on low — a cooking show, someone folding dumplings with great concentration. The ashtray needs emptying. The room has the specific atmosphere of a man who has been waiting for something bad and has stopped cleaning in the meantime.

Heeseung looks around once. Looks back at him.

“Six months,” he says. “The Incheon account first. Then the Busan contact. Then Park Dohyun, fourteenth of last month, Yongsan.” A pause, easy, unhurried. “You thought you were far enough away.”

Kim Jungsoo’s mouth opens. “I was going to—”

“Don’t,” Heeseung says.

He stops.

Heeseung tilts his head slightly. Looks at Kim Jungsoo the way he looks at most problems — with the complete and patient attention of a man who has already solved it and is now simply executing. There is something in him that enjoys this part. He does not perform remorse about that. Remorse requires believing you should be different than you are and Heeseung has not believed that since he was seventeen.

“You made a calculation,” Heeseung says. “My father is ageing. The structure is shifting. You wanted to be on the right side of it.” He takes his hands out of his pockets. “The miscalculation was thinking there are two sides. There’s one side. Mine.”

Kim Jungsoo is very still. “Heeseung—”

“You know what this is,” Heeseung says.

A long silence. The dumpling show continues behind them, tinny and absurd. Kim Jungsoo closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says. Very quietly. The voice of a man who has run out of moves.

“Good,” Heeseung says. “Then we don’t need to discuss it further.”

He does it efficiently. He has always been efficient. The sound is louder than he expects in the small room and then the room is very quiet. He stands there for a moment in the quiet and looks at what the situation has become and feels the same thing he always feels which is close to nothing, with one thin thread of something underneath it that might be satisfaction and which he does not examine.

The television is still going.

He turns it off.

Stands in the resulting silence for exactly five seconds.

Then he leaves. Down the stairs, three blocks to the car, drives back to the apartment. He showers because he is precise about these things. The water runs hot. He stands under it and looks at the tiles and thinks about the gala.

He gets dressed.

He looks at himself in the mirror for exactly as long as necessary.

He looks good. He always looks good. He is aware of this the way he is aware of most things about himself — as information, as a tool, as something that serves a function.

He picks up his keys.

He smiles at his own reflection. The same smile. The one that isn’t warm.

He arrives at the gala at nine forty-seven.

The room is at full temperature by then — the hour when enough drinks have been consumed that the performances have loosened slightly, the careful calibrations of the first hour relaxing into something more legible. He walks in and does what he always does. Thirty seconds. Full read.

Shim Daejung at the centre, which is where Shim Daejung always is. A cluster of promotions people to the left. The eastern circuit contingent near the bar. Jake Shim somewhere in the middle doing what Jake Shim always does at these things, which is be effortlessly the most entertaining person in his immediate vicinity while appearing not to try.

The new fighter. Jungwon — the name from his file, Yang Jungwon, Mapo-gu, underground circuit, clean record in every sense of the word. He is standing at the edge of a conversation with two men from the promotions board, listening with the stillness that his file had flagged and that is more notable in person. Young. Very good looking in the specific way of someone who doesn’t know what to do with it yet. Heeseung files this.

And then he finds her.

He always finds her. This is not a choice. It is something his eyes do before his brain has directed them to, something that has been true since he was nineteen years old and has not become less true in the years since no matter what he has done to make it less true. She is across the room talking to someone he doesn’t register because she is there and everything else is background.

Black dress. Dark hair. The particular way she holds herself in rooms like this — the ease that is not ease, the performance of belonging that has become so practiced it is indistinguishable from the real thing except that Heeseung knows the difference. He knows every version of her. That is the problem and has always been the problem.

Park Sunghoon is nearby. Also filed. Also dealt with in the privacy of his own chest in the flat affectless way he deals with things he is not going to act on. Yet.

He takes a champagne glass from a server and moves into the room.

He speaks to the people he needs to speak to. Does it efficiently, leaves each conversation with something he didn’t have before, moves through the room with the unhurried deliberateness that people mistake for ease and which is actually control. He shakes Shim Daejung’s hand and they exchange pleasantries with the specific quality of men who have been enemies for long enough that the civility has become its own language. Daejung’s eyes do the thing they always do when they find Heeseung — a flicker, quickly managed, that Heeseung reads as guilt and has been reading as guilt for years. Good. He wants it there. He wants the man to feel it every time.

“Lee,” Daejung says. “Your father couldn’t make it?”

“Prior commitment,” Heeseung says. Which means his father chose not to come, which both of them know, which neither of them will say.

“A shame.” The smile is perfect. “Next time.”

“Of course,” Heeseung says, and moves on.

He finds Yang Jungwon by the windows.

The fighter is alone for the first time in the evening, having been passed around the room by Daejung for the better part of an hour and apparently having found a moment to stand at the edge of it and simply breathe. Heeseung appreciates this. The room does not.

He stops beside him. Jungwon registers him without turning immediately — a peripheral awareness, the specific alertness of someone who keeps track of their surroundings as a matter of habit. Then he turns and looks at Heeseung with those still eyes and says nothing.

“Yang Jungwon,” Heeseung says.

“I don’t know you,” Jungwon says. Not rudely. Just accurately.

“Lee Heeseung.” He extends his hand. Jungwon takes it. The grip is what it was with Sunghoon — level, no performance. “Lee Corp.”

Something moves in Jungwon’s expression. The name has registered. Heeseung watches him file it and recalibrate and maintain his composure, which he does well.

“The other side,” Jungwon says.

“The other side,” Heeseung agrees. “How are you finding it?”

“The room?”

“The world you’ve walked into.”

Jungwon looks at him. The assessment in it is genuine — not performance, not posturing, just someone looking at a situation and determining what it is. “I don’t know yet,” he says.

“Honest answer.”

“Only kind I have.”

Heeseung looks at him for a moment. Considers him properly. The file had been accurate but files are flat and this person is not flat — there is something in him that is harder to categorise, a quality of presence that Heeseung does not usually encounter in fighters who have just signed with someone else’s operation. He is not intimidated. He is not performing confidence. He is simply here, in the room, looking at it as it is.

“A word of advice,” Heeseung says. “Freely given.”

“From the competition.”

“From someone who grew up in this.” He looks out at the room. “Watch who brings you into conversations and watch who they’re watching while they do it. The introductions in rooms like this are never just introductions.”

Jungwon follows his eyeline to where Shim Daejung is now speaking to the Matsuda CFO. “I know,” he says.

Heeseung looks at him sideways. “Do you.”

“I’m from Mapo-gu,” Jungwon says. “Not a different planet.”

The corner of Heeseung’s mouth moves. One small involuntary thing. He takes a sip of champagne and looks back at the room.

“Good luck in the ring,” he says. “You’ll need less of it than most.”

“That a compliment from the competition?”

“Call it an observation,” Heeseung says, and moves on.

He finds her between conversations.

She is moving from one cluster to another with the fluid ease of someone who has been navigating this current her entire life, and she clocks him before he reaches her — he sees it, the almost imperceptible shift in her posture, the half second of management that she does so fast most people miss it. He has never missed it. He knows what it means.

“You’re late,” she says, when he reaches her side.

“I’m always late,” he says.

“Hence the observation.”

She looks at him in the way she looks at him in rooms like this — level, composed, the full armour on. Under the armour is the thing he is the only person who knows. He does not think about this too carefully or too often because thinking about it carefully leads to places that compromise his timeline.

“You look well,” he says.

“Don’t,” she says. Same word she said to Sunghoon earlier. He knows because he was watching.

“It’s a neutral observation.”

“Nothing you say is neutral.”

He smiles. It is a real smile, which he allows himself because it is her and because the room will read it as the civility of two rivals’ children being civilised and will not read what is underneath it, which is something older and less civil entirely.

“Dance with me,” he says.

“No.”

“It’s good for the optics. Rival families, cordial.”

“We’re not cordial.”

“They don’t know that.”

She looks at him for a long moment. He looks back. The room moves around them. Somewhere across it Park Sunghoon is talking to someone and not watching, which is the only reason this conversation is happening at this register.

She sets her champagne on a nearby table.

“One,” she says.

“One,” he agrees.

The floor has a small number of couples moving through something slow and orchestral that the venue has piped in for atmosphere. He takes her hand and puts his other at her waist and she does the thing she does when he touches her in public, which is become very still and very composed and be in the exact way he knows she is trying not to be. He can feel her pulse at her wrist. He does not mention this.

They move. She is a good dancer. He is a better one. They both know this and she has never liked knowing it.

“The new fighter,” he says, into the space near her ear. “Jungwon.”

“What about him.”

“You spoke to him.”

“So did you.”

“I saw.” His hand at her waist adjusts slightly. “He’s interesting.”

“He’s my father’s,” she says. The words are flat and final and mean nothing and mean everything.

“For now,” Heeseung says.

She pulls back enough to look at him. “Don’t,” she says.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re always doing something.”

He looks at her. At the face he has known longer than almost any other face — the way it looks when the armour thins, which is happening now despite her, because it always does with him. He is the only variable she has never fully been able to manage and they both know it and she hates it and he has spent years not examining how he feels about that.

He turns her, smooth, brings her back in close. His mouth near her ear. He can smell her perfume and under it something that is just her, that has always been just her, that he filed away at nineteen and has never been able to fully retrieve.

“I have something tonight,” he says, very quietly. “After this.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Yes you are.”

She is rigid in his arms for exactly one second. “Heeseung—”

“Come after midnight,” he says. “You know the address.”

The music continues. They move through the last few bars of it and she looks straight ahead and does not look at him and he does not look at her and between them is fifteen years of history that neither of them has ever successfully put down.

The music resolves. She steps back. Looks at him with an expression that is composed and furious and underneath both of those things is the thing she never lets him see directly but which he reads anyway because he always reads it.

“Fuck you,” she says. Pleasantly, quietly, the way people say things in rooms like this when the thing they’re saying cannot be said at volume.

He takes her hand and brings it to his mouth. Presses his lips to her knuckles once, formal, the way you do in rooms like this. Over it he looks at her.

“Midnight,” he says.

He releases her hand and walks away.

He leaves the gala at eleven fifteen. Drives back to the apartment. Showers again because he is precise about these things. Changes into something easier. Pours a glass of whisky and sits in the dark of his living room and waits.

The apartment is spare and chosen. One painting on the main wall, small, something his mother made before his father made it so she couldn’t make anything anymore. He looks at it sometimes. He looked at it before the gala. He looked at it and felt the task and turned away.

At twelve oh four he hears the elevator.

He doesn’t move. Stays in the chair. Listens to her — the elevator opening, the pause in the entrance hall where she makes the decision again, the footsteps across the floor. She has been pausing in his doorways for years. She has been making the decision for years. She always makes the same one.

She appears in the doorway. Still in the gala dress. Heels in her hand. She looks at him in the chair in the dark and her face does what her face does when it’s just them — the armour present but thinner, the real edges of her visible at the seams.

“I hate you,” she says.

“I know,” he says.

“I mean it this time.”

“You mean it every time.”

She puts her heels down. Crosses the room toward him and he watches her come with the unhurried attention he gives to things he wants, which is patient and total and a little unnerving and she knows all of this and comes toward him anyway.

She stops in front of him. Looks down at him in the chair.

He reaches up and takes her wrist. Her pulse under his thumb, fast, the same as on the dance floor. He runs his thumb over it once, deliberate, and watches her jaw tighten.

“Sit down,” he says.

“Don’t tell me—”

He pulls her down into his lap in one smooth motion and she lands against him with a sharp breath and his mouth finds the side of her neck immediately, the place below her ear that he mapped years ago and has never forgotten.

“Heeseung.” Warning in it. Or the shape of warning.

“You came,” he says, into her skin.

“Shut up.”

“You always come.” His mouth moves against her throat. “Every time. You tell me no and then you’re in my elevator at midnight.” His hand slides up her thigh under the hem of the dress, deliberate and unhurried. “What does that tell you.”

“That I have poor judgment.”

“That you know whose you are,” he says, and feels her whole body react to it. He pulls back and looks at her and his expression is the one that has never once been warm. “Say it.”

“Don’t—”

“Say it.”

A beat. Her jaw tight. “Yours,” she says, and hates that she means it.

“Good girl.” He kisses her then — not careful, not composed, his hand coming up to the back of her neck and holding her there while he takes his time with her mouth, messy and unhurried, his tongue against hers until she makes a sound into him she couldn’t suppress. He pulls back and looks at the state of her mouth. Looks satisfied by it. “He had his hands on you all night,” he says, quiet. “Sunghoon.”

“Don’t start—”

“Did he kiss you.” His thumb presses to her lower lip, still wet from his mouth. “Did you let him put his mouth here.”

“No—”

“But you thought about it.” Not an accusation. A statement. His thumb drags slow across her lip. “And then you thought about this.”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.

He stands with her, lifts her, her legs wrapping around him with the ease of a body that remembers. Carries her to the bedroom and drops her onto the bed and steps back and looks at her — dress, dark hair against his pillow, chest rising and falling too fast for composure.

“Take it off,” he says.

“You usually—”

“I want to watch you do it.”

She holds his gaze and reaches back and unzips it and lets it fall and he looks at her in her lingerie on his bed and takes his time about looking because she is his and he is not in a hurry to pretend otherwise.

He moves to the edge of the bed. Crouches. Puts both hands on her knees and pushes them apart slowly and she lets him with the specific surrender she only has for him. His thumbs press into the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“He touched you tonight,” he says. “In front of everyone. His hands on your waist.” His thumbs press harder. “You let him.”

“Heeseung—”

“Did you like it.”

“Stop—”

“Did you.”

“No,” she says, and means it, and he reads that she means it and files it.

“Because you were thinking about this,” he says. “Every time he touched you.”

She looks at him and her eyes are dark and furious and fully honest. “Yes,” she says.

He takes the lingerie off methodically. Looks at her completely bare on his bed and the thing behind the locked door presses against it once and he closes it again. He lowers his mouth to the scars on her thighs — one, then the next, then the next. Methodical. His. She makes the sound that isn’t for anyone else and he feels it in his spine.

He looks up at her from between her thighs. “I’ve got you,” he says, which means possession and something else and both simultaneously.

He keeps her thighs apart with his forearm flat across her hips and puts his mouth on her cunt and she gasps — sharp, genuine — and her hand finds his hair immediately. He takes his time. Tongue flat and slow first, reading her, then focused, patient in the way he’s patient with everything that matters to him. When she tries to grind against his mouth he pins her down harder and doesn’t adjust his pace.

“Please—” she breathes.

He pulls back. Looks up at her. Her pussy is wet against his lips and her composure is completely gone, the real her all the way to the surface.

“Please what,” he says.

“Don’t make me—”

“I’m going to make you,” he says, pleasantly. “Every time. Say it.”

“Your mouth,” she says, jaw tight with the effort of it. “Please. I want your mouth.”

“Where.”

“Heeseung—”

“Where, babygirl.”

The word does something to her. He watches it happen. Files it. “My cunt,” she says, face flushed with want and something like fury. “Please.”

“Good girl,” he says, and puts his mouth back on her.

He works her with his tongue and two fingers and then three, feeling her stretch, feeling her clench around him, reading every sound she makes and using each one. When she’s shaking he pulls back and crawls up her body and kisses her — deep and messy, his tongue against hers, letting her taste herself on his mouth — and she makes a sound against him that is nothing like the composed woman from the gala.

“Sunghoon doesn’t know what you taste like,” he says, against her mouth. “Does he.”

“No—”

“No.” He kisses her again, slower, messier, his hand cupping her jaw and tilting her where he wants her. “He doesn’t know any of it. The sounds you make. What you look like like this.” He pulls back and looks at her face — wrecked, wanting, entirely his. “Only me.”

“Only you,” she breathes, and stops fighting it.

He reaches down and strokes her once and she arches up and he removes his hand. “Tell me what you want,” he says.

“You—”

“Specifically.”

Her jaw tightens. “Your cock,” she says. “Please.”

“Since you asked,” he says, and the smile isn’t warm, but underneath it is the thing he will never say.

He sinks into her slowly — all the way, deliberate, every inch — and the sound she makes when he’s fully seated inside her is the sound he would do anything to keep hearing, which is information he will take to his grave. He stills. Presses his palm flat to her lower stomach and feels himself there, the slight pressure of it, the faint swell, and watches her eyes go wide.

“Feel that,” he says.

“Yes—”

“Every time you go home to him,” he says, low, “you’re going to feel this.” He drives forward and she cries out and he does it again. “Every time he puts his hands on you, you’re going to think about whose cock did this to you.”

“Yours—”

“Say it properly.”

“Yours,” she breathes, breaking. “Only yours—”

He reaches up and wraps his hand around her throat — not tight, just the weight of it, just the reminder of him — and tilts her face to his and makes her hold his gaze while he moves. The rhythm is deep and relentless and she takes it with her hands braced against the headboard and her eyes on his because breaking eye contact with Heeseung has always felt like losing something.

“Sunghoon touches you like he’s asking permission,” he says, low, against her ear, his hand present at her throat. “Like he’s not sure he’s allowed.” He drives deeper and feels her clench around his cock. “You don’t want that.”

“No—”

“What do you want.”

“This—” Broken. Honest. “You. Please—”

He kisses her again — deep and messy, tongue against hers, swallowing the sounds she makes — and his free hand works between them to find her clit and she pulls back from the kiss to gasp and he chases her mouth and takes it back. Keeps kissing her while his fingers work and his hips drive forward and she is completely undone beneath him, no composure left anywhere.

His hand at her stomach presses flat again, feeling himself moving inside her, the obscenity of it, and she looks down and makes a sound that is not composed and not civilised and entirely real.

“You feel like mine,” he says, against her mouth.

“Say it again,” she says. Against everything. Against better judgment. Against fifteen years of reasons not to.

He pulls back to look at her. His hips still moving. His hand tightening fractionally at her throat, just enough. The fault line in the locked door.

“Mine,” he says, low and certain. His hand at her throat. His palm at her stomach. His cock buried inside her. “Mine.”

She comes apart.

Her pussy clenches around him and she makes a sound that fills the quiet apartment and he drives through it, relentless, and she soaks his hand and the sheets beneath her and makes a broken sound that he swallows with his mouth, kissing her through it, messy and deep, his tongue against hers while she shakes. He says it one more time against her mouth like it keeps escaping him — mine — low and rough and nothing like his usual control, the one crack he allows himself, the one fault line that has always been hers.

He follows her. It hits him in the base of his spine and breaks over him with her name in it, his face pressed to her throat, the controlled architecture of him coming apart at exactly one place. He fills her and stays there and her hands in his hair go gentle for the first time all night and it costs him more than anything else has.

He pulls out slowly. His hand at her throat loosens and becomes a palm resting at her collarbone, warm and still. He lies beside her and looks at the ceiling and then looks at her and then looks at the ceiling again.

She lies on her back, chest still rising and falling fast. The room is dark and warm and full of things neither of them will say.

He looks at the mark above her collarbone that she will have to deal with tomorrow. He looks at it without apology.

“Sunghoon will see that,” he says.

“I know,” she says.

“Good,” he says, quietly. And means it completely.

She lies on her back looking at the ceiling, chest still rising and falling fast. The room is dark and warm and smells like them and for a few minutes neither of them says anything and the silence is, as their silences have always been, full of things.

“You should sleep,” he says.

“I’m not staying.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“I know what time it is.”

He turns his head and looks at her profile. The line of her nose, her jaw, the way her chest rises and falls. He has looked at this face for years. He will look at it for years more. He will use it and he will keep it and he will never tell her the thing that is true about it because telling her would compromise everything and he is patient and he is thorough and he does not compromise things.

Even things with her name on them.

“Sunghoon,” he says.

She closes her eyes. “Don’t.”

“Is it serious.”

“No.”

He turns his head and looks at her profile. The line of her nose, her throat, the mark he has left above her collarbone that she will have to deal with tomorrow. He looks at this without apology.

“Sunghoon,” he says.

She closes her eyes. “Don’t start.”

“Is it serious.”

“No.”

“Does he think it is.”

A beat. The pause of someone who knows the answer and doesn’t want to give it. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks,” she says.

“It matters to me,” he says. Flatly. Simply. The most honest thing he will say tonight and he says it like it costs nothing.

She opens her eyes. Looks at the ceiling. Something in her face moves. “Heeseung,” she says, very quietly. Not angry. Something else.

“I know,” he says. Which means he knows what she is and isn’t going to say. Which means he is letting her not say it. Which is the particular mercy he extends to her because she is the one person he extends it to.

She sits up. Finds her dress. Puts it on with the practised efficiency of someone who has dressed in this room before. He watches her. He always watches her.

She finds her heels. Stands in the doorway of his bedroom and looks back at him once, in the dark, with an expression he reads in full — the want and the anger and the thing underneath both that neither of them will name.

“Don’t,” she says.

He says nothing.

She leaves. He hears the elevator open and close. He lies in the dark of his room in the apartment that three people know exists and feels the fault line in the architecture of himself and closes it, methodically, the way he closes everything.

He thinks about the gala. About Shim Daejung’s flicker. About Yang Jungwon’s still eyes watching the room. About Kim Jungsoo in the apartment in Mapo-gu and the cooking show still going.

He thinks about her walking back to the car with his mark on her throat and going home and sleeping in a bed that is not his.

He thinks about the timeline. What it requires. What it will cost.

He closes his eyes.

He is patient.

He is thorough.

He smiles at the ceiling in the dark, the smile that isn’t warm, and goes to sleep.

A/N: and that’s the chapter of what is going to absolutely ruin everyone 😝. heeseung has been living in my head rent free and i’m not even a little sorry about it. if you made it to the end you’re just like me and we should talk. reblogs and feedback keep me writing — see you in the next one!

perm taglist: (50/50) @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa @firstclassjaylee

[lac4ygal]

I did just update my theme btw but it’s still me yall 😂

[lac4ygal]

when is the second part for “kiss and tell” coming??? btw love your content!!

Ahh sorry I’ve been kinda busy rn but I have a few sections left to further develop and then I’ll release it! sorry for the wait but thank you for all the love on it and it should be out some time in the following week 😚

[lac4ygal]

KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 001 - RINGSIDE | 4.5k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! implied sex, making out, kissing, smoking weed, alcohol consumption, complicated relationships, attachment issues, power imbalance undertones, possessive behaviour, tension, male gaze

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YOU

You hear him in the shower.

The particular sound of Sunghoon being somewhere — running water, a cupboard closing, the low hum of something he doesn’t know he’s doing. You lie in his sheets and listen to it and look at the ceiling and feel the morning come in through the gap in the blackout curtains, one thin line of Seoul light cutting across the room like it has somewhere to be.

His bedroom is the same as it always is. Dark wood, cream sheets, the specific order of a person who grew up with staff and absorbed their standards without noticing. Everything in its place. Everything expensive without announcing it.

A half-empty glass of water on his side of the bed that wasn’t there when you arrived last night, which means he woke at some point and you didn’t. You are usually a light sleeper. You are not, apparently, a light sleeper with Sunghoon, which is the kind of information you do not examine.

You stretch, slowly, feel last night in the length of your body. Your mouth is dry. Your hair is in a state. You reach for his water glass and drink half of it and put it back and lie there in your lingerie in his silk sheets in his expensive dark bedroom and feel, in the specific private way you allow yourself before the day requires anything, completely fine.

Not happy. Not unhappy. Fine, which is its own category. Sunghoon is its own category.

He comes out of the bathroom in a towel, hair damp, already looking like a man with somewhere to be. He stops when he sees you and something in his expression does the thing it always does — moves through several things quickly before landing on the one he decides to show you.

“You’re awake,” he says.

“Observant,” you say.

He crosses to the wardrobe. Opens it with the efficiency of someone running a familiar routine. Pulls out a shirt, considers it, puts it back. The towel sits low on his hips in a way that is entirely unfair at this hour. “I have a meeting at nine,” he says.

“I know.”

“It’s eight fifteen.

“I know,” you say again. You sit up. The sheet pools at your waist and his back is to you and then it isn’t because he’s turned around with the shirt in his hand and his eyes go to you and stay there and the meeting is, briefly, theoretical.

“Fuck,” he says, with some feeling.

“You look good too,” you say.

He laughs short. Crosses to the bed and stands over you and you tip your chin up and he kisses you in the way that belongs to mornings — slower than last night, less urgent, the familiar unhurried rhythm of two people who know exactly what this is. His hand finds your jaw. His thumb traces your lower lip when he pulls back and he looks at you for a moment in a way you don’t examine either.

“Tonight?” He says.

“Tonight’s the gala.”

“After the gala then.”

You slide your hand into the front of his shirt where he hasn’t done the buttons yet, feeling his muscles convulse and an intake of breath and smile against his mouth. “Maybe,” you say, and slip your tongue in before he can respond, you feel him make a sound low in his throat that means his meeting is going to be something he deals with rather than something he arrives to correctly.

You pull back. He looks at you. “That’s not fair,” he says.

“I know,” you say, and reach for your dress from last night where it’s folded over the chair. Because you always fold it. Because some habits are about maintaining the evidence of who you are even in the rooms where no one’s watching.

He watches you dress. Doesn’t say anything. The particular quality of his watching is something you know and don’t discuss.

“Driver’s coming at eight thirty,” he says eventually, doing his cufflinks.

“I know.”

“You always know everything,” he says. Not a complaint. Just an observation, the way Sunghoon delivers most things about you — like he’s still making sense of them.

You pick up your bag, find your sunglasses, stand in front of his mirror to fix what can be fixed. He appears behind you in the reflection. Taller. The shirt finally done. He looks at you in the mirror the way he sometimes looks at you and you let him do it for one second before you look away.

“Tonight,” he says again, to the back of your head.

“We’ll see,” you say, and leave.

The car smells like leather and air conditioning and the very particular neutrality of a space that belongs to no one. Your driver, Mr. Oh, has been with your family for eleven years. He does not ask questions. He does not comment on timing. He says “good morning, Miss Shim” and pulls into traffic and you sit in the back with your sunglasses on and watch Seoul do its Saturday morning thing.

You like the city like this. Before the full performance of it kicks in. Families outside convenience stores, someone walking a dog that is too big for its owner, a street vendor setting up for the day with the slow deliberate movements of someone who has done it ten thousand times. The city doesn’t care who you are at this hour. It’s just a city.

You take out your phone. Jake has texted at seven forty-three: you coming home first or straight to the venue

You type back: home first. don’t do anything stupid before I get there.

His response is immediate: too late but it’s fine

You close your eyes behind your sunglasses. “Mr. Oh,” you say. “Can we stop at the GS25 on Dosan-daero?”

“Of course, Miss Shim.”

You buy two coffees and a bottle of water and get back in the car. You drink one coffee on the way home. The other you leave in the cupholder for whoever needs it at the house.

Home is a house in Hannam-dong that your father bought the year you were born and has never considered replacing because he is not a man who replaces things. It is large without being ostentatious, which is its own kind of statement. The garden is kept by a man named Seo who arrives every Tuesday and treats the plants with a seriousness that you respect. The inside is the inside you have always known — the particular smell of it, the weight of the ceilings, the way the morning light moves through the east-facing windows in the main hall.

Your father is in the study when you come in. You can hear the meeting before you reach the door — low voices, the specific register of men talking about money. You straighten without thinking. Put your sunglasses on top of your head. Push the door.

“Good morning,” you say.

Your father looks up. “Sweetheart.” The word lands the way it always lands — warm and complete, like you are still the thing he organised his world around. Which you are. Which is its own complicated thing.

There are four men at the table. You know two of them. The other two you assess in the second it takes to cross the room to your father’s side — ages, posture, the way their eyes move when you walk in. They move the way men’s eyes always move when you walk into a room, which is to say immediately and with a kind of hunger they have not been asked to manage. You let it happen. You have been letting it happen since you were seventeen and your father first brought you into rooms like this and you understood, without being told, what your presence was doing and what it was for.

You relish it. You would not say this out loud. You relish the specific power of being looked at like that by men who have power of their own and losing it, briefly, to you. It is not a comfortable thing to admit about yourself and it is true.

You kiss your father’s cheek. He puts a hand briefly over yours on his shoulder.

“We’re almost done here,” he says. “Forty minutes.”

“Take your time,” you say. You smile at the room. The room responds. You leave.

Upstairs you shower for a long time. Let the water run hot enough to matter. You stand in it and think about nothing in particular, which is the thing showers are for — the specific permission to be empty for ten minutes before the day requires you to be full again.

You wash your hair. You condition it. You do all the things your body requires with the automatic efficiency of someone who has been maintaining themselves at this level for long enough that it no longer feels like effort. It just is. The serum and the moisturiser and the way you wrap your hair before you dry it and the specific order of everything that adds up to the version of you the world receives.

By the time you’re done the meeting downstairs has ended. You can tell from the quality of the house’s silence. Your father’s study silence and his post-meeting silence are different things and you have lived with both long enough to know them.

You’re at your vanity in your robe, doing your base, when you hear Jake.

Specifically, you hear Jake trying to be quiet, which is always louder than Jake being loud. The particular careful placing of feet on stairs that indicates someone who doesn’t want to be heard and lacks the coordination for it.

You go to your door. Open it. He is on the stairs, shoes in hand, jacket over his arm, with the specific expression of a man who knows exactly how he looks and has made peace with it. You stare at him. He stares back.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“You’re drunk,” you say.

“I’m finely drunk.”

“It’s ten in the morning, Jake.”

“It’s been a long night.” He attempts the next step and misjudges it slightly. You cross the landing and take his arm and he lets you redirect him upstairs without ceremony, which is how you know he’s drunker than he’s performing.

“Isn’t Sunghoon with you?” You say.

“He had a meeting.” A pause. “He said to tell you—” He stops. Recalibrates. “Actually he didn’t say anything. I made that up.”

“Obviously.”

You get him to his room. He sits on the edge of his bed and looks up at you with the particular expression he gets when he’s drunk enough to be honest — less of the performance, more of the actual face underneath. You have always loved this face more than the other one. Not because it’s sad, though sometimes it is, but because it’s him.

“The gala’s tonight,” you say.

“I know.”

“Appa can’t see you like this.”

“I know.” He lies back on the bed still in his jacket. “I’ll be fine by seven.”

“You’ll sleep until six and be rushing at six forty-five.”

“That’s fine.”

“Jake.”

“That’s fine,” he says again, softer. His eyes are already closing. You stand there for a moment looking at him — your brother, who is sometimes a disaster and always yours.

You pull his jacket off. He helps without waking up properly. You hang it over the chair.

“Water,” you say, putting a glass on his nightstand. “Tylenol. Don’t sleep past six.”

“Love you,” he says, into his pillow.

“Idiot,” you say. Which means the same thing.

He is, in fact, up by five-thirty though.

You’re finishing your makeup when he knocks on your door, already showered, already more or less assembled, holding two cigarettes and the expression of a man who has physically reset himself through force of will and is unreasonably proud of it.

“Ready,” he says.

“You were asleep three hours ago.”

“I’m a professional.” He holds out a cigarette. You take it. He lights both and sits on your window ledge while you finish your liner in the mirror.

This is its own ritual. Older than any other ritual you have with anyone. Jake on a window ledge, you at a mirror, cigarette smoke in the air between you. It started on the fire escape of your first apartment when you were teenagers, snuck out past midnight because the house was too full of what it was and you both needed somewhere to breathe. You have been doing versions of it since. Different windows. Same smoke. Same particular silence that is the only silence either of you fully trusts.

“How was last night,” you say.

“Fine. How was yours.”

You look at him in the mirror. He is looking out the window with the expression of someone who has decided to ask a question and decided not to. You have catalogued this expression for years.

“Fine,” you say.

He nods. Takes a long drag. “The new fighter’s going to be there tonight,” he says. “The one from the underground. Appa’s been talking about him.”

“I know.”

“Haven’t met him yet.”

“Neither have I.”

Jake looks at you then, briefly, with something in his face that is gone before you can classify it. “Should be interesting,” he says.

You finish your liner. Look at yourself in the full mirror. The dress is dark and the earrings are right and you look exactly like what you are — which is the point. You always look exactly like what you are. The art is in controlling what that means.

“Ready,” you say.

The press is outside the venue on Teheran-ro, which you expected and which Jake expected and which neither of you commented on during the car ride because it is so constant a feature of your lives that commenting on it would be like commenting on traffic. It simply is.

You rode from the house together in the back of the car sharing a second cigarette with the windows cracked and Jake playing something from his phone too loud and you watching the city go past and feeling the shift happen in you that always happens on the way to these things — the settling into the version of yourself the room requires, the quiet closing of the door on everything else.

The cameras start before you’re fully out of the car. Jake goes first, easy, comfortable, the full wattage of his smile deployed with the practiced fluency of someone born knowing how to be photographed. He turns back and offers his hand and you take it and step out.

The lights. The sound of your names. The specific sensation of being looked at by a lens, which is different from being looked at by a person and which you have never fully explained to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. You smile. Jake squeezes your hand once. You both look forward.

Inside, the venue is what the venue always is — a controlled version of excess, glamour managed to the point where it stops being glamour and becomes something colder and more permanent. You know this room. You know most of the people in it. You navigate it the way you navigate all rooms of this type — with ease that is not performed but is also not effortless, because nothing about this is effortless, it is just practiced past the point of visible effort.

Jake is already scanning. It takes him approximately ninety seconds to locate three people he wants to talk to, which is normal, and to locate the bar, which is faster. “There’s Sunghoon,” he says, chin-tilting toward the far side of the room.

You don’t look. “Go,” you say. “Find me later.”

“Don’t disappear,” he says, which is what he always says, which means I’ll disappear and I need to know where to find you when I need to not be performing anymore.

“I won’t,” you say. Which means I know.

He goes. You turn to the room.

You find Mrs. Park first or well Mrs. Park finds you.

Sunghoon’s mother is a woman who has moved through rooms like this for thirty years and wears the knowledge of it lightly, which is rarer than it should be. She has always liked you. You have always liked her, which is rarer still given the specific category of woman who tends to be warm to you in these rooms.

“Darling,” she says, and you lean in and kiss both cheeks and she smells of the same perfume she has always worn and holds your hands and looks at you. “You look wonderful.”

“So do you,” you say, and mean it.

“Your father must be thrilled to have you here.” A pause, the kind that has content in it. “Sunghoon told me you’ve been well.”

“Sunghoon tells you everything,” you say.

She laughs, genuine. “He tells me very little. I read between the lines.” She pats your hand once. “Come find me before the end of the night.”

“I will,” you say. And then Sunghoon materialises at your side with the timing that suggests he has been watching for the moment his mother found you, and he kisses her cheek and she cups his face briefly in both hands the way she has done since he was a child and you watch this and feel something uncomplicated, which is rare enough that you register it.

“Miss Shim,” Sunghoon says, when his mother has been redirected by someone else.

“Mr. Park,” you say.

He looks at you in the way he looks at you in public, which is calibrated — interested without being obvious, warm without being readable. He has a champagne glass and he hands it to you and takes another from a passing server and you stand together in the way you stand together in these rooms, which is close enough to be something and deniable enough to be nothing.

“You look—” he starts.

“Don’t,” you say.

He smiles instead. Looks out at the room. “Jake made it I see,” he says.

“Barely.”

“I know. I dropped him at the house.”

“You should have put him to bed.”

“He wouldn’t have gone.” He glances at you sideways. “He’s fine now though.”

“He’s always fine.”

“He is.” Sunghoon says it with a certainty that is one of the things you don’t think about — the way he knows your brother, the years of it, the specific fluency of two people who have been in each other’s lives long enough to stop needing to explain. It is one of the things that makes this whole arrangement what it is. Sunghoon is already inside the wall. He got there through Jake. What he does with that proximity is something you manage but did not design.

“There’s someone you should see,” he says. He nods, subtle, toward the far side of the lobby. “Your father’s new one. He’s been standing at that wall for twenty minutes.”

You follow his eyeline. The boy at the wall is — not what you expected.

You don’t know what you expected. Your father had said young, had said underground, had said the kind of natural you only see twice in a career. You had processed this as information. You had not processed it as the specific image of a man in a suit that fits him like it was built for him standing alone at the edge of a room full of people who have been in rooms like this their whole lives, completely still, looking at everything and showing nothing.

He is beautiful in a way that is almost aggressive. Not the manicured kind that fills these rooms. Something rawer and less apologetic. He is holding a champagne glass he has not touched. He has the eyes of someone who is cataloguing everything around him with a precision that most people in this room would find unsettling if they were paying attention, which they aren’t, because he is new and unproven and this room hasn’t decided what he is yet.

You have already decided. “I’ll go say hello,” you say.

Sunghoon looks at you. “He’s your father’s boxer,” he says.

“I know who he is.”

A pause. “Of course you do,” Sunghoon says, which sounds like one thing and might be another.

You hand him your champagne and cross the

He sees you coming. You can tell — his eyes track you in the last ten feet with the same precision they were tracking everything else, but they don’t move on. You stop in front of him and look at him properly, unhurried, because you have never learned to want things quietly either, you just have better reasons to hide it.

“You must be the new one,” you say.

He is looking at you with an expression you cannot immediately classify, which is unusual. Most men’s expressions when you approach them are readable. His is doing several things simultaneously and landing on none of them.

“My father’s new investment,” you continue. “The one from the underground.” You look him over once. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“You’re—” he starts.

“His daughter.” You say it before he can say whatever he was going to say, because controlling the terms of a conversation from the first sentence is something you do without thinking. “Don’t look so surprised. He has one.”

“I wasn’t going to say surprised,” he says.

His voice is even. Low without performing low. He is not rattled, which most people are when you approach them like this. He is just — present. Looking at you with those still eyes like he is solving something.

“What were you going to say?” you ask.

“I don’t know yet,” he says.

You look at him for a moment. Something moves in your chest, small and unauthorised. “Careful,” you say. “This room eats people like you.”

“What kind of people.”

“Honest ones.”

Sunghoon’s hand finds the small of your back. Easy, familiar, the weight of him behind you. You feel Jungwon’s eyes track it — not obviously, but you see it, because you are always watching for the thing people are trying not to show.

“Who’s this?” Sunghoon says.

“Father’s boxer,” you say. “The new one.”

They shake hands. You watch Jungwon during it — the way he meets Sunghoon’s grip without performing, without the subtle aggression that men sometimes deploy in handshakes to establish something. He is just — level. It is interesting.

“First time at one of these?” Sunghoon asks.

“Yes,” Jungwon says.

“You’re doing well. You’ve got the face right. Most people look terrified.”

“And you?” Jungwon says. “You always look like this?”

Sunghoon blinks. Laughs, real. “Yeah,” he says. “Unfortunately.”

Something passes across Jungwon’s face that is almost amusement. Not quite. The almost version, which is more interesting. You watch him recalibrate his read on Sunghoon and file it away and you think, without meaning to, that this one is going to be something.

Sunghoon’s hand at your back redirects you gently. There’s someone across the room he needs to talk to. You let him move you because that is how this works in public and because you have already gotten what you came for.

You look back once. Jungwon is looking at you. You look away first. You don’t entirely know why.

The gala proper is upstairs and it is everything these things always are — a chandelier-lit performance of an industry that is publicly about sport and privately about power and the difference between the two has always been smaller than anyone announces. You know this room and you move through it the way water moves, finding every gap, reading every current.

Your father is at the centre of it. He always is. Shim Daejung in a room full of people who owe him something or want something from him or both — you have watched this your entire life, the specific gravity of him, the way conversations orient. He sees you across the room and the particular warmth that crosses his face when he does is the most unperformed thing about him and you love him for it without condition even as you know exactly what you are to him in this room.

You do the things you are here to do.

You talk to the chairman of the sponsorship board for eleven minutes and leave him wanting to extend the contract. You talk to the wife of a rival promoter for seven minutes and learn three things about the rival promoter’s current situation that your father will find useful. You drink half a glass of champagne and leave the other half at a table and take a fresh glass when the waiter passes because arriving at these things with a full glass signals that you haven’t been working the room and you have always been working the room.

You find Jake by the second hour. He is leaning against a pillar talking to a woman you don’t know who is looking at him like he is the most interesting thing in the room, which is an effect Jake produces without effort and which he is absolutely using while pretending not to.

“Having fun?” you say, arriving at his shoulder.

“Always,” he says. The woman excuses herself, sensing sibling energy, which is correct. Jake watches her go with appreciation and then turns to you with his actual face.

“How’s the room,” he says.

“Manageable. Matsuda’s CFO is here, which is new.”

“Appa know?”

“Appa sent him.”

Jake processes this. “Chess,” he says.

“Chess,” you agree.

He reaches over and straightens your earring without asking, which is a Jake thing — the small automatic gestures of someone who has been aware of you his whole life. “You talked to the new fighter?” he says.

“Briefly. In the lobby.”

“And?”

You look at the room. At the specific geography of it, where everyone is positioned, the distances between things. Somewhere in it Jungwon is being introduced to people by your father, being brought into the architecture of the world he signed his name into three days ago. “He’s interesting,” you say.

Jake looks at you sideways. You feel it without turning your head. “Interesting,” he says.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

He takes a sip of whatever he’s drinking and looks at the room with the expression of a man choosing, consciously, to leave something alone. “Sure,” he says. Which means he is filing it and will return to it.

You look at the room.

Across it, through the gap between two conversations, you find Jungwon without looking for him. He is with your father and two men you recognise from the eastern promotions circuit, standing with that same quality of stillness, listening more than he speaks. Your father says something and the men laugh and Jungwon’s mouth moves in a way that might be a smile.

He looks up. Across the room, through the noise and the chandeliers and the specific atmosphere of an industry built on money and men hitting each other for it, he looks directly at you.

Like he knew where you were.

You look away first. Again.

You take a sip of champagne and say something to Jake about the Matsuda situation and feel, in the very back of your chest where you keep the things you don’t examine, something small and unauthorised and entirely inconvenient settle in like it has found somewhere to stay.

You don’t look back.

A/N: chapter two <3 everyone in this fic is a little bit insane unfortunately reader and sunghoon and jungwon is trying his best but he walked into the worst family in seoul so prayers for him honestly. thank u for reading already :)

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KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 001 - RINGSIDE | 4.5k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! implied sex, making out, kissing, smoking weed, alcohol consumption, complicated relationships, attachment issues, power imbalance undertones, possessive behaviour, tension, male gaze

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YOU

You hear him in the shower.

The particular sound of Sunghoon being somewhere — running water, a cupboard closing, the low hum of something he doesn’t know he’s doing. You lie in his sheets and listen to it and look at the ceiling and feel the morning come in through the gap in the blackout curtains, one thin line of Seoul light cutting across the room like it has somewhere to be.

His bedroom is the same as it always is. Dark wood, cream sheets, the specific order of a person who grew up with staff and absorbed their standards without noticing. Everything in its place. Everything expensive without announcing it.

A half-empty glass of water on his side of the bed that wasn’t there when you arrived last night, which means he woke at some point and you didn’t. You are usually a light sleeper. You are not, apparently, a light sleeper with Sunghoon, which is the kind of information you do not examine.

You stretch, slowly, feel last night in the length of your body. Your mouth is dry. Your hair is in a state. You reach for his water glass and drink half of it and put it back and lie there in your lingerie in his silk sheets in his expensive dark bedroom and feel, in the specific private way you allow yourself before the day requires anything, completely fine.

Not happy. Not unhappy. Fine, which is its own category. Sunghoon is its own category.

He comes out of the bathroom in a towel, hair damp, already looking like a man with somewhere to be. He stops when he sees you and something in his expression does the thing it always does — moves through several things quickly before landing on the one he decides to show you.

“You’re awake,” he says.

“Observant,” you say.

He crosses to the wardrobe. Opens it with the efficiency of someone running a familiar routine. Pulls out a shirt, considers it, puts it back. The towel sits low on his hips in a way that is entirely unfair at this hour. “I have a meeting at nine,” he says.

“I know.”

“It’s eight fifteen.

“I know,” you say again. You sit up. The sheet pools at your waist and his back is to you and then it isn’t because he’s turned around with the shirt in his hand and his eyes go to you and stay there and the meeting is, briefly, theoretical.

“Fuck,” he says, with some feeling.

“You look good too,” you say.

He laughs short. Crosses to the bed and stands over you and you tip your chin up and he kisses you in the way that belongs to mornings — slower than last night, less urgent, the familiar unhurried rhythm of two people who know exactly what this is. His hand finds your jaw. His thumb traces your lower lip when he pulls back and he looks at you for a moment in a way you don’t examine either.

“Tonight?” He says.

“Tonight’s the gala.”

“After the gala then.”

You slide your hand into the front of his shirt where he hasn’t done the buttons yet, feeling his muscles convulse and an intake of breath and smile against his mouth. “Maybe,” you say, and slip your tongue in before he can respond, you feel him make a sound low in his throat that means his meeting is going to be something he deals with rather than something he arrives to correctly.

You pull back. He looks at you. “That’s not fair,” he says.

“I know,” you say, and reach for your dress from last night where it’s folded over the chair. Because you always fold it. Because some habits are about maintaining the evidence of who you are even in the rooms where no one’s watching.

He watches you dress. Doesn’t say anything. The particular quality of his watching is something you know and don’t discuss.

“Driver’s coming at eight thirty,” he says eventually, doing his cufflinks.

“I know.”

“You always know everything,” he says. Not a complaint. Just an observation, the way Sunghoon delivers most things about you — like he’s still making sense of them.

You pick up your bag, find your sunglasses, stand in front of his mirror to fix what can be fixed. He appears behind you in the reflection. Taller. The shirt finally done. He looks at you in the mirror the way he sometimes looks at you and you let him do it for one second before you look away.

“Tonight,” he says again, to the back of your head.

“We’ll see,” you say, and leave.

The car smells like leather and air conditioning and the very particular neutrality of a space that belongs to no one. Your driver, Mr. Oh, has been with your family for eleven years. He does not ask questions. He does not comment on timing. He says “good morning, Miss Shim” and pulls into traffic and you sit in the back with your sunglasses on and watch Seoul do its Saturday morning thing.

You like the city like this. Before the full performance of it kicks in. Families outside convenience stores, someone walking a dog that is too big for its owner, a street vendor setting up for the day with the slow deliberate movements of someone who has done it ten thousand times. The city doesn’t care who you are at this hour. It’s just a city.

You take out your phone. Jake has texted at seven forty-three: you coming home first or straight to the venue

You type back: home first. don’t do anything stupid before I get there.

His response is immediate: too late but it’s fine

You close your eyes behind your sunglasses. “Mr. Oh,” you say. “Can we stop at the GS25 on Dosan-daero?”

“Of course, Miss Shim.”

You buy two coffees and a bottle of water and get back in the car. You drink one coffee on the way home. The other you leave in the cupholder for whoever needs it at the house.

Home is a house in Hannam-dong that your father bought the year you were born and has never considered replacing because he is not a man who replaces things. It is large without being ostentatious, which is its own kind of statement. The garden is kept by a man named Seo who arrives every Tuesday and treats the plants with a seriousness that you respect. The inside is the inside you have always known — the particular smell of it, the weight of the ceilings, the way the morning light moves through the east-facing windows in the main hall.

Your father is in the study when you come in. You can hear the meeting before you reach the door — low voices, the specific register of men talking about money. You straighten without thinking. Put your sunglasses on top of your head. Push the door.

“Good morning,” you say.

Your father looks up. “Sweetheart.” The word lands the way it always lands — warm and complete, like you are still the thing he organised his world around. Which you are. Which is its own complicated thing.

There are four men at the table. You know two of them. The other two you assess in the second it takes to cross the room to your father’s side — ages, posture, the way their eyes move when you walk in. They move the way men’s eyes always move when you walk into a room, which is to say immediately and with a kind of hunger they have not been asked to manage. You let it happen. You have been letting it happen since you were seventeen and your father first brought you into rooms like this and you understood, without being told, what your presence was doing and what it was for.

You relish it. You would not say this out loud. You relish the specific power of being looked at like that by men who have power of their own and losing it, briefly, to you. It is not a comfortable thing to admit about yourself and it is true.

You kiss your father’s cheek. He puts a hand briefly over yours on his shoulder.

“We’re almost done here,” he says. “Forty minutes.”

“Take your time,” you say. You smile at the room. The room responds. You leave.

Upstairs you shower for a long time. Let the water run hot enough to matter. You stand in it and think about nothing in particular, which is the thing showers are for — the specific permission to be empty for ten minutes before the day requires you to be full again.

You wash your hair. You condition it. You do all the things your body requires with the automatic efficiency of someone who has been maintaining themselves at this level for long enough that it no longer feels like effort. It just is. The serum and the moisturiser and the way you wrap your hair before you dry it and the specific order of everything that adds up to the version of you the world receives.

By the time you’re done the meeting downstairs has ended. You can tell from the quality of the house’s silence. Your father’s study silence and his post-meeting silence are different things and you have lived with both long enough to know them.

You’re at your vanity in your robe, doing your base, when you hear Jake.

Specifically, you hear Jake trying to be quiet, which is always louder than Jake being loud. The particular careful placing of feet on stairs that indicates someone who doesn’t want to be heard and lacks the coordination for it.

You go to your door. Open it. He is on the stairs, shoes in hand, jacket over his arm, with the specific expression of a man who knows exactly how he looks and has made peace with it. You stare at him. He stares back.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“You’re drunk,” you say.

“I’m finely drunk.”

“It’s ten in the morning, Jake.”

“It’s been a long night.” He attempts the next step and misjudges it slightly. You cross the landing and take his arm and he lets you redirect him upstairs without ceremony, which is how you know he’s drunker than he’s performing.

“Isn’t Sunghoon with you?” You say.

“He had a meeting.” A pause. “He said to tell you—” He stops. Recalibrates. “Actually he didn’t say anything. I made that up.”

“Obviously.”

You get him to his room. He sits on the edge of his bed and looks up at you with the particular expression he gets when he’s drunk enough to be honest — less of the performance, more of the actual face underneath. You have always loved this face more than the other one. Not because it’s sad, though sometimes it is, but because it’s him.

“The gala’s tonight,” you say.

“I know.”

“Appa can’t see you like this.”

“I know.” He lies back on the bed still in his jacket. “I’ll be fine by seven.”

“You’ll sleep until six and be rushing at six forty-five.”

“That’s fine.”

“Jake.”

“That’s fine,” he says again, softer. His eyes are already closing. You stand there for a moment looking at him — your brother, who is sometimes a disaster and always yours.

You pull his jacket off. He helps without waking up properly. You hang it over the chair.

“Water,” you say, putting a glass on his nightstand. “Tylenol. Don’t sleep past six.”

“Love you,” he says, into his pillow.

“Idiot,” you say. Which means the same thing.

He is, in fact, up by five-thirty though.

You’re finishing your makeup when he knocks on your door, already showered, already more or less assembled, holding two cigarettes and the expression of a man who has physically reset himself through force of will and is unreasonably proud of it.

“Ready,” he says.

“You were asleep three hours ago.”

“I’m a professional.” He holds out a cigarette. You take it. He lights both and sits on your window ledge while you finish your liner in the mirror.

This is its own ritual. Older than any other ritual you have with anyone. Jake on a window ledge, you at a mirror, cigarette smoke in the air between you. It started on the fire escape of your first apartment when you were teenagers, snuck out past midnight because the house was too full of what it was and you both needed somewhere to breathe. You have been doing versions of it since. Different windows. Same smoke. Same particular silence that is the only silence either of you fully trusts.

“How was last night,” you say.

“Fine. How was yours.”

You look at him in the mirror. He is looking out the window with the expression of someone who has decided to ask a question and decided not to. You have catalogued this expression for years.

“Fine,” you say.

He nods. Takes a long drag. “The new fighter’s going to be there tonight,” he says. “The one from the underground. Appa’s been talking about him.”

“I know.”

“Haven’t met him yet.”

“Neither have I.”

Jake looks at you then, briefly, with something in his face that is gone before you can classify it. “Should be interesting,” he says.

You finish your liner. Look at yourself in the full mirror. The dress is dark and the earrings are right and you look exactly like what you are — which is the point. You always look exactly like what you are. The art is in controlling what that means.

“Ready,” you say.

The press is outside the venue on Teheran-ro, which you expected and which Jake expected and which neither of you commented on during the car ride because it is so constant a feature of your lives that commenting on it would be like commenting on traffic. It simply is.

You rode from the house together in the back of the car sharing a second cigarette with the windows cracked and Jake playing something from his phone too loud and you watching the city go past and feeling the shift happen in you that always happens on the way to these things — the settling into the version of yourself the room requires, the quiet closing of the door on everything else.

The cameras start before you’re fully out of the car. Jake goes first, easy, comfortable, the full wattage of his smile deployed with the practiced fluency of someone born knowing how to be photographed. He turns back and offers his hand and you take it and step out.

The lights. The sound of your names. The specific sensation of being looked at by a lens, which is different from being looked at by a person and which you have never fully explained to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. You smile. Jake squeezes your hand once. You both look forward.

Inside, the venue is what the venue always is — a controlled version of excess, glamour managed to the point where it stops being glamour and becomes something colder and more permanent. You know this room. You know most of the people in it. You navigate it the way you navigate all rooms of this type — with ease that is not performed but is also not effortless, because nothing about this is effortless, it is just practiced past the point of visible effort.

Jake is already scanning. It takes him approximately ninety seconds to locate three people he wants to talk to, which is normal, and to locate the bar, which is faster. “There’s Sunghoon,” he says, chin-tilting toward the far side of the room.

You don’t look. “Go,” you say. “Find me later.”

“Don’t disappear,” he says, which is what he always says, which means I’ll disappear and I need to know where to find you when I need to not be performing anymore.

“I won’t,” you say. Which means I know.

He goes. You turn to the room.

You find Mrs. Park first or well Mrs. Park finds you.

Sunghoon’s mother is a woman who has moved through rooms like this for thirty years and wears the knowledge of it lightly, which is rarer than it should be. She has always liked you. You have always liked her, which is rarer still given the specific category of woman who tends to be warm to you in these rooms.

“Darling,” she says, and you lean in and kiss both cheeks and she smells of the same perfume she has always worn and holds your hands and looks at you. “You look wonderful.”

“So do you,” you say, and mean it.

“Your father must be thrilled to have you here.” A pause, the kind that has content in it. “Sunghoon told me you’ve been well.”

“Sunghoon tells you everything,” you say.

She laughs, genuine. “He tells me very little. I read between the lines.” She pats your hand once. “Come find me before the end of the night.”

“I will,” you say. And then Sunghoon materialises at your side with the timing that suggests he has been watching for the moment his mother found you, and he kisses her cheek and she cups his face briefly in both hands the way she has done since he was a child and you watch this and feel something uncomplicated, which is rare enough that you register it.

“Miss Shim,” Sunghoon says, when his mother has been redirected by someone else.

“Mr. Park,” you say.

He looks at you in the way he looks at you in public, which is calibrated — interested without being obvious, warm without being readable. He has a champagne glass and he hands it to you and takes another from a passing server and you stand together in the way you stand together in these rooms, which is close enough to be something and deniable enough to be nothing.

“You look—” he starts.

“Don’t,” you say.

He smiles instead. Looks out at the room. “Jake made it I see,” he says.

“Barely.”

“I know. I dropped him at the house.”

“You should have put him to bed.”

“He wouldn’t have gone.” He glances at you sideways. “He’s fine now though.”

“He’s always fine.”

“He is.” Sunghoon says it with a certainty that is one of the things you don’t think about — the way he knows your brother, the years of it, the specific fluency of two people who have been in each other’s lives long enough to stop needing to explain. It is one of the things that makes this whole arrangement what it is. Sunghoon is already inside the wall. He got there through Jake. What he does with that proximity is something you manage but did not design.

“There’s someone you should see,” he says. He nods, subtle, toward the far side of the lobby. “Your father’s new one. He’s been standing at that wall for twenty minutes.”

You follow his eyeline. The boy at the wall is — not what you expected.

You don’t know what you expected. Your father had said young, had said underground, had said the kind of natural you only see twice in a career. You had processed this as information. You had not processed it as the specific image of a man in a suit that fits him like it was built for him standing alone at the edge of a room full of people who have been in rooms like this their whole lives, completely still, looking at everything and showing nothing.

He is beautiful in a way that is almost aggressive. Not the manicured kind that fills these rooms. Something rawer and less apologetic. He is holding a champagne glass he has not touched. He has the eyes of someone who is cataloguing everything around him with a precision that most people in this room would find unsettling if they were paying attention, which they aren’t, because he is new and unproven and this room hasn’t decided what he is yet.

You have already decided. “I’ll go say hello,” you say.

Sunghoon looks at you. “He’s your father’s boxer,” he says.

“I know who he is.”

A pause. “Of course you do,” Sunghoon says, which sounds like one thing and might be another.

You hand him your champagne and cross the

He sees you coming. You can tell — his eyes track you in the last ten feet with the same precision they were tracking everything else, but they don’t move on. You stop in front of him and look at him properly, unhurried, because you have never learned to want things quietly either, you just have better reasons to hide it.

“You must be the new one,” you say.

He is looking at you with an expression you cannot immediately classify, which is unusual. Most men’s expressions when you approach them are readable. His is doing several things simultaneously and landing on none of them.

“My father’s new investment,” you continue. “The one from the underground.” You look him over once. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“You’re—” he starts.

“His daughter.” You say it before he can say whatever he was going to say, because controlling the terms of a conversation from the first sentence is something you do without thinking. “Don’t look so surprised. He has one.”

“I wasn’t going to say surprised,” he says.

His voice is even. Low without performing low. He is not rattled, which most people are when you approach them like this. He is just — present. Looking at you with those still eyes like he is solving something.

“What were you going to say?” you ask.

“I don’t know yet,” he says.

You look at him for a moment. Something moves in your chest, small and unauthorised. “Careful,” you say. “This room eats people like you.”

“What kind of people.”

“Honest ones.”

Sunghoon’s hand finds the small of your back. Easy, familiar, the weight of him behind you. You feel Jungwon’s eyes track it — not obviously, but you see it, because you are always watching for the thing people are trying not to show.

“Who’s this?” Sunghoon says.

“Father’s boxer,” you say. “The new one.”

They shake hands. You watch Jungwon during it — the way he meets Sunghoon’s grip without performing, without the subtle aggression that men sometimes deploy in handshakes to establish something. He is just — level. It is interesting.

“First time at one of these?” Sunghoon asks.

“Yes,” Jungwon says.

“You’re doing well. You’ve got the face right. Most people look terrified.”

“And you?” Jungwon says. “You always look like this?”

Sunghoon blinks. Laughs, real. “Yeah,” he says. “Unfortunately.”

Something passes across Jungwon’s face that is almost amusement. Not quite. The almost version, which is more interesting. You watch him recalibrate his read on Sunghoon and file it away and you think, without meaning to, that this one is going to be something.

Sunghoon’s hand at your back redirects you gently. There’s someone across the room he needs to talk to. You let him move you because that is how this works in public and because you have already gotten what you came for.

You look back once. Jungwon is looking at you. You look away first. You don’t entirely know why.

The gala proper is upstairs and it is everything these things always are — a chandelier-lit performance of an industry that is publicly about sport and privately about power and the difference between the two has always been smaller than anyone announces. You know this room and you move through it the way water moves, finding every gap, reading every current.

Your father is at the centre of it. He always is. Shim Daejung in a room full of people who owe him something or want something from him or both — you have watched this your entire life, the specific gravity of him, the way conversations orient. He sees you across the room and the particular warmth that crosses his face when he does is the most unperformed thing about him and you love him for it without condition even as you know exactly what you are to him in this room.

You do the things you are here to do.

You talk to the chairman of the sponsorship board for eleven minutes and leave him wanting to extend the contract. You talk to the wife of a rival promoter for seven minutes and learn three things about the rival promoter’s current situation that your father will find useful. You drink half a glass of champagne and leave the other half at a table and take a fresh glass when the waiter passes because arriving at these things with a full glass signals that you haven’t been working the room and you have always been working the room.

You find Jake by the second hour. He is leaning against a pillar talking to a woman you don’t know who is looking at him like he is the most interesting thing in the room, which is an effect Jake produces without effort and which he is absolutely using while pretending not to.

“Having fun?” you say, arriving at his shoulder.

“Always,” he says. The woman excuses herself, sensing sibling energy, which is correct. Jake watches her go with appreciation and then turns to you with his actual face.

“How’s the room,” he says.

“Manageable. Matsuda’s CFO is here, which is new.”

“Appa know?”

“Appa sent him.”

Jake processes this. “Chess,” he says.

“Chess,” you agree.

He reaches over and straightens your earring without asking, which is a Jake thing — the small automatic gestures of someone who has been aware of you his whole life. “You talked to the new fighter?” he says.

“Briefly. In the lobby.”

“And?”

You look at the room. At the specific geography of it, where everyone is positioned, the distances between things. Somewhere in it Jungwon is being introduced to people by your father, being brought into the architecture of the world he signed his name into three days ago. “He’s interesting,” you say.

Jake looks at you sideways. You feel it without turning your head. “Interesting,” he says.

“Don’t,” you say.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

He takes a sip of whatever he’s drinking and looks at the room with the expression of a man choosing, consciously, to leave something alone. “Sure,” he says. Which means he is filing it and will return to it.

You look at the room.

Across it, through the gap between two conversations, you find Jungwon without looking for him. He is with your father and two men you recognise from the eastern promotions circuit, standing with that same quality of stillness, listening more than he speaks. Your father says something and the men laugh and Jungwon’s mouth moves in a way that might be a smile.

He looks up. Across the room, through the noise and the chandeliers and the specific atmosphere of an industry built on money and men hitting each other for it, he looks directly at you.

Like he knew where you were.

You look away first. Again.

You take a sip of champagne and say something to Jake about the Matsuda situation and feel, in the very back of your chest where you keep the things you don’t examine, something small and unauthorised and entirely inconvenient settle in like it has found somewhere to stay.

You don’t look back.

A/N: chapter two <3 everyone in this fic is a little bit insane unfortunately reader and sunghoon and jungwon is trying his best but he walked into the worst family in seoul so prayers for him honestly. thank u for reading already :)

perm taglist: @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa

[lac4ygal]

KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 000 - MAPO-GU | 5.8k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! violence, underground fighting, exploitation, class disparity, poverty, morally grey environment, implications of illegal crime

masterlist | next

YANG JUNGWON

The apartment had one window and it faced a wall.

Forty centimetres of gap between the buildings. Jungwon had measured it once with his arm — couldn’t get to the elbow before hitting brick. Enough space for rain to collect and rot and nothing else. The landlord had called it cosy when he signed the lease four years ago. Jungwon had looked at the word cosy and filed it under things people say when they mean something worse.

He woke at five because the man upstairs woke at five and the ceiling was a suggestion. Footsteps, the groan of pipes, a radio on the same trot station every morning at a volume that implied the man upstairs had already made his peace with the rest of the building’s opinion. Jungwon lay there in the grey and let it happen. Two minutes, maybe three. The water stain above his bed had been spreading since March. He watched it the way you watch something you can’t stop — passive, scientific, waiting for the conclusion. It had reached the edge of the plaster now. He gave it another month before something structural happened.

He got up.

Coffee first, instant, because the machine had died in February and replacing it kept falling below more urgent things on a list that never got shorter. He made it in the dark — the overhead bulb had blown two weeks ago and the floor lamp reached the kitchen well enough and the money was better used elsewhere. He knew this kitchen by touch. Four steps from the bedroom door to the counter. The kettle always in the same place. He’d stopped needing light for any of it a long time ago.

He ate standing up. Leftover rice, cold, with whatever the jar in the back of the fridge still had in it. He ate the way he did most things — efficiently, without ceremony, because food was fuel and ceremony was for people with time.

Then he sat at the table and wrapped his hands.

Left first, always left. The tape was getting thin at the edges, the kind of worn that would hold for now and fail at the worst moment. He added it to the list in his head he never wrote down. New tape. Bulb for the kitchen. Call his mother back. The list lived in the back of his skull like background noise he’d learned to manage without letting it disappear. He wrapped slowly and evenly, the way Choi had taught him when his wrapping was still sloppy and his hands were paying for it. The repetition was almost meditative. The pressure of the tape. The specific resistance of each knuckle. He knew his hands the way he knew this kitchen — completely, without needing to look.

Outside the window, the wall. Forty centimetres of dark.

He finished the wrap, flexed both fists twice, stood up.

Mapo-gu at five-thirty in the morning was the only version of itself Jungwon had any patience for.

Later it would become the usual thing — crowded, loud, the specific chaos of a district that was always halfway between something and something else. Not the money of Gangnam, not the grit of the further edges. Just dense and functional and a little tired, like most of Seoul that didn’t make it into photographs. But at five-thirty the streets were doing maintenance on themselves. Delivery trucks idling outside restaurants that wouldn’t open for hours. A woman mopping the entrance of a convenience store in wide slow arcs. Pigeons. A cat that lived under the pojangmacha on the corner and had never once acknowledged Jungwon despite four years of daily passing.

He ran the same route every morning. Not for lack of imagination but because the route was correct — covered the distance he needed, hit the incline by the overpass that made his lungs work, brought him back over the bridge where the Han was grey and enormous and entirely indifferent to everything happening on its banks. He liked that about the river. It had been there for centuries. It did not care about any individual thing occurring in its vicinity. Jungwon found this deeply reasonable.

He ran hard. Harder than necessary for conditioning alone, harder than any trainer had told him to run at this hour. He ran like the distance had to be punished. He had never examined why.

Past the PC bang on Wausan-ro that had never once been closed in his memory, its neon humming in the early grey, a few figures still visible through the window — night gamers at the end of long sessions, eyes hollowed, belonging to a different clock entirely. Past the GS25 where the night shift worker, a man in his late forties named Byeongsu whose name Jungwon knew only because it was on his tag, always looked up when Jungwon passed and gave a single nod. Not a greeting exactly. An acknowledgement of shared madness. They had never spoken beyond the transaction of buying things. They had been nodding at each other for three years.

Down toward the river.

The bridge in the early morning had its own atmosphere — wind coming off the Han with more force than wind anywhere else, like the open water had been saving it. Jungwon hit it every morning and felt his lungs adjust and pushed through the resistance and by the midpoint he was in the place the running always took him. The particular blank of a body working hard enough that the mind stops producing commentary. Just the bridge. Just the wind. The grey water below and the city on both sides looking temporary against the sky.

He stopped at the midpoint, hands on the railing. Thirty seconds, no more. He looked at the river.

Then he turned and ran back.

There was an old man who sat outside the pharmacy on Tojeong-ro every morning with a small dog.

The dog was white and very fat and deeply serious about it. The old man was blind — had been, as far as Jungwon knew, for the entire four years he’d been running this route. He sat in the same plastic chair regardless of weather, same grey jacket, and the dog sat beside him with the particular stillness of an animal that understood its job was simply to be present.

Jungwon had started stopping on the third week. He didn’t entirely know why. He’d slowed down one morning — the old man had been talking to the dog as he passed, not performing, just talking, telling it something about the weather — and something about the image had made him stop moving.

He’d stood there like an idiot, and then the old man had turned his face toward him with the precise accuracy of someone whose other senses had compensated completely, and said:

“You run every day.” Not a question.

“Yes,” Jungwon had said.

The old man nodded like this confirmed something. Gestured at the step beside him and Jungwon, who had nowhere he needed to be for another forty minutes, had sat down.

That had been four years ago. Now he stopped every morning for somewhere between five and twenty minutes. They talked about small things — the weather, the dog, which the old man called Bori and which regarded Jungwon with professional neutrality, the state of the street, the quality of the previous night’s sleep. The old man had never asked what Jungwon did or where he was going. Jungwon had never volunteered it.

This morning Bori was wearing a small yellow coat that she clearly found humiliating. “She’s been in it three days,” the old man said, before Jungwon had said anything. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“The coat is good,” Jungwon said.

“She hates it.”

“She looks dignified.”

The old man made a sound that was almost a laugh. They sat for a while. The street filled incrementally around them — shutters going up, a school kid dragging a bag, the smell of something frying becoming more pronounced somewhere down the block. Bori endured her coat with stoic suffering. Jungwon drank the rest of his water and watched a pigeon make a series of questionable decisions near the road.

“Late night?” the old man asked.

“Early morning,” Jungwon said.

The old man turned his face toward him with that accurate stillness. Didn’t say anything. Jungwon had learned that his silences were a specific kind of listening and had stopped trying to fill them. After a moment: “You eat?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Enough.”

Another silence. The pigeon resolved its situation. Bori shifted her weight with the air of someone who had accepted their fate but wished to register ongoing objection.

“Good,” the old man said finally.

Jungwon stood, rolled his shoulder, handed back the empty water bottle. “Same time tomorrow,” he said.

The old man nodded. Already looking ahead at nothing, at everything, at whatever the blind see when they look at a street they know by sound and smell and the weight of years.

Jungwon ran the rest of the way to the gym.

Choi’s Gym occupied the ground floor of a building on a side street that had survived two redevelopment schemes through some combination of bureaucratic inertia and Choi’s refusal to negotiate his lease. It looked like what it was — a place where people came to hit things, kept barely functional, loved in the way you love something that has never pretended to be more than it is.

The bags were duct-taped at the seams. The floor mats had absorbed so many years of sweat they had their own microbiome. The mirrors along the far wall had a crack through the left one that had been there since before Jungwon arrived and would presumably be there after he left. The lockers didn’t lock — everyone knew, everyone left their stuff anyway, nothing had ever gone missing. There was an unwritten agreement about that. Most of the important agreements here were unwritten.

Choi himself was usually already in when Jungwon arrived. A man who had fought middleweight fifteen years ago, blown his knee in a match that should have been his, opened this gym with the insurance payout and hadn’t left since. He was not sentimental. He didn’t give speeches. He communicated mostly in short observations and the specific quality of his silence when he was watching you work.

He had trained Jungwon for two years. Real training — the architecture of how Jungwon’s body generated and distributed power, the footwork that looked simple and wasn’t, the way his defence could be both his best and worst quality depending on how he was moving. He’d broken him down and rebuilt him with better information and one afternoon, wrapping his own hands just to have something to do with them, had said: “I’ve given you everything I have. The rest is yours.”

Jungwon had understood what this meant. He’d also understood, without it being said, that he could keep using the space. Keep showing up at six in the morning and working until his body had nothing left. The gym was his in the way things become yours not through ownership but through showing up consistently enough that your absence would change the room.

The other guys at Choi’s knew him. Had known him long enough that the initial wariness — he was young, he was quiet, he had the kind of eyes that made people want to establish early whether he was a problem — had resolved into something easier. Not friendship, not exactly. Respect, which in a gym like this meant more.

Hyunwoo, a welterweight who’d been at Choi’s longer than Jungwon, worked pads with him most mornings. They didn’t talk much when they worked. Hyunwoo held the pads with the solid reliable presence of someone who understood that silence was part of it.

“Your right cross is angry today,” Hyunwoo said, after the third round. Holding his padded hands up and shaking them out slightly.

“Is that a complaint?”

“It’s an observation.” Hyunwoo looked at him. “Something happening?”

“No.”

Hyunwoo looked at him for another second, then raised the pads again. “Sure,” he said. Which meant he didn’t believe him and wasn’t going to push it. This was one of the things Jungwon liked about the gym. Nobody pushed.

He finished with three rounds of shadow in front of the cracked mirror. He looked at his own eyes and moved and the movement told him what he needed to know. Something had been building in the accumulated weight of all the hours — a certainty that felt less like arrogance and more like simple fact. He was getting better. Not gradually the way improvement usually felt. Something clicking into place that had been approaching alignment for years.

He didn’t say this to anyone. He kept it in the private part of his mind where he kept things not yet ready to test against the world.

He had a shift at the restaurant at eleven.

The restaurant was a small jjigae place on a backstreet that had been run by the same family for thirty years and showed it comfortably. The owner, Ajeossi Park, was a man of vast patience and very specific opinions about broth. Jungwon had worked there two years — lunch service, sometimes dinner, occasionally both when someone called in sick.

He liked it there. The rhythm of service. The particular choreography of a small restaurant that had been doing the same thing for decades — everyone knowing their part, the work happening in the gaps between words. The regulars who ordered the same thing every time without looking at the menu. The office workers who came in harried and left slower. The grandmother who sat alone by the window every Tuesday and always left a tip that was too much and which Ajeossi Park always quietly added to the staff pot.

“You look tired,” Ajeossi Park said, watching him set up his station.

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

“I’m always fine.”

Ajeossi Park made a sound that communicated deep skepticism and went back to his broth. The lunch rush came and went. Jungwon worked clean and fast and the regulars who’d been coming long enough to have opinions said nothing about his service, which was the highest compliment available in the restaurant’s particular economy.

One of the regulars — an office woman who came in every Wednesday and always ordered the same sundubu — looked at him as he refilled her water and said, “You should smile more.”

Jungwon looked at her. Then smiled. Not a performance of a smile — something small and genuine, which was worse for her somehow, she looked briefly like she’d been handed something unexpected.

“There,” he said, and went back to the kitchen.

Ajeossi Park, who had witnessed this, said nothing. But when Jungwon left at three there was an extra portion of banchan wrapped in foil on his bag with no note. He ate it on the subway home. It was very good.

The name he fought under in the underground was Stray.

The promoter, a man named Guk who ran the Yeongdeungpo operation with the energy of someone who had been managing controlled chaos for so long he’d started to enjoy it, had given him the name on his first night and Jungwon hadn’t objected. Practical decision. His real name staying out of rooms where illegal things happened seemed like basic sense.

He became a different version of himself when he crossed the threshold of the parking structure. Not performed — he didn’t have the patience for performance — but compressed. Everything that was usually present in him got pushed down until what was left was surface and calculation. The warmth he allowed in the gym, the five minutes with the old man, the easy quiet of the restaurant at the end of lunch service — none of it came in with him. He left it at the door the way you leave your shoes.

In the underground he spoke to no one he didn’t have to. Sat with his back to the wall. Was the last to arrive and the first to leave after collecting. He had a reputation he’d never done anything to cultivate — it had grown from the winning, eleven fights without a loss, and from the quality of his stillness in the moments before a fight. Other fighters paced and stretched and performed readiness. Stray sat still and it unnerved people in a way that pacing never could.

The fans — because there were fans, regulars who came specifically for him, who tracked his fights and bet heavily on his name — were not people he interacted with. He was aware of them the way he was aware of the crowd in general. Present, irrelevant to the task. He’d heard what they said about him. The stillness. The eyes. The way fights ended with a particular finality, like the conclusion had been decided before anyone threw a punch.

He didn’t think about what they meant to him. He thought about the money, which was real and which he collected after every fight in an envelope from Guk with no ceremony. The money went to the list. The list that had his mother’s name on it somewhere underneath the tape and the bulb and everything else. The list he never wrote down but never forgot.

The night of the twelfth fight his knuckle was wrong.

Not broken — he knew broken, knew that specific deep screaming pain, and this wasn’t it. A misalignment from two weeks ago that hadn’t resolved, sitting slightly wrong in the wrap no matter how he adjusted it. He’d taped it tighter than usual, added an extra pass around the wrist for stability. It would hold. He’d fought on worse.

The other guy was named Kwon something. Big — not freakishly, just that extra category of wide that made rooms feel smaller. He had the confidence that came with size, the assumption that the argument was already won. Jungwon had seen this specific confidence many times. It was always interesting to watch it revise itself.

Guk ran through the terms in the back room. Standard — three rounds, anything goes above the waist within reason, sixty-forty split in Stray’s favour because Stray was what people were paying for. Jungwon nodded and found a point on the wall and looked at it and breathed.

“You good?” Guk asked. He always asked. He never wanted the answer.

“I’m good.”

“Knuckle?”

Jungwon looked at him. “I’m good,” he said again.

Guk nodded and left. The other corner was doing its usual talking. Jungwon didn’t listen.

The space on the second level of the structure was cleared of cars, makeshift rope boundary, crowd three and four deep around the edges. Strip lighting that made everything look clinical, shadows pooling under chins and eyes, the smell of cigarette smoke and concrete and the specific charged smell of a crowd with money on something.

When Guk stepped back Jungwon simply looked at Kwon.

That was all. Looked at him the way you look at a problem you’ve already solved in principle and are now executing in practice. Kwon’s eyes moved slightly — not much, not enough for most to notice — and Jungwon filed it away and started.

The fight lasted six minutes and twenty seconds.

The crowd was weather. Present, ambient, irrelevant to the specific geometry of what was happening inside the rope. What mattered was Kwon — the way his right side dropped a fraction too early, the way his weight shifted back when he tired, which happened at two minutes and was earlier than he’d expected. The math of the distance between them. The angles. The patterns that weren’t patterns but felt like them, built from years of solving this same category of problem in different configurations.

His bad knuckle connected wrong twice. The third time he adjusted without thinking, redistributed, found a different angle. His body had been solving problems like this longer than his brain had been consciously directing it to.

Kwon went down in the sixth minute. He stayed down.

Jungwon stepped back and breathed and looked at his hands.

“Stray. Yang Jungwon.”

His real name landed differently. He stayed completely still and looked.

The man was standing slightly apart from the crowd.

Not tall, not broad. A face that had been handsome and settled into something more interesting. The coat was dark and expensive in the way that didn’t need to announce itself — Jungwon didn’t know expensive yet, not really, but he knew the absence of effort and this was that. The crowd had given him space without being asked. Jungwon noted this.

“Yang Jungwon,” the man said again, not a question either time.

Jungwon said nothing. Waited.

“I’ve been watching you for three weeks.” No preamble, no performance. Just the fact, laid down plainly. “I was here for the Busan fighter in February. You were the undercard. I came back.”

“Why.” Not a question. A word requiring completion.

“Because you move differently,” the man said. “I’ve been in this business for twenty years. I know what trained looks like and I know what natural looks like and I know what it looks like when they’re the same thing. I’ve seen it twice.” A pause. “You’re the third.”

Jungwon looked at him. Let the silence ask the question he wasn’t going to ask out loud.

“My name is Shim Daejung. I run the Shim Group — legitimate boxing operation, national championships, title holders, press and sponsorship and everything that comes with it.” A beat. “And other operations. The kind you’d understand better than press would.”

The crowd was dispersing around them. Guk somewhere at the edge counting his cut. Strip lights making everyone look interrogated.

“I’m not here to manage you,” Shim Daejung said. “Managing is what happens when someone wants a percentage of what you already are. I’m talking about building. There’s a difference.”

“What does building look like,” Jungwon said.

“It looks like your name on a legitimate contract. Training facilities, a real corner, fights that don’t require a fake name.” He looked at him steadily. “It looks like what you’re already doing but with the whole world watching instead of a hundred and fifty people in a parking structure.”

Jungwon looked back at him. In his chest something was happening he kept his face away from. The door. The specific feeling of a door.

“I have a card,” Shim Daejung said. “Take it or don’t. I’ll be here next Friday either way.”

He held it out. Jungwon took it. Looked at it once and pocketed it.

“The sixty-forty,” Jungwon said. “That your standard rate.”

Something moved in Shim Daejung’s expression. “That’s Guk’s rate. My rate is different.”

“How different.”

“Call me Wednesday and I’ll tell you.”

He turned and the crowd closed around him like water.

Jungwon stood with the card in his pocket and the noise of the room thinning around him. Guk materialised at his shoulder with the envelope. He took it without looking, felt the weight of it, pocketed that too.

He left. Outside in the night air he walked half a block and stopped and took the card out again. Looked at it under a streetlight. The name, the number, the logo of a company that had fighters who had names people knew.

He put it back and started walking.

He called on Wednesday.

They met Thursday in a building in Gangnam that made him aware, in a way he was usually able to set aside, of the specific weight of his clothing. He sat across a table from Shim Daejung in an office where the desk probably cost more than his annual rent and spoke the way he always spoke — less than he thought, only what was necessary.

“You read the contract,” Shim Daejung said. Not a question.

“All of it.”

“And?”

“Page seven, clause four. The exclusivity term is too broad.”

Shim Daejung looked at him for a moment. Then reached across and made a note. “What else.”

“Page twelve. The image rights extend beyond the contract period. That needs to be limited.”

“Fifteen months post-termination.”

“Six.”

“Ten.”

“Seven.”

A pause. “Fine.” Another note. “Anything else?”

“The training facility access. I want it in writing that I choose my own corner.”

“You’ll have a team—”

“Who I choose,” Jungwon said. “Or I don’t sign.”

Shim Daejung looked at him. The look lasted long enough to mean something. Then the corner of his mouth moved in a way that wasn’t quite a smile. “In writing,” he said. “Fine.”

They went through the rest of it. Shim Daejung answered every question directly, adjusted without performing generosity, explained the third clause with the specificity of someone who had already thought about how it would land. The hand on his shoulder in the parking structure had been proprietary. Everything in this room was, surprisingly, straight.

Jungwon signed on a Thursday afternoon with the sound of Gangnam coming up through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Shim Daejung shook his hand. Said there was an event on Saturday. A gala — industry people, press, important room.

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

Jungwon thought about the forty centimetres of gap. The water stain. “No,” he said.

“Good.” Shim Daejung held his gaze for a moment. “Welcome to the Shim Group, Jungwon.”

It was the first time he’d used his name without the full version. Jungwon noticed this the way he noticed most things — completely, without showing it.

“Thank you,” he said.

On Friday morning he stopped at the pharmacy corner. Bori was minus the yellow coat. The old man was in his grey jacket regardless, as always.

Jungwon sat on the step. The old man waited. “Something changed,” Jungwon said eventually.

“Good change or bad change.”

He thought about it honestly. The contract. The Gangnam office. The door that was either opening or closing depending on which side of it you stood. “Don’t know yet,” he said.

The old man nodded slowly. A delivery truck went past. Bori shifted her weight. “Are you scared?” the old man asked.

Jungwon thought about lying. Thought about the face he’d need to construct. Decided it wasn’t worth the construction. “A little,” he said.

The old man was quiet for a moment. “Good,” he said then. “Scared means it matters.”

Jungwon looked at the street. At the cat under the pojangmacha, which looked back at him with absolute indifference and looked away.

“Eat properly,” the old man said. “Whatever it is.”

Jungwon stood. Looked at the old man for a moment — the grey jacket, the face turned toward the sound of the street, Bori’s fat white side rising and falling at his ankle.

“Same time tomorrow,” he said. The old man said nothing. Which meant yes.

The suit arrived Saturday morning. A garment bag at his door, a note with an address and a time. No name. Just the information, efficient and impersonal.

He put it on in the apartment with its one window facing the wall.

It fit. Someone had gotten his measurements somewhere — from the file, probably, from whatever Shim Daejung had compiled before the parking structure. This should have unsettled him. It did, slightly. He filed it for later.

He looked at himself in the small bathroom mirror, taking a step back to see most of it. He looked like someone else. Not unrecognizably — his face was his face, the jaw his jaw, the eyes that people in the underground had always found too still for comfort. But the suit placed him in a category he had never occupied and the category felt theoretical, like a word in a language still being learned. You could say it correctly. You didn’t yet know what it cost.

He took the subway to Gangnam.

The lobby of the hotel was its own kind of violence.

Not loud. The opposite — controlled, curated, every surface chosen by someone who understood that real money didn’t need to announce itself and did anyway through material and proportion and light. Jungwon walked through it with his face set and his hands loose at his sides and looked at nothing for longer than a second. He’d learned this in the underground — the extended look showed you. You looked once, fully, and you moved.

He looked once.

Chandeliers. Marble. Women in dresses that probably had names. Men in suits that made his look like a starting point. The sound of money socializing — laughter calibrated to carry, conversation in the middle register. He found a wall near the entrance and stood with his back to it.

He was being looked at. He could feel it before he confirmed it — the particular pressure of eyes that didn’t know whether you warranted attention yet and were deciding. He kept his face neutral and looked at the room and let them decide.

A server passed with champagne. He took a glass because having something in his hand was better than not and then held it without drinking because he was working even if no one had told him that was what this was.

“You must be the new one.”

He turned.

She was standing close enough that he hadn’t heard her approach, which he noted because he usually heard everything. A black dress. Dark hair. The kind of beautiful that hit you before you’d processed it, that you were already dealing with the effects of before your brain had caught up to the cause. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t immediately classify — amused, assessing, something else underneath both.

“My father’s new investment,” she said. “The one from the underground.” She looked him over once, unhurried, the same way the room had looked at him but without the uncertainty. She had already decided. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“You’re—” he started.

“His daughter.” She said it like it was the simplest fact in the world. “Don’t look so surprised. He has one.”

“I wasn’t going to say surprised,” he said.

“What were you going to say?”

He looked at her. At the expression he still hadn’t fully classified. “I don’t know yet,” he said

Something shifted in her face. Not much. Enough.

“Careful,” she said, and the word could have meant ten different things. “This room eats people like you.”

“What kind of people.”

“Honest ones.”

Before he could answer a hand settled on the small of her back. Light, easy, the kind of contact between people who have a long history of it. The man was tall, well-built, the specific kind of handsome that came from having always been handsome and knowing exactly what to do with it. He looked at Jungwon with an expression of mild interest, the way you look at something new in a room you own.

“Who’s this?” he said, not unpleasantly.

“Father’s boxer,” she said. “The new one.”

The man extended a hand to Jungwon. “Park Sunghoon.”

“Yang Jungwon.”

Sunghoon’s grip was firm, practised, the handshake of someone who had been shaking important hands since he was old enough to be brought to events like this. He held it a second longer than necessary, which Jungwon logged.

“Jungwon,” Sunghoon said, like he was trying the name out. “Where are you from?”

“Mapo-gu.”

Sunghoon nodded like this confirmed something. “First time at one of these?”

“Yes.”

“You’re doing well,” Sunghoon said. “You’ve got the face right. Most people look terrified.” He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it land more cleanly than cruelty would have.

Jungwon looked at him. “And you?” he said. “You always look like this?”

Sunghoon blinked once. Then smiled, and the smile was real, which Jungwon hadn’t expected. “Yeah,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

She was watching this exchange with the expression he still hadn’t classified. When Sunghoon turned to her she let him redirect her toward someone across the room — his hand still at her back, easy, proprietary — and as she turned she looked back at Jungwon once over her shoulder.

The look lasted one second. Maybe less.

He looked away first. Stood with his untouched champagne and watched them move through the crowd and felt, precisely and briefly, like a man who had just picked up something without knowing what it was or whether he should be holding it.

Shim Daejung appeared at his shoulder twenty minutes later.

“I see you’ve met my daughter,” he said, following Jungwon’s eyeline.

“Briefly,” Jungwon said.

Shim Daejung made a sound that wasn’t quite a response. “Come. There are people you should know.”

He moved Jungwon through the room with the practiced ease of a man who had been doing this for decades — introductions efficient and purposeful, names and affiliations given like briefings, handshakes that lasted exactly as long as necessary. Jungwon observed. Listened more than he spoke. Smiled when it was required and stopped when it wasn’t, which seemed to confuse some people and interest others.

By the time Shim Daejung collected him for the elevator he had the shape of the room mapped. Who mattered and who wanted to look like they did. Who was watching him with curiosity and who with something more calculating.

He had also catalogued, without intending to, exactly where she was in the room at every point. He did not examine this.

The elevator was gilt-edged, mirrored on three sides.

Jungwon stepped in and looked at his reflection and looked away. Shim Daejung pressed the button and the doors closed and the car began to rise and in the small contained space Jungwon became aware, precisely and briefly, of his own breathing.

The thing he hadn’t been able to name since the parking structure gathered in his chest and became real in a way it hadn’t been entirely before. The suit. The building. The man beside him who had watched him for three weeks in a parking structure and handed him a card and waited for Wednesday. The contract he had read every line of and negotiated and signed on a Thursday afternoon.

The life behind him. The forty centimetres of gap. The water stain. The old man and Bori who would be at the same corner tomorrow and who had said scared means it matters and meant something larger than fear.

The life ahead was in the room above. He had a contract and an outline and nothing else. He had a girl in a black dress who had said this room eats people like you and looked back at him once over her shoulder and he did not know what to do with either of those facts.

He exhaled once, slow. Shim Daejung glanced at him sideways. “Nervous?”

Jungwon considered the lie. Decided against it. “A little,” he said.

Shim Daejung faced forward. The elevator rose.

“Don’t be,” he said. Simply, like the instruction was sufficient. Then, quieter, something that landed as both reassurance and warning in a way that Jungwon was beginning to understand was this man’s particular register for everything: “You’ll be fine.”

The elevator slowed. The doors reflected three versions of them both — the man and the investment, the owner and the owned, and whatever else they were that neither of them had language for yet.

The bell rang once.

The doors opened.

A/N: chapter one done 🥊 wanted to start this fic by sitting in jungwon’s world for a bit before everything gets… significantly worse for him <3 thank u for all the love on the masterlist already :( i hope you enjoy the beginning of everyone making deeply questionable decisions. pls scream at me below if you read i love hearing everyone’s thoughts 😘

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KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

chapter 000 - MAPO-GU | 5.8k words

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

warnings! violence, underground fighting, exploitation, class disparity, poverty, morally grey environment, implications of illegal crime

masterlist | next

YANG JUNGWON

The apartment had one window and it faced a wall.

Forty centimetres of gap between the buildings. Jungwon had measured it once with his arm — couldn’t get to the elbow before hitting brick. Enough space for rain to collect and rot and nothing else. The landlord had called it cosy when he signed the lease four years ago. Jungwon had looked at the word cosy and filed it under things people say when they mean something worse.

He woke at five because the man upstairs woke at five and the ceiling was a suggestion. Footsteps, the groan of pipes, a radio on the same trot station every morning at a volume that implied the man upstairs had already made his peace with the rest of the building’s opinion. Jungwon lay there in the grey and let it happen. Two minutes, maybe three. The water stain above his bed had been spreading since March. He watched it the way you watch something you can’t stop — passive, scientific, waiting for the conclusion. It had reached the edge of the plaster now. He gave it another month before something structural happened.

He got up.

Coffee first, instant, because the machine had died in February and replacing it kept falling below more urgent things on a list that never got shorter. He made it in the dark — the overhead bulb had blown two weeks ago and the floor lamp reached the kitchen well enough and the money was better used elsewhere. He knew this kitchen by touch. Four steps from the bedroom door to the counter. The kettle always in the same place. He’d stopped needing light for any of it a long time ago.

He ate standing up. Leftover rice, cold, with whatever the jar in the back of the fridge still had in it. He ate the way he did most things — efficiently, without ceremony, because food was fuel and ceremony was for people with time.

Then he sat at the table and wrapped his hands.

Left first, always left. The tape was getting thin at the edges, the kind of worn that would hold for now and fail at the worst moment. He added it to the list in his head he never wrote down. New tape. Bulb for the kitchen. Call his mother back. The list lived in the back of his skull like background noise he’d learned to manage without letting it disappear. He wrapped slowly and evenly, the way Choi had taught him when his wrapping was still sloppy and his hands were paying for it. The repetition was almost meditative. The pressure of the tape. The specific resistance of each knuckle. He knew his hands the way he knew this kitchen — completely, without needing to look.

Outside the window, the wall. Forty centimetres of dark.

He finished the wrap, flexed both fists twice, stood up.

Mapo-gu at five-thirty in the morning was the only version of itself Jungwon had any patience for.

Later it would become the usual thing — crowded, loud, the specific chaos of a district that was always halfway between something and something else. Not the money of Gangnam, not the grit of the further edges. Just dense and functional and a little tired, like most of Seoul that didn’t make it into photographs. But at five-thirty the streets were doing maintenance on themselves. Delivery trucks idling outside restaurants that wouldn’t open for hours. A woman mopping the entrance of a convenience store in wide slow arcs. Pigeons. A cat that lived under the pojangmacha on the corner and had never once acknowledged Jungwon despite four years of daily passing.

He ran the same route every morning. Not for lack of imagination but because the route was correct — covered the distance he needed, hit the incline by the overpass that made his lungs work, brought him back over the bridge where the Han was grey and enormous and entirely indifferent to everything happening on its banks. He liked that about the river. It had been there for centuries. It did not care about any individual thing occurring in its vicinity. Jungwon found this deeply reasonable.

He ran hard. Harder than necessary for conditioning alone, harder than any trainer had told him to run at this hour. He ran like the distance had to be punished. He had never examined why.

Past the PC bang on Wausan-ro that had never once been closed in his memory, its neon humming in the early grey, a few figures still visible through the window — night gamers at the end of long sessions, eyes hollowed, belonging to a different clock entirely. Past the GS25 where the night shift worker, a man in his late forties named Byeongsu whose name Jungwon knew only because it was on his tag, always looked up when Jungwon passed and gave a single nod. Not a greeting exactly. An acknowledgement of shared madness. They had never spoken beyond the transaction of buying things. They had been nodding at each other for three years.

Down toward the river.

The bridge in the early morning had its own atmosphere — wind coming off the Han with more force than wind anywhere else, like the open water had been saving it. Jungwon hit it every morning and felt his lungs adjust and pushed through the resistance and by the midpoint he was in the place the running always took him. The particular blank of a body working hard enough that the mind stops producing commentary. Just the bridge. Just the wind. The grey water below and the city on both sides looking temporary against the sky.

He stopped at the midpoint, hands on the railing. Thirty seconds, no more. He looked at the river.

Then he turned and ran back.

There was an old man who sat outside the pharmacy on Tojeong-ro every morning with a small dog.

The dog was white and very fat and deeply serious about it. The old man was blind — had been, as far as Jungwon knew, for the entire four years he’d been running this route. He sat in the same plastic chair regardless of weather, same grey jacket, and the dog sat beside him with the particular stillness of an animal that understood its job was simply to be present.

Jungwon had started stopping on the third week. He didn’t entirely know why. He’d slowed down one morning — the old man had been talking to the dog as he passed, not performing, just talking, telling it something about the weather — and something about the image had made him stop moving.

He’d stood there like an idiot, and then the old man had turned his face toward him with the precise accuracy of someone whose other senses had compensated completely, and said:

“You run every day.” Not a question.

“Yes,” Jungwon had said.

The old man nodded like this confirmed something. Gestured at the step beside him and Jungwon, who had nowhere he needed to be for another forty minutes, had sat down.

That had been four years ago. Now he stopped every morning for somewhere between five and twenty minutes. They talked about small things — the weather, the dog, which the old man called Bori and which regarded Jungwon with professional neutrality, the state of the street, the quality of the previous night’s sleep. The old man had never asked what Jungwon did or where he was going. Jungwon had never volunteered it.

This morning Bori was wearing a small yellow coat that she clearly found humiliating. “She’s been in it three days,” the old man said, before Jungwon had said anything. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“The coat is good,” Jungwon said.

“She hates it.”

“She looks dignified.”

The old man made a sound that was almost a laugh. They sat for a while. The street filled incrementally around them — shutters going up, a school kid dragging a bag, the smell of something frying becoming more pronounced somewhere down the block. Bori endured her coat with stoic suffering. Jungwon drank the rest of his water and watched a pigeon make a series of questionable decisions near the road.

“Late night?” the old man asked.

“Early morning,” Jungwon said.

The old man turned his face toward him with that accurate stillness. Didn’t say anything. Jungwon had learned that his silences were a specific kind of listening and had stopped trying to fill them. After a moment: “You eat?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Enough.”

Another silence. The pigeon resolved its situation. Bori shifted her weight with the air of someone who had accepted their fate but wished to register ongoing objection.

“Good,” the old man said finally.

Jungwon stood, rolled his shoulder, handed back the empty water bottle. “Same time tomorrow,” he said.

The old man nodded. Already looking ahead at nothing, at everything, at whatever the blind see when they look at a street they know by sound and smell and the weight of years.

Jungwon ran the rest of the way to the gym.

Choi’s Gym occupied the ground floor of a building on a side street that had survived two redevelopment schemes through some combination of bureaucratic inertia and Choi’s refusal to negotiate his lease. It looked like what it was — a place where people came to hit things, kept barely functional, loved in the way you love something that has never pretended to be more than it is.

The bags were duct-taped at the seams. The floor mats had absorbed so many years of sweat they had their own microbiome. The mirrors along the far wall had a crack through the left one that had been there since before Jungwon arrived and would presumably be there after he left. The lockers didn’t lock — everyone knew, everyone left their stuff anyway, nothing had ever gone missing. There was an unwritten agreement about that. Most of the important agreements here were unwritten.

Choi himself was usually already in when Jungwon arrived. A man who had fought middleweight fifteen years ago, blown his knee in a match that should have been his, opened this gym with the insurance payout and hadn’t left since. He was not sentimental. He didn’t give speeches. He communicated mostly in short observations and the specific quality of his silence when he was watching you work.

He had trained Jungwon for two years. Real training — the architecture of how Jungwon’s body generated and distributed power, the footwork that looked simple and wasn’t, the way his defence could be both his best and worst quality depending on how he was moving. He’d broken him down and rebuilt him with better information and one afternoon, wrapping his own hands just to have something to do with them, had said: “I’ve given you everything I have. The rest is yours.”

Jungwon had understood what this meant. He’d also understood, without it being said, that he could keep using the space. Keep showing up at six in the morning and working until his body had nothing left. The gym was his in the way things become yours not through ownership but through showing up consistently enough that your absence would change the room.

The other guys at Choi’s knew him. Had known him long enough that the initial wariness — he was young, he was quiet, he had the kind of eyes that made people want to establish early whether he was a problem — had resolved into something easier. Not friendship, not exactly. Respect, which in a gym like this meant more.

Hyunwoo, a welterweight who’d been at Choi’s longer than Jungwon, worked pads with him most mornings. They didn’t talk much when they worked. Hyunwoo held the pads with the solid reliable presence of someone who understood that silence was part of it.

“Your right cross is angry today,” Hyunwoo said, after the third round. Holding his padded hands up and shaking them out slightly.

“Is that a complaint?”

“It’s an observation.” Hyunwoo looked at him. “Something happening?”

“No.”

Hyunwoo looked at him for another second, then raised the pads again. “Sure,” he said. Which meant he didn’t believe him and wasn’t going to push it. This was one of the things Jungwon liked about the gym. Nobody pushed.

He finished with three rounds of shadow in front of the cracked mirror. He looked at his own eyes and moved and the movement told him what he needed to know. Something had been building in the accumulated weight of all the hours — a certainty that felt less like arrogance and more like simple fact. He was getting better. Not gradually the way improvement usually felt. Something clicking into place that had been approaching alignment for years.

He didn’t say this to anyone. He kept it in the private part of his mind where he kept things not yet ready to test against the world.

He had a shift at the restaurant at eleven.

The restaurant was a small jjigae place on a backstreet that had been run by the same family for thirty years and showed it comfortably. The owner, Ajeossi Park, was a man of vast patience and very specific opinions about broth. Jungwon had worked there two years — lunch service, sometimes dinner, occasionally both when someone called in sick.

He liked it there. The rhythm of service. The particular choreography of a small restaurant that had been doing the same thing for decades — everyone knowing their part, the work happening in the gaps between words. The regulars who ordered the same thing every time without looking at the menu. The office workers who came in harried and left slower. The grandmother who sat alone by the window every Tuesday and always left a tip that was too much and which Ajeossi Park always quietly added to the staff pot.

“You look tired,” Ajeossi Park said, watching him set up his station.

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

“I’m always fine.”

Ajeossi Park made a sound that communicated deep skepticism and went back to his broth. The lunch rush came and went. Jungwon worked clean and fast and the regulars who’d been coming long enough to have opinions said nothing about his service, which was the highest compliment available in the restaurant’s particular economy.

One of the regulars — an office woman who came in every Wednesday and always ordered the same sundubu — looked at him as he refilled her water and said, “You should smile more.”

Jungwon looked at her. Then smiled. Not a performance of a smile — something small and genuine, which was worse for her somehow, she looked briefly like she’d been handed something unexpected.

“There,” he said, and went back to the kitchen.

Ajeossi Park, who had witnessed this, said nothing. But when Jungwon left at three there was an extra portion of banchan wrapped in foil on his bag with no note. He ate it on the subway home. It was very good.

The name he fought under in the underground was Stray.

The promoter, a man named Guk who ran the Yeongdeungpo operation with the energy of someone who had been managing controlled chaos for so long he’d started to enjoy it, had given him the name on his first night and Jungwon hadn’t objected. Practical decision. His real name staying out of rooms where illegal things happened seemed like basic sense.

He became a different version of himself when he crossed the threshold of the parking structure. Not performed — he didn’t have the patience for performance — but compressed. Everything that was usually present in him got pushed down until what was left was surface and calculation. The warmth he allowed in the gym, the five minutes with the old man, the easy quiet of the restaurant at the end of lunch service — none of it came in with him. He left it at the door the way you leave your shoes.

In the underground he spoke to no one he didn’t have to. Sat with his back to the wall. Was the last to arrive and the first to leave after collecting. He had a reputation he’d never done anything to cultivate — it had grown from the winning, eleven fights without a loss, and from the quality of his stillness in the moments before a fight. Other fighters paced and stretched and performed readiness. Stray sat still and it unnerved people in a way that pacing never could.

The fans — because there were fans, regulars who came specifically for him, who tracked his fights and bet heavily on his name — were not people he interacted with. He was aware of them the way he was aware of the crowd in general. Present, irrelevant to the task. He’d heard what they said about him. The stillness. The eyes. The way fights ended with a particular finality, like the conclusion had been decided before anyone threw a punch.

He didn’t think about what they meant to him. He thought about the money, which was real and which he collected after every fight in an envelope from Guk with no ceremony. The money went to the list. The list that had his mother’s name on it somewhere underneath the tape and the bulb and everything else. The list he never wrote down but never forgot.

The night of the twelfth fight his knuckle was wrong.

Not broken — he knew broken, knew that specific deep screaming pain, and this wasn’t it. A misalignment from two weeks ago that hadn’t resolved, sitting slightly wrong in the wrap no matter how he adjusted it. He’d taped it tighter than usual, added an extra pass around the wrist for stability. It would hold. He’d fought on worse.

The other guy was named Kwon something. Big — not freakishly, just that extra category of wide that made rooms feel smaller. He had the confidence that came with size, the assumption that the argument was already won. Jungwon had seen this specific confidence many times. It was always interesting to watch it revise itself.

Guk ran through the terms in the back room. Standard — three rounds, anything goes above the waist within reason, sixty-forty split in Stray’s favour because Stray was what people were paying for. Jungwon nodded and found a point on the wall and looked at it and breathed.

“You good?” Guk asked. He always asked. He never wanted the answer.

“I’m good.”

“Knuckle?”

Jungwon looked at him. “I’m good,” he said again.

Guk nodded and left. The other corner was doing its usual talking. Jungwon didn’t listen.

The space on the second level of the structure was cleared of cars, makeshift rope boundary, crowd three and four deep around the edges. Strip lighting that made everything look clinical, shadows pooling under chins and eyes, the smell of cigarette smoke and concrete and the specific charged smell of a crowd with money on something.

When Guk stepped back Jungwon simply looked at Kwon.

That was all. Looked at him the way you look at a problem you’ve already solved in principle and are now executing in practice. Kwon’s eyes moved slightly — not much, not enough for most to notice — and Jungwon filed it away and started.

The fight lasted six minutes and twenty seconds.

The crowd was weather. Present, ambient, irrelevant to the specific geometry of what was happening inside the rope. What mattered was Kwon — the way his right side dropped a fraction too early, the way his weight shifted back when he tired, which happened at two minutes and was earlier than he’d expected. The math of the distance between them. The angles. The patterns that weren’t patterns but felt like them, built from years of solving this same category of problem in different configurations.

His bad knuckle connected wrong twice. The third time he adjusted without thinking, redistributed, found a different angle. His body had been solving problems like this longer than his brain had been consciously directing it to.

Kwon went down in the sixth minute. He stayed down.

Jungwon stepped back and breathed and looked at his hands.

“Stray. Yang Jungwon.”

His real name landed differently. He stayed completely still and looked.

The man was standing slightly apart from the crowd.

Not tall, not broad. A face that had been handsome and settled into something more interesting. The coat was dark and expensive in the way that didn’t need to announce itself — Jungwon didn’t know expensive yet, not really, but he knew the absence of effort and this was that. The crowd had given him space without being asked. Jungwon noted this.

“Yang Jungwon,” the man said again, not a question either time.

Jungwon said nothing. Waited.

“I’ve been watching you for three weeks.” No preamble, no performance. Just the fact, laid down plainly. “I was here for the Busan fighter in February. You were the undercard. I came back.”

“Why.” Not a question. A word requiring completion.

“Because you move differently,” the man said. “I’ve been in this business for twenty years. I know what trained looks like and I know what natural looks like and I know what it looks like when they’re the same thing. I’ve seen it twice.” A pause. “You’re the third.”

Jungwon looked at him. Let the silence ask the question he wasn’t going to ask out loud.

“My name is Shim Daejung. I run the Shim Group — legitimate boxing operation, national championships, title holders, press and sponsorship and everything that comes with it.” A beat. “And other operations. The kind you’d understand better than press would.”

The crowd was dispersing around them. Guk somewhere at the edge counting his cut. Strip lights making everyone look interrogated.

“I’m not here to manage you,” Shim Daejung said. “Managing is what happens when someone wants a percentage of what you already are. I’m talking about building. There’s a difference.”

“What does building look like,” Jungwon said.

“It looks like your name on a legitimate contract. Training facilities, a real corner, fights that don’t require a fake name.” He looked at him steadily. “It looks like what you’re already doing but with the whole world watching instead of a hundred and fifty people in a parking structure.”

Jungwon looked back at him. In his chest something was happening he kept his face away from. The door. The specific feeling of a door.

“I have a card,” Shim Daejung said. “Take it or don’t. I’ll be here next Friday either way.”

He held it out. Jungwon took it. Looked at it once and pocketed it.

“The sixty-forty,” Jungwon said. “That your standard rate.”

Something moved in Shim Daejung’s expression. “That’s Guk’s rate. My rate is different.”

“How different.”

“Call me Wednesday and I’ll tell you.”

He turned and the crowd closed around him like water.

Jungwon stood with the card in his pocket and the noise of the room thinning around him. Guk materialised at his shoulder with the envelope. He took it without looking, felt the weight of it, pocketed that too.

He left. Outside in the night air he walked half a block and stopped and took the card out again. Looked at it under a streetlight. The name, the number, the logo of a company that had fighters who had names people knew.

He put it back and started walking.

He called on Wednesday.

They met Thursday in a building in Gangnam that made him aware, in a way he was usually able to set aside, of the specific weight of his clothing. He sat across a table from Shim Daejung in an office where the desk probably cost more than his annual rent and spoke the way he always spoke — less than he thought, only what was necessary.

“You read the contract,” Shim Daejung said. Not a question.

“All of it.”

“And?”

“Page seven, clause four. The exclusivity term is too broad.”

Shim Daejung looked at him for a moment. Then reached across and made a note. “What else.”

“Page twelve. The image rights extend beyond the contract period. That needs to be limited.”

“Fifteen months post-termination.”

“Six.”

“Ten.”

“Seven.”

A pause. “Fine.” Another note. “Anything else?”

“The training facility access. I want it in writing that I choose my own corner.”

“You’ll have a team—”

“Who I choose,” Jungwon said. “Or I don’t sign.”

Shim Daejung looked at him. The look lasted long enough to mean something. Then the corner of his mouth moved in a way that wasn’t quite a smile. “In writing,” he said. “Fine.”

They went through the rest of it. Shim Daejung answered every question directly, adjusted without performing generosity, explained the third clause with the specificity of someone who had already thought about how it would land. The hand on his shoulder in the parking structure had been proprietary. Everything in this room was, surprisingly, straight.

Jungwon signed on a Thursday afternoon with the sound of Gangnam coming up through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Shim Daejung shook his hand. Said there was an event on Saturday. A gala — industry people, press, important room.

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

Jungwon thought about the forty centimetres of gap. The water stain. “No,” he said.

“Good.” Shim Daejung held his gaze for a moment. “Welcome to the Shim Group, Jungwon.”

It was the first time he’d used his name without the full version. Jungwon noticed this the way he noticed most things — completely, without showing it.

“Thank you,” he said.

On Friday morning he stopped at the pharmacy corner. Bori was minus the yellow coat. The old man was in his grey jacket regardless, as always.

Jungwon sat on the step. The old man waited. “Something changed,” Jungwon said eventually.

“Good change or bad change.”

He thought about it honestly. The contract. The Gangnam office. The door that was either opening or closing depending on which side of it you stood. “Don’t know yet,” he said.

The old man nodded slowly. A delivery truck went past. Bori shifted her weight. “Are you scared?” the old man asked.

Jungwon thought about lying. Thought about the face he’d need to construct. Decided it wasn’t worth the construction. “A little,” he said.

The old man was quiet for a moment. “Good,” he said then. “Scared means it matters.”

Jungwon looked at the street. At the cat under the pojangmacha, which looked back at him with absolute indifference and looked away.

“Eat properly,” the old man said. “Whatever it is.”

Jungwon stood. Looked at the old man for a moment — the grey jacket, the face turned toward the sound of the street, Bori’s fat white side rising and falling at his ankle.

“Same time tomorrow,” he said. The old man said nothing. Which meant yes.

The suit arrived Saturday morning. A garment bag at his door, a note with an address and a time. No name. Just the information, efficient and impersonal.

He put it on in the apartment with its one window facing the wall.

It fit. Someone had gotten his measurements somewhere — from the file, probably, from whatever Shim Daejung had compiled before the parking structure. This should have unsettled him. It did, slightly. He filed it for later.

He looked at himself in the small bathroom mirror, taking a step back to see most of it. He looked like someone else. Not unrecognizably — his face was his face, the jaw his jaw, the eyes that people in the underground had always found too still for comfort. But the suit placed him in a category he had never occupied and the category felt theoretical, like a word in a language still being learned. You could say it correctly. You didn’t yet know what it cost.

He took the subway to Gangnam.

The lobby of the hotel was its own kind of violence.

Not loud. The opposite — controlled, curated, every surface chosen by someone who understood that real money didn’t need to announce itself and did anyway through material and proportion and light. Jungwon walked through it with his face set and his hands loose at his sides and looked at nothing for longer than a second. He’d learned this in the underground — the extended look showed you. You looked once, fully, and you moved.

He looked once.

Chandeliers. Marble. Women in dresses that probably had names. Men in suits that made his look like a starting point. The sound of money socializing — laughter calibrated to carry, conversation in the middle register. He found a wall near the entrance and stood with his back to it.

He was being looked at. He could feel it before he confirmed it — the particular pressure of eyes that didn’t know whether you warranted attention yet and were deciding. He kept his face neutral and looked at the room and let them decide.

A server passed with champagne. He took a glass because having something in his hand was better than not and then held it without drinking because he was working even if no one had told him that was what this was.

“You must be the new one.”

He turned.

She was standing close enough that he hadn’t heard her approach, which he noted because he usually heard everything. A black dress. Dark hair. The kind of beautiful that hit you before you’d processed it, that you were already dealing with the effects of before your brain had caught up to the cause. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t immediately classify — amused, assessing, something else underneath both.

“My father’s new investment,” she said. “The one from the underground.” She looked him over once, unhurried, the same way the room had looked at him but without the uncertainty. She had already decided. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“You’re—” he started.

“His daughter.” She said it like it was the simplest fact in the world. “Don’t look so surprised. He has one.”

“I wasn’t going to say surprised,” he said.

“What were you going to say?”

He looked at her. At the expression he still hadn’t fully classified. “I don’t know yet,” he said

Something shifted in her face. Not much. Enough.

“Careful,” she said, and the word could have meant ten different things. “This room eats people like you.”

“What kind of people.”

“Honest ones.”

Before he could answer a hand settled on the small of her back. Light, easy, the kind of contact between people who have a long history of it. The man was tall, well-built, the specific kind of handsome that came from having always been handsome and knowing exactly what to do with it. He looked at Jungwon with an expression of mild interest, the way you look at something new in a room you own.

“Who’s this?” he said, not unpleasantly.

“Father’s boxer,” she said. “The new one.”

The man extended a hand to Jungwon. “Park Sunghoon.”

“Yang Jungwon.”

Sunghoon’s grip was firm, practised, the handshake of someone who had been shaking important hands since he was old enough to be brought to events like this. He held it a second longer than necessary, which Jungwon logged.

“Jungwon,” Sunghoon said, like he was trying the name out. “Where are you from?”

“Mapo-gu.”

Sunghoon nodded like this confirmed something. “First time at one of these?”

“Yes.”

“You’re doing well,” Sunghoon said. “You’ve got the face right. Most people look terrified.” He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it land more cleanly than cruelty would have.

Jungwon looked at him. “And you?” he said. “You always look like this?”

Sunghoon blinked once. Then smiled, and the smile was real, which Jungwon hadn’t expected. “Yeah,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

She was watching this exchange with the expression he still hadn’t classified. When Sunghoon turned to her she let him redirect her toward someone across the room — his hand still at her back, easy, proprietary — and as she turned she looked back at Jungwon once over her shoulder.

The look lasted one second. Maybe less.

He looked away first. Stood with his untouched champagne and watched them move through the crowd and felt, precisely and briefly, like a man who had just picked up something without knowing what it was or whether he should be holding it.

Shim Daejung appeared at his shoulder twenty minutes later.

“I see you’ve met my daughter,” he said, following Jungwon’s eyeline.

“Briefly,” Jungwon said.

Shim Daejung made a sound that wasn’t quite a response. “Come. There are people you should know.”

He moved Jungwon through the room with the practiced ease of a man who had been doing this for decades — introductions efficient and purposeful, names and affiliations given like briefings, handshakes that lasted exactly as long as necessary. Jungwon observed. Listened more than he spoke. Smiled when it was required and stopped when it wasn’t, which seemed to confuse some people and interest others.

By the time Shim Daejung collected him for the elevator he had the shape of the room mapped. Who mattered and who wanted to look like they did. Who was watching him with curiosity and who with something more calculating.

He had also catalogued, without intending to, exactly where she was in the room at every point. He did not examine this.

The elevator was gilt-edged, mirrored on three sides.

Jungwon stepped in and looked at his reflection and looked away. Shim Daejung pressed the button and the doors closed and the car began to rise and in the small contained space Jungwon became aware, precisely and briefly, of his own breathing.

The thing he hadn’t been able to name since the parking structure gathered in his chest and became real in a way it hadn’t been entirely before. The suit. The building. The man beside him who had watched him for three weeks in a parking structure and handed him a card and waited for Wednesday. The contract he had read every line of and negotiated and signed on a Thursday afternoon.

The life behind him. The forty centimetres of gap. The water stain. The old man and Bori who would be at the same corner tomorrow and who had said scared means it matters and meant something larger than fear.

The life ahead was in the room above. He had a contract and an outline and nothing else. He had a girl in a black dress who had said this room eats people like you and looked back at him once over her shoulder and he did not know what to do with either of those facts.

He exhaled once, slow. Shim Daejung glanced at him sideways. “Nervous?”

Jungwon considered the lie. Decided against it. “A little,” he said.

Shim Daejung faced forward. The elevator rose.

“Don’t be,” he said. Simply, like the instruction was sufficient. Then, quieter, something that landed as both reassurance and warning in a way that Jungwon was beginning to understand was this man’s particular register for everything: “You’ll be fine.”

The elevator slowed. The doors reflected three versions of them both — the man and the investment, the owner and the owned, and whatever else they were that neither of them had language for yet.

The bell rang once.

The doors opened.

A/N: chapter one done 🥊 wanted to start this fic by sitting in jungwon’s world for a bit before everything gets… significantly worse for him <3 thank u for all the love on the masterlist already :( i hope you enjoy the beginning of everyone making deeply questionable decisions. pls scream at me below if you read i love hearing everyone’s thoughts 😘

perm taglist: @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa

[lac4ygal]

KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

Seoul’s boxing world is all champagne, flashing cameras, and designer suits — at least on the surface. Beneath it, the Shim empire was built on blood dressed up as luxury: violence, dirty money, underground fights. Men powerful enough to bury bodies and call it business. And you belong to the worst of them. As the daughter of Shim Group’s CEO, you’ve spent your entire life playing the role expected of you — untouchable, elegant, useful. But when YANG JUNGWON , a gifted fighter with bruised knuckles and quiet honesty, crashes into your world from Mapo-gu, and LEE HEESEUNG — heir to your family’s greatest enemy — starts pulling at secrets meant to stay buried, the carefully controlled life you’ve built begins to unravel. All while PARK SUNGHOON , your oldest and most familiar mistake, knows every ugly part of you that nobody else gets to see. The deeper the three of them pull you in, the harder it becomes to separate love from manipulation, loyalty from possession, and truth from performance. And when the truth finally surfaces, someone will bleed for it. Maybe everyone will.

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

estimated word count!!

themes! legacy as a prison , performance vs reality , love as consumption , class disparity , power imbalance , manipulation , violence hidden under beauty , the fantasy of escape , moral corruption , loneliness

content warnings for each chapter will be stated before. the following work is a work of fanfiction and does not reflect the personalities, thoughts and actions of the real people. this fanfiction will alternate between five different POVS including; reader, jungwon, heeseung, sunghoon and jake.

fic taglist is open just comment below for a tag

note…

KRAZY RICH KOREANS MASTERLIST !

chapter 000 - MAPO-GU

chapter 001 - RINGSIDE

chapter 002 - FASHIONABLY LATE

chapter 003 - FAVOURITE

chapter 004 - TERITORY

chapter 005 - DEAL THE DECK

more to come…

perm taglist: @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa

[lac4ygal]

chapters 000 and 001 dropping tonight!

[lac4ygal]

KRAZY RICH KOREANS a 양정원, 이희승, 박성훈 fanfiction

Seoul’s boxing world is all champagne, flashing cameras, and designer suits — at least on the surface. Beneath it, the Shim empire was built on blood dressed up as luxury: violence, dirty money, underground fights. Men powerful enough to bury bodies and call it business. And you belong to the worst of them. As the daughter of Shim Group’s CEO, you’ve spent your entire life playing the role expected of you — untouchable, elegant, useful. But when YANG JUNGWON , a gifted fighter with bruised knuckles and quiet honesty, crashes into your world from Mapo-gu, and LEE HEESEUNG — heir to your family’s greatest enemy — starts pulling at secrets meant to stay buried, the carefully controlled life you’ve built begins to unravel. All while PARK SUNGHOON , your oldest and most familiar mistake, knows every ugly part of you that nobody else gets to see. The deeper the three of them pull you in, the harder it becomes to separate love from manipulation, loyalty from possession, and truth from performance. And when the truth finally surfaces, someone will bleed for it. Maybe everyone will.

featuring; yangjungwon x leeheeseung x parksunghoon x female!reader

estimated word count!! - 15.8k (ongoing)

themes! legacy as a prison , performance vs reality , love as consumption , class disparity , power imbalance , manipulation , violence hidden under beauty , the fantasy of escape , moral corruption , loneliness

content warnings for each chapter will be stated before. the following work is a work of fanfiction and does not reflect the personalities, thoughts and actions of the real people. this fanfiction will alternate between five different POVS including; reader, jungwon, heeseung, sunghoon and jake.

fic taglist is open just comment below for a tag

note…

KRAZY RICH KOREANS MASTERLIST !

chapter 000 - MAPO-GU (5.8k)

chapter 001 - RINGSIDE (4.5k)

chapter 002 - FASHIONABLY LATE (5.5k)

chapter 003 - FAVOURITE

chapter 004 - TERRITORY

chapter 005 - DEAL THE DECK

more to come…

perm taglist: @kristynaaah @yuudaiinhs @urlocalengene @woninlove @n4n4files @jimineepaboya @grdientlips @hooniluhv @afanok @engenewilstaykon @seungiesdoll @rinforu @isa942572 @ride-a-nishimura @florarua @baedreamverse @softblaqn @rikisloverrr @kittyvalr @ellushic @dimples264493 @kimmm02 @kiwicup @jakebitez @mystgene @baek-some-cake @betagalactose @kookiesnkim @honeyvelvetinez @violetteaismyfavourite @meowza1 @abbyssful @yandere-stories @imminentcodexcore @mlink64 @k4y-sh @rubadubdubinthetub @jungwno @k3nza @simjakeyjake @heeseungdada @bbrianawhatt @onlyifusayyesxx @mintchocoddeonut @sillycactus143 @heexyzy @wonkiipiilled @sugarcwtie @alleiraa

[lac4ygal]

I wanted to say first that I truly love your fics, specially the niki one ‘teeth and tenderness’, everything that I see about him now reminds me of this specific fic and I love it soo much, the way you know exactly what to write to make us want more is truly amazing! hope one day you can write another one like this one

your writing is truly beautiful and amazing, you’re my fav writer 🩷

omg thank u! Im so happy that you liked it bc it took forever to write and I wrote it after finished the movie Bones And All which is fab and u should watch it if you liked that Niki fic. Thank you for supporting me ILY😝✌️💞

[lac4ygal]

I've read a lot of your fics and honestly i love your style of writing so much! One thing that i really admire is ur jungwon fics (esp 'secrets through passageways' and 'what the moon remembers') because the way u characterize him perfectly into each genre while keeping his natural demeanor fascinates me every time 😭 Dare i say i'd read an entire book if you ever published cuz ur style of writing is so naturally encapsulating AND THE ANGST OHMYGODDD!!! Somehow everytime i stumble upon a genuinely good fic its always urs😭😭 just to sum it up youre really talented and i hope to see more from u soon! (ps. secrets through the passageways reminds me soo much of the inheritance games, have u read it?)

AWWW YOURE SO KIND!! Im so glad my writing has piqued you like I’m seriously so happy you love it and it engages you bc sometimes I worry loll😅 and the angst can be heaven or im scared it’s not going to hit so than u sm for your words!!

and yes secrets through passageways was inspired by The Inheritance Games bc I LOVE that series like I binged all the books last summer on holiday