WHEN | AUGUST 28, 2020
WHERE | A HOTEL ROOM, HONG KONG
WITH | @agentvenus
he doesn’t need to ask the question--they know each other too well, he can tell exactly what seong-min is feeling by a hitch in her breath, by a roll of her eyes, and agent hathaway was theirs. their mistake, their shared failure. she will come, independent of his asking, because they need this--because someone needs to bleed in the place of agent hathaway’s killer, and they need to be the ones to inflict that pain.
he doesn’t need to ask her--but in that fragile, newly wounded part of his mind where certain truths had once stood monument, where fragile altars now stood empty, he needs to hear her say it. he needs to say the words in some form, even if it’s typing them slowly across the screen of his phone, sitting at a dimly lit hotel bar while jazz plays somewhere distantly, hauntingly.
will you come?
because she has always been able to read his mind, because perhaps after all this time they have become two halves of a whole person, she calls him from a burner phone and tells him that she’ll be there within the week. he exhales a breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding, drags a hand over his face where he’s certain new lines have formed, where he wishes not for the first time that there were physical scars, that would heal and stay healed, as opposed to mental ones.
she rests a hand on his shoulder now, as she comes to take the chair beside him on the balcony. he does not flinch, does not shrug out of it like he might have if someone else had touched him--he just places his own over the top, and looks up at her with his best approximation of a smile. he thinks she might love him enough not to comment on the fact that it doesn’t reach his eyes, that it’s clearly a poorly constructed front.
“he’s still sitting at his desk, catching up on emails.” he says with a long-suffering sigh and a roll of his eyes. “will you ever forgive me for dragging you out here for someone so utterly boring?”