regarding: characters & their patron gods
(some mythologies that — doomed to repeat or perhaps only clawing to be remembered and told — sink in their decay with the discipline of roots refusing to become entropic)
focus on: j*ngkook
word count: ~1.1k
warnings: blood, alcohol use, murder
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
lilo's mic: i'm not actually avoiding writing the next part this time, i'm actually just obsessed with minor details; there's a difference. the blurbs are random tangential bits that sort of connect character to respective god, time is incredibly fluid, but maybe i'll signify it on occasion. further note: this is not a comprehensive list of deities, there is quite a lot more to the pantheon than just this, please let me know if you are interested in a whole round-up.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ how quickly they do sell their souls / for the feast, and the promise of gold ⌟
ʙɪᴛᴜɪɴ
ʞooʞɓunɾ
⌜ SCATTERED STARLIGHT ; lesser sprite ; playful & an omen of danger ⌟
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑
preceding the arc of envy-drowned hatchlings + heaving crowns .
— jungkook slung a leg over the nondescript bike and for half a moment breathed in the smell of skit city: exhaust fumes and street food, nut carts and cigarettes, and beneath that, barely colored, something faintly syrup-sweet.
of course, five blocks south and the charm was undercut by the reek of piss; but here, and especially tonight, all that surrounded him was salty and sweet, sharp but familiar. comforting, almost, and entirely his.
— hyo-seop, who always a few centimeters and years ahead — even from their earliest meeting, when jungkook was sure he'd grow a bit taller, yet, and hyo-seop was always bent forward in a humble plea — flicked his forehead with an affectionate sort of annoyance.
"you look too pleased." as he should be. an amateur heist, a girl, a narrowly avoided shootout because his bike would always be just a little faster than the rest (not the one he was sitting on now, of course, though perhaps, if this one were to keep, he could tame it to be something magnificent and with a smoothness that threatened to tremble with sincerity, hand it off to a woman with the sun in her eyes and stars in her hair, blush pink and twinkling). jungkook just grinned. another flick. "how you charmed kyung-ah is beyond me."
"your cousin has good taste."
— hyo-seop pushed him and jungkook returned the shove, and in the echo of a bout of laughter they were off. southward. past the piss of lower skit and across the border into hoku. east hanging, and the salted sea air started to drift towards them, life on the wind that ruffled his hair, movement and speed all pulled toward him like they were drawn, magnetic.
it wouldn't be long now, before the old guard were taken out and those still with claws in them would rise up, in their stead.
spine breakers, he'd like to call them on that fateful day. a craving so strong you'd do anything — risk everything, the expendable and the invaluable alike to have even a taste of the best. to hell with those who get in your way, down into the great nothing, even the elders you unking along the way.
— hyo-seop revved his engine, like he wanted a race, and jungkook spared no second in indulging the cherubic impulse, willing this stolen bike further, bending it to his will like some wild mustang, untamed and unused to his determined unyeild.
— "you only have your youth once," and when that puppeteer kim hongjoong had uttered it in the dim of the mechanic garage, the words were meant to be all misdirectional mischief and artful deceit (as though he weren't younger than jungkook himself; sure, one might have read the tone for a playful sort of conspiracy, but jungkook was too bright to believe the serpens master of guile would at all flirt with the self-effacing. jungkook was more clever than that. he had the discernment to recognize a man who believed himself less human than myth.).
then, jungkook had passed the hoku native a grin teetering on overbold — when you were scheming desceptre and overthrow, impertinence seemed the most predictable card to play — "and you can hand it's freedom and power me?"
"i'm going to show you how to take it."
— the luminary was as energetic and pulsating as always. lights sparking, drinks spilling, voices overflowing and igniting — fervor feeding off the accelerant of liquor and passion, illegality and mania. he stopped by the mercenary circles, expecting to find deokhee mingling there, and when he heard from wooyoung that she was busy with an assignment all her own, he tipped one back with the twin, instead, losing track of time within the stories and the banter that always accompanied woo; the honey-thick of friendship.
"what brings you to hoku?" wooyoung was more settled, now: arm draped over his companion, the lion's share of his entertainment eaten through. "said you wouldn't be seeing us for a few months more, that 'president' of yours tightening your leash. did you finally kill the bastard?"
jungkook laughed. if wooyoung cared to look, he'd see all the lights of the luminary glinting in the biker's eyes. sparks of ambition, starlight constellating new omens of premonition and conspiracy. if you looked at it slanted, dread.
"something like that."
— ʙɪᴛᴜɪɴ had been a star sprite, once, one of the nameless many children of raketu and haemosu — dark and light. where hoku was impulsive she was methodical, but mischief had been the soul of them both, binding their histories and complicating their lore. in some stories, it was bituin that, scheming, compelled hoku to steal light from their father and do with it what he wont. in other tales she plotted alongside him and, playful, misled her parents in their clumsy uncertainty to buy hoku more stolen time. they were both nameless, then; both conduits of oblivion and duty, fixed points in samgong's sands. but starlight was meant to scatter, and sun rays to burn, and in this time — so distant from the golden reign of gods, life before life — yet somehow so neatly tethered — illume and shine was caught in the iris of an aspirant and believer, and bituin's starlight was marching into the spiral resolve of his drowned pupil.
— hyo-seop came to fetch him with a purposeful kind of wandering, and with the favor of wanton luck, jungkook followed his brother in arms: first deeper into the pit of the power-plant's greed, and then out one of it's winding exhaust pipes.
— then it was the choking resolute of helmets, surety in the doubt bred of anonymity and deceit. their stolen bike proved to be satisfactory, and when hyo-seop shot the tires of the man they'd been tailing and jungkook was standing over him, black helmet unfeeling, the night was alive in it's slaughtering. the sliver-hung moon seemed to hum as it tilted into a scintillating grin.
the president of a skit-born biker gang put up a fight, but in the end, the self-inflated righteous are always at a disadvantage to the hungry and disenchanted youth.
(he bruised, and the purple bloom revealed him to be akin to royalty, but none of it's divine right of kings. gods do not contuse. only men bleed and break.)
— the battered got in a punch, and when the wind was knocked out of his attacker, something in the folding of him struck recognition. "jungkook—?"
the knife embedded deep, the path it dug aimed true. another sharp jerk of his body and jungkook twisted the blade deeper, as though he needed to corkscrew this soul for the rites of iku.
he flipped open the visor of his helmet, then, wide eyes latching onto dying ones, like it was courtesy to face the man you ambushed and killed. like it was politeness and respect to set your soul as witness when it came your turn for usurpation.
— maybe it was a laughing that convulsed within a dying man, or a distorting contempt. choking cut through the stillness of night, and on jungkook's cheek, blood was sprayed.
i just know that chanlisto is that couple that hosts a new years party and excitedly anticipates midnight of the new year with a song queued and everything, counting down the seconds to their big kiss and then getting silly giggly afterwards as though they didn't plan the moment down to the minutia.
focus on: muni sarang (diane meunier), choi san, & song deokhee
word count: ~4.6k
warnings: language, intermittent Lore Dumping™, mentions of violence, occasional graphic imagery, mentions of semi-main character death, Even More Gods Are Introduced and i think that is lovely
lilo's mic: still knee deep in history but with more character introductions! i think at some point i might do a character recap page where i can offer some quick stats about the character's strengths and role, but idk if it would be helpful or just another way that i Procrastinate™ — let me know your thoughts !
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ my girl pinched my hips to see if i still exist / i think not ⌟
ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
— ʜᴀᴇᴍᴏ ᴘᴏʀᴛ was the main harbour of hoku city. home to the oldest and most robust working port on the island, the leeward side of the city was often referred to as haemopu side — an amalgamation of the names ʜᴀᴇᴍᴏꜱᴜ, the god of light and namesake of haemo port; and ᴋᴀᴘᴜ: sacred, taboo, forbidden. it was an unspoken rule that the shadows that danced on haemopu side were all puppets of that power known as serpens, and if you saw their strings or witnessed their plays, you would keep quiet, or your days were numbered — your gift from samgong through.
— still, haemo port was vast and wide, and business had to keep. it wasn't particularly bad luck to be a shop stationed near haemo port: there was so much foot traffic there, so many lives crossing back and forth, still hungry to survive; the best of money could be found for those who dared haemopu and kept their sight where it belonged — out of their eyes and in the open hands of hoku — or so the urban prayer went.
to the untrained eye, haemo port and ʜᴀᴇꜱᴜ ꜱᴛʀᴇᴇᴛ (the road that led to the devouring mouth of it) were the same as any other harbour on the island: only slightly more complicated than the sum of their intricately stacked, labyrinthine parts; bathed in light by enormous streetlamps so that when the sun went down, the majesty of ʀᴀᴋᴇᴛᴜ, night, couldn't be the refuge with which spirits attempted to thwart demons. but the fangs of some serpents still found their venomous purchase, and the storefronts along haesu street were often just that — fronts. legitimate stores, but facades for things still sinister, sliding their way through the waters, encircling your world, whole.
— on the furthest place inland haesu street ever went, there was an old business complex that had stood so long the original signage was lost and along with it, the precedent name. haemo complex, haesu park, haemo plaza, haemopu ether — old things have many names, and in legend, the many named becomes gods. inside the six story building, shops and establishments checked in and out like aimless souls in a graveyard: some lingered, some faded, some lasted the test of time.
on the first floor of haesu complex stood a taekwondo studio.
next to it, an indoor shooting range.
— we start this story with the taekwondo studio — the dojang, where mountains go to be edified and pupils to be fortified. eventually, we will open the door to see what is made with bullets and loose gunpowder, but for now, we take an abrupt turn right, through the third set of doors on the ground floor.
ᴄʜᴏɪ ᴊᴇᴏɴɢᴄʜᴇᴏʟ, father of one, was the owner of the modest studio: a stern man with a compassionate underbelly, a fourth dan black belt and the first sabeom — teacher — to enter the business complex. in the early days, when he was newly teaching and the world was more cruel and wanton than it ought, he orchestrated and ran illegal fights in the backmost part of his dojang. necessity begged it; life forced his unwavering hand. he'd never been proud, but he stood in his choices steadfast, and if you only saw the whole of him from an angle upturned and below, it seemed the might of him was his honor, unmarred.
dealing in entertainment and prestige, jeongcheol made ends meet in the evening to bring necessities and opportunity to his wife and newborn son at dawn, and by noon, instill dreams in the children that called him sabeom, center of their budding confidence.
when the serpens found out about his midnight habits, they paid a prompt price for front row tickets. by the end of the evening, jeongcheol's rental payments were moved to an account more reliable, and his small family moved out of the back office space and into one of the apartments that sat on the fifth and sixth floors. in exchange, the fights would persist on a grander scale at a more regular schedule ad infinitum, and the serpens would get their due cut.
jeongcheol always knew that this favor would amount to more debt, in the future, but for the security he was promised, in this blood oath? for the advantage and chance he could bestow upon his son? if it were shortsighted and misguided — this business deal with the serpent of the sky — then forgive him, but omniscience was simply the name of his city, not the power in his mind.
— and as san, his darling boy, grew from jeja to seonbae and in the course of time, sabeom all his own — a 3rd dan black belt and the pride of jeongcheol's world — the price of a demon's mercy became ever clearer, crystalizing into the certainty of future: law.
— it was in that very dojang, after all, that jeongcheol added to his myriad of students two young girls: diane and soyeon, dawn and dusk. jeja diane, a student named wisdom, took early to sparring with san, never minding that the younger always won, ever scheming to learn from a protégé's skill.
when san was chosen to be the demon heir's protector, it wasn't a matter of surprise or honor, simply that of providence.
and san was dignified by it, at any rate.
— only ever envisioning an inherited taekwondo studio for himself, a modest future but fulfilling dream, san's world expanded at the hands of diane — and his dojang, while still being the center of all his tethered existence, was a future now shared. ʏᴇᴏꜱᴀɴɢ, a pupil and friend, would aid him in handling the fights in the backmost part all of his father's hope and shame, an eternal rite, the sisyphean promise the choi family would never complete.
— jeongcheol had slowly backed away from the uglier side of his business as he aged into complacency and fatigue, and san had taken up the mantle in his place. now, sin would beget sin and shackled to the serpens would be yet another soul.
yeo was clear that he didn't mind.
already one foot into corruption, what was one more leg?
— he'd been cleaning up bruises from betting fights and broken limbs from shadow duels for years. he'd sewn flesh together the way others might knit tenderness and virtue, goodness and love.
every dojang needed it's medic. and every medic needed his charge.
— this was merit enough, for the both of them. respect for san in being trusted with something on which the whole of the underworld revolved; prestige for yeosang in the power inherent of a ruling head of a domain long standing, and in it's ancience, revered.
and watching them both, once the hand that led them deep into the mouth of something ravenous, still, stood choi jeongcheol, left wondering when security was no longer security — a promise no longer words of honor.
ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— diane had asked him to disappear, again.
— it was never an explicit demand, not since the first time, when she'd been following the tail of a banker and realized it would be so much easier to approach him if she were just a woman and not a daughter, held.
the nameless banker had decided he no longer wished to be a pigeon fed from an opened hand but a raven shot out of the sky, the shiny things he stole slipping from his traitor beak and landing back into the hand of the power that wielded the shotgun evermore.
— "you're intimidating, san." and it hadn't been her words or the command in her eye so much as it was a shift in her being — sarang to diane, veracity to something mutable and ever brewing. "i need to ensnare him..."
and he'd slipped away, taken her half-cue and was already gone.
— if the demon of hoku knew how often diane asked him to slip away, san was sure the mythic ernest would be none too pleased. it takes half a second for malignance to seize you in hoku city, and only a fraction of that if you're particularly inclined. of course, san was never far, and sarang more competent than what the wills of well meaning fathers offered her, but it would be more than just san's immortal soul on the line if something befell her and he were at all still breathing.
but it was always sarang's eyes that sought for the mercy of him, in the hairbreadth turn of her infinitesimal micro-expression, the graceful warp into something so unseen it were all but hidden to eyes that were any less devoted than his. and it was never a question because she would never need to ask; he'd learned to read the depths of her during sparring sessions in a dojang made of his youth and all his tomorrow. once, he'd crafted alongside her the armor that was so much a second skin, there were barely any joints or seams that one could rub the pad of their thumb along.
he'd seen her, then, and so he always knew.
— and that's how he found himself here, again. vanished from a spot he said he'd always defend: dematerialized, because bang chan had come to call.
— or so diane let the boy think. she'd found chan first, weeks before this encounter he'd name 'chance' or 'fate'. it had been simple to learn his routine and easier to insert herself in it. a coffee shop he always walked past. her new favorite window seat. a position so comfortable it looked as though it had always been.
and so they talked; this woman neither diane nor sarang, crafting a life by degrees of admission, chan warming to the gentle flame of her lies so that eventually, perhaps, knowledge of him would melt, secrets in him slip between them, in this place behind glass, warm between cups of untouched coffee.
not even san would hear the things chan would reveal in his adventurous, half-flirtatious speech. the thought often made the black belt's heart skid — his resolve stutter — but the bulk of him never wavered. he was a mountain and summits never crumbled; their might certainly never moved.
and that simple conflict of interest was something his friends never failed to entertain, and in mocking, enjoy.
— ᴅᴇᴏᴋʜᴇᴇ, twin sister of ᴡᴏᴏʏᴏᴜɴɢ and the one-minute younger half of their expert gunman team, was the one to first discover san's internal battle, having joked about his affection for diane from his sabeom days at the dojang. first, a true baseless joke, then overtime, a comfortable uncomfortability for san as it grew in truth and size.
san and his diane; no one loved their work the way san did; if san could marry duty he would.
— if he wasn't always looking at deokhee down the barrel of her sniper rifle, he just might knock some humility into her near prophetic teasing and her twin's identical shit eating grin.
but what was he to do when she was, in part, always right?
— sarang laughed at something chan said, and diane reached out to touch his shoulder with the soft of her hand. san turned his gaze, somehow half guilty, and that's when he saw the ephemera of a shadow he should not have.
what was kim hongjoong doing all the way here?
— first order of business would be to pull sarang from the place at which she stood. second would be to see just who the informant whisperer was that hongjoong strove to meet. third would be to evaluate just where that placed this puppet-master of secrets in the ever turbulent waters of organization and fealty — obeisance and axis.
— san was standing in front of her in the coffee shop before the shadow had ever truly dissipated — before any of the prior thoughts had fully formed in his mind.
sarang was good at smoothing her own confusion and concern, and playing the part of the innocent and sheltered. she huffed a convincing sigh and muttered something about a father that, overprotective, cut her time with this young officer short, and san caught the thrown word of 'cousin' like a fire-hot, thousand pound and ever-burning coal.
so that's how she'd explained his presence to chan.
— when she knew she'd almost been caught in the act by hongjoong, sarang swore.
— ʜᴏɴɢᴊᴏᴏɴɢ was a member of the serpens syndicate, and had, since the death of byeonghwa, been the watchful eye that extended past the confines of hoku city. loyal to the demon — a horkos made potent in the poignance of a blood debt — hongjoong was trusted... so far as anyone could be reliable, in this city that ate you whole, in these times that twisted the sinew of your very heart. at any rate, he was an informant of ernest, and while not one nearly as volatile as soyeon, still convoluted in intent.
he would be interested — perhaps even moreso curious than san, who daily burned all of his inquisition and steadfast resolve near through — as to what the demon heir was doing out here, in the pristine half of hoku city, talking with an officer that would just as soon as imprison her, if he knew even a fraction of the atrocities and moral impurities she ordered and aided, abetted and carried out.
— of course, even if hongjoong were to ask, sarang would never tell.
— not even with san, himself, did sarang reveal her true intentions in this business involving newly minted officer bang chan, a rookie at some few years post-graduation, an acquaintance turned friend from their first windfall encounter. not even with san, who knew the verity of sarang and had cherished her humanity from it's first appearance, did she let any information slip, a single hint pass.
he'd look into her eyes and unexpectedly, a wall was there — a guardedness of which he'd never known. she was no longer forthright about all possibilities with him. her thoughts were not so easily read, her want not so readily known.
— but that was not the worry that had the jaw with which to gnaw at san. not yet, anyway. not when hongjoong was surreptitiously on the same path as them, in a place where neither was colloquially seen (his informant hadn't been anyone of note, and so the consequence of his gained knowledge that day couldn't have been much, but one could never be complacent, if they wished to thrive).
— not when soyeon was unhappy, and sarang was the fool to not believe it.
— not when ernest, kingpin of terror, chessmaster of the underworld and ruler of hoku city, was mired in that slow changing-of-hands and place of gentle retreat where all of his speech was about the hand of iku, that terrify in the weight of dying.
the death of a demon was always a wounded threat that demanded first redress.
— it had started, in part, with the death of byeong-hwa. what was a king, after all, when his sworn shield had fallen? what menace was left in a monster, when his right hand was rotting, 6 feet below? the monsoon season would come, and a sickness would plague ernest along with the rain. jangma was the will of bada — the monsoon season the cursing volition of the sea. it was divine law, in some ways, that bada would claim her vengeance on hoku by taking it's epicenter and sweeping it's fortune and prosperity into her tumultuous seas, but it was still too soon, and thus, a secret well hidden.
no one in the serpens outside of the few remaining elders that sat at the demon's table, byeong-hwa's only daughter, his heir, and his warded nephew knew of the state of ernest's true mind.
the tides were swelling, the ground was saturating; bada was clambering toward the city, and at the time least affordable, the cracks between sarang and soyeon's friendship and intertwined lives deepened to a schism, with roots on either side, blooms torn apart, thorns tearing stem like gnashing teeth devouring flesh.
— when it rains, it pours, and in jangma, the storms were violent and unending; when bada raged, all the gods hovered close to witness her torrential price.
— "i'll tell ʏᴜɴʜᴏ." when they were haemopu side, diane turned to san, the silence between them broken, the confidence that always held in it's place perhaps worse for wear, if either of them had the resolve to mention it. "he'll have some clever way to spin hongjoong off our track - if he even saw anything in the first place."
— san nodded: just once, a jerky motion that left this world still buzzing, a dull, low whine.
yunho, sarang's cousin, was a close confidant of theirs. he moved into the serpens complex when he was 17. some commonplace tragedy left him with a want in the pit of his belly, and ever since the breaking down of all that tied sarang to soyeon and night to the dawining day, he had played the role of strategist and pragmatic advisor to his cousin — a safer, less volatile option for diane to pick, considering soyeon had always been her council, former.
— diplomats need their advisors; conmen require their marks. diane had a necessity for yunho and a plan for bang chan, and of course, they would be dealt with first. san was just a bodyguard, and in this way, he'd always known his place. but favor had a way of lead to want, and if he tended to that fire, it could always lick its way past his defenses and consume him whole.
— sarang blinked, and the change pulled san from his thoughts the way it always would. born to serve, her movements were what he'd been shaped to read. "i guess i'll tell hermes that you stood him up for yunho again, when it's time for your 13:00 date and you don't show."
— sarang laughed at that, warm and clear, almost chasing away the mist that had gathered all through the day, at choice intervals and expected alleyways, thickening to the obscurity of fog. hermes was sarang's greyhound — the puppy she'd once found when younger but crowned wise. she never had taken him to the serpens complex, where he could be socialized with the dobermans she'd cared for most her life. instead, san took him in — an act of kindness she never stopped praising him for, never quite forthright about her reasoning but offering just enough to where he was satisfied.
"tell the twins when you see them i need to have a word."
ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— the shop never had a name: just a wordless sign in the shape of a generic gun scope: the focus for an eye you'd never look into as you took your final, heaving breath.
the shooting range, the eye, akita's place, the final shop on the ground floor of haemo plaza.
— every child who'd ever touched a gun — any soul who had enough of some small mercy they had the fire to protect it in this heaving city — had, at some point, entered the shooting range that sat haemopu side. established longer than jeongcheol's dojang, but having changed hands at around the same time, the shooting range was owned by a woman named ᴀᴋɪᴛᴀ — ex-military but dishonorably discharged, a mother of twins, and simultaneously warm yet cold: distant, but always manning her station.
it was only natural that, sharpshooter of her squad, akita had taught her children to shoot from the moment their hands had the strength to thumb a trigger.
eyes bred to look at you through the barrel of a firearm, hearts trained to see the liberation at the end of a mission and none of the causalities between. akita took her twins, cradle of her future, and gave them all the skills she broke skin and bruised knuckle to hone. they would never have to struggle, because they would be born with skilled gift. they would have the freedom of honor, because no training would mar their resolve.
— at first, the shooting range was only that which sat within the four walls in the ground floor of that complex. but slowly it expanded: the back property, accessed through the side entrance, narrow but deep, for single sessions with moving targets; the abandoned lot near the docks that akita had come into possession of by chance and was appraising for sale until her daughter showed an aptitude for long range and a spark to pursue it.
before long, what was modest expanded, and with an open mouth, devoured until engorged. the shooting range was well known. beloved. conspicuous. exactly the sort of place one would expect to find a doorway into the depths of a now illegal, though still legitimate syndicate, and therefore, a place where they could never be found. in reverence and renown, akita secured a safe haven for her children, a place where they could rest without the fear of being poached.
two doors down, the serpens paid a lease, but here, in the four walls she maintained, they could never sink in their teeth.
but fate was the domain of samgong, and mischief the trait of hoku, and here, in a city where the presence of gods were only so strong because they were so ceaselessly revered, the two powers often conspired to thwart the dreams of those who dared trying, and those whose complacency masqueraded as crown.
— wooyoung, the older of the twins, was the impulsive to deokhee's passion. touched by caprice, drowning in compulsion — akita whispered into his ear as he grew up, tickling the soft skin hidden there, that he was born the same star sprite as hoku: before he became the omniscient eye, back when he was nameless, and his fervency was tried by the test of his father's tedium. in constant motion, neverending activity: "make no deals with iku, listen not to the obligation of horkos. you are a star, you belong to nothing but your own burn."
— deokhee, of course, was the fire burning her older brother brighter, still, the combustion in his path that kept him from apathy, that saw all his visions through. ᴇᴏɴᴊɪ, her mother would call her, the fire god born into flesh. the ardor, the devotion, the commitment deepening to obsession, the dedication to wooyoung's whims, the conviction in her twin brother's mania. akita adored her daughter's fervency, fanned the flames of her exuberance never quenched. "shackle yourself to no one, my eonji, you are not meant to be contained. never turn in on yourself; find a direction to incinerate: you are meant to set this world ablaze."
— avoiding flirtation with the fetters of the serpens was an unspoken request from akita, a desire never plainly raised. if she had been wiser (if she saw all too clearly the way serpents rise to challenge and adaptable, warp their venom to something honey-sweet) perhaps akita would have been more explicit in her demands, exact in all she envisioned and prayed to conspire. but it seemed an evident requirement, a moral anchored deep and in it's inevitability, made potent and strange.
"you are made for more," she had always told them.
but what can be done when your only framework of 'more' and 'greater' is the gunpowder residue of a superior weapon?
— once, akita built her children into crook of a firearm. ever after, they would know mostly it's bitter taste.
— none of this is to say, however, that the twins were a tragedy and their penchant something acrid, lead.
— deokhee was bottled excitement and effervescent joy in every task, and wooyoung the kind of gregarious that surrounded him with enthusiastic friendship and kindred brotherhood in every space he ventured to grace.
— and ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀʀʏ was one of those third spaces that wooyoung and deokhee frequented most.
a serpens owned establishment: an electricity plant on the edge of town, with hidden rooms that opened into dark things that could only hide in the shadow of a generator as massive as that which fueled a never-blinking city. the luminary was one of the largest holes in the wall that the serpens ran. there, you could order any sin you could pay the ferryman to usher you to.
(so long as you were in the right room, of course. the serpens liked to keep their messes orderly.)
— the twins mostly frequented the rooms with standard bar fare. alcohol, dance, betting and games of chance, fisticuffs when more than just spirits hit you square in the jaw after one freedom too many. a common enough vice with a burgeoning sea of acquaintances and a militia of contacts and friends. it was here, in the pale of haemosu's light — all the glare they could harness but never reach — that the twin's sociability spun a web that was never meant to entrap them, but still made them the perfect players for a serpent game.
after all, it was in the luminary that the twins aligned themselves with the ꜱᴘɪɴᴇ ʙʀᴇᴀᴋᴇʀ ʙɪᴋᴇʀꜱ.
a group of criminals and delinquents that rode through ꜱᴋɪᴛ — the next door neighbor of hoku city, and the border at which the serpens let their needles halt. the serpens owned hoku, and every gang and group of would-be hopefuls that they'd long run out had taken up station in skit and brawled it out, there. a neighboring city was of no consequence to the serpens as long as they spilled blood on their rightful side of the fault line, and the spine breakers were a fairly established group that worked their own city and only occasionally crossed the borders of hoku — careful to always show their deference and pay their dues. they were a infrequent though to some familiar face in the luminary on nights when the moon hung low, mostly to work deals with the mercenaries for hire in the back, and always to chase a drink alongside the twins.
ᴊᴜɴɢᴋᴏᴏᴋ was their closest companion of the lot, and if his drink of choice was an expected usual, and his uninspired flirtation with deokhee an affectionate and comfortable aside, then the night would be warm and the luminary waitstaff would make better money in tips than they had all month.
— and it was precisely that friendship with jungkook (and perhaps their closeness with san, though why make complicated something already written by fate?), that brought the twins to the serpens those aging years ago.
it had been hongjoong, newly syndicate minted, that noticed these two sparrows who somehow seemed to know everyone he had been keeping his thousand eyes on, and dared to ask himself what use could come with knowing their names.
it had been simple, after, for seonghwa to convince him that wooyoung was the easier approach, and for soyeon to cast the die on his fate.
(but that had been years ago: before the breaking down of factions, before suspicion and envy cast shadows that demons new not how to play, before ties were cut like marionette strings, and seonghwa and soyeon became a duo, and hongjoong, far enough from the barrel to not yet choose how to align, had to keep his ideas in his breast pocket and his lies tucked beneath his tie.)
— in the end, the twins were brought into the serpens because their connections would open doors that had no keys. it was through wooyoung and deokhee that the serpens greedy left hand reached into the heart of skit and, with an emboldened and wanting jungkook, staged a coup and installed this friend as the spine breaker's acting head.
ever after, the bikers would be in debt of the might of hoku, and in perpetuity, there would be scouts and reinforcements should there be need of aid from a distance.
— it was simply providence that the twins would have use beyond their sociability and want. it was the work of that ever mischievous hoku that in a chance encounter and a single ploy, diane was gifted with the two best marksman the city could afford.
danger, of course, in the single-minded passion of deokhee and the brilliant, aimless apathy of wooyoung, but when combined together (and wooyoung under the threat of the only one he swore obeisance to: san), they were a power more than their arsenal, a weapon greater than their might and distant reach.
— when san found the two of them sitting on his couch, deokhee knuckle deep in affectionate rubs for hermes, wooyoung eating noodles out of the pot, on his pinky swinging the apartment's spare key ("for emergencies," san had said, and pointedly handed it to deokhee), there was less a reaction of disappointment or surprise, and more an acceptance that at least this way, the message would be easily delivered, in brevity, made sweet.
"diane's calling."
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
pt. ii | | series masterlist
ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) :
1 - jeongcheol, san's father, used to run a taekwondo studio. because times were hard, he ran illegal fights in the back of his dojang, and when the serpen's found out, they co-opted his business and expanded it. as he got older, he passed down his dojang to san, who now works as the bodyguard of diane. because of his busy schedule, he co-manages the dojang with yeosang, the medic of the taekwondo studio.
2 - the taekwondo studio is situated on haesu street in an unnamed work-live complex often referred to as haemo plaza. on the same floor as the dojang there is an unnamed shooting range, owned by akita, the mother of twin gunman for the serpens deokhee and wooyoung. akita does not know of her children's affiliation with the syndicate and would disapprove if she knew.
3 - san, deokhee, and wooyoung are all friends are are closely allied with diane. diane is also close allies with yunho, her cousin and strategist council after her falling out with soyeon has deepened in the past few years (there has been a vague multi-year time skip from pt. i to pt. ii).
4 - ernest, kingpin of the serpens, is currently dying. it is a well kept secret - but not from soyeon, who diane fears will use this knowledge opportunistically. recently, diane has been keeping many secrets from even her closest confidant, san, especially regarding her consistently visiting officer bang chan, trying to weasel from him secrets... but about what?
5 - hongjoong is a member of the serpens with many secrets and many informants. diane is unsure if, in the power vacuum created after ernest's death, if he will show loyalty towards her or soyeon, and so she is wary of what he knows, when he was in the area as she was meeting up with bang chan.
6 - hongjoong was the one to originally recruit twins deokhee and wooyoung, because they have many contacts in hoku and neighboring cities - notably jungkook, now leader of a biker gang in the neighboring city named skit.
7 - diane has a mission for deokhee and wooyoung heretofore lacking details or rhyme.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
ʙᴇꜰᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴘᴀꜱᴛ ɪꜱ ᴄᴏɴꜱɪᴅᴇʀᴇᴅ ᴘʀᴇᴠɪᴏᴜꜱ . . .
pt. i | | series masterlist
focus on: muni sarang (diane meunier)
word count: ~4.1k
warnings: language, intermittent Lore Dumping™, mentions of violence, occasional graphic imagery, mentions of semi-main character death
lilo's mic: we start this story with essentially a history lesson, to keep you up to date on all of the Complex Relational Lore between all of our characters. also, before this past is considered previous is currently the only part of the story i actually have planned. so. enjoy it, this part of the story will probably be the only part that truly makes complete coherent sense. but, in the wise words of okalani akana in her swag girl era: fucka dat, we he'e nalu.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ i kick a rhyme drinking moonshine / i pour a sip on the concrete for the deceased ⌟
ᴅʀɪɴᴋɪɴɢ ᴍᴏᴏɴꜱʜɪɴᴇ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
— in hoku city there were three gods that everyone prayed to and, in secret, one power that bound them. supplication for the latter was far more clandestine, whispered and sequestered — in exile, made strange. ʜᴏᴋᴜ, ɴᴇꜱᴏɪ, ʙᴀᴅᴀ. star, earth, sea. the three gods that, when destiny conspired and came crawling, created the refuge of the bay on which hoku city was erected. favoritism named the city hoku when it was nesoi who ruled over land, and bada that, with her heaving oceans, carved the bay. but hoku was a star, and the city fell right beneath it's never blinking truth. it was only inevitable that one would be remembered more than the others, and in hoku's complacency, it would only be fair that bada's volatility and nesoi's jealousy would grow.
the ꜱᴇʀᴘᴇɴꜱ was the intensity that kept the city from eating itself whole.
— serpens, short for the serpens syndicate, was no true god, though certainly you'd be forgiven for thinking as much.
— formed generations ago (eight? six? what did it truly matter when the bones of them no longer existed, long pulverized, buried then exhumed, desecrated, then revered on an altar?) when a woman stepped off of a boat and onto the anticipating shores of a fetal city, barely christened with the name of hoku — the recrowning of a deity once forgotten, now animated anew and worshiped again, a cycle beginning at it's center. she had a dream of creating an empire — a whole world that would bend to her whims, small enough to swallow whole, powerful enough to seat her progeny for millennia — and create it, she had. first as a true business, a coalition of handpicked merchants who would come to rule the city with the foresight of a deified star, the omniscient eye, and the volatility of the omnipresent sea that raged around them. their trade was primarily alcoholic spirits and all manner of goods that could be sourced from the omnipotent abundance of the earth.
in those days, the prohibition had yet to emerge. in some ways, it was harder, more convoluted — byzantine. to hold the stopper on someone's desires is so much simpler when you are the only voice commanding vice. to control the flow of sin is a straightforward, near effortless task when there is only one fount, and you it's supplier.
— generations ago, when the world was less complicated, and the laws held with a velvet glove rather than an iron fist, the serpens syndicate was formed. not yet a godhead, something commonplace and admired. perhaps sharper, then, as it navigated streets it did not yet own and, with lazy skill, intricately wove itself into the desires of the people there. and with time, the corrupting influence of that diety named ꜱᴀᴍɢᴏɴɢ, that which is illicit becomes so much more tantalizing to hold. first it was little things, and then the shadows came to dance closer to their vision, and serpens had no choice but to embrace them or be swallowed whole.
— eventually, the elders of the serpens died and their prestige passed to the children beneath them. markets swelled and companies rose, and other things, still, ebbed with the water and, violently, were pulled to sea. only the serpens was strong enough to survive. only the snake born of sky and sea, tending to the ground beneath, could curl itself into the heart of the city and, triumphant, keep it's watchful eye keen.
and when prohibition came knocking, an unfortunate response to the political fear of a red light district growing stronger than it's keeper... well, who were the serpens to venerate: the gods that birthed them, and by favor, swelled their size? or the lawmen that cowered in fear, clawing at what never belonged to them to start?
— it was an easy choice, the former. and an evident decision for the people of hoku to raise the serpens up and, in their devotion, both conceal and empower them.
— when the prohibition hit, the serpens was headed by the mysterious ᴇʀɴᴇꜱᴛ, eldest of the meunier family and heir to the most vast and impressive organization hoku would ever see. open and inviting by name, but hidden yet renown, envied and feared, by reputation.
it was he who expanded their previous business, opening more hidden speakeasies — nips for the well to do that just needed something to take off the edge, bars for those who only wished to partake in their established addictions, and more clandestine holes in the wall for those that were used to the darker shades and umbra the serpens had long been expected to supply: canned heat, bottled torment, and tinned apparitions of ebullient euphoria.
bootlegging, drug peddling, pleasure dealing, death. the gods could save you from misfortune and lead you from disgrace, but the serpens could command all that sin and vice and all those evils that itched the back of your screaming throat.
— so pray to them. buy a bottle of their greed and spill a drink onto the pavement. the cops would never know if it was you that offered the liquid, or them that spilled it in confiscation. but the serpens would know. they were in every window, on every street corner, just around the block. they would see you downtrodden, and they would appreciate your awe, and they would raise you, when the moment became opportune.
to the serpens, master of all three: the omniscient eye, the omnipresent sea, the omnipotent abundance of the earth.
ᴅʀɪɴᴋɪɴɢ ᴍᴏᴏɴꜱʜɪɴᴇ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— ernest was a man that, however paradoxically, lived up to his name. warm. friendly. true. and yet, to those who would interfere with his business and create problems or messes (things less than ideal), he was unequivocally feared. his ire was your death; your mistake his boot on your broken neck, a miscalculation...? something bloody would be trickling into the rust-stained drain, the slow drip absinthe that was distilling into liquid gold in the serpen's hands.
most of the grotesque work — the unrefined, the unsightly brute force — was left to the delegation of ernest's right hand: ʙʏᴇᴏɴɢ-ʜᴡᴀ. a man to be equally feared, a name to invoke misfortune and curse. how the two met was a secret all-too-well kept. one day he appeared: the shadow of a crime lord, the brass knuckles of his right fist.
— even when they became fathers their resolve never weakened, their terror never lifted. ꜱᴏʏᴇᴏɴ, born in august, the daughter of a kingpin's right hand, and ᴅɪᴀɴᴇ, born two months later, the dauphin of a power much larger than the self, a weapon so deadly even ɪᴋᴜ himself — death incarnate — could only fathom the shallows of it's striking blow.
if anything, the rise of the next generation simply made them all the more careful in their planning — more visionary, more cutthroat.
— soyeon was born the eldest, and the shadow in her fathers deeds caressed the hair on her head and worshiped the light in her eyes until they were as dark as all that she would be groomed to do. diane was her opposite and not-quite-equal — someone on a pedestal already raised, above in rank and not apologetic of it... yet.
— when it came to diane — darling of hoku's underground world, devoted of that which sat above — many things would sink in slowly, overtime: eat their way through her thickened skin and gnaw at the tenderness encased within. yet was her eventuality, yet was all that she could not abide, and yet would be the knife pointed at her treasonous heart at the beginning of what lies beyond.
it was her father's fault, if we're to place blame.
after all, was it not him, that, in the giddy delight of having a daughter, suggested to his wife that his progeny should have a name no less witty and ironic than his own? ernest for a kingpin. truth for a crown of deceit. they should name her something cynical — acerbic when you faced it unblinking, bathed in truth. sarang, he said, through bubbling laughter: love, when it would be most impossible to abide.
and it had stayed that way: her second identity, her secret name. the epithet she only used with the closest of her kin, the appellation she only whispered through unsteady breath. sarang. love. oh, how it betrayed her. oh, how it shackled her to the floor of her deception and ever-growing lies.
— daughters of monsters and daughters of men. hoku crawled with them and it was the power of ʜᴏʀᴋᴏꜱ — oath — and that almighty mixture of convenience and duty that combined to draw the fates of diane and soyeon ever close, so they would tangle upon bloom.
after all. when there was an education for one, why should there not be opportunity for both? when there was such rich history between the fathers, why not a friendship and devotion for the daughters?
so knit their lives to be experiences in tandem. cut the cloth so their fraying edges could tangle rather than break. school together, extra circulars joint, assembled schedules with collective goals; if their lives were in constant collaboration and concert, their goals and dreams, too, might coalesce and unify. perhaps their bond would triumph over that of even their fathers and their leverage, in the end, would eclipse all the control and power the serpens had ever known.
— from their youngest years, diane and soyeon were together. it was only natural that companionship should rise, and no one celebrated it more than the demon of hoku and his calloused right hand.
byeong-hwa and his quiet pride (the secret, near half curve of a schadenfreude smile; the confident satisfaction of a brief exchange of half-muttered words). the mastermind of an empire didn't express much, but in his silence was a world of self gratified honor and his daughter and her closest companion were at the epicenter — all he could focus on, all he could contain. his blessings were all skills they would hone to a knifepoint, his devotion a paved road.
ernest, by contrast (a man indulged in his freedom, so high above the rest that he bound those that would not be bidden and answered to only those he so carefully chose), delighted in the two girls with ripe expression and open hands near constantly filled with the tangible, though on rare occasion and most cherished, the cerebral. diane, to whom he gave all his wisdom and wove all of his bleeding love, and soyeon, who he blessed with clairty of vision for all her ambition.
— two fathers, two daughters. and all that to say nothing of the mothers who bore them and ever after rose them up. and for a moment longer than the stasis that holds you at the fear of death, and in am embrace softer than the hands encircling your eiderdown throat, the two girls received all that virtue and knowledge surrounding them, and they were happy.
"i thought your name was diane."
"it is."
"then why does samchon ernest call you sarang?"
"it's my secret name," and the younger girl giggled, flipped upside down on the stairs she would climb like monkey bars, dreaming that this staircase was a freedom beyond one she would be granted at this age, still prepubsecent, a liberty perhaps not reached even in the whole of this life. "only the people who know me best call me that. family."
and for a long moment soyeon just stared at diane. upside down as well, moreso hanging than dangling, too stubborn to admit to the vulnerability in suspension. she looked at the girl beside her — this built in friend, this given companion that she grew to care for more dearly than any other — soft. then... "can i use it, too?"
"of course! i was waiting for you to."
— and it would be only too intimate when such familiarity would rot and envy sink in her teeth — anchored deep with her claws.
— diane was the heir to hoku, and soyeon her second fiddle. a weapon for diane to one day direct, a voice in her ear that could be disregarded or misattributed.
it began in those meetings, almost mock sessions — child's play — where diane would speak her beliefs into action, her desires into assignment, and soyeon would see the heart of the blonde leaping from its place and tumbling out of her uncertain throat. soyeon would challenge her then, the way she had their whole lives, with the counsel she was bred to provide, and her tutors would set their jaws and flicker their eyes.
when she speaks, her word is law, her ambitions reign.
never mind the softness that turned her bile into forgiveness, the compassion and love within her yielding and spreading thick, a knife turned to it's side, indulgence forgetting the edge to favor the spine.
— they were little moments, and the thoughts, though poisonous, petty. diane's tenderness would blind her one moment, and the next she would dictate a torture graphic and bloody to the fool who had dared to break byeong-hwa's good knee. the resources of her station could enable her volatility, but without the fervor of passionate emotion, it was a tendency more likely to dull from lack of use.
and so it was a simple question of fitness — a lingering hypothetical of what if that rooted itself in the dark places where twisted things like to grow, and, by degrees, spread it's uncertainty into the deeper beliefs in soyeon's mind.
ᴅʀɪɴᴋɪɴɢ ᴍᴏᴏɴꜱʜɪɴᴇ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— it was a sort of self gratifying joke in the meunier household that sarang could see the truth of people and diane could see their use.
sarang, imbued with love from the moment she was a thought in the minds of her parents (a hope, a joy — something to be cradled and held — cherished, for all innocence in hoku city was fleeting and met a tragic demise) , could always see the truth of someone despite any will to hide — verity and devotion bowed before her: unblinking, unmotivated, bare.
diane was less romantically inclined. she had to be, by nature of her role — her existence, her duty, her reign. she could only see the use of people. it was her only saving grace. if she began to entangle herself in the hearts of men, bog herself down in the histories and vulnerabilities of their lives, it would be impossible to do her work. it would be foolish of her: imbecilic to see the heart of people — to focus on all their love, all their life, all their vibrancy, still bleeding and not yet cold. it wouldn't serve her in the end, and so diane had to let those ideals rest.
— it was certainly a work in progress — this distinction between the two parts of herself.
which was more true? which would win in the end? these were questions without answers, quandaries lacking resolve. who are we really? that which we project or that which we feel tearing us limb from limb, clawing inside out, feasting on our rotting flesh, and undeterred, forever starting again?
— but let us begin here with the duality of sarang and diane. the same person — two different people — the same values, different ideals. diane neatly dissected herself on the daily — crafting identities and electing character (cherry picking the best of her, discerning those weaknesses that fit the narrative, burying those foibles that could not), a vulture that picked herself clean and only consumed that which would not fester between her teeth.
— and when she would go out and into this world that would only see her by degrees, she would often keep another name in her back pocket. secrets upon secrets; lies upon lies. you could never truly know her because you only knew a half, a part, a fragment. when she was old enough to hold her own and old enough to where her educational needs differed from that of soyeon and the two of them on occasion would part only to return again, half changed, diane chose a second friend. a bodyguard, mainly. a protector in name.
— his name was ꜱᴀɴ. a year younger than her, but with a build twice her size. fearless, intense, courageous, genuine. how he found his way into the underbelly of hoku city was a predictable tragedy, a commonplace loss; but how he managed to safeguard the softest parts of himself in a place protected and secure, still half transparent to be seen by the eyes of one so clear as sarang, was his true peculiarity.
it was unsurprising, in the end, when diane chose him to be her armed weapon: her chosen conspirator, her useful friend.
— once, when san was newly appointed, and diane hoped to hide a fascination she had with the softness of humanity, she slipped away from san in the crowd. he'd caught up with her and all of his barreling force of anger burnt into ash when he realized what she stooped over was a stray puppy — still infant, terrified and matted and cold.
"you could take him to the complex. the demon of hoku would never say no."
"i know." and sarang was uncharacteristically quiet, like this was some secret, some vulnerable part of her character that untombed itself and didn't belong here — at least, it was still somehow premature. "but innocence has no place in the serpens. i don't want him to bury himself alive and resurface as something changed."
and they stood there, the guiltless whelp before them, whose only sin was not being loved to the point of sanctuary.
"don't slip away from me again. your father is on every corner of this city and if i'm seen without you and a hint of concern, it will be my head." and it was sarang, then, that nodded her apology and agreed. "you don't have to hide softness from me."
— and it was that sort of understanding, that sort of freedom, that compacted and grew, spiraled and engorged — feasted on opportunity as any serpent might — and became the monster curled in the little demon's lap.
it certainly led them to where they were, now.
— the courtyard of the police academy was simple and no nonsense, by a general rule: bare. but during special events like the one being celebrated today, blue ribbon (with shades from the deepest midnight to the softest powder blue) was wrapped around columns and set to flutter in the mild breeze. whole families sat, poised and proper, in unyielding folding chairs. they clapped politely when names of graduating students were called, and peacocked, beaming, when the name was an honor their own.
diane sat comfortably toward the back, her eyes following police academy hopefuls, then the crowd that so warmly received them, by turns.
san was alongside her, as always, but their conversation was nothing but niceties for the duration of the ceremony — nothing like the conversation they'd had before they'd resolved to arrive.
"why are you so set on seeing the police graduates anyway?"
— establishing a civilian face in the most unlikely of locations. taking stock of who was still trusted with the youngest recruits. finding an exposed and vulnerable underbelly that soon enough, could be exploited, gutted, turned. the police were slowly understanding the profile of turncoat that the serpens was partial to adding to their payroll. it had been soyeon's idea to poach where they were least likely to expect: idealized graduates, still wet behind the ears with nothing of value, yet, but the potential and fire of youth.
there was another younger serpens member hidden somewhere in the crowd, sharp minded ꜱᴇᴏɴɢʜᴡᴀ who ernest, these days, was partial to favoring whenever he needed another mind of judgement than just diane, and soyeon was busy, aiding the few senior members to fill the gaping hole left by byeong-hwa.
(he'd died last fall, days before he swore he'd finally retire. a bad omen, some had said: vengeance and penance would always force the worst to reap what they sow. there had been a few retirements after that, some loyal enough and peripheral enough to be true resignations, some far too close to the trigger to see any reprieve other than what lay on the other side of a bullet and it's ashen powder. they were of an age, it was understood. for some of them, there was no expertise, just liability. according to the laws of the gods, a roulette with fate and a handgun was the most they deserved, and an honor they could rest easy with on another plane.)
at the end of this ceremony, diane would convene with seonghwa and together, they would find the rabbits easiest for the blow. perhaps the girl that few clapped for beyond polite acknowledgement; ever still, the boy with a smothered nervousness in his gait, like if he looked over his shoulder, he'd draw attention to his own smoking gun.
— one of the graduates had a grin that near broke into a boisterous laugh when his name was called. "ʙᴀɴɢ ᴄʜᴀɴ." the row in front of diane erupted into the most fearsome of cheers, and they stood, perhaps to make up for their sitting so far back.
diane stood, too, if only to size up this boy that had made her very ground shake with raucous thunder.
when somehow they locked eyes, it was all her power to not immediately falter.
— when the speeches were through, sarang sat to linger.
she and seonghwa shouldn't leave and arrive at their mutual second location quite so noticeably. even in the hubbub of a graduation ceremony. even on a night the nips were sure to be bought dry with young people looking to celebrate, hiding their illegalities under the alibi of youth.
— she could have moved. anticipated the movements that would wrap her string of fate around her neck like a noose.
she stayed rooted to her spot.
— bang chan, the ebullient graduate from before, came proudly over to his family before long. he caught her gaze, big brown eyes flicking briefly to the muscle beside her, before turning to who must have been his sister and laughing, pulling her into an embrace.
it took less than one whole look for san to disappear from beside her, and when bang chan was done receiving congratulation from his sea of adoring family, sarang — diane — was quite alone.
"hi."
and she echoed his greeting before finding more of her voice. "congratulations on your graduation."
"ah, thank you." and he was bashful, rubbing the back of his neck. "it wasn't anything anyone else hadn't done."
"the whole courtyard burst with applause."
and he had all the humility of laughter. "that was just my family." and he waved to the group of familiars retreating out of the archway, a promise to catch up soon. his smile twisted into something still warm but searching. "i saw you standing, though. we can't have met before; i know i would have remembered you."
and for a moment, there was a sound on the tip of her tongue, sly and smooth, serpentine sooth. but a different moniker tumbled out when she thought better, a contrasting life.
a fake name. chan savored the taste of lies on his tongue.
"are you here for anyone i might know?"
"no," and a half truth was followed with falsehood, the genuinely twinkle in her eye accompanied with a smile she could not truly own. "i came to get out of the house, and this is one of the few places my father allowed — so long as i brought my cousin, of course."
"that's the desired affect." a laugh. then here, a half calculating, half hopeful hint. "but a push over. give him money for ramyeon and he'll vanish."
and when he left, it was with the parting wish that he would see her one day, again.
— when san appeared at diane's side as though he'd never left, it was mutually understood that they'd never speak of this bang chan and report only to seonghwa those names easily overtook: cho miyeon, seo changbin.
in the end, nothing would come of nothing and only dust follows dust; those things we do in the space between living and death — where nothing can live and no one can die — are always clandestine but teeter on meaningless. we can only have that which we are given to hold, and if there are no hands in this space of oblivion, and the omniscient eye cannot see, are we held in contempt for the arteries we burst and the chambers we disintegrate on our way to be free?
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
pt. i | | series masterlist
ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) :
1 - hoku city is a port city where there is currently one major gang at play, named the serpens syndicate. the serpens is an old organization that was started long ago as a legitimate business selling alcoholic beverages. as time went on, they expanded their business to things less than legal, and their control over the port makes them strong and rich.
2 - hoku city recently became a prohibition city though it is not well maintained. the serpens is older than the prohibition laws and has many ways to circumvent the system, though the police force is becoming savvy to their m.o.
3 - the current leader of the serpens is ernest meunier. he has an heir, diane meunier. ernest's right hand man was the late byeong-hwa, who has a daughter, soyeon. byeong-hwa died and soyeon, groomed to inherit his place, keeps ernest informed with the aid of older informants, who are slowly "aging out" of the life of crime.
4 - diane meets bang chan, a recent police academy graduate, when scouting for police officers the serpens will add to their payroll. she keeps their meeting and acquaintance a secret from all others, barring san, her bodyguard and friend.
lilo's mic: welcome to the second arc of otbka!!!!!!!! back by absolutely no one's demand, if you happen to stumble upon this know that while most of the supplemental material is not required reading, the extra (under the heading "how quickly they do sell their souls") titled "KAPU" most certainly is, if you want to understand any of okalani and mingi's growth this arc. also, bruno mars, if you are reading this, pls send me a dm and i will include you in every mafia story i ever create, hereonin. you're criminally underutilized in otbka, but i will never make the same mistake twice when given sufficient motivation.
— the night buzzed around them, dark and deep. below, whole lives clattered against the concrete, souls bruising before they bartered something precious to the grips of the unforgiving, whatever profit they gleaned proof to ᴇᴏᴘꜱɪɴ that their existence meant something: that when they gave themselves to ɪᴋᴜ, their time had been well spent.
— "...one inescapable maw to another."
— a sightless eye was drawn first from the black, unblinking, then the observing other: a woman still silent in her half-blind regard of peering contemplation.
— "shoot."
(and so the speaker would. the gun was in her mouth, already. in this very instant, her breath caught poised, caressing the hairbreadth trigger.)
— silence that wasn't a silence. a pause that couldn't bring itself to still. soft, an intake of breath. "do you ever have some screaming that never stops? like the violence never digested after swallowing, and the person just lays there, all this time later?"
— the torturist raised her brow. "i would have thought you as knowledgeable as me." and her words drew her forth, out of obscurity and into the glow of the rooftop light, a sinner alongside a demon with her ruling ring.
— "... but i suppose it depends... on what they're saying... where they were. who is screaming."
— ᴅɪᴀɴᴇ turned to look at her companion, to see her presumption that somehow lacked accusation, her could-be-knowledge, if the woman bared her teeth — but there was no longer an eyeline there. ᴏᴋᴀʟᴀɴɪ stared out at the land below her as though transfixed, ignorant to the foolish daring of self-disclosure beside her, the leverage that could be gained in such inklings of weakness.
diane swallowed a wail defiant and thick in that seclusion the mercenary granted her.
ʀᴀᴋᴇᴛᴜ hummed on, barely audible in the stillness; one more night of her thousand, the calm before the blood of dawn.
— diane appraised the woman beside her when the screams were only rotting in their encasement — for a moment, made dull. three years had passed since okalani bought her freedom and diane ascended, and in the interim, an unspoken respect and lucrative alliance had led them here: to evenings fashioned by the silence and discretion of ᴋᴏʏᴏ, to the precarious wicker net found in regard, revelation, and rapport.
friendship, maybe, if such a thing in hoku city could evolve.
warmth, if they could claw it from the frigid formality of transaction, from the familiarity of knowing one's way with violence and deceit.
— "for being in the business of secrets, you don't collect them well."
(and if her truth bared it's teeth, it would wrap around her carefully crystallized speech and whisper like this: 'you don't betray me. i want to know why.')
— okalani breathed impassive and full; a beat almost pensive, as though there existed some cloaked and lampshaded way to express her feelings, and if she could reach it, she'd take hold. "i've not been paid," she relented, "puppetmasters keep secrets in checkbooks to cash in. i steal on request... tonight, things here are just here." a smile, then, something reflected and dim. "and i know better than to collect from serpens - least of all, you."
— the wind buffeted (and what did this pious call it — the wont of ᴍᴀꜱᴜ?); an aroma of street food — over salty, sizzling to a blistered sweet — wafted to their vantage place. below, the unmistakable laugh of ᴍɪɴɢɪ called out, high with too much breath, still spluttering into realization, pulling the attention of his sister the way a liar tugs at her own grin.
— diane no longer choked on regret such as this. still, it stuck between teeth and would have to be muzzled later.
('certainly the serpens knows how to collect from you.')
— "kill it." okalani's face was solemn, long hair ropes of black that someone once taught her to braid into nooses. diane was placid where love might have drawn concern. "you said you were a mouth devouring; serpents swallow their prey whole. kill it. smother it. then, at least, it can't scream anything new."
ᴠɪꜱᴄᴇʀᴀʟ, ʀᴇʟᴏᴀᴅᴀʙʟᴇ ๋࣭ 🂾 ₊♜⭑ ๋࣭⌯⁍ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— ʜᴏᴋᴜ ᴄɪᴛʏ could never want for kings.
— diamonds drawn on billboards advertising the latest miracle detergent, scepters painted on the side of weeping glass bottles, rapid transit tycoon ᴋɪᴍ ɴᴀᴍ-ᴊᴜɴɢ in a coronet alongside all of these, crown jewels spilling from his pockets, authority in one hand and an open palm the other, "ride in precious comfortability" —a different angle of the same poised grin— "there's no traffic beneath a bustling crowd." even wooden boxes stacked high on hoku-bound cargo vessels were filled with exports, stamped with the sigil of an eye that reigned with the omnipotence of king.
— to walk the streets of hoku was to be ruled; held in the cracked-palm of dry law, dipped in the seeping persistence of influence and advertisement, wrung out and kept by the vice that, here, only lived in shadow but still overindulged and engorged, always fed.
— apathy to the hypocrisy of a prohibition city housing the strongest illicit organization of this too-close and choking world was a quality sewn into the skin of every citizen, stitches disinfected by the very alcohol the city so vehemently disavowed.
— in shade, there was sin of every flavor and price tag. drink for the working class, powder for those clawing at relevance just above, and for the rich who could just as easily hire a boat to take them to the not so distant shores of ᴀᴋᴜᴀ — an island 80 kilometers away with laws as wet as a dip in the oceans surrounding them — hoku offered services and sin erring on the side of just slightly more tantalizing, a greed moreso addictive: blood and sweat drowned.
that, and, of course, the notoriety of having frequented and employed a power so illustrious and feared as the ꜱᴇʀᴘᴇɴꜱ.
— mostly, the wares courted by the notable and famous were just as cosmic as themselves: moonshine, powdered stars, canned heaven, bodies that pulsed with such presence and power it turned all blood in a ten-kilometer radius into stardrift — scintillating and carbonated, one sway away from a giggling state of death.
"moribund," ʏᴜɴʜᴏ called them, when their backs were turned and their money graced the sharpened edge of a serpens table. it was his role to face the more refined clientele, act as the middle man between them and the darker underbelly, them and the demon crown.
"moribunnies," ᴋʏᴜɴɢ-ᴀʜ had quipped, a presence half there in the syndicate and always gone.
the name had stuck in a way her soul hadn't, and while she flitted too and fro — from ꜱᴋɪᴛ ᴄɪᴛʏ to hoku, the border where ʜᴀʟᴀ ʜᴀʟᴀ kissed the star god's urban sprawl and back — her words stayed, as much a laugh on serpens member's lips as a prayer of worship to the diamond encrusted wealth the pretty fools left in their wake.
— ᴀʜɴ ʜʏᴇ-ᴊɪɴ and ʟᴇᴇ ᴊɪᴇᴜɴ of old money riches, as wayward as their gossamer-thin skirts fluttering in a windward-side breeze, never generous with their gratuity but always the first to run a tab; ᴘᴀʀᴋ ᴊᴇᴏɴɢꜱᴏɴɢ with all his father's lofty ambitions and twice the riches in hand, though none of the artistic vision to see something through; ᴋɪᴍ ꜱᴇᴏᴋᴊɪɴ, complacent in his status of rail, road, and salted sea way heir; even political powers like the monomymous ᴋᴇᴀɴᴜ and his devil-may-care gambling partner in far too much debt to ever quite swim free, ᴘᴇᴛᴇʀ ɢᴇɴᴇ.
— hoku was built atop them. the serpens siphoned their secrets and capital from a desperation to live so voraciously you'd shame gluttony. the world spun as was its wont, and the few dreamers and scant still-idealists that ran themselves ragged through streets that did not love them wrote poetry in notebooks that would decompose in her alleys.
hoku city could never want for kings, and there were always enough subjects to fill tax-paid infrastructure — plenty rats to engorge themselves on the abundance of a port city, the copiousness of success.
and where there are rats, there is always a viper to curb their proliferation; where there are targets, there are always serpents to profit on their death.
— and here, in the seedy underbelly of ᴄʏᴘʜᴇʀ ᴄᴀꜱɪɴᴏ ᴄʟᴜʙ, a serpent was everstill and coiling, about to strike a meal it could swallow whole.
"THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS, I WOULD NEVER COUNT CARDS!"
a man in a custom-fitted evening jacket was floundering into realness, rim-red eyes from liquor fermented too deep, a defensive stance that only told any half-interested onlooker that the allegation he so vehemently denied had truth enough to cut more than just skin.
some men, in desperation, believe the strength of their speech is a mirror to the power of their nature and repute. "HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN A PATRON, AND TO BE ACCUSED LIKE THIS?"
a custom .45 automatic kissed the wrinkled flesh of a too-warm temple before he could finish his appealing set. still half to standing, the man's mouth opened and closed like an ill-timed marionette. mingi didn't so much as raise his gaze to see above the rim of his shades as he threatened with perfect aim.
stuttering, then, a heartbeat lost in syncopation, the gentleman was all joints, jumping and over-animated, hands skittering over his own alarm before recalling the firearm of his own in his coat pocket. he reached, a bid to grasp for what lay so close at hand, a way to bolster against all he was losing and crawl out of what he was slipping down the esophagus and into—
— "i wouldn't do that if i were you." a loaded click, the cocking of another gun. this one dug into the perfect comb of the back of his head.
— some men cease to squirm when they realize they're caught in a hunting snare.
"hey, naekko."
(hey, baby. hey, lover. hey, mine.)
a too casual rolling of the sharpest of eyes. "be careful. this one looks excited."
the gentleman choked on his own terror-drawn bile.
when ᴅᴇᴏᴋʜᴇᴇ spoke again, it was a venom-sweet drawl that curled around the shell of his undeserving ear. half-amused, like this was a skit she'd payed front row tickets too, half steeped in threat. "we don't let just anyone stiff an establishment of the serpens."
"t-to even know i was cheating the house, he would've had to—"
— blood splattered on the poker chips, a fresh coat of paint that would be left glinting as a way to remind.
— the music had never truly ceased, and so there was nothing to filter back into stagnant air. gunpowder settled. flesh crumpled. deokhee leaned forward to blow the smoke off her lovers gun. patrons of passing interest paid cursory glances: listless, dim curiosity of what the police force would chalk it up to in vague newspaper headlines come the morrow. a skim of the lapel and it's pin. ah. not a politician. alas. not someone from whom they were getting paid.
— the croupier finished the rest of the liquor in the gentleman's glass, composure that earned him employment at such an establishment, his cold regard turning from mingi to the body with blood pouring fresh.
— mingi pushed his sunglasses up into the dark of his hair with a belated sigh.
"diane still has you cleaning up small time messes?" deokhee's usual biting assessment was laced with causal preoccupation, already shooting a conspiratorial grin to the croupier as he passed her a cigarette. "and here i thought you were planning a date for us, not quickening a funeral."
something rumbled deep in mingi's chest, and when their passionless companion left them to get a vest freshly pressed, off to man another round table of debt and dread, deokhee walked up to her dutiful lover, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone before innocently kissing his pouting lips. "glasses are new."
"you like 'em?"
when he bent down to pick up the body, she pulled them off his head.
"remind me a bit of san's."
"they are," and his voice carried that near-constant amiability, "compensation for picking off this one"—mingi jostled the man slung over his shoulder—"and the expensive drinks. cypher is ridiculous..."
"and you have a few more added to your tab, jagi. puppetmaster's picking up."
mingi groaned, and the scattered popping of deokhee's laughter was all chagrin and firearm ammunition.
— the usher that, face scrunched in disgust at the body and perhaps his own rotting luck at being tasked with seeing them out, led the two out the back entrance of cypher, reluctantly gave deokhee a light when she gestured for one. the door unceremoniously shut, and the lights of the casino' signage cast her cool arrogance in a hypnotic glow.
somewhere, a dog was barking and street vendors were heckling, but in the closeness of the alley, here, for a hairbreadth a moment, there was just the blur of burning, the blaze of her bold.
mingi made a comment about dry cleaning.
her laughter was smoke.
— "next time san asks a job beneath you, tell him he's the dog on diane's leash, not you."
and silence was something twisted when he bore it: uncertain and mutilated, too-stiff and dull.
— when ᴋɪᴍ ʜᴏɴɢᴊᴏᴏɴɢ stepped beneath the slanted awning of cypher's back alley, deokhee's cigarette was smouldering, and the rapid-fire of her ramblings were painting the alley warm. mingi wrapped every other syllable around the curve of his lips and when he tugged them to grinning, pulled her in for an absent minded kiss.
the corpse lay before them like an afterthought, ashes flicked in belated intervals.
— hongjoong's usual coat was gone, and he rolled up his sleeves before squatting before the carcass, running gloved fingers over would be seams.
if they listened, flesh squished beneath the knife.
— "i hear you played two whole games against him."
kim hongjoong only spoke when he had the taunting reason to, twisting the knife in movements almost-precise, like carving could be a trade of his, if there was ever a reason for wont.
— mingi's voice was thick when he spoke, reverberating somewhere in the belly, entrails of the man before him. "wanted to be sure it was the right target before i shot him"— and that earned a mindless "generous" murmured in the flesh of hongjoong's shoulder as he severed a head; a stuttered explanation following —"they all look the same in there. a dress code or something."
and hongjoong smiled because clawing into relevance always had unspoken attire, and in his way — with the flicker of memory in an eyeline that snagged on deokhee — mingi revealed something else, perhaps more true.
— "so how was he?" a sharp jerk of hongjoong's head, now cocked to one side as he traced long, lithe lines down the inside of a left arm. he split a man down the crease of his suit jacket, flaying fabric and skin. a deepening of his glee. "in poker, i mean."
— "slow," and somehow, a reflection of the current speaker, despite his usual tone and overflow. perhaps this reticence was a cautious deference, so like the blood of his sister, perhaps it was drowning in something more. "but decent."
— deokhee grew tired of listening to the stilted way the two men would speak. "wouldn't have been a match at all, for me."
if he heard the quiet challenge in the depths of her speech, hongjoong made no acknowledgement. "half of that gambling hall wouldn't be, if your twin is to be believed." then, with more bite in his grin, "i still have reservations, though."
"bold, when your face is at my boot."
"calculated." he didn't miss a beat. "which is only half true of this one." hongjoong pulled at a cut of him with a bone-riddled crunch, blood running free.
— a half moment later, he stood. more crimson, now, staining his dark shirt to match that of mingi's. hongjoong pulled a slaughter-red handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his hands, and with a half look and no words, commanded mingi to bag the pieces he scavenged.
— "anything to report about ᴇᴅᴇɴ?" his question was directed at deokhee, now, with the air of casualty that teased he knew all along she'd end up here at just the preicse time to reply, and she stared back at him, only half interested.
"other than confirming names of recruits with a penchant for the pool hall across the street, no. you'll need more invested dogs if you want to catch anything." deokhee kicked her heel before a pool of blood.
— the two serpent seniors shared apathetic conversation about what all would come of the night's main event ("do i want to know why he's split like rare cuts of beef?" "repaying jackson wang for an old deed." "he's gonna sell him back to the family piecemeal, isn't he?" "..." "there's a reason why i don't bet against the luminary."), and the tension building in the gun still diligently bending beneath them built to a snapping.
— "where's okal?" mingi's countenance was too-earnest when he turned to the puppetmaster before him, teeth gnawing the inside of his cheek. his eyes were wide behind his shades — the white glass of them seen in the slit gap of vulnerability only granted from a vantage place above — and when he caught the man already staring, he turned his head.
as though being seen was admitting to already going to the luminary earlier that evening; admitting to walking through the side doors that had once been a home stretch; admitting to stopping before he turned down the too-familiar aisles that would lead to the rooms always haunted by mercenaries, because truly going there would mean allowing the depths of him to be placed on a butchers floor, again, to be hooked up to electrical wires that still sparked in distant corners of his mind; admitting to almost setting things right.
and that he couldn't do. not for three years, yet.
— "your guess... and your aim is better than mine."
(deokhee couldn't contain herself. a need to diffuse the pressure cooker of regretting dread. "lovers spat?" "privacy." a nasal-leaning scoff.)
— "you heading to the luminary?" hongjoong's shadows flickered as though affirming, and in the hairbreadth before the faltering of his pride, there was almost, within mingi, a burgeoning resolve. "when you see her, will you tell me?"
— "you could always come."
— and mingi sighed, twisting his wrists in a half motion — like he meant to obscure them in his pockets but found them too bloodstained to be worth hiding, now. "ah, no... she won't be working tonight. it's a... anniversary, of sorts."
— hongjoong passed mingi a cloth to wipe the gore. first blood to keep him busy, then plausibility to wash his hands. if anyone knew how to drown in excess, it was mingi, and still, his feelings were transparent to a place of reckless.
"i'm sure the luminary's seen her." distant sound came from the front entrance; a bacchanal was starting. soon, they'd be wanting the vulnerability of hearts. "wang sees everything there, and your sister's nothing if not routine."
ᴠɪꜱᴄᴇʀᴀʟ, ʀᴇʟᴏᴀᴅᴀʙʟᴇ ๋࣭ 🂾 ₊♜⭑ ๋࣭⌯⁍ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— "i wouldn't be so skeptical if i were you, san. keep eyeing her like that and when you go to have a sip, boom." wooyoung tapped a rhythm fast on the counter of the bar and san rolled his eyes, a too-fond smile already threatening to break through his keen-eyed composure. mayari laughed, twisting a cap off another bottle stamped with hoku's seal.
— "that's not how that would work."
— a conspiratorial leaning in: "so then you do know how." the glass bottles were winking, and mayari's grin-in-response only goaded wooyoung to be more over the top, his high spirits all sparks threatening to light any solitary drinker with a fire infectious and bright. the luminary wasn't a place for disconsolate imbibing to begin, but with wooyoung present, the threat of any slight frown was annihilated. san breathed, content.
— "if you give her any more reason to, wooyo, she'll detonate yours, first."
— mayari laughed and wooyoung's eyes went comically large before shoving the taller man beside him, chastising him for his supposed rude behavior. mayari finished off their drinks before passing the bottle back to her sister and true bartender beside, a complicated handshake offered in thanks for letting her behind the bar to entertain her two companions serendipitously met.
— wooyoung offered a wink to her sister and mayari groaned. san tipped back the liquor.
"hmm?" wooyoung's attention turned back to the relevant party, gauging san's response. when the twin-shooter saw his friend slip into the luminary's stardrift glow, he claimed he knew the best person to beg a drink off of, a new, innovative high.
"hmm," san agreed, taking another long drink. he nodded at mayari as praise. "you definitely have a future in mixology, if you ever retire the explosives."
"mixology, he says," was wooyoung, with a teasing lilt. "best bartender, to me."
"there is a difference." was mayari's reply.
— the two broke into amiable disagreement as san lapsed into something still scintillant but sharp, surveying the emporium before him: the patrons, the exits, the tickets in everyone's pockets that held their weapons in lock-up reserve. the luminary held a reputation of privilege, pleasure, and peace that few places on mainland soil could claim. it was safe, by the standards of so many mercenary elites and powerplay rivals, but still, it was a hot bed for brawlers and upshots who knew no knuckles of defeat, and san was nothing if not a vigilant: an open-eyed and ever-wary sentinel. a wakeman. a horkos-kept dog. he kept a pulse on every creature writhing within the luminary, and in return, only the neon lights gazed back at him. here, in his minds eye, there was only efficiency crafted in caution.
a weapon never stops guarding his charge.
— "san." but puppetmasters bleed into shadows when others are blinded by lights. "where's your keeper?"
— "on the roof talking with yours." and kim hongjoong liked when dogs were nipping. it made for better play. "so..." san took another drink from his glass. wooyoung had followed his spirits to somewhere more lively. mayari was talking with her sister in another tongue. hongjoong looked over the glass. "how's mingi?"
— "alive." (a dry scoff; as if there was ever doubt) "busy, but not enough."
— san played with the empty of his glass, rolling the curved edge on the counter, lips pursed. hongjoong never bid for one for himself. not likely restraint — he probably drowned something at cypher. "asking about okalani?"
hongjoong didn't need words to give credence to something given.
"at some point he has to stop avoiding her."
"they met four months ago on the hala hala job."
"a drink while passing hostages don't count, kim."
"they hugged." a raised brow. "so says kyung-ah."
"impersonal. mingi'd hug a corpse."
— hongjoong swept his hands against the bar. "and i have one for the keeper. he somewhere around?"
— and of course, there'd be no one better to lead the equerry of demons to the illustrious jackson wang than a soldier posing as a mountain, a holy knight play acting the stoic. san led hongjoong deeper into a greed they were all too familiar, then down into levels more secured. one look at them both, and other sentinels parted, unseen, men who could neither want, nor bleed.
"you don't have to worry about your mercenary, by the way. the demon is just here to talk; no deals, this time. today is... a memory for mingi. diane guessed it was for her, as well."
silence was kim hongjoong's game, but never was impassivity. the indifference to the opaqueness of revelation caught san's attentive eye. he looked deep at the man beside him.
"you knew that already, didn't you?"
"from channels you would respect, this time. i'm hoping for this thing called a long game." and hongjoong's gaze lingered on the neckline of san's tight clothes. beneath fabric, something metallic and finely-crafted heated up, and like a brand, burned. "so are you."
san pointed to one of the many nondescript doors in a snaking long hallway. he shifted in his skin before he could look away. it wasn't as though no one had ever teased it. but something about the assessment of a liar made it feel true.
san turned to go back the way he came.
— "don't give me any more reason to."
ᴠɪꜱᴄᴇʀᴀʟ, ʀᴇʟᴏᴀᴅᴀʙʟᴇ ๋࣭ 🂾 ₊♜⭑ ๋࣭⌯⁍ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— somewhere on the long and winding roads that connect all mainland cities like a liberators highway, on the near far-side of skit city and the true home-ground of openness, where everything lived and nothing went to die, park kyung-ah pushed herself back on her bike, so ᴊᴜɴɢᴋᴏᴏᴋ could swing a leg over, in front of her, and settle in the seat to grin.
"you staying for a while yet?" and his face was so close his words were spiral promises caressing her skin. his nose brushed against hers, and she hummed, pretend consideration to prolong the sweetness of sunset.
"nowhere else has called."
"well, i'll call for again." and he kissed her. "and again." yet another. "every day until you choose to just stay."
kyung-ah kissed jungkook with a tenderness deep. "but will you follow, if i do the calling?"
jungkook leaned back, hands on his thighs with eyes twinkling.
"where are you planning on going?"
— and kyung-ah grinned, tilting her head to the right just enough to make the loose strands of her pink locks sway, as though bidden by some breeze. there was a challenge in her look, or perhaps just a restlessness, because the man before her took the silent cue and dismounted to go the motorcycle of his own. kyung-ah blew him a kiss before hiding beneath her helmet, and with a kick of energy, was off. jungkook was lightning in his pursuit of her, and whipping on the signboard behind them, relevant even here, a poster.
ᴍɪꜱꜱɪɴɢ: ꜰᴏʀᴍᴇʀ ᴏꜰꜰɪᴄᴇʀ ʙᴀɴɢ ᴄʜᴀɴ
⌯⁍ ๋࣭ ⭑♜₊ 🂾 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭ 🂾 ₊♜⭑ ๋࣭⌯⁍
pt. vi | | series masterlist
ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) :
1 - three years have passed since diane ascended the serpens throne. since then, mingi has become a serpens prospect while okalani has remained a mercenary-for-hire, separating the siblings and drawing lines of tenion.
2 - mingi gets assigned odd jobs from others, and on this night, san has him take out someone who is in debt to jackson wang, owner of the luminary. the job is seemingly busy work, something his lover, deokhee, does not appreciate
3 - kim hongjoong is looking for information on a group named eden, enlisting the help of deokhee, but finding nothing of note.
regarding: characters & their patron gods
(some mythologies that — doomed to repeat or perhaps only clawing to be remembered and told — sink in their decay with the discipline of roots refusing to become entropic)
focus on: h*ngjoong
word count: ~1.2k
warnings: funerals, alcohol, vorarephobia
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
lilo's mic: the girlies who get it get it and the girlies who don't never can; bada swallowed the person most important to hongjoong and in it's same tumult ferried to shore the one person who could reach him, after; okajoong and the sea of how your narrative transfixes me!!!!!!!!
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ how quickly they do sell their souls / for the feast, and the promise of gold ⌟
ʙᴀᴅᴀ
ɓuooɾɓuoɥ
⌜ SEA ; domain ruler ; tumultuous & strange ⌟
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑
preceding 'before this past is considered previous' .
— time was always considered the great devouring, but there was always something jealous and vindictive, malicious and swallowing in the great maw of that endless sea.
— bada;
some faith-blind virtuous had taken the time to introduce her to hongjoong, once: a monk draped in a dying season robe embroidered with the symbols of every deity at the hem, an extravagance only allowed here, in mourning, because it was a reminder and prayer to each of the gods. (practical; in time and reverence, cost-effective. here, in hoku city, such maximization was a sight none too rare.) the monk had stood waist deep in the water facing the wind, like one was wont to do at funerals, so that zephyrs could heal your shallow but heaving wounds and gales could edify your crumbling resolve.
hongjoong had scoffed from beside him, then, the name seeming to soft, too loving, too hopeful for the wanton violence of those waves crashing to shore, eroding the sediment of the cliff-side (the sea's sister, according to his guiding mourner and tutor of the faith. because there were always the hundred other faces with a thousand other stories that supposedly preceded life and, mercifully, gave them seed). his throat was too wind-drowned to be thick, his distaste barely breathed scorn. this sea knew how to take and how to flee, and how to wrap someone in so much cerement and destiny that they would be beside you one moment and the next, never to be seen. you could wait for them, at the edge of every protruding crag, you could fashion your own lighthouse, a star to guide them from sea, but bada knew how to obliterate them, enshroud them in her salt waters: the swallowing of the ocean was always a sure price, but it was only a naive hopeful that would believe different and ever pay such a fee.
the guiding mourner stiffened at that. hongjoong's contempt. his effacing disregard. ("your lack of kapu," a woman with a beauty chthonic would call it, so much later, a burgeoning smile to accompany her lilt, an intrigue almost-fond glinting in her eye — like he was some mystery to solve, and her, the great detective.)
— the monk had pushed it aside for the time being. allowed that clawing irreverence to be the twisting of grief; the affliction of death. chief mourners were supposed to be bitter, after all. it was a guiding's duty to stay. turn hongjoong, in all of his misery, to the clarity of the wind.
some men are stubborn and all jagged edges. some stones seem rooted, unable to be overturned: freed.
some part of hongjoong (perhaps the part of him that felt like it had burned it's way to being exhumed, here, brought back to heaving by the weight of ashes in a nondescript box and the wayward soul they were meant to represent) felt sorry for this monk, his assigned companion — this tutor given to his ignorant obstinance that refused to be coddled, too proud to be helped.
— what holy sin had this faith-drenched monk made, that when a funeral was called and no one there to lead hongjoong from the eye of hoku to the waters of the sea, the duty had landed to this man and his dour black robes? it can't have been an honor. not when hongjoong entered the monastery cold and dry-cheeked, his voice steady and exacting — still sharp in it's detached calm.
— when it came time for the chanting, hongjoong had said the rites enough to need no reading. the wind took the ashes when the moment was right, scattering the desaturated remains across waves of reckoning, and at the end of dying, the monk walked back to the monastery alone, and hongjoong went to get a drink.
the docks held his nip of choice.
— always filled to the brim with sailors who couldn't abide solid ground unless thoroughly drunk, tired wharfingers who were like to let their secrets spill, dockmen who would sooner brawl with an officer of the law than answer their questions straight.
there was truth here, for those discerning enough to collect it.
there was comfort in the surety of others feeding no lies.
— hongjoong ordered drinks by same name of his duty, and when two chief mourners were pushed toward him across the length of the bar, it was with a sympathy that meant he'd see no questions, tonight, only collect the answers due to him.
in the boisterous hum of other people's living, hongjoong drank to his constant companion, a deity known to him by no name other than it's purpose and it's craft: death.
— dark descended on the wharf when yunho did, and after quiet questioning, the serpens trusted took the second glass, a drink of his own.
— he considered the taste. then, seemed to agree with the taste of distilled grieving.
"i left my respects at the eye of hoku, but i think it wouldn't be too strange to leave some in your breast pocket, too."
hongjoong tapped the rim of his drink on his lips, as though the curve of the glass could stand in for the expected stretch of his grin. there could be no mirth, yet; for now, only the impression of sin. "you really didn't have to, yun."
"maybe not. but i'd rather you not start a bar fight or wander off the docks and into the harbor tonight." he took another drink, as if compulsion was his newfound vice, eyeing the man beside him. "how long did you know i was following you?"
"before you even started." — cynical disbelief; knowledge that no master reveals his true craft — "you're too empathetic; kind..." — the truth almost drew forth from them both something familiarly sweet yet tinged with the hauntings of bitter — "...and you've nothing else to do."
yunho kicked his stool.
— later, as the stars were burning all their brilliance through, the two men walked back through the stillness to the familiar turns of wraith-like haemopu. hongjoong led the spiral way, but somehow his legs habitually froze up and all at once his gaze would be pulled to wander, called by the dread song of the sea.
— bada. an obfuscation of a name; a siren's deceit hiding her true nature. a great deceiver, and they drank deep in her ploys and coveted her enchanted lies.
— maybe that monk had been right. maybe believers knew that a false name would always entice more than a fitting one, and in the simplest aspect of her — the cheapest, that everyone and even nothing could afford — there ought to be a pure gambit for an easy swallowing. an simple lie to draw you, sure, in. consumption was the most ambiguous of losses. what did it mean for the rest of the world, when you were devoured whole?
"who's ashes did ᴍᴀꜱᴜ take?"
— "who?" almost flippant. the question set hongjoong to walking again. he was no sailor or fisherman. bada oughtn't transfix him and drown him so.
yunho was all steady comfort beside him, a true guiding mourner, though bereavement was more a question than a burden, now. "the wind—" and his long fingers danced in the skies to the gentle buffeting of air "—masu."
"ah. i stopped listening to the monk by then." hongjoong knew no gods, really. his education on them had always been lacking, and the facts he knew to be true were omnipresent without the veneration of deities he could not see. they had no roots in him, and thus they had no teeth.
(but perhaps such simplicity could not apply to the chaotic turbulent of churning, the maw of a wanting abyss. perhaps not bada in her swallowing sea—)
— "the ashes?"
— and it was hongjoong's turn to airily gesticulate, turn the verity of night into shaded grey. strings of fate could spin onto his fingers, then, and if he was interested in their thread, he could tighten — puppet strings or truths, most always the convenience of woven lies.
— but yunho's eyes were earnest, glinting they way they did behind the clear glass of heartfelt amplification. candor seemed to soothe hongjoong's drying throat.
— his eyes turned to the tugging insistence of a lady. to bada. to that gnawing sea.
"false ashes — in reality, just some clothes. it was a funeral long overdue, and so there wasn't much for the wind to steal... bada swallowed my brother years ago."
regarding: characters & their patron gods
(some mythologies that — doomed to repeat or perhaps only clawing to be remembered and told — sink in their decay with the discipline of roots refusing to become entropic)
focus on: okalani akana
word count: ~2.2k
warnings: blood, graphic imagery, mentions of death and vague mentions of torture
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
lilo's mic: HUGE shout out to @munnaeuns for beta reading this for me ('noooo baddie down' had me WEEPING), tonight we do not die like men but rather feast like kings!!! okajoong make me unhinged i need them to kiss nasty with tongue. mingi is my DARLING BOY AND I WISH HIM THE BEST BUT ALSO LOVE TO MAKE HIM SUFFER NOOOO. and yes, taecyeon is mr. ok taecyeon, he deserves to be here but at what cost and in what tortured capacity.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ how quickly they do sell their souls / for the feast, and the promise of gold ⌟
ᴋᴀᴘᴜ
ıuɐlɐʞo
⌜ SACRED ; cosmic force ; rigid & preternatural ⌟
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑
preceding the arc of envy-drowned hatchlings + heaving crowns .
— when they'd come to hoku city, it had been by boat.
the cheapest one they could find on a night that seemed devoid of all stars. a fishing skiff, okalani had been hoping (something nondescript, the business of some old man who was more pity at their bleeding than questioning; a safety precaution; a merciful kill, if honsool was bent on it's devouring.) — but that night was kapu voreun, and no one would be fishing. the moon was absent in the great expanse of raketu and one look at the sky could have told okalani before she reached the sandy shores that no fisherman would be out tonight. no mercies would be small, in the pitch of a sacred night. the evenfall was kapu; it was forbidden; it was sacrosanct and reverent, and tonight there was no death and thus no promise of life.
the tumult of voreun — that lava sprite that such an evening was, in deference, hoping to appease — boiled in okalani's throat. bile digested the terror within, but there could be no eruption here.
they needed a boat.
— and find one, they had. some small-to-midsize cargo vessel that groaned with the weight of abundance — the gift of nesoi. when the labourers weren't looking, prehensile hunger lifted persimmons and pears, and mingi's charm (as well as an extra coin — it's due, though discounted price) had bought them a young coconut off the captain, the then-boy weaving okalani's lie about needing it to hold rituals for what they knew as kapu, but what the mainland called a new moon.
they wanted to sail safely, did they not? they had to beg passage from the sea, who, on such a night, would be docked near her daughter and hesitant to let them traverse her waters. go in presumption, and bada would, vengeful, swallow them whole. they were all fishermen here; they all knew the volatility of the enchanting sea. this ritual could be their kindness.
— (but in it's stead was this: mingi had whined when okalani spread the coconut flesh on the rawness of his skin still freshly scarred, wroth red lines branching like capillaries, winding and grasping, stretching across his shoulders and back like the many worded pleas that had filled that hollow honsool-owned room: half broken, half formed, all spiraling desperation and choked sobs, leading back to the same throat and that singular, unbroken spine. she gave him the flesh for healing, then pushed into his hands every too-ripe persimmon, mumbling half-knowledge about vitamin c. all apologies. all don't leave mes. all brother, what happens now?)
bada had carried them away from akua on a night meant to honor her only daughter, and okalani had spilled into her waters the coconut juice that might have quenched the rot within her that needed assuaging.
(a ritual all the same; despite the necrotic flesh of her tongue urging onto the boatmen half lies, she would still give the gods this. if not, how would they live past this sea?)
but the gods, in the end, had saved her, even if it had seemed at first that their sacred evening had forsaken her. though voreun threatened to eat her through, nesoi and bada now lifted her. though byeorak in his lightning had been weilded by honsool to mottle her brother's skin and iku had taken taecyeon, who she still whispered all her broken grief and forbearance to, it was the true severing of horkos that freed them and hoku that guided them through.
the gods mete clemency just as adamantly as slaughter. it had been long since okalani learned to hold the truth of their power but not to summon it — to fear their violence, but not reproach it. kapu meant to love something, but to die by it. to protect it, but never speak it's name. forbidden; blessed. prohibited; the altar at which you bent your will and praying, adored.
— after the boat, after the sewing of her left eye, after there were names she and mingi consigned to the venerated oblivion of taboo, and haemosu bled his wife's night to shining day, hoku city had been laid out before them on an underground subway's oversplitting and crawling grid.
symbols, colors, alphanumeric codes. hoku city was a cipher and nested in it's scattering encryption were layers of occult and clandestinity, syndicate and crime.
— she knew of the serpens before their boat arrived. of course she did. one was not born into misfortune and it's subsequent fall into tragedy, and, a bartering piece, work themselves to heaving without holding the kingpin of all treachery in their mind's eye. it had been taecyeon, her once-older brother, that had warned her of hoku-born demons using black trench coats to bind together all their stolen flesh (mingi had laughed, as was his way, and certainly, itching at the back of okalani's mind was the question of just when old magic became obsolete myth; when shapeshifting terrors became solidified and only their minds that liquidated, fluctuating dread; when did the flesh become realness and the malevolence anchor instead in spirit, the monsters mostly-men? it was all true, those ancient stories that had raised her and carved pantheons of gods in her head. she'd seen them. walked alongside demons and shapeshifters and half-buried men. they crawled along a coast she had once stared out at with two eyes rather than one. but perhaps things were less literal, now, on land that did not know her and in the absence of an older brother who could no longer hold her; or maybe things were just better concealed).
she’d stepped into the luminary for employment, never knowing it was a vipers lair.
— the first jobs were ugly: demanding in their outcome, cheap in their pay. with each one she and mingi flickered with the fires of hubris, because in this city all that held was price and pride, and the strength of one dictated the other; humility would leave you desecrated and deprived. they play acted surety because they needed others to believe it. in this way, they laid and glutted their self-efficacy, their burgeoning pride. in the early mornings, okalani would walk along deserted stretches of subway track, stations that lay abandoned, places that belonged to rats. she'd spread out a handkerchief, set her forehead to the unyielding of the cool-metal tracks. to samgong; and she did the meditations. to fate; and she offered the nothing she had to bless.
— (and a puppeteer had found her, then, a man with too many tugging strings to manipulate the steady truth of fate, but only one god to tether them. he'd asked her who she was praying to, and then, impertinent, if she believed. "i believe samgong bought me and for reasons, placed me here. if there was no fate, no design, better people than me would be standing here. but i cannot die." and a demon in a trenchcoat just blinked at her, soaking in her words through the pores of his stolen skin. it had been the first time he asked of her vague and dreading musings, but never the last. he had given her no name, only his address: a nip on the docks, nearest bada. "captain" then, she'd taken to calling him. a patron of the sea. a lover of the tides that could never set samgong free.)
— when the violence and the intelligence and the promise of a mercenary sibling death-scheduled-delivery was just becoming well known enough to offer the comfortability of complacency and the right of advantage, jackson wang dazzled them with the promise of the serpens.
a smart man, truly, he'd approached mingi.
— "we could join them, y'know." and mingi'd been filled with that bashful sort of hopefulness, kapu and memory so depleted and thin that all it would take was one wayward word and as though slapped with it, he'd bruise. okalani just looked at her baby brother, all brimming with sugar-sweetened dreams from the luminary's imposing keeper, the serpens recruiter, jackson wang. how strikingly he looked like taecyeon, then, believing, hopeful, sure; how truly he saw a promise and a life and somehow, a way out.
— an offer; a story repeating itself. an open hand, now, and on the horizon, another slaughterhouse meant for an underperforming member: a punishment dealt in blood for the breaking of horkos, an oath that had a way out, but only in a torturemaster's clause. strip them of their membership, cleave from their skin the tattoo. cruciate from them their most useful skill and their easiest meaning, scarring, mark them as damaged and thoroughly used. seal their freedom with the kiss of death. hunt them as they crawled to mercy on kapu voreun.
ghosts or fulfilling prophecies; crossroads or illusions of choice? mingi mistook her silent eulogy for interest. or, perhaps he knew her better than that, and simply pushed through. his dark eyes. so that of his brother. "it's not like we don't have the skills."
— skill. craftsmanship and mastery their blood had already paid for, their sight and their muscle ached for as a way to remind. was it just skill that led them here? or had it been some curse that they'd been given, some torment sent by the gods when taecyeon broke their horkos to honsool. they'd paid for it — in the manner that had been deemed evenhanded, in the blood-and-flesh price that their once-leader had carried out — but some oaths are more exacting than that, some bonds are broken at the offense of kapu. that this was all their lives could grant them — death and the twisting of it — was that not the ire of the sacred?
"we didn't pay the piper and run to be shackled to a different keeper, mingi." and when okalani spoke, it was for taecyeon; for the promise she made to a brother when his larynx was already in the grips of iku; for the life they could never have, now, but still could catch the visage of, in mornings when the world was still and they were above ground, not heaving. "i promised we wouldn't be owned."
— promises die when there's no blood or fire to consecrate them. taecyeon hadn't been burned; that was the blasphemy of the honsool way. there had been plenty of blood to be spilt, but only on two ends. maybe that's why they'd electrocuted mingi, dissolved the skin of his tattoo rather than gut it. he hadn't bled in that room lacking gods, in that sepulchre without stone. so how long could empty words keep him?
but once, their lives had been sold to honsool, and once, their skin had been inked permanent with their mark. they were gone from akua, now — bada had sailed them and nesoi had nursed them and now hoku held them in the pupil of his eye.
— old ways were molding. something rancid crept over every principle this world had once known. in time that would come long after now (after attempts at serpens usurpation and the joining of disparate lives, after crowning an heir of moral desolation, a kingpin of desecration, a commander of immorality and crime), a demon in a trench coat who knew the knuckles of only one god — that salted, drowned sea — would ask her again if he could keep her and place a serpent on her lapel.
— mingi would say yes; his debts were unbled and easily paid. his devastation was in gunshots. and as he placed them neatly, whole lives were dead before their ruby ichor could well in the hollow and mourning, drip.
— okalani would twist her organs until they were an art origami: intricate and perplexing, the tragedy of a fixed and unyeilding story. she'd tug on that puppet-master shapeshifting, kiss the equerry of demons and find that he hadn't stolen the skin beneath his sharp coat because she'd finally touched it, and there were no seams, no sewing, no curses of dread. his lips would be soft, his malevolence real but acquiescing, made smooth at the warmth of her hands.
all of her work was bleeding; every task in her arsenal was wheedling out the betrayal of horkos or the disappointing unawareness of it. here, her kapu was all the heart of her still beating, and here, a question proved she paid her debt.
— "i can't." and she wouldn't. and some promises were like carving sinew from lead, humanness from rigidity; as tender as they could be, their edges would never be fully silk.
(but here, there was this: mingi understanding in his overflowing gentle-heartedness and pity, that enduring copiousness the caprice of his psyche — the blade of sincerity, everything thriving true. he wrapped her in an embrace that knew no sorrows and only the promise of tomorrow and days after. he wandered when a puppeteer lingered, and then there was only okalani and this man named kim hongjoong. if there was defeat inside him at her refusal, he didn't show it. his lips were still stained with her color, and his cheeks were sparkling with rose quartz suspended in a mine. she'd breathe before words would form on her tongue, "you told me once you chose to hear no stolen secrets about me. that you only wanted truth from my lips. did you mean that, captain?"
("i'm an honest man in business." was his echo of conversations past, and as though coaxed by his smiling, that ebullient dusting of warmth was shared. "i meant every word."
("then i have some kapu to share with you. a story. something new.")
lilo's mic: final part of before this past is considered previous and guess what? i know what comes after, finally!!!! also, yes, i did include a cello moment for my raging bias best cellist okalani AND I'M RIGHT FOR IT. if you were wondering, i was imagining this concerto by ligeti.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭
⌜ lest i confess, my destiny's manifest ⌟
ᴍʏ ᴅᴇꜱᴛɪɴʏ'ꜱ ᴍᴀɴɪꜰᴇꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
— when the captain of hoku cpd's gang task force told him to punch the clock for an unspecified amount of overtime — the command aimed to the dozen of officers in the room, a tone brusque and unyielding, graveled and refusing to erode from the tectonic pressure of grit against grit — officer bang chan knew something was immutably and irrevocably, horribly and inexorably wrong.
then they'd thrown him into kevlar he'd been promised only weeks before he wouldn't see the tensile force of for a few years, yet —"too shiny," officers had chuckled, their mirth all jaded; bared teeth. "academy spit so fresh you sweat green. nah, these are reserved for that bastard syndicate. we won't be giving them any of you." — they'd shoved a firearm in his fumbling hands and stuck him in the back of a sergeant's car, their sirens a dread lullaby waking every shadow cat so it might hiss at every serpent that danced to the melody, bidden.
— the radio voices came in and out in bouts of barely intelligible static. "suspected bombing... 10th ward... fire spreading... the leeward side of hoku... gunfire... multiple sectors—
the column formation of police cars led chan deep into the engorged pitch of night, road swallowing their visibility whole with broken street lamps, the void a silent yet buzzing, anticipated sort of calm. raketu; yet her tenebrosity not so suffocating that those flashing lights — bruise blue and blood red — were snuffed out.
chan followed them with his eyes, transfixed by their blinking banter. wordlessly he exhumed folktales from his youth, stories from his mother's lips about ʙɪᴛᴜɪɴ and her dwarf starlight — asterisks that bewitched you, then led you deep inside the stomach of your own demise.
— the sirens cut when they moved out of the traffic-heavy areas. their lights flickered out when they entered the 10th ward.
— silence, here, a nothingness that betrayed the presence of a maw — some ravenous void.
— they must have reached sector 2 when it seemed their lights in the far distance were back and leading them: a vexing sort of spiral countermarch, but it only took chan a beat to realize the lack of blue and the predominant pulsation of orange. another collapse of the chambers in his heart and all he could see was fire.
"enji's price." and the ill omen slipped out his mouth like an intake of breath and not the blaspheme it had the power to be.
"there're no gods here, boy. and you've never been south of the 5th ward, so listen up..."
— it was the syndicate's doing, or so the sergeant had told, a conclusion made water as it slipped down the chain of command, a mantra draining into the mouths of whoever the cpd had managed to find in the precinct, yet somehow failing to quench all chan's overgrown dread. it bypassed the esophagus for his trachea and chan coughed, brittle-throated; dry.
"all this smoke," and he waved it away like it truly was.
there was certainly enough to obscure the stars in the sky.
the sergeant looked but said nothing.
— their car turned left, headed closer to the sea. driving past buildings without names and structures without development, they heard the all too familiar pop of gunfire deep within that undying blight called old haemo plaza.
no flames here.
from the front seat, an authoritative grunt. "gunfire. how many shooters?"
if only there was more liquid truth to swallow. loosen his throat. unclench his jaw.
chan's speech stuttered like a failing heart, a hangfire in a casing. "3 at least... with everything else, i reckon there's more."
the sergeant's foot seemed leaden. the car neither accelerated or slowed; bowelless, they moved on. before chan could falter or so much as blink, old haemo was gone.
(a hangfire is most dangerous to the shooter. the delay lulls them into the uncertainty of their own mind, the fecklessness in a yearning for truth; they eject the bullet, they become careless of the muzzle. the gunshot is still active, and a bullet will always find skin.)
"sir?"
"don't look at me like that, boy. you want to go home tonight?"
chan said nothing. he hadn't the weariness to agree or the guilelessness to say no.
"we start with the fires." a beat. bituin never seemed closer; stars, after all, were just another kind of industrial burning. "when vipers strike, best they bleed their venom dry in someone else's skin."
orange. red. tongues that licked against oblivion and reached for a too-distant sky.
it came from his heart and only after was processed through his brain, because had he known what he was about to utter, chan would have taken the firearm in hand and loosed it in his temple instead, hangfire and misfiring and all want of trying be damned: "and civilians?"
— the sergeant turned to him, and in his eyes there was no fire, not even the flickering sparks of bituin, half buried. there was only the swallowing, and the dusk of it. acheron; grim. "welcome to the 10th ward, officer bang. there's no civilians here, just snakes and their prey."
— the fire was upon them soon enough, a warehouse aflame — conflagrant and excandescent, incinerating a unfledged officer's every flailing truth. "you see anyone, you shoot. hear me?"
and it was in his ears but none of his ringing skull. the kevlar itched, and chan watched the sergeant grumble something consigned and pitiless.
of course; the callous-hardened sergeant for the green boy.
— all of that academy spit was acidifying to bile.
— officer bang nodded his head.
ᴍʏ ᴅᴇꜱᴛɪɴʏ'ꜱ ᴍᴀɴɪꜰᴇꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— before demon craftsmanship sent the city to burning — a baptism at the hands of a licking and purpose-bent fire — haemo plaza was quiet, barely glowing, it's light and activity steadily falling alongside the retirement of a long and laboured day.
— before the reckoning of detonation, wooyoung, mayari, and okalani swept across that somnolent business complex and slipped into a bar named ᴄᴀᴅᴀᴠᴇʀ. it's front an antique gift shop and record store, wooyoung was all too familiar with the way into it's illicit depths — "deokhee works here," by way of explanation, and he knocked on an employee door with a rhythm strange, and muttered some word or another to grant him access to the contraband within.
"particularly well hidden for being on haesu street." okalani waved off the excelsior of drink and focused her eye on the hole-in-the-wall speakeasy they'd descended a lithe and sharp leaning staircase into — jewel-toned velvet upholstery, ornate decor with gilded filigree, a few patron parties tucked in pockets around the periphery, their conversation muted, turned death low in conspiratorial wit.
"the shops in haemo plaza like to keep their connections quiet. some of the older leases holders still respect law" —mayari considered a menu before her, all coiled writing and neat-stamped prices, knife sharp, while wooyoung's fingers, once loose and dancing across the adorned edge of the main bar, stilled. a half second, then breathing into recovery. mayari was blind in her continue— "it's funny. you'd think, 'haemopu side, old and overturning: the perfect place for the serpens to hide.' and maybe that's why it gets raided so little. too obvious." she looked at wooyoung with all the sharp of grinning. "i bet your twin is glad for that."
"more than you know." and he winked with a charm oversteeped in ebullience, fluid in his turning to the barkeep and drawing him into a conversation as amiable as a wolf who bared no teeth.
— there was a spectre of music; a single cellist in a half room sitting further in. the macabre of their bow weedled the ghost of eerie into the winding paths for walking, and when they got their poison, the ice within the glass clinked.
the song was half familiar, like that out of a dread memory, and neither mayari or wooyoung seemed to mind okalani's need to sit them in the corner closest to it's haunting lullaby. they fell into a rhythm of bickering ("are you old enough to drink?" "that's your biggest concern?" "you know, before prohibition they had under 16 laws." "how old do you think i am?") as okalani tried to place the origin of this single-player's cadenza that lacked it's full concerto.
— okalani fished out a timepiece; mayari, almost cat-like, tipped her head. the minute hand shifted. the demolitionist nudged the shooter.
with a long draught of something tempestuous and murky, wooyoung stood to make a message at the telephone.
— his voice was calculated to casual when he spoke, and the comfortable cadence colored the warmth of the bar.
okalani praised the woman beside her. "i'm sure you know, but you're very talented."
"thank you," mayari responded. without the comfort of the other serpens, she was now half to timidity, a smile creeping onto her charming features, shyness folding into itself with the iridescence of delicate insect wings: shimmering, then gone, enchanting with their lustrous glow.
okalani warmed: playful, pleased. "your work with wooyoung... exquisite."
and they both laughed, half committed things, as the first explosion hit.
— nesoi groaned, the majesty of the ground quaking, glasses rattling in the aftershocks of detonation, the sound so loud the cello, perturbed, cried shrill.
then more, just as planned. further away, now, leading in the opposite direction of cadaver, blasts reverberating through the floorboards, drawing the curiosity of patrons forth, up and out of their debauchery, smothering them thick in sin.
okalani went to play the part of innocent concern, and wooyoung slid back into her place.
"and now?" mayari asked, sharp eyed — still ready.
"we wait. eventually we'll hear from the demon of hoku; maybe yunho." wooyoung reached for his drink and took a nervous-to-resigned sip, a lock of hair slipping to hang over his forehead, cutting just above the eye. he sniffed. "do you know what a drinking game is?"
"again, how old do you think i am?"
— the tide of patrons returning from their uncertain vigil rose before it fell: some tabs were paid with a staccato, finger-drumming urgency, the entryway a revolver firing blanks — no death, no vice, just unrighteousness going the way it came; others ordered another slow-drip, oblivion-bound abinsthe, settling back into the cushions that once housed them — complacent with burning, emollient with impending dread.
two serpents and their torturist accomplice played the latter, as though this speakeasy was assured safety, as though they were not already moribund from the moment they were born, all lives prematurely marked by iku, at once samgong's unlucky favorites, at last, sepulchred.
— the cellist was gone but the instrument, their keeper, remained. there was nothing to hush their voices here but the echo of distant upheaval, the far-off marching of other's dread.
perhaps that was why wooyoung spotted them. in the half-light, saw a slant toward death.
there was an air of emptiness; anticipation turned static. mayari had brought with her explosives the breath of iku, and the threat of his weight glinted from the opposite corner.
— a party of six. one with a face that needled at wooyoung's memory. a member of serpens. a baby face who favored a single-action semi automatic. if deokhee were here, she'd have remembered his handedness.
— wooyoung furrowed his brow to pull forth his twin's knowledge.
instead, he locked eyes.
"shit."
— mayari's victory drink shattered to the melody of gunshots, and wooyoung returned fire so swiftly one might debate whether the headshot bullet landed before his opponents reflexive trigger. okalani barricaded with their round table, and the youngest had yelped, but taken a gun to fire.
(okalani hadn't seemed enthused when wooyoung had passed one of his beloved collection to mayari, earlier. all of her height had bristled when wooyoung, tongue in cheek, said he favored backup with two good eyes.)
— "the telephone," okalani urged, and it took wooyoung longer to piece together the unspoken strategy that mayari already seemed to digest.
gunshots drew company. they were alone and in need of backup. on the far end wall (the very wall at which he was aiming, crawling with six, now five, criminals filled with a violent delight, the raised hackles of deranged enmity) sat a counter burdened with the telephone. damage it and they would be swept eulogy.
wooyoung's aim was always lauded to be reliably true.
gunshots. the scent of their powder.
"ready to make a call?"
ᴍʏ ᴅᴇꜱᴛɪɴʏ'ꜱ ᴍᴀɴɪꜰᴇꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— deokhee's left hand twitched.
("your brother's calling," akita had said once, when their eyes had been looking through a scope at a target distant. deokhee's hand had tremored then, too, and the then-adolescent had complained that it ought not have done. not when she'd trained her hands and eyes to obey her mind so completely. not when she'd won composure with sweat and spit. "you're half him and he is half you. his left hand is your right, and your right his left. go." and deokhee had stomped off, annoyed her mother hadn't let her finish her round, a sour mostly dulled when wooyoung, who'd been searching for stray currency to spend, bought them hotteok to share.)
— she was too grounded for a mother's stories, now. an older generation's superstitions, a biased accounting of selfish dreams and half-baked hopes. they only aligned with a version of her that no longer existed — perhaps never did.
— akita's vision wasn't what deokhee had trained hers to become. the greatest sharpshooter on hoku soil saw everything and saw it long before it was reified before her. akita had trained deokhee to look down the scope, but at some point, mother lost that same eye. or perhaps she'd bequeathed it onto her daughter, painted it into the sclera and weaved it into the burning umber of her iris. passed it down; plucked it from her retina and hid it deep inside deokhee where no one else could reach.
for a military-grade gunman, akita was somehow blind, now.
(blind in her children, anyway. unable to see the contours of their shadows for what they were, unable to read the stories in their silence, the warning in their grins. she didn't know the serpens had coiled around them and turned their flesh to frigid scale, and it seemed almost a willful ignorance. that, or a tragic degeneration: macular and maternal, somehow one and not the other but yet, the rot in both, fed.)
— deokhee believed in the sight at the end of a shotgun. now, the realness of flesh breaking to blood.
— but still. the address on her itinerary was a half block away (she'd taken the long route, taking to avoid the procession of cop cars that sped to the burning heart of a city they could not hope to contain, much less hold) and when her left hand twitched, a trembling that did not belong to her — could not, because control was what she'd mastered, here, in the stakes of an assignment, the confines of a job — deokhee pushed deeper into the gas.
just one more target, woo. then, let me find you.
— the old laundromat stood on the mostly abandoned zoning of ᴋᴏʏᴏ ᴡᴀʏ. deokhee had chosen to take the frontage road instead of the layman streets, risking visibility for predictability. the latter, she found, always won out in the end when it came to lower level criminals like her or the dead man she was racing toward. demons and figureheads played the roulette of gods and thought outside of the box. their weapons were just good at catching prey.
— 24 HOURS; EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK; TOKENS 25% OFF EVERY WEDNESDAY. the windows were still poster-blocked and unbroken, all three stories high. it hardly looked unserviced, despite it having been busted as a serpens establishment a few months back ("sacrifice a spot of diseased flesh or see they amputate the leg," ernest meunier had been rumored to have said when explaining his planning, as though kingpins needed a reason, as though the canned heat the cpd had seized had been even a fraction of all they moved through the city). somehow, it almost seemed a monument. no one would dare touch what was not theirs. and this, even in it's raid, belonged to the serpens.
of course, no one had touched it until now.
— dim lights illuminated the porthole windows of rows of washing machines and their vortex, voided whirlpools left unused: uninhabited, vacant. old vending machines lined one corner, hard, unforgiving chairs centrally sat. the blue-tinged light bulbs hummed a low buzz as deokhee placed her feet carefully: as of yet unseen, never quite heard.
the simple layout of the building made for easy scanning. the bottom floor was cleared, and then the stairwell to the second.
— the man on the second floor didn't stand a chance. facing away from her, novel and cigarette in hand. he made to half-turn when the floor sighed beneath movement. the sound he made in alarm was strangled by surprise and cut short by blood. simple. a job quickly done.
— deokhee was just about to leave when she noticed a tattoo on his neck that didn't match up to the picture she was given.
the muffled shuffle of movement from above.
of course her target wouldn't be reading wuthering fucking heights. someone else was here. and now they knew she was coming.
"shit."
— one man before she made it back to the stairwell, another on the steps. she danced away from their bullets. shot them square in the chest. too fast. one tried to grab her ankle before she made it to the landing. fine, then. one to disfigure the head.
— third floor. sewing machines for alterations. another man waiting just behind the door. one shot. hot blood. at the end, a half partition wall, an office. two strides and four bullets. another dead upon arrival.
panting, she stuck her hand in her back pocket and unfolded a photograph speckled with red.
which one of you is it?
— she searched the face of each man. if they were somehow still heaving, she crushed their windpipe.
— it was on the second floor that she sensed something, crouched over the man who'd been the first to charge (not paperback and cigarettes — some authorial escapist fantasy out of those dime novels she'd pick up on a bleeding-sun saturday, all jaded morals and wry grins — the more realistic triggerman, the one who's timing almost grazed her ribs).
— her gun was aimed at him before his shadow graced the doorway.
mingi.
and they both had their weapons drawn.
— the crickets outside had been stunned into silence. now, one ventured to sing.
— "handled someone crawling out a window." mingi was the first to put his firearm down. deokhee felt his eyes rake over her form like he always did — checking for nonexistent injuries, some reality in his dread. her gaze flicked back to the corpse before her, something dead but not yet cold. distant, unmarred. when he was seemingly satisfied, mingi's voice was still thick. "d'you have a list?"
stiff. still stone. "target's on the stairs." between two fingers, she held the photograph out anyway.
the mercenary took it, and deokhee stood so mingi could indulge in that habit where he rummaged the bodies, looted the dead.
— with the hem of her shirt, deokhee rubbed splattered blood off her cheeks. she stepped back, making herself a feigning comfortable on one of the too-cold chairs. "diane send you after me?"
a lighter. mingi scratched his neck, checked it's flame. "no... i uh... i asked hongjoong. a favor. he said he'd kill me if i got in your way but that's just joong and i..." a bitten-off sigh. "i needed to be with you."
— "i can handle myself, you know."
"i know." and the words were chased so swiftly after deokhee's own, it could have only been that he'd anticipated the words and half formed his reply before her own had ever graced her lips.
— deokhee turned her eyes down. bit her cheek.
"i'm not over it. and don't say 'i kn —"
"i know."
— her gaze shot to him, accusing, and mingi's features were already half twisted in grimace. he worked quickly in overcorrecting himself, like his was the body bleeding thin. "i mean i understand, i get it, i know" — and his own eyeline ventured the gulf to hers, and for a moment, they were caught in the rich hues of the other, the dampness of earth after the kiss of apology-drowned rain. "i didn't mean to. didn't know it was him. didn't see 'til he was aiming for oka and i didn't realize it was him until i'd pulled the trigger—"
and he was crouched before deokhee now, somehow unmoving then all at once appeared and able to cross her distance, below her and pleading, his hands halfway to resting on her thigh. "i'd change it, if i could. and not just wooyoung. i should've found you, after. should've told you. let you say whatever you wanted, then."
— ah. and there was the biting sting. not in the violence, but in the keeping of it. not in the blood that was their living but in the lies that had never been their art.
"i didn't give you much time." and that was the touch of forgiveness. barely-huffed, feather-light.
— "no," and mingi was half to relieved chuckling as he pulled off the rough of his glove, skin to soften, but still the calloused pad of his thumb as he wiped sweat and blood off her forehead. "but i love you; you and your speed."
and it rushed to meet him in a kiss that had them both gasping then grinning into it, her arms pulling him by his shirt, mingi pressing deeper in kind, his hands grounded in kneading her thighs.
— bliss.
— from upstairs, a telephone began to ring. in unison, they groaned.
"what are the chances serpens kept the telephone working and that's for us?" but deokhee was already moving to stand, her fingers lingering in the strands of mingi's short hair, giving them a tug.
sincerity, welling to bleed. "i'll meet you."
— deokhee took her time on the stairs, then ran her fingers along the telephone's spine before picking up the receiver, silent. "finally," and she could hear kim hongjoong rolling his eyes more clearly than the muffled tone of voice. "we need you at haemo plaza — wooyoung is at cadaver. mayari called, there's a bit of a shoot out. if you come across mingi, tell him his sister is there, too."
the line went dead. trust kim hongjoong to keep it brief when pulling your strings.
— mingi still hadn't come up yet (perhaps he'd found something better than a packet of cigarettes and the usual loose change) so deokhee went down to fetch him, chatter about what the serpens now wanted and their tastelessness in sharing it already ringing forth before her feet had touched the landing.
her lover was frozen in more than just contemplation as he hovered over the novel-hungry body. his rigid fingers were caught at the neckline of the dead man's shirt; neither seemed to breathe.
deokhee called his name softly in careful uncertain; she'd never seen him so still.
another try before mingi was moved to blinking.
— "i need to tell oka... he's honsool."
ᴍʏ ᴅᴇꜱᴛɪɴʏ'ꜱ ᴍᴀɴɪꜰᴇꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— it was sarang that held a two-fold tragedy in either hand, and it would be diane that swallowed it: that inescapable maw where her every love went to ferment until it was unrecognizable, and the mourning within was bicuspid, redoubled.
dead. and certainly it had been a long time on the hemorrhaging horizon, but there was finality in it, now, that had never quite existed before — a weight that was more than just a signet ring on her finger but somehow entirely seated there: right where she could not escape it. there, where it pulled her down like lead.
— no one had spoken. breath had been stolen with iku and a star god forgot to offer words, between. just a lack, and somehow, the dread presence of it. just a silence that made the cartilage of a larynx bruise until it ached.
sarang took her time in saying goodbye, and when diane pulled back from her fathers still-warm bedside, the elders in the room were already lined up. the first, an older woman with weathered cheeks and haunted eyes, took diane's hand in her own. her lips had moved in the shape and impression of dignified fealty, and then she knelt and kissed the ring on the demon's hand.
another, and the line became a procession. another, and their words started to take on the murmuring of sound.
kim hongjoong ghosted his lips over her signet and then stood. he waited for yunho to finish the same rite before they took their leave, off to complete the tasks she'd delegated when she'd been simply an heir rather than a demon crowned.
— one last presence pulled her thoughts away from streets set to burning, to lives consigned to slaughter — past the draperies of the room, beyond the shroud of this dead. he took her hand with the same humble gentility as others, and when he bowed, it was the majesty of the earth bending in steadfast obeisance to the glory of an unblinking star. the words were no practiced formality when formed with his tongue and spoken with his timbre, and before his lips graced the deceptions of her profession and the softness of her skin, his hand held hers and squeezed.
let me hold you, it seemed to say. for a moment, let it be just this.
— and san's soft kiss was pressed to sarang's still-raw grief.
— yunho returned, and the living that had stayed bottlenecked in the dying room hollowed itself into the air of the foyer.
cousin walked beside cousin, and before either spoke, both knew the performance of these next words.
"soyeon?" and diane was always the picture of grace in lying display. inquisitive but cold. distant, but still something to reach.
"not here, domina."
and she hummed. let the words flow not just through her but burrow into the skulls of the small mob surrounding her, all ravenous, all listening in piquant dread. "a fickle right hand." and the slipping was all soyeon's own, but it plunged in other people's iris. it rooted suspicion where there had once been only the stasis of doubt. "hongjoong?"
he was quick in his report, staccato. always prepared. "i've spread the news. already, the streets are whispering."
already, cobras and rattlesnakes were writhing within all her father's death and all her new-borne truth.
they'd slither their way to the harbor, and when they came to see it true, they'd kiss her ring. make this power something veritable and concrete, tangible, true.
when diane spoke, she was no stranger to the art of command. "then the doors are open as of now. we'll arrange the date of the funeral for two weeks. showing up only then tells me you'd rather be short your knucklebones. or better yet — a head. tell them that, too."
— hongjoong had left, again, as the tragoidia required, and diane began the numbing motions of testing her power, her sharpened eyes watching the elders assembled before her: analyzing microexpression and behavior for the hints of ally, rooting out defectors too-close at hand.
— of one, she was already certain. if not for the lies he was so fond to utter, then the ties to her good nature that he was all too amiable to pick through and overconfident, sunder. leaking insight into the coffers of soyeon, spreading uncertainty where there had never been wary, biting his tongue in meetings but never fast enough to curb his morbidity. always, the bile slipping out.
so now, he would retch on it. nauseate. spew.
— and when she accused him of his insidious ruin, spinning in the middle of the room, the floor a hand-painted dais, he stilled. no one had ever trembled quite so like a rabbit caught in a snare.
— so give him something to run from. turn his hourglass. remind him of the nearness of death.
"i'll spare the life of your son if you confirm for us every detail of your plans."
"h-he's an innocent! just a boy!"
"not your youngest—" (after all, they had decorum to keep, to them, there was still honor in gore) "—i speak of jongho. or did you forget? he's serpens. you sold him. he lost his innocence the moment he entered my den."
— at least this father had no moment of calculation. the tears overspilled before his lips could form the shape of despair.
— he gasped and cried enough to implicate a half-dozen, intolerable whines including seonghwa. diane was on her spindly, spiraled way to officially naming the old comrade a traitor drowned, when the door opened and yunho appeared, the picture of urgency contained, smothered immediate, his spectre bottled erratic.
knowledge of her own plans. the elders whispered. who would have the motivation to rise against the serpens? and why now? "explosions of warehouses haemopu side. mostly our liquor stores and powders. cpd is responding."
the man on his knees shuddered in terror, forehead to the ground in clemency and supplication.
— diane walked to him. with the tip of her shoe she dug under the man's chin to lift it, back still bowed. "speak."
and his bewilder was truth, but he breathed the name of dozen insignificants more, as though this paltry might satisfy a gluton. as if this mysterious "we" was headed by a mythic, as though there was no leader to speak of but the divine. another of the elders was mentioned. now seized. the rat beneath diane still squirmed, and when she was tired of wringing sobs from a canary who, in front of this gathering crowd, refused to precisely sing, she had san hold him tight, shake him to still.
she may not have the patience or skill of a torturist, but this man already proved himself brittle-boned. weak.
— he wept and writhed as diane pulled off one of her heels.
— "it's soyeon!" and he screamed a traitor's name like would-be mercy as the sharp black of her heel tore through the suspensory ligaments of his eye.
— gasps. horror. and here, the audience to a right-hand's tragic and self-inflicted demise.
diane leaned in close, her lips at the shell of an unworthy's trembling ear. "i hope your youngest is as good as you at bending the knee."
a shot through the head and he crumpled like paper in a too-tight fist.
— the spectators to her primordial scene were still whispering, appraising this demon's justice and ire, and then entered hongjoong, and in his grin at the gore and chaos, a secret. a promise. a location.
so kyung-ah had held her end of the bargain in following.
there had been little doubt in it (there was never one so dependable as a party hopeful and willing; the promise of fraternity could often be more devout than the loyalty of fear), diane always knew the girl would comply. but there would always be something invigorating in a con gone right, something vital in the face of aired betrayal and decisive death.
something to appease diane and her maw that needed it's swallowing.
— when he reported the details of a conversation told, the master of puppets reanimated kyung-ah's memory, made it dance arrhythmic with his jerking strings.
soyeon first went to see seonghwa. deokhee's timing was good, and at at the time she reached him he was still bleeding and whispering, almost dead. another accomplice had been with him — serpens. and diane digested the name.
she's at limerence, now. room seventeen.
— the aparthotel held no doors unopened to her when diane meunier, leader of the serpens and demon of hoku, graced the threshold of a final, desperate scene.
— san had disappeared again, and this time, it was through the demand of clenched and grieving teeth.
— the laquered iron-wrought xvii stared at her unblinking, and for a moment, she was just a child.
("kawi, bawi, bo!" the car was stopped outside of the dojang. the late afternoon sun had turned their hands warm and blooming, sweat clung to the folds of their skin like something sweetened sticky, and soyeon had lost again.
("sarang, you can't do umul!" and she groaned, defeated as sarang imitated the dark haired girl's bo falling through the well of her fingers: abysmal descent. down, down, down. "traitor. you never said you were playing with an umul."
("of course i didn't. then you would have expected it." and sarang stuck out her tongue, to which soyeon shot daggers, tensing for just a moment before pouncing to tickle the blonde haired girl to stitches; preparation before the strike, something meunier had long grown accustomed to noticing. anticipation before knives, edge before uninhibited truth. their laughter exploded like the raucous of a rising sun or the blazing of a setting day, and when it died down they settled into the comfortable reverence of a solar eclipse. night stared at day, in all of her vibrant radiance, too-saturated wealth and prosper, and luminance regarded shade and all it's soothing confidence of concealment, clandestine rare. in the cosmos, beyond, raketu was writing messages of devotion to a beauty named haemosu.
("next time, i'm going to use umul and it will be your turn to lose.")
— in hoku city, gods walked as freely as men, speech was uttered the same tone as prayer, and to the people who paved the blood-drowned streets and tiled it's underground belly, mythology was history and time walked in a round. after every night, haemosu took his thousand knives and carved his way, in guilt, to bleeding day.
the door opened before sarang could step fully to it.
a man with dragon eyes had his hand on the knob. her presence stilled him momentarily like a brandished blade.
he closed the door. his hand dropped, and then his gaze.
ignoring the gun trained between his eyes, the unknown criminal bent his already hood-obscured head. silently, he begged permission of the other and, deferent, kissed every knuckle but the one that bore the burden of a blood-drowned serpent, a crowned ring.
not serpens. perhaps not of even hoku.
— not a faithful of soyeon, either. not if he saw the woman at the end of the trigger and silent, made no alarm.
— mystery drowned. a sigh. footsteps. a beat within a baited juncture.
— the interlapse of a moment lacking sound.
— then sarang pushed open the door, stepped through it, and aimed a fatal threat to soyeon's head.
(they'd done this once, too; before soyeon had requested her own training sessions with a different sparring partner, when the basics choi jeongcheol had taught them had been the simplicity of disarming an opponent with a gun.)
— jealousy was the wrath of ᴠᴏʀᴇᴜɴ, a roiling but life giving lava diety, and once, two girls had puzzled at her molten, dripping figure. as though her anger was something they could never comprehend.
— soyeon sat at the right-hand edge of a moth eaten bed, her laughter caustic with the unnerving full-boil of disbelief, and sarang watched this once friend, searching for the tense before her blow.
"shoot me," and as if speaking was the spell needed to break her hysteria, soyeon's hyperventilating began to calm. "do it. end it here. your still-green officer can scrape bits of me off the wall."
— diane took calculated steps forward. in soyeon, she could see no change. "your father's warehouses are burning." an expert's blow. another step. further into the tiger cave. "your allies rot in non-graves. you have nothing, anymore. i was expecting you; i was waiting for clever schemes of your ambition. my father always said he gave those to you."
— "kill me!"
don't speak of him.
— "it's your birthright. your claim." soyeon's acerbic grin, yet still no tension, just resignation feigning for ease. somehow, this soyeon didn't care if the knife twisted and distorted inside her, already it was embedded too-deep. "kill me, sarang, do it."
("sarang~~," a girl with a sharp cut bob the color of pitch poked at her companion's cheek until she'd distracted her enough from the shelter puppies to coax her eye. then, a grin. "you love them, and samchon would buy anything for you. just ask him." and there was hesitation in the girl with bouncing curls, so the older poked her again. "c'mon, sarang, do it.")
— sarang.
— the gun wavered. soyeon tensed. diane was tackled to the floor in the frenzied delirium of a thousand arms lacking their thousand knives: rolling, scratching, biting. all grasping for the gun that would be their final roulette.
— soyeon overpowered her. pinned. diane tore the rubbery cartilage of soyeon's ear. skin. shoulders bruising; bodies squirming; acid spitting; strident yells. hands that gained purchase, then night aimed a gun under the chin of heaving daylight and in the well of her bottomless eyes shined the incomprehensible: rising tears. her voice was hoarse whisper, the shivering of violent rage. "you can't understand how long i've wished you dead."
click.
— the hollow of an empty chamber. in their fervor, loose bullets had fallen from a demon's coat pocket, scattered in their hair.
("remember this," and sabeom choi had been pacing, again, as was his way. "you are a student in this dojang. with each other, you are safe. here, our bullets are wisdom. and you, jeja diane, have all of them in here." and he'd touched her head.)
— soyeon screamed with the brokenness of empty desolation, unfailing embittered loss. she brought the blunt end of an empty casket down on diane's forehead.
pain. someone, somewhere, wept.
— in this myth, there was no delirium in heaving.
— and day plunged a knife in the left-most side of her still-mourned midnight.
wailing. one knife. a single hand.
there was poison that all dripped to pool in sarang's bottomless ocean of a mouth before blood began to bloom; but then the ruby ichor swelled, the first sign of dawn.
ᴍʏ ᴅᴇꜱᴛɪɴʏ'ꜱ ᴍᴀɴɪꜰᴇꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.
— the funeral of a godhead. an ascension for the next kingpin. a eulogy to their vast legacy.
somehow still clandestine, a secret somehow wrapped in oblivion as well as grief, hoku city bore the veil of reverent mourning well: in stillness, in jangma, in the abinsthe-drip of dread.
hoku cpd had been too busy red-tape scrubbing the aftermath of multiple warehouse explosions — the actions of a boy named choi jongho and myriad accomplices, most of whom had died in a shootout at haemo plaza, the violence of unpeaceful protest. they had set flame to the stored goods of a malpracticing garment factory, and the bold of the crooked opposing had opened fire on a union no longer waiting to be heard.
(the pieces fell too cleanly into place, and it had the serpentine tracks of the syndicate all over it, but among the cadavers were people from a handful of neighboring cities, and so officer hands were too busy for their minds to sit idly and truly consider.)
— ernest meunier wasn't a simple man, and his legacy could be no transparent burial; his ceremony wasn't a typical bereavement, but it had standing arrangements of flowers in all the suitable styles, and fabrics dyed in the colors of serpens mourning.
(for him, there would be no walk from the eye of hoku to the shallows of the tugging sea, but on the last day of the fiscal year, serpent members everywhere would chase the sunset to the mouth of bada. they'd spread black petals in her gaping maw, and in that would be a symbol of the traditional aspect of it. eopsin was their god of profit, and no one was more profitable than the serpens. pray to one, perform the funeral rites of another. in this way, cpd would never know when to target an attack in a would-be upheaval of their oldest king. in this way, his ashes might still find their way to resting.)
— the serpens complex was made corporeal for the funeral. serpents and visiting reverentials came to kiss the signet ring of the new demon of hoku. no one kissed every knuckle but that which bore the dread ring. diane waited, but he never came.
the spine breakers from skit, honsool from akua, the black pirates from somewhere further north than that, archer eyes alongside, luck & trouble, after...
yunho whispered in her ear the story of every face that ventured the chasm of sin to venerate the ascension of demons. how he could recall all these blank faces, featureless bodies, was an art all his own. hongjoong took his place when more distant gangs and unfamiliar criminals stopped by.
(though perhaps it hadn't been the failing of her cousin's knowledge and moreso the presence of mayari that pulled him gently away. she'd find him later sprawled over a demonlitionists cluttered work counter, long limbs reaching for the woman who, still diligent, pressed delight and affection against his starched shirt cuffed edges as she passed him mediocre instant coffee. nothing was sweeter and more invigorating than her clandestine laughter at all his clumsy charm.)
— song mingi (untouched from the gunfire that had greeted him when he'd finally reached cadaver, his bullets a ceaseless barrage, bounty worthy of nesoi) came hours after his older sister had. careful in his respect, as though this act were fragile, he surprised most of the demon council when, rather than simply show obeisance and esteem with the deepest of bows (like most mercenaries, like his sister had, with other mourners beside) he comported himself like a hatchling member of the serpens.
— so the gunman had accepted her invitation — took his opportunity to come into the fold. one sibling and not the other.
how strange, to see the dawning of a severed pair. how compelling yet arduous, to take one limb and knowingly snap it in two.
— mourning was the dressing of so many ants in hoku. they crawled through the underground tunnels, they zigzagged to the pale light of day, they overfilled nips and bars and, still hungry, turned them out, again; clambering over suffocating lives — people that hadn't the will to slaughter a childhood dream and eat their own ambitions though. ants in the palm of hoku. pest and vermin mired in samgong's tapestry and a kingpin's stew.
— in the end, san sat on the floor of his apartment, towel slung over his shoulders, wet hair dripping cool bathwater at unanticipated intervals, excess hitting wooyoung's forehead, making it crease in surprised annoyance, some half-hearted accusation crossing his lips when the droplets numbered over three. he could move if he wanted to, but there was a lazy kind of acceptance that his head belonged in san's lap as the mountain conspired to help him win in his twin game of crib.
deokhee had the advice of hermes, who laid his long greyhound body behind her, like a cushion softening a losing blow (or so wooyoung told her. the fact, though, was she'd always manage winning.).
— across the city, on a deserted track meant for racing, kyung-ah kicked her motorcycle to standing right alongside jungkook. he congratulated her for her new loyalties — the serpens was a syndicate that sparkled with the refined imposition of opulence — it suited her expensive tastes. she bit her lip, laughing, and promises of crossing the border to skit were whispered into skin between the meeting of their lips.
— on the pearlescent and glistening side of hoku, the refined and unadulterated, the lustrous and vibrant, still, there could be no thoughts of criminality, no mourning for the shades of hoku. haemosu was faint in the way he often could be after reckoning, but the privileged drank in their dappled view.
— for once, officer bang relaxed in the freedom of having nothing to do. his sergeant had sent him home to recover from one too many hours walking the beat, and now he sat on his parent's front lawn, the spaniel, berry, in his lap, a guitar at his side and a notebook in his hands. it would be hannah's birthday, soon.
— he was halfway to penning a cliche of words for his gift of a song (hannah was studying music, and somehow she'd always credited him as an inspiration for it. him. when he hadn't written a song since he was thirteen and she was scared of the dark so he'd made up something to half hum. siblings. it didn't make sense how you managed to touch them. with the barest of brushes, set them on an uncharted course, forever changed.) when the post stopped by.
— "chan! or should i say officer?" and he laughed good-natured, calming berry with scratches behind the ears. "glad to have found you — this one's addressed here, but to you." and they handed over a thick pocket file, only barely closed and bulging. "serendipitous you'd be here."
"i guess that's fate." but something in the heft of the package was pulling the mirth out of his voice, the smile from his eyes. he checked for a return address. lacking one.
the mail carrier said something warm in leaving, and habit murmured something noncommittally kind, and after two minutes of hollow staring at the gentle cursive of his name in an unfamiliar hand, chan fished for his pen to break the seal. open it.
— a letter greeted him, margins tight and writing thin, though there was more than enough page for the four lines of pithy writing. a better man would have read it before pulling out the rest, a file folder with a blacked out family name but the given of diane.
— but chan was always impatient in his pursuit of knowledge, and impulse his smouldering brand.
— he pulled the file to consider in better view.
and pinned to the cover of it, a black and white photo. a woman whose smile lacked warmth, the visage of one who'd once smiled with the innocence of a lamb, but in that same breath, given him a false name.
⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖
pt. v | | series masterlist
ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) :
1 - ernest meunier is dead. already, people begin to pledge their loyalty to the new demon of hoku: diane. soyeon has disappeared from the main serpens complex, going to gain space from the insult of ernest overlooking her on his deathbed, but when she leaves, she sees that hoku city is burning.
2 - after laying their explosive but before they detonate, mayari, wooyoung, and okalani go to a bar to lay low. the warehouses burn, and a group of people at the same bar who are loyal to soyeon recognize mayari's work and shoot. they're quickly outnumbered, and they call for back-up, to which they are sent mingi and deokhee, the latter of whom had been picking off high level soyeon supporters.
3 - during one of their gunfights, mingi notices that one of the men working with soyeon is honsool.
4 - hoku cpd is responding the the warehouse fires. they notice gun violence at haemo plaza, and officer bang is demoralized when they choose to move on.
5 - kyung-ah, who had tailed soyeon after she left the complex, followed soyeon to limerence. diane follows, and in their final confrontation, she stabs soyeon deeply in the side.
6 - they hold a funeral for ernest. mingi has chosen to join the serpens while okalani has not. across hoku, officer bang gets something in the mail. a letter and a file of heretofore unexplored information about a woman named diane. and attached is the face of a woman he knows.
