falling asleep in a time machine ⤖ bang chan
❖ genre : mafia au; fluffy angst; hurt/comfort; female reader insert
❖ word count : 6,9k.
❖ warning : swearing, implied major character death, mention of arson, depictions of vomiting, killing, blood, death, can be brutal (!!!), delusional happy ending.
❖ summary : four times you try to go back in time and save chan; or alternatively, you keep dreaming about chan to see if there is a way to undo his death when in reality there isn’t — from the world of illicit & priceless.
❖ author’s note : just finished my first term of uni (like actually the first term ever) and I’m so dead inside so here’s a silly little something. I can’t use pts anymore so pls bear with the banner *cries and dusts off this old blog* also I try to explain here why Chan was so attached and pissed off when mc stole his mother’s ring even though it’s accidental.
first attempt —
There are three missions that have altered the course of your and Chan’s relationship.
The first mission goes back to when you were still going on heists and Ryujin had foolishly put a piece of Chan’s mother’s sentiments into your pocket. Neither you nor Chan have come to know or like each other much before it.
The second one is the mansion with a bomb planted in the basement and Chan got locked inside a conference room with a three-layered door, one of them made from the same metal as the fucking Titanic. The third mission involves a casino where the Germans and Italians came together to push Chan toward a dead-end they had cultivated for the Devil himself, to his ultimate demise. They are all too arrogant to admit that Chan will take over the entirety of the East Asian market before any of them can start rolling in their graves.
Three missions of importance and not long after that, you and Chan have agreed to never go on a mission without each other. An unwritten contract. An unspoken promise. Nothing that the mafia engages in is legal so everything runs on trust, on how much faith you are willing to give those who you keep close.
However, there is a fourth mission that the Underworld records will fail to keep because even only a minuscule part of the Bang family is informed about this—how their precious heir has been summoned to bring home the girl he loves.
“Would you do laundry and taxes with me?”
“That’s an odd way to propose to someone, Y/N. And please, you’re asking an obvious question.” Chan looks up at you from his book. His smile is gentle, soft at the corners with his dimples sinking in—it’s how you know that he means it—the way it usually is these days. The way it has been for the past year. It is almost obscure, you think, how you both would have wanted each other’s head on a stick a year ago before one of you managed to make the other person cry out of gratitude.
You lift the book away from his face, glimpsing at the cover. Because Chan is an absolute heathen, he has been reading No Longer Human and you’re being annoying about it because he hasn’t come out to train with you for two days already. “Are you telling me you’ll say ‘no’?”
“We’re already doing laundry and taxes together. We will just have matching rings and a signed piece of paper,” Chan gives you a pointed look; he always looks so serious whenever he wants to correct you as if your sarcasm is that dry. “So it naturally implies as a ‘yes’, idiot,” he nags, even though he doesn’t mean the last part.
“Oh how you wound me, love,” you bite back, even though you don’t mean it either. “Chan, come on. You’re locking yourself up in a prison.”
Chan lets out a long, heavy sigh as if he’s insulted that you have just called his room a prison—which you never verbally hinted at, he simply interpreted it that way. He reaches over to grab the book from your hand, seemingly giving up his reading time for you, and places it on his bedside.
“What are you–” You watch as Chan walks over to one of his mahogany drawers. “-doing?”
“I need caffeine to talk to you.”
Despite your bristling, he stays true to his words and finds himself a mug, a tea bag, along with a boiler. By the time Chan finishes filling up the boiler with water and turns on the heating switch, your legs are dangling over the edge of his bed as you puff up like a cat, baffled and offended.
“So,” Chan inquires, a steaming mug of tea in his hand. “What’s up?”
“I find your current state distressing to look at,” you elaborate with glee, a glint coming into your eyes that Chan knows you’re up to no good. “Take a week off with me. We can go anywhere you want, it’ll be a short getaway, just the two of us.”
Chan’s back is turned toward you because he’s too busy searching for a spoon but you can boldly assume that he’s smiling. It’s hinted in his tone when he asks, “You mean a vacation?”
“Brilliant interpretation, Chan,” you smile wryly. “Of course, I meant a vacation!”
“No, you can go have fun by yourself. You have my permission,” he shakes his head. “I have things to attend to. Meetings, banquets, important business transactions. You know how boring the mafia lifestyle is.”
You still, voice low and suppressed in something Chan can’t seem to grasp at. “You’re going back to your family.” It’s barely a movement, a small enough action. Any passerby would think that you have only faltered a little but Chan has observed you for a good while now to notice you’re holding your shoulders back from trembling.
“I am going back to my family,” he repeats calmly. “Only for a week, though. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“Chan, I know they want to see me.”
Chan tries not to let anything show on his face. “And they may very well kill you because that is what they are. Godawful, egoistic, and incapable of compassion.”
“Let me go with you, I—” you begin, though you cut yourself off almost instantly. The room is suddenly steeped in silence, unwieldy at the absence of your words. Every noise seems amplified in the quiet: the boys’ chatters echoing dully from the living room, the ticking hands of the clock, and every breath you take to calm the anxiety in your rib cage.
I do not fear death, sickness, or anyone’s hatred. What I fear most is losing you, Chan. It’s all so beyond you because a year ago, you were a thief, taking things as you please and sending them away when they’re no longer of use for your benefit. Now there is someone who you will live for and his kiss you will kill for, his laugh you will die for.
“Chan, do you have any idea what I would turn into if you left me?” You have always worried loudly, from the volume of your attentiveness and the anxiety beneath your skin all lie in the tender manner of how you love Chan—the same goes for him, that you can be certain of.
“I will never leave you, Y/N. We will be okay,” he assures you, unbearably calm.
Chan is a liar.
second attempt —
Chan is supposed to go back to the Bang family’s estate with Yuriko for the New Year. Yuriko is the housekeeper whom he has retired for about a year ever since you came into the picture. The boys, especially Jisung, have been forced into keeping their surroundings clean because, for some wicked reason, they think you are absolutely terrifying when you’re upset about their muddy shoes dirtying the floor after a mission. Yuriko always giggles at that, her Young Master surely knows how to pick a partner.
“I’ve got word that your father wants you to back to the estate, Young Master,” Yuriko tells Chan when she finds you and Chan in the archive because you have insisted on reading about something you won’t say a word to him. Surely, Chan recognizes what you’re searching for but he doesn’t mention it.
“He said he wanted to make sure you are ready to take over his position. And there is a dinner he wants your attendance for,” Yuriko continues, hands clasped behind her back. You didn’t even realize when she stepped in and approached Chan—for a mere housekeeper to be so swift and quiet with her movements, you have long guessed that she’s not just any old woman to be hired by the Bang family.
The way Chan stiffens in his seat is telling all on its own. You are suddenly struck with the recurring memory of how Minho used to babble about how much of an ass Chan’s family is when he has had one too many drinks. “You don’t know how bigshot mafia families treat their children, do you? They kept the world from knowing for a reason. I’m surprised Chan didn’t turn out to be a monster like them.”
“Forgive me, Yuriko, but you can tell the old man to suck it up,” Chan says softly but his voice is dark, tense, riddled with a sharpness you haven’t heard from him in a long time—you were threatened just the same way when you had stolen his mother’s ring. Now you realize Chan only ever speaks so heartlessly if something precious to him is hanging on the verge of being taken away.
“Young Master,” Yuriko frowns for two reasons; firstly, Chan has never been able to decline his blood family of anything and secondly, there isn’t much that she can do to solve the problem at hand. She’s a mere servant for the Bang family; she doesn’t have much power to begin with and therefore, she can’t exactly tell them ‘no’.
“No, you can’t make me,” Chan grits because he knows, he understands it all too well. Unsaid words of all the things money can buy hang in the air like bile.
“Young Master Christopher, you must know what happens if you defy your father.” And there goes Yuriko’s final warning along with Chan dashing out of the archive, straight through the hallway and the front door of the mansion, completely vanishing in the white curtain of December snow.
Yuriko murmurs something under her breath, unintended for you to hear her. You continue staring forward, the file in your hands completely forgotten. “He can come home with me,” you say without actually thinking about it until she turns to stare at you, expressionless before breaking into a fit of giggles.
“I think Young Master would like that.”
With that, you set off to find Chan.
“No one will love you unconditionally like we do.” “You belong to us, so do as we say.” “Work to kill, kill or you’ll die. You were born to kill, it’s a gift that not everyone receives.” “The world will bow before you and sway the way you want it but you’ll have to-”
“I don’t want any of that,” Chan hisses but the voices keep coming back louder, harsher, with more bite than he has ever heard from them. “None of you ever gave me anything that matters! You just can’t admit that you made me a murderer!!”
The snow around him sinks with each step he takes, their words still echoing in his mind and sending shivers down his spine, driven so deeply inside his skull that he wishes he could have nothing of this reality. “Be mindful of yourself. Control it.” “Your fangs and claws are too sharp for you to be swinging just at anyone,” he hears them again
His nose burns in the cold but Chan doesn’t notice something warm and wet trickle down his cheekbones. “You never cared about restraint. You said I must kill or I would die. You all just want to possess me, you want me not as an heir but as a commodity!!”
“It’s how we’ve been running this family. It’s how we keep things in order. You’re one of us, Christopher, you are this family.”
With a huff, Chan eventually gives in and listens because he has no other choice but to; he slides down against concrete with a white-out vision, a quivering figure with nothing on but his cardigan. “Then you’re just as godawful as any of them,” he tells himself, knees curling against his chest, almost justified in his own lie that he wants to burst out laughing.
Chan knows they have made him more of a weapon than a child, more of a monster than a man and he is stuck with it for good. He has been holding onto life just because he can, not so much that he wants to. Because he never truly wanted anything before or was wanted in any way.
“Oh my god, you’re a fucking man-child!”
He hears someone’s nagging from afar and ignores it, hugging himself impossibly tighter because asking for comfort is unacceptable, they taught him so. “Chan!!” He hopes it goes away with all of the other voices.
It doesn’t. Instead, it comes closer in a humane form, boots crunching against the snow and warm breaths sounding rhythmically. “It’s been an hour. Do you have any idea how worried we all were- how worried I was?! What the actual hell,” you snap. “Now I’m going to hear all this shit from Seungmin again because I let you run off and he’s too terrified of you to properly lecture you. God-”
Your rambles cut off when you kneel down next to him, rummaging for a scarf, a pair of gloves, yet another pair of gloves, his puffer jacket, and a hat from your bag. Chan quietly watches as he tries to blink away the oncoming tears but he can’t—they keep coming. He doesn’t reply when your scolding goes on because even though your voice is sharp, Chan can catch the worry hidden along the edges. Being cared for and cherished like this has made him realize how much he doesn’t want to come back to his family and he wants to cry like he’s the fourteen-year-old boy who used to refuse to pick up a gun all over again.
A child who was unable to stuff down the overwhelming agony and grief forced upon him. A child who was weaponized. A child who was threatened into killing his own mother. “If you can’t kill what you hold near and dear, you’ll never be able to kill anyone to save yourself.”
“Chan?” you call out to him, unbearably soft. There’s a certainty, a sort of gentleness in the way his name is said that only makes his tears come hotter, more and more of it because your love feels big, overwhelming.
Chan hates crying so he never did, not when they had locked him up in his room, not when they had starved him because of his disobedience, not when they had made him pull the trigger with the gun’s mouth pressing against his mother’s chest. Chan hates crying but it seems to be all he’s doing now.
You’re wrapping him up so gently and trying to warm him up because you know he’s just as human as any mundane individual out there. Humans shiver when the temperature drops, they shed tears when they’re upset, and they bleed and bruise at the right amount of impact. That’s why humans are so clingy toward each other so they can prevent harm from coming the other person’s way. Because no one enjoys getting hurt and there is no good reason to voluntarily get hurt; it sounds like common sense but Chan never grew up with such things. He never came to think he was deserving of such things.
“Chan, come home with me. Forget your family. I don’t need to know about them,” you smile at him, somehow empathetic and so understanding when Chan has barely given you an explanation, when he is desperate to fill the silence but he knows his voice will be weak with tears, stumbling, and pitching all over the place.
Chan sniffles, finding the courage to say something back because he wants to, not because he feels like he has to, “Can I really…come-come home with you?”
“I’m sure the girls wouldn't mind, they might be a little annoying. Yeji, though, can be wary of strangers,” you shrug, something so relaxed about your posture tells him that you have learned to accept something without telling him.
A breathy chuckle. “Especially when they’re a mafia leader.”
An exhale. Chan shudders when you embrace him wholly—every moment of pride and arrogance, betrayal and hurt that he has been boxing away—as the beautiful mess that he is. You’re the safest person on the face of Earth not because you are on equal terms with him in power but because you never care about those things. You will let him break something, burn something down, cry, and laugh however he pleases but you won’t ever let go of his hand. You never ask him for anything in return while continuing to save him over and over again.
He’s so unbelievably lucky, Chan thinks but doesn’t say it aloud, instead, he tells you, “If you’ll have me.”
The night after you drive Chan back to your mansion, the place goes up in flames. Only you are able to open your eyes to see the next daylight.
“Welcome home,” you want to whisper but can only watch a last smile bloom on the face of a ghost amidst the orange blaze.
third attempt —
You decide to come home with Chan.
For a non-mafia family, it might go like this.
Meeting Chan’s parents will be the hardest thing you have ever done—and that is coming from someone who has broken through the world’s most modern security systems and got your hands on objects worth billions of dollars.
You will bow when you meet them, use the politest speech you have taught yourself last minute, and desperately try not to remember how Chan was forced to shoot his own mother as a child. They will pinch your cheek and call you lovely, chuckling at how stiff you are and offering you a ‘Come on in! Don’t mind the mess, it’s always how our house is.’
You will smile and you will play along because you want them to like you so badly it hurts.
Chan will gawk at you without even trying to hide it because you have given him a completely different experience upon your first encounter. Casual, timid, and quick with your tongues when it comes to those witty retorts.
They will then ask you, ‘‘What are your hobbies? Any sports? Instruments?’’ Purely in the Asian parents’ style.
You will be so nervous that you forget you play the violin and practice meditation occasionally. You will sit at their dinner table in their cozy, lived-in home, and rack your brain for a proper answer that might be deemed reasonable for a mundane girl. “It can be anything you do for fun, honey. No need to be nervous,” they will say again and you will give them a small grimace in return.
It’s probably deeply fucked up when the first thing that comes to your mind is ‘I retired from heists a year ago because museums are fucking boring so I have moved on to finding new and creative ways to eliminate anything that might be the cause of Chan’s suffering.’
“…You play the violin beautifully,” Chan will suggest quietly beside you, his hand laced with yours beneath the table. “And you interrupt my reading time whenever you need attention.”
“I…I like to be with you,” you will finally find the courage to say with a firm squeeze of his hand, and the strength to smile when his eyes widen faintly, flustered yet not surprised.
Still, it doesn’t matter whether Chan was born from a mafia family. You don’t hesitate to hold his hand beneath the table when Chan tenses up from the disappointed gaze of his father, lean over ever so slightly, and whisper, “I like to be with you.” He almost gasps but refrains. “Wherever we are. As long as you allow me to stay by your side.”
For once, Chan lets himself think that he won’t fuck up something before he even gets to have it in his arms.
You did come home with Chan even if the dinner is anything but cozy and mundane. Their smiles are cold porcelain, a familiarity with death so staggering you feel nauseous. They are all here, though. Every single one of them. “I’ll be back,” you say and excuse yourself to use the restroom, he assumes.
Chan finds an uneasy slick in his throat, almost thick like blood when he sees a bright thing in your eyes. He lets you go anyway. Will things happen differently if he holds you back?
Minutes after your withdrawal from the dinner table, an explosion goes off downstairs. The mansion quivers with a long string of rumble, a horrible feeling looming over everyone in the room like an ugly shadow. Though, no one bats an eye. Maintaining such a high position in the Underworld for so long is more than enough for the bounty on each of their heads to go up to millions of dollars.
As much as Chan detests his blood family, he doesn’t want to die here, a horrendous place for his corpse to be found. So he stands as the rest of the room begins arming themselves, doing his best not to pay any heed to his father, and bolts downstairs.
In situations like this, he is taught to close his heart and kill. Hence why there was barely any screaming when the commotion occurred, only the metallic sounds of bullets being clicked into their chamber. Truth be told, there is a weapon vault on the main floor of the mansion. Chan knows the most efficient shortcut there and can run through any hallways even without any lights on. He did grow up in this terrible place, and now he will make use of that to get you out of here before anything else.
Chan arrives at the main floor and there is nothing but a giant hole and crumbled metal pieces in the weapon vault—or what used to be the weapon vault, blown up by a bomb it seems. Well, shit, he doesn’t even know how to register this. The entrance to his father’s most treasured place in the mansion has a three-layered door with an extremely lethal surveillance system, who and how the fuck-
He stops. He doesn’t so much as twitch. It gives him a moment of pure chill when the main floor has gone completely muted, both audibly and visually, like his life has just tipped off balance and leaned towards the bad part of a zombie movie. Upstairs, there is a cry for help and the sound of bullets continuously firing.
“My fucking god,” Chan curses and turns on his heels, steeling himself mentally while rushing up the stairs.
Upon arriving at the scene, it’s difficult to say whether turning up just five minutes earlier would have made much of a difference. Fuck, but if he had held you back, would things have taken a different turn?
There is a lot of blood. Too much blood to be explained away, and too much evidence to be traced back to no one else other than you. Well, to be fair, you’re the only person still standing and kicking aside from Chan anyway. The shotgun in your hand with a silencer attached speaks volumes, a knife between your teeth, and your left hand is fisted tightly.
“…Y-Y/N,” Chan utters, in disbelief. “You’re Y/N, aren’t you?”
You release something in your left hand and several fifteen-bullet magazines drop to the ground, the sound scratching his spine in the wrong way. The knife also hits the ground, metal echoing loudly against hard marble.
“You’re here, Chan,” you reply, like your hands and clothes aren’t painted red. Swiftly, you duck to fumble for something beneath the dining table. Chan’s gaze follows you suit, prompting uneasiness to crawl down his throat when he realizes everything is, quite literally, drenched in blood. When he manages to snap out of it, you are unwrapping something from a white blanket—Berry, his eight-year-old Spaniel.
You don’t look one bit surprised to see him—you have been expecting him. You simply keep on tucking Berry neatly into the blanket, murmuring something along the lines of ‘it’s over now’ and ‘I’m sorry I scared you’. Berry offers you a small whimper in return, still startled and recovering from the loud ruckus.
Chan inhales very slowly. Exhales. “What did you do?”
“I killed everyone here,” you say levelly, as if mass murder is no big deal. “You’re a little late. I thought your intuition would be keener than that.”
“This is no time for a fucking joke,” he snaps. Chan has snapped because he’s mad at himself. He has been living purely by his intuition for more than two decades already, without it he would have died a long time ago. Yet when it comes to you, he’s always the most irrational.
Your lips twitch like you’re about to smile but realize he’s upset. “You’re right, sorry.”
Chan moves further into the room, his shoes squelching with each blood-drenched step he takes. He takes the scene in once again and keeps calm because that is what he has trained himself to do ever since the first time he got kidnapped. When his gaze brushes over the corpse of his father, he tries not to think about anything just yet. What’s done is done but Chan can piece the scene together from the explosion downstairs—a bait that anyone will be eager to take and a good way to disarm your enemies—to the scattering of hole-filled bodies, their blood blooming against the marble floor like a grotesque bouquet.
The crux of it is you know all too well he will run to find you without question, lending you the space and time to kill whoever remains.
“Why?”
Your eyes sweep over the mass of bodies, dull and distant. “Does it really matter?” You don’t think it’s fair to say you did it because you love him; it will become a curse that haunts him for as long as he lives. Yes, you love Chan with your entire soul but you also simply want to act as you please, allowing yourself to have your selfish ways of declaring your love for him.
His chest heaves without any stability. “I thought you said you’re used to taking many things but you don’t take lives!!”
You cut right in, all glass. “Will anyone be able to do anything about it? Can anyone possibly arrest me, Chan?”
Chan shudders, a sour thing gnawing at the back of his throat. It’s a morbid feeling he knows will become recurring at night, on the bad days. Chan wants to be furious, it feels like a moral obligation to be. Then again, everything the world has learned about empathy is already torn up by his family, they smeared it beneath their feet like it’s common trash. In the end, all of his nightmares and source of fear amounts to this, a mass of corpses with no resolution.
“Do you want to kill me, Chan? If so, do it. You’re your own person, you are free.”
Your eyes have turned into ice, and suddenly you have become so intangible that Chan slowly grows afraid. He thinks of terrible things, Am I allowed to have you? What makes you want me so badly? Why am I different from any of them?
The sound of retching interrupts his train of thought. It takes him precisely half a second to stare at how you are folded over your knees, dry heaving at the marble floor with Berry fumbling for help right at your side. Chan rushes to you to keep your hair out of your face as you gasp for air, choking on stomach bile and body raking with shudders. Once his hand smooths over the fabric on your back, you eventually cough and hack out the last of whatever is left that your system rejects.
You breathe as shallowly as you can. Quiet wheezes, hollow breaths that pull in and out of your lungs too quickly. Chan rubs small, gentle circles on your back and doesn’t expect it when you snap up to look at him with wide, pained eyes as though you didn’t just murder his entire family in cold blood minutes ago, like you didn’t just take out the Underworld’s most feared lineage of demons by yourself.
Chan decides not to say anything, lets you lean into him shakily, and tries to figure out what you’re attempting to do with your hands. Dry blood makes your skin itchy every time your fingers twitch but you don’t mind it.
“I’m here, I’m here,” he finally whispers with you sitting in the circle of his arms; you’re shaking like you’re sobbing even though you make no noise and cry no tears. Chan lets you squirm with a wild mania in your eyes, frantic and lost. He can’t quite pinpoint what you want until he gets it.
You stop shaking the moment your head leans against the left side of his chest, right where his beating heart is. A pattern in his rib cage and a rhythm in your ears, relief so immense you feel like you can finally breathe. What you want is just to hear the sound of his heartbeat. It makes Chan feel a little exposed, somewhat scrutinized but he really doesn’t mind taking himself apart to hand his heart over to you.
“I’m sorry,” you mumble, your tone wet and warm with oncoming tears.
Chan presses his lips into a thin line, feeling like a hypocrite when he keeps you caged in his arms. “What are you sorry for, silly?” From the bottom of his heart, it’s abominable, he thinks—that even amidst such gruesome bloodshed created by your own hands, Chan is relieved that you are not hurt.
“I’m sorry this isn’t real.”
fourth attempt —
Chan is coming home with you. The childhood home you used to grow up in with two extremely loving, a little too oblivious parents who never once questioned their daughter’s occupation in the big city.
It takes time to adjust but Chan is sliding into your little family without noticing it himself. He manages to impress your mom with his cooking and discusses politics with your dad. You might be going delusional but you swear you saw him chuckling faintly at your parents’ terrible taste of reality TV.
The house might only amount to one-tenth of his mansion but it smells like fresh laundry all around, tender and soft, smothered in the love of ordinary human beings. So everything just feels that much bigger, a love so warm and overwhelming it stains Chan’s eyes with unfamiliar myriads of emotions. It takes him a few days to finally laugh a little louder, not refraining his speech to specifically formal phrases, and allowing himself to nag you in front of your parents. He even makes a sound of disbelief when you keep telling them he’s only a friend from work.
“Oh my god, why are you so salty about it,” you chide and close your bedroom door. “If I had said you’re my boyfriend, they would have started interrogating you!”
Chan sits on the duvet you have laid on the floor for him—your childhood bed is too small to share—and mumbles something morbid under his breath, “I am quite good at tolerating any methods of torture thank you very much.” However, he doesn’t miss the look your parents give you whenever you bid them goodnight with Chan hovering over you in a way that’s nowhere near platonic.
You snort, actually, no, it’s too bitter for you to even react. “The worst they will do is leave you out when we watch TV,” you grin to relieve the inevitably building tension, shit-eating and all.
“That’s cruel. You know I love reality TV,” Chan replies, completely monotone. He flings an arm over his eyes like he’s putting in effort to mimic a dying body trying to convey his love in a Shakespeare play. Wrestling with like ten other housewives to buy those eggs on sale for your mom was more of a workout than any gun fights he has engaged in.
“Sleep. Mom said we’re going outside tomorrow,” you huff, tossing him a teddy bear from your bed—the amount of stuffed animals you own is impressive, they easily take up half of your bed so Chan had to accept his fate with the duvet.
“I thought we’re heading back?”
“We will after going out with her. She said she wanted something from the bakery.”
Chan hums in response, his gaze skimming over the interior of your room again. Light pink wallpapers, white bookshelves and wardrobe lining the corners, and soft hues of blue on your bed and curtains to top it all off. “Truly, you are the designer of a generation.”
“Toddlers usually don’t like black. And I was eight, Chan, shut the fuck up,” you laugh, the sound so hearty it makes him want to bottle it and keep it all to himself like a child hiding his favorite candy.
“Hurts my eyes a little, but I like it,” he declares and unwinds for the day.
You never realize you don’t really walk around town every time you visit your parents. Maybe it’s because you didn’t have many friends growing up, meaning there’s no one to call up for a hangout, or maybe it’s because all of the memories you want to relive here are with your parents, in the warmth of their home. So you walk down the sleepy streets with laziness on your shoulders, somewhat at peace when Chan can’t seem to keep his eyes in one place, secretly comparing the imageries of bright, colorful Seoul with this hazy rural area.
“What is that place over there?” He asks when you stride past a sketchy-looking building when in reality, it’s a spa run by this really nice old lady upstairs.
“Did you go to school here?” He ponders when you glance at what looks like a middle school; no kids are running and shouting in the playground since it’s the New Year holiday.
Your mom notices how much curiosity Chan has for an apparent mid-twenties young adult so she giggles, offering to point out something she thinks he might be interested in, “That’s a small park Y/N used to play at. She wouldn’t leave when I came to pick her up after work.”
You can’t decide if you should scowl at your mom or burst out laughing at her implication that Chan, the leader of a notorious mafia group, should go and sit on one of the swings while she heads inside the bakery. “Come on, Chan,” you quickly make your choice.
Chan sighs, though the sound is fond because he sees a sort of excitement blooming loud and clear in your pretty eyes. You have observed Chan long enough to know when he has given in so you laugh, turning to your mom and saying, “We’ll be back in a minute.” The familiar promise melts Chan inside out but he doesn’t tell you that.
You accidentally drop your phone while walking down the stone steps so you turn away for half a second. And when you look back, Chan is seated neatly on the swing which is definitely not fitting for his age—his long legs dragging against the soil as his arms are crossed in front of his chest. As serious as he tries to look, you find the whole imagery so ridiculously unserious. He senses your gaze burning holes on the back of his neck so he stands, reaches upward, and lifts himself to sit on the metal bar that the chains rain down from.
“Chan, what the fuck, that’s not how you use a swing,” you chide, nearly rolling on the ground and barking a laugh. “If I take a photo of you right now, how dead am I?”
Chan doesn’t even need to turn his head. “What do you think?”
He looks down when your footsteps squish against the snow and he tries to imagine how a little you would hang around this place for an entire afternoon, up to no good things while waiting for your mom. “Concise as always, boss,” you purse your lips at him, nostalgia a heavy weight on the curve of your shoulders as you peer over places you used to designate as your hiding spots.
Chan catches something shifting on your face and he ponders; why would you voluntarily involve yourself in outlaw doings when you could have had a perfectly normal life? “When did you start stealing?”
“Probably when my parents sent me away for university. I hated it. School was hard and the expenses were awful for their bank accounts but they wouldn’t tell me that,” you mutter and decide to join him, legs dangling over the edges, a confession dragged from your lips unwillingly.
Chan scoots a little closer, a hand reaching over to your left side to keep you from falling. “And you figured you were pretty good at it?”
“Nothing to be proud of, obviously,” you shake your head and can’t help a small grin. “Okay, maybe just a little. I was making money from racing on the side as well.”
It takes him a moment to register your words when surprise halts the words in his throat. No wonder you’re better at handling car chases than any of his teammates who have been involved in this business for years. You look over at him, seeing that he’s having trouble reacting so you pinch his nose teasingly, “I know, so sexy, ain’t it?”
Chan rolls his eyes, neglects the warmth spreading on his cheeks, and simply sits with you. The swing creaks and groans beneath the weight of two adults, rust staining his hand when he lifts it to check.
“It was enough money for me to graduate and I was fine with that. Mind you I was always the top of my class,” you scoff, thinking of long days when you used to get little to no sleep, of when you had mustered the best smiles for your parents through FaceTime, of how you had begun not caring for how much money the jewels you had stolen were worth.
None of it matters anymore, you think as you lean into Chan, and he lets you. “I’ll guess this, you were homeschooled?”
Chan doesn’t answer immediately as realization tightens his ribs. You don’t talk about home or how you grew up, and Chan doesn’t talk about his parents. Perhaps you both are similar in that way so neither of you mind when the other person never initiated it. “I was. Everything I ever learned was taught in that forsaken mansion. Most of it, actually.”
“Everything?”
“You can’t run away from what you’re surrounded with,” he says, and there’s a chilling edge to it, an icy kind of shiver that makes your fingers more numb than the winter cold ever can.
“Chan, you’re not them,” you declare out of the blue, eyes crinkling up in adoration. “You are free, okay? No matter how hard they try to ruin you, you can’t become them.”
When you look up again, his eyes have a glassy shine when he says, “I know that now.”
“Don’t cry,” you huff out a breath.
“I’m not crying,” Chan shakes his head slowly, voice suspiciously shaky. “I guess I just thought you had a lot to live for and I was…you know, it was arrogant of me to keep you by my side.”
You laugh, a sharp, crisp bark of a sound that cuts right through his doubts. “Who do you think you’re talking to? If I wanted to run, I would have and no one could catch me, not now, not ever.”
“Well, I did,” Chan retorts, though there is no bite to it.
“Only because I let you,” you play along sedately. It’s the soft hum of your voice that makes breathing for him feel easier, and his shoulders feel lighter. When Chan exhales, it no longer tastes like the unfathomable, untouchable nightmares that he was so used to choke down, swallow, and not allow himself to throw them up as proof to show anyone else.
Your mom returns perhaps in about an hour, a box tucked in her arms and groceries hanging from her elbow. “Time to go back,” she yells from the top of the stone steps. “We need to cook dinner, kids!”
You don’t dare budge. Chan notices it and nudges your shoulder gently, sensing your discontent. “You heard your mom, come on now.”
“I don’t want to go back,” you disagree. “Let’s stay here. I want to go to the beach with you when it gets warmer. And diving, kayaking, too!”
“You told me to leave my credit cards back home. You’ll have to feed me and pay all of my expenses,” Chan reminds you.
“Guess what, I left mine at home too,” you reply breezily. Maybe you both need to find new jobs. You don’t think Chan should worry about that because there’s nothing that he can’t do if he puts his mind to it, he’s just that great. Chan is the greatest thing there is, the best thing that has ever happened to you.
You watch rosy lips part, brown eyes widening as his grip on your shoulder falters faintly. “I don’t deserve good things, Y/N. I can’t stay here with you,” Chan says like he means it. “Tell me to leave.” He really is stupid until the very end.
“If you’re worried about that, I’ll kindly decline my spot in heaven and go to hell with you,” you assure him, your voice chirping with mirth but even that doesn’t seem to elevate his gloom at all. A groan. “Fine then, as the most wonderful person alive, I now denounce us of all our wrongdoings. And I announce us to be the best of normal friends as normal people!”
His solemn expression crumbles and now he just looks straight up insulted. “It’s supposed to be ‘husband and wife’,” Chan nags while fighting off a grin of his own.
A light feeling burgeons in your chest. “I thought you didn’t care about that kind of thing? We’re already doing laundry and taxes together, right? It’s not like we have enough money to buy the rings either.”
“I suppose I’ll have no say in that,” Chan sighs in defeat, finally smiling brightly as he reminds himself of what he has, and what he wants to become for you. “But I like to be with you as well. If you’ll have me.”
You look back at him, wanting nothing more than to burn those words into the flesh of your heart. “I already have you right here, don’t I?”
Because Chan’s existence is etched deeply somewhere inside your soul. And you love him everyday for that.
❖ note (yet again) : hello there, if you have reached the end, thank you so much for reading! I wish 2024 will bring you and your loved ones nothing but happiness and great health! (no one asked but I really tried to simplify their speech of affection towards each other here compared to illicit & priceless because all they really want is to be normal people living a normal life)
