▓█ in universe ▬▬▬▬ past→ present day ▬▬▬▬ what is this? who knows
FEBRUARY, 2012
he doesn’t know where his future is going; he’s young and too smart– no, too ambitious for his own good. it’s ambition that knows no boundaries and outdoes any other quality he possesses: the logic, and reason, and careful planning and problem solving he’s known for.
(he’s young, and he’s smart, but in none of the right ways; foolish everywhere else)
yoongi sits on his own laptop beside him, in the cafe they’ve made one of many of their unofficial headquarters, and jeongguk spares a glance over at him. min yoongi: partner in crime, intelligent senior, aspiring lawyer, hex in his free time– best friend, min yoongi.
he frowns for a moment, and yoongi looks up from his laptop, and catches his gaze like it’s an accident, and yoongi frowns back. “what?” he asks, but there’s a chuckle in his voice that makes jeongguk’s lips quirk up in a tiny smile as he shrugs.
“i’m just thinking– how long is all of this going to last, you know? you’ll become a lawyer if everything goes according to plan, and i’m sure i’ll do something like this for the rest of my life, so…”
yoongi stares at him blankly for a moment, and jeongguk figures his expression would be entirely unreadable even if he was good at deciphering emotion and understanding people.
“don’t worry about it,” he answers curtly, and he turns his attention back to the codes on his screen, and jeongguk drags his chair over so he can look at what he’s doing.
“that’s not going to work,” he points out with a smug smile, and yoongi glances over at him with the slightest sigh. jeongguk doesn’t even let him ask any questions before he scrambles over to his best friend’s keyboard and fixes the error he spotted with a beaming grin. yoongi tries to look over at him in annoyance, but he ends up laughing too.
jeongguk scoots his chair away, then uses yoongi’s lap as a footrest.
“gross,” yoongi complains, but it’s unenthusiastic and he doesn't’ actually make any effort to displace the younger male.
“i just saved our entire operation, you should be thanking me,” he jokes, and yoongi playfully scoffs.
“get back to work,” yoongi scolds him after a moment, and jeongguk snickers and moves his laptop into his lap so he doesn’t have to move, and they stay like that in silence for a while, each working on individual parts of their next scheme that will eventually join together to create some terror of a prank for their school to face.
“hey,” yoongi says, and his voice is the kind of quiet that hints at sincerity and makes jeongguk hold back any sarcasm.
“don’t worry, okay? forever and always– regardless of wherever we end up, you’re…my friend. ”
jeongguk didn’t really know what that word meant before yoongi.
(he’s young and ambitious, so he lets his typically logical mind fixate on dreams, sometimes; he pictures a future where he works his way up samsung’s job ladder and becomes the youngest head programmer they’ve ever had– a future where that coexists with yoongi as a bigshot lawyer, and both of them with beaming, proud parents that brag about them at the expensive business parties they host now. they’ll leave the conversing to those a little more sociable, and stand on the balcony of one of their penthouses in their expensive suits, overlooking seoul, thinking, we could’ve razed this city, once, but we did this instead.)
09 MARCH, 2016, 02:42 AM
he wakes up to darkness, and sleep clouding his vision of the spotless ceiling above him. his apartment still feels empty and unlived in without a glance around it– even from within his bed. reality sinks in, and he inhales, and presses his palms to closed eyelids. there is a tsunami in his chest: nostalgia, confusion, anger, resentment for a memory. i’m just trying to sleep. this isn’t fair.
he takes more time than he would care to admit to recover; he can feel his heartbeat in his stomach like he does after a nightmare, and he sits up and takes a sip from the glass of water he keeps on his bedside table. he reaches for his phone to check the time: naturally some ungodly hour of the morning, but the date catches his eye.
march 9th: min yoongi’s birthday. with years of practice, that date holds little more importance to him than a flicker– like a light switch being turned on, and then immediately off again, but he still holds his phone in his hand, and hangs his head, sitting at the edge of the bed– tugs a hand through his hair and sighs.
he makes his phone flicker back to life, then quickly navigates menus. (contacts→ y → …)
all he has left of him now is two letters: yg, because yoongi was too straightforward, and maybe he was too good for hex now. this was his logic when he first changed the contact name, from something far more endearing he no longer remembers, shortly after his best friend stopped coming to school– as if they hadn’t drifted apart long before then. now, he keeps it this way, just in case his top class security on his phone is compromised. he can’t risk association with a black lotus hacker, even if one day in the past, he would’ve risked everything for exactly that.
{ CONTACT…yg }
[ DELETE CONTACT? ]
[ ↢ YES ↣ ] [ NO ]
he hesitates– stares at the screen, then sighs, and winces, and goes through the entire motion of throwing his phone across the room without actually letting go (and maybe that sums up his entire life.)
[ DELETE CONTACT? ]
[ YES ] [ ↢ NO ↣ ]
this time he really does throw his phone, and it conveniently lands safely in a pile of clothes he’ll need to wash later, but for now, he tucks himself back under his covers and rolls over, facing the wall with every intention of going back to sleep without any further disturbances.
it’s funny that now, the most he can hope for is that yoongi is alive for this birthday, and the next, if they’re lucky; he doesn’t dare wish to have anything to do with it at all.
▓█ (probably) in universe ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter
“i shouldn’t even dignify that with a response,” he answers, taking a swig of the drink in his glass. how lucky he was, to run into the same drunk fool he had to drive home months ago in a different bar. talk about a nightmare. he shouldn’t dignify donghae’s advances with a response, but naturally, he has several.
“do i need to explain to you how creepy it is that you were just asking to see my id to make sure i’m old enough to drink? i’m pretty sure there are at least 3 things illegal about what you’ve said or done since you walked over here,” he goes on, and in truth, that’s why he’s mad (and also hot, apparently.) because here comes this guy, most likely drunk again, and even more likely to ruin his entire night. it starts with an oh no, not you again, under jeongguk’s breath, and donghae claiming to be a police officer, asking for his id. he doesn’t even have a badge.
this time, though, he’s wiser. he knows lee donghae, thanks to vanguard surveillance, some of which he’s had a large hand in conducting himself. (no one knows surveillance better than he does, after all.) now, he knows donghae’s old job, and his new one, and his habits, and how foolish he is.
in truth, he doesn’t know why rocket bothers when he seems so useless and unable to cause them harm, but he never outwardly questions her, and he can see to point in it. it’s fun, too-- like a game of cat and mouse in the stage where the cat already caught the mouse, but continues to toss it into the air while it’s somewhere between life and death just for kicks.
truthfully, he knows donghae’s schedule quite well, thanks to his excellent surveillance, and he chose this spot specifically hoping to avoid him, but ah, how fickle humans are. it’s the only thing he can ever count on them for. he didn’t intend to work tonight, but it seems the universe has other plans. he’ll make the best of it, but not without having a little fun first.
“i can’t believe you haven’t gotten arrested yet, after what happened last time,” he frowns dramatically down at his glass, like he’s terribly traumatized by their last encounter that the other male was probably too drunk to remember now. in truth, he is, but it’s not like donghae did anything particularly awful, or at least it wouldn’t be if it was anyone other than jeongguk.
▓█ au (i hope omg) ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter drabble
how he ended up the getaway driver in this mission, he doesn’t know. he would complain about the higher ups, and some genius figuring he’d do well enough with cars, since he’s good with all other kinds of technology, and cars are “close enough,” but he doesn’t know if there are higher ups higher than him now-- he is, after all, “top dog,” according to vanguard’s second in command herself.
still, he is behind the wheel, and they’re lucky he can drive at all, let alone better than most under pressure. spotting gaps between cars to weave in between them is not so different from finding gaps in system security, though it’s so much more real and concrete; the stakes seem higher with a black lotus car somewhere behind them, with a hitman leaning out the window firing shots that already cracked the back window.
the woman is standing in the road. one minute, the coast is clear, and then she’s there, like some god damn ghost materializing from the depths of hell.
he slams on the breaks, and he swears he doesn’t actually hit her-- but still, she slams on his window, and yells you hit me, you hit me, and she’s panicking and crying, and he wants to say if i hit you, you wouldn’t be able to stand up and bang on my window like that, trust me, but he’s momentarily stunned, because the gunfire stopped when she appeared, and he can only assume black lotus’s entourage trailing their car has mysteriously disappeared.
“keep your guns on the ready, but out of her sight,” he mutters to the rest of the vanguard members in the car before he rolls his window down, and offers her the most excruciatingly forced, falsely polite smile.
“i’m sorry miss-- but you seem to be alright. really though i-- didn’t see you, i thought the road was clear. you’ll have to forgive me; you see--” he looks at her face, and the uneasiness he’s felt since her appearance finds its reason: she is the daughter of that judge whose name won’t come to him in this precise moment under such stress. his mind reels for a moment, adding together every bit of information he knows, about this situation and about her father--jung. last name: jung. these people involved in the law, and the money that comes with their work, are so often entangled in crime, too, and black lotus, and it’s all too coincidental.
“syndicate are on my trail and i really, really don’t have time for this,” and with that, he hits the gas again, hoping if it was her aim to stall him for some reason, she didn’t succeed.
▓█ in universe ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter
“This wasn’t the drink I ordered,” he insists, patience clearly wearing thin, and the bartender blinks up at him with wide, apologetic eyes. She’s honestly terrible at her job, clearly hesitant to give Jeongguk a drink in the first place, likely because of how young he looks. His best guess is she purposely messed up his drink in hopes that he would leave, instead of outwardly saying she wouldn’t serve him anything. He’s already lost all respect for her, as well as his willingness to let her have her way.
“Make a new one,” he demands, and he slides the glass across the counter to her, eyes boring a hole in the floor as she scurries away and he rests his elbow on the counter, chin on his palm.
She interrupts his thoughts with her voice, and for as surprisingly as her words are, he isn’t surprised to see her. He’s not used to anyone seeing him as something other than a child, or little brother at best; he intimidates some, but is never someone to be found attractive, and if he is, it isn’t often, in his experience. She puzzles him more than anything, and for every ounce of confusion he posses in relation to her, he holds just as much mistrust.
Surely, no one simply finds him attractive and flirts with him just for the amusement of it. It’s too hard to believe, so he’s sure her motives run deeper than anything on the surface. He’s encountered her like this in enough places like this to make it too strange to be coincidence; he’s also encountered her enough to steel himself and his nerves.
It’s like a game now-- like a challenge, and he doesn’t know if he’s more fond of anything.
“I’m always mad,” he sighs, the sound too dramatic to lack playfulness, expression a mix of a well-timed pout and hint of a smirk.
Still, she’s pretty-- soft, yet undoubtedly one of those beautiful things with edges capable harm when handled too roughly. He cannot think of words to describe her in a mind so dominated by numbers and calculations, but he studies the curves of her face like she’s some kind of equation he’ll learn the answer to if he searches long enough.
It makes him want to ask her how she got here, but he’s afraid she’ll ask him, too, and he doesn’t know.
▓█ in universe ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter
This is like some terrible scene from a romantic comedy, where a girl sits at a bar and withstands terrible pickup lines from a male that either becomes her main love interest or the main antagonist in the movie, except Jeongguk isn’t a girl, and it’s Hansol. Somehow reality is even more disgusting than the aforementioned scenario.
It’s ironic, because they are at a bar, though their cups are full of soda and not alcohol, because the bartenders at Club Mystique know them too well to let them get away with breaking this particular law (too often.) Jeongguk may consider Hansol a friend, if he knew the meaning of such a thing, so instead, he considers him a pattern. Club Mystique is a home base of sorts, and Hansol is part of it. They’re similar in age, and Hansol drifted to him from the moment he joined Vanguard because of it.
Maybe it’s because they’re the only ones that take each other seriously despite their age. It’s a mutual understanding, for as much as Protocol generally refuses to communicate with him. He treats Hansol like an annoyance every waking moment he’s alive, and yet here he still is. For as much as Jeongguk detests people, he knows not to waste his energy in the face of such sheer determination.
Maybe, they could be friends, in a world where Jeongguk is actually as much Jeongguk as he is Protocol-- in a world where he is capable of being anything but Protocol to anyone else.
But instead, it’s a pattern-- the banter, and Protocol rolling his eyes. He could smile and play along, but instead, he shoots him a standard cold glare for the sake of irony, and ignores Hansol’s bubbling laughter in favor of taking a sip of the soda in his cup.
“And you, Vernon,” he begins, condescendingly, as always. “Are the clouds to my sky-- always getting in my way. Every fucking day.”
▓█ in universe (if you want) ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter
He wondered when she would figure it out. For such a young age, he is a small master of manipulation; he has spun so many lies that he himself no longer knows what to believe, even in the depths of his own mind. He speaks to every person he meets with the full intention of squeezing everything that can benefit him out of them, and he will do anything necessary to receive it if he finds them useful.
Some people are worth more effort than others. Some are worth the effort, yet don’t require it. Evie is a middleground.
It started with curiosity, and a hunch, and a fondness for tea that proved useful, but not nearly strong enough to continue to enjoy it for as often as he found his way to the tea shop. He became a regular customer-- a little friendlier than his typical personality would permit, but it wasn’t a lie. They didn’t inquire enough about each other for lying to be necessary. It was comfortable.
That is, until he was the only customer in the shop, and a man walked in with a gunshot wound, and Evie leaped into hesitant action.
Since then, he dropped by whenever he was in the area and his time was free, likely unnerving the girl for how much he knew about her operation, but he assured her her secret was safe with him. (A secret is never safe with Protocol, it’s just kept quiet until it’s revelation will launch him closer to his ambitions.)
She eventually gave up on chasing him away, and he eventually watched her tend to wounds and treat those addicted with even more substances to both prolong and shorten pathetic lifespans.
It’s after the shop empties, and Protocol assisted in preventing a female from dying of some kind of allergic reaction in the center of the shop that she speaks, and it’s a subject he knew couldn’t be avoided forever.
“You don’t give a damn about me,” is a statement, but she and him aren’t so different, and he knows there is a question within it-- a lingering so why are you still here that she can’t say.
“You’re right,” is his only reply, and he shrugs like that’s enough, because he doesn’t have a better answer.
▓█ in universe (if you want) ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ drabble/potential starter
First, he sees the hitman. Protocol narrows his eyes-- flips from security camera to security camera inside Vanguard territory to track him and see if he currently endangers them or not. Protocol is currently on security duty: a tedious and often unexciting job, but vital to ensuring the safety of Vanguard’s operations. He doesn’t mind, because watching people is his specialty, and even through security cameras, he can learn.
He’s learned over time to piece together footage over a security camera to match those of faces he’s seen in person or in pictures. It’s easy, after his years of practice, and if that fails, he’s created a facematching database that may soon rival SPD’s own to assist him, though he prefers to do it himself. He works with machines every day, but his goal is to become one himself-- one that calculates and comes to conclusions faster.
This hitman is Black Lotus, on his radar for an attempted hit on one of Vangaurd’s doctors this month. From what he knows of him, he countlessly is contracted to kill important targets that aren’t outwardly dangerous: doctors, businessmen, rich backers opposing whoever employs him.
He keeps an eye on him-- notices the way he sticks his hands in his pockets and casts a glance toward the security cameras every now and then, and how he tries to avoid them. Amateur.
He flips through the cameras again, flies through one, then does a doubletake back to it. There’s a girl walking through the alley, staring down at her feet. Her face is soft, and familiar, and it takes a moment of Jeongguk searching through his mind to remember where and why he knows her, and yes, it’s Jeongguk that knows her. She was bright, almost overbearingly so, in high school, and in all meanings of the word. Her personality was vibrant, and her mind sharp, at least from what he knew of her.
He flips back to the camera he last spotted the hitman on, and clenches his jaw, because everything adds up, and if Park Sooyoung continues down this alleyway, the hitman will meet her, and he suspects the worst.
Now, he focuses his attention on his laptop, where he tracks her cellphone signal. His gaze drifts to the security cameras against his better judgement, before he forces himself to focus on tracking her, and finding her phone number, because if he’s too late, he doesn’t want to see it. She’s not his responsibility, anyway. In fact, keeping her out of harm’s way is probably more trouble than it’s worth. By saving her, she will know too much about him, and yet he can’t just let her die knowing what he does.
He succeeds, and sends a message to her quickly-- decisively.
{ message ► xxx-xxx-xxxx }►don’t go to the end of the alley you’re walking in. if you look to your right, there’s a door. it’s a back entrance to a club. if you go through it, you’ll be in a staff hallway outside the kitchens. if you keep walking straight once you get there, you’ll be in the main portion of the club. get lost in the people there as soon as you can► i know you’re wondering why you should listen to me but there’s a hitman with a gun waiting for you at the end of this alley and i doubt i need to continue for you to understand why
He waits a moment-- considers saying more. it’s been a long time since Jeongguk has stood a fighting chance against Protocol. Something within him wants to see her face to face-- make sure she’s okay-- ask her why a hitman wants her dead. Somehow, this persuades Protocol, too, as information and a challenge always does. Still, it’s a risk he isn’t sure is worth it, but he’s even less certain she’ll listen to him unless he elaborates.
{ message ► xxx-xxx-xxxx }► i'll come meet you. you’ll know it’s me because i’ll say “tomorrow is a full moon.” also because you’ll recognize me, maybe. doesn’t matter if you don’t, but hopefully this is evidence enough that i’m not fucking around and you need to listen to me
He considers leaving her there after, because there is only one person in this world that knows the correlation between Jeongguk and Protocol, and who each of them are, and he wants to keep it that way. His curiosity wins out in the end, and no one ever said he has to be honest with her.
He makes his way through the shadows as always-- out of his base of operations, and into the club with the bouncer only narrowing his eyes at his young looks in the face of his ID. He makes his way through countless people in the club, music booming, with the same vast distaste as always, but she is there, in the middle of the dance floor, trying her best to sway to the beat like she usually would, when her life wasn’t on the line.
“Tomorrow is a full moon,” he says once he gets close enough, and he bows to her when she turns around, more polite than usual in hopes of subduing any of her lingering fear.
“If you’re important enough to have a hitman on you, you were probably worried this was a trap. It’s not, this time, but you should be careful.”
He stands there-- stares at her, uncertain of how to proceed. Maybe that’s enough. She’s still alive, so he fulfilled his unnecessary, personal mission. Truthfully, he wants to leave; clubs aren’t his scene.
But then she smiles at him, like she finally snaps out of her daze after taking everything in, and says, “Jeongguk...? You’re my hero,” so lightly for the circumstances that he’s certain she’s joking.
He just nods hesitantly, and mutters a quick, “Yep, that’s me.”
▓█ in universe ▬▬▬▬ present day ▬▬▬▬ potential starter
[ tw: blood ]
“Yes,” he answers, his voice a dull, distant echo in his head. He agrees, because it’s easier than an explanation. It’s easier than no, this isn’t my blood, it’s their blood; it’s Vanguard’s blood; it’s everyone’s blood, but not mine.
It’s easier than telling this man that he was trying to save the members of his gang before law enforcement arrived and it was too late. If they saved their lives, the police would likely destroy their future. But Protocol is not a doctor. Protocol is the brain of the operation; Protocol is responsible for deaths, again. It’s happened before; he thinks he should be used to it by now, but the weight of it still hangs heavily over him.
He assumes the male talking to him now is from Salvatore, judging by how quickly he appeared, and how he’d fired bullets at Black Lotus’s soldiers as they retreated from the scene, but only just enough. He didn’t posses the bloodlust that the other gangs always did. He didn’t question an innocent face-- foolish. Typical of Salvatore.
“It’s okay,” he assures him, reaction still slow-- still in shock from the sight of the blood covering his hands and clothes-- still in shock from the life of Vanguard soldiers slipping between his fingers again. He goes over the entire strategy in his head, and there was no way he could’ve planned for a Black Lotus ambush when Syndicate was their intended enemy on the mission, yet he should’ve. He can’t afford to make mistakes like this anymore.
He lets tears fill his eyes and then scatter on his eyelashes, if only to aid his disguise of innocence in the face of this strange man he can’t trust, but truly, he just wants him to leave. This is his responsibility, and should be his mistake to deal with alone.
