The bunker is quiet. But then, as of late, the bunker is nothing but quiet. It’s disconcerting, unnerving, perhaps even a little terrifying. Minwoo has never been a fan of the quiet. It upsets him, gets to him in a way little else does, which is why he’s so intently focused on his darts and the board tacked to the wall on the opposite side of the bunker. His shoulder still hurts sometimes, giving him trouble, so what better way to kill time and silence both than with the focus and intent that comes with practicing? One day, one day soon, Minwoo will be able to do this with his eyes closed and nail the bull’s eyes every time. For now, he must settle with concentration and delicately careful aim.
came and went, and despite the fact that Minwoo should have been exhausted enough to sleep for days, he just....couldn't. The knowledge that he was finally home again weighed heavily on frail shoulders, and the guilt of his departure made it impossible to rest. So as noon rolled around, Minwoo slipped from bed and staggered to the door. The rest of the bunker was brighter than he remembered, and he cringed away from the pain of the light before scrunching his eyes shut and navigating the path to Jeongmin's room by memory alone. All too soon, he was there, and before guilt could send him back to his sanctuary, Minwoo tapped at the door.
When he woke again, it was dark, and for an instant Minwoo was terrified. Had his release all been a dream? Was he still trapped in that god-forsaken cage in Neverland? Would he ever get to see his family again? But as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, Minwoo found himself staring at the entrance to the bunker. Home was there, right there, just within reach! And it may as well have been on the moon for all the good it did him. His hands were still bound, and there was no way for him to go inside. Someone would come or go eventually, sure, no doubt seeing him, but his hands hurt, and his wrists ached, and the pain of consciousness was enough to have tears stinging his eyes. So he tried, voice cracking as he cried a waving, “Hyungs--”
Somewhere between the here of the cage and the there of wherever Pan is taking him, Minwoo slips into unconsciousness. But then, perhaps that’s a blessing. He doesn’t feel the way Pan slings him around, even more careless now that his young charge is no longer awake and coherent. Nor does he feel the way the rope bites into the chafed skin of his wrists, or the way something in his shoulder pops out of place.
Minwoo is lucky. The pain doesn’t rouse him. Even as he’s jostled into a car and taken back to where he’d walked into Pan’s clutches, he sleeps.
As he’s dumped -- still tied, still blinded -- Minwoo wakes briefly, but there’s nowhere to go, no escape to be had. He’s free, but he he’s still bound, and until he hears the telltale crunch of dirt under tires, he doesn’t move. As soon as the car is gone, Minwoo forces himself into an upright position and fights to pull the blindfold from his eyes.
It gives just enough that he can see, from one eye, just enough of the path to get moving. So he does. It’s dusk, thankfully, and even then it’s too much all at once, the glow of sunset and the rising moon nearly too much for his overly sensitive eyes. On top of that, Minwoo can only take two or three staggering steps at a time before he has to stop and lean against whatever’s close for support, but at least he’s moving. At least he’s headed home.
After dark, the city comes alive, and when Minwoo doesn’t have a job to do, he enjoys wandering. He’s lived in Seoul his whole life, in various places for various times, but there’s always something more to see, or something that wasn’t here before. So he wanders, and he likes it, gleaning a certain amount of satisfaction out of the way he can get lost but never fail to find his way home again.
But tonight is not a night purely for wandering. He’s just finished a case, a rather successful one at that, and Minwoo is looking celebrate. He just needs to find a place. He knows there’s one nearby, knows it’s a bar, and a club, and something more all smashed into one building, but he’s never actually been inside, nor has he ever had a reason...until tonight.
It doesn’t take long. Minwoo’s mental map of the city is a good one, and it only takes perhaps twenty minutes for him to sight the building. He doesn’t hestate at the door, and heads for the bar without pause. Rather than be unnerved by the stares he receives from patrons and employees alike, Minwoo makes his way over to an empty barstool and slips up onto it. While he waits, his focus drifts to the wall behind the bar, and to a row of bottles there. He’s halfway through the tequilas when a body drifts into view, forcing Minwoo to straighten up, even if only marginally.
“I’d like a jägerbomb,” Minwoo says with a lazy smile, his eyes never leaving the row of liquor bottles that he’s reading. He knows the bartender is there listening -- and probably annoyed - but he fail to find a reason to care. “With beer, and not redbull, please. I intend to walk home and not get run down by a car because I think I can cross the street faster than they can.”
“Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.”
“Tootles, how would you like to learn something I haven’t taught to any of the other lost boys?”
“...sir?”
“Would you be interested in a new set of lessons?”
Silence.
Then: “I’d like that. What are you going to be teaching me?”
“I’m going to teach you the skill of self-reliance. Would you like that Tootles?”
“Yes! I would, yes!”
Laughter, deep and quiet. “Okay, okay. We’ll get started tomorrow at noon. Bring your knife with you. But only your knife. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir. Noon tomorrow!”
When Peter Pan had approached Minwoo about a new set of lessons, the boy had been ecstatic. Really. He liked to learn -- loved to learn -- and he loved to learn things that none of the others were being taught, because it meant he had something he could teach them later, or something that he could keep as just his, something that he and Peter shared.
But he hadn’t expected the lesson to leave him stranded in the middle of the woods far back behind Neverland with nothing more than a knife, the clothing on his back, and the murmured reassurance that, “I’ll be back in three days time to fetch you. Until then, survive.”
It’s edging toward the hottest part of the day, and Minwoo has lost track of how long he’s been wandering the woods. He knows he needs to find water, and some sort of shelter for the night. Food, too. But all he has is a knife, and every tree looks the same, every direction looks the same, every single thing in the godforsaken forest sounds the same--
Minwoo’s never been outside of Seoul before. Aside from living in Neverland with Pan, and the twins, and the elder trio, a time which consisted entirely of him remaining indoors. He survived a year on the streets, sure, even thrived to some degree, but the woods changes the game, and it’s not a game he’s entirely pleased with. Already, Minwoo has a list of things he plans to look up as soon as he’s returned to the sanctuary of his library.
But first, he needs water.
An hour later, as the sun is beginning to set, Minwoo catches a break. He stumbles, quite literally, into a small spring that burbles up out of the ground and snakes its way down to a rocky pool. From where Minwoo stands, he can see small, silvery shapes in the water. And then, at the closest edge of the pool....a rabbit. It’s heard him, scents him, and it’s looking his way, stock still and almost invisible with its dark fur. But Minwoo knows patience, knows it like his own name, and he freezes until the rabbit turns and continues to drink. With that patience on one side and silence on the other, Minwoo creeps forward. And when he’s close enough, he lunges.
With the rabbit actually in hand, it’s smaller than it had first looked, even as it struggles and makes pitiful noises of terror. It’s still just a child, Minwoo finds himself thinking, eyes wide and hands shaking where he pins the rabbit’s legs to the ground. It’s a child, just like he is, and it’s not fair that he should have to kill a child to eat and live.
But he’s hungry. He’s so hungry. Regardless of the fact that Minwoo has no fire to cook the meat, regardless that he had no idea how to skin the rabbit, he’s so hungry, and with all the time he spent on the streets scrimping and saving his food to make it last, he knows he could make this one measley rabbit last until Peter comes for him...
Minwoo looks at the rabbit, and the rabbit looks back, ears hung low and eyes dark. He raises the knife, turns his head away--
--and he can’t do it. He can’t kill. Not something that’s never done him any wrong. Not when it’s just a child, not when it’s just like him.
The rabbit goes free, bolting for the underbrush as soon as Minwoo uncurls his fingers and scoots away.
Minwoo goes hungry that night.
His morals and values tell him he’s done well, but his stomach protests until the stars begin to bleed the colors of pre-dawn.
Mid-morning, already running out of steam, Minwoo finds berries, and he feasts, and ten minutes later finds himself getting sick into a nearby shrub. He thinks it’s the berries, thinks maybe they were unripe, and made him sick -- but he doesn’t know. The outside world is not friendly, and he just doesn’t know.
He stays by the tiny pool for the rest of the day, curled up on his side as he watches the silvery shapes beneath the water. He dozes now and again, sleeping fitfully, stomach cramping with hunger, chest tight with the pain of failure.
Tomorrow, he vows, as bitter tears sting his eyes. Tomorrow, I will survive.
Tomorrow comes in a torrent of rain that chills him to the bone.
Minwoo wakes, and he’s so cold, so fucking cold, that at first he thinks he’s rolled into the little pool he’d been curled up beside. But then the sky brightens, and thunder crackles overhead, and terror pulses through Minwoo’s entire being as he jolts upright and scrambles instinctively for cover. Water from the pool swells around his ankles, overflow from the torrential downpour that weighs his shoes down as he reaches for the distant shelter of a tree with low-lying branches.
By the time Minwoo hauls himself into the branches, his shoes are waterlogged, and they drip as much water as the surrounding leaves. The rain has seeped into skin and has chilled to the bone, and even though his stomach grumbles quietly in hunger, Minwoo doesn’t make a move to leave his semi-dry sanctuary. Food isn’t worth braving the cold. Instead, Minwoo watches the rain fall, watches the pool flood, watches the earth below turn into a soupy, leafy marsh. Eventually, despite lightning striking close enough to make his eyes sting with the added light, and despite the thunder roaring like a cruel beast overhead, Minwoo sleeps.
When Peter Pan finds him the next day at noon -- and it’s Peter that finds him, and not the other way around -- Minwoo is half-drowned, still soaked to the skin, and clinging to the branch he’s tucked himself up into. He’s starving, and he’s cold, and he’s miserable, and he’s never felt so worthless. Minwoo’s stomach hurts so much that he can’t even look at the piece of meat and bread Peter offers him, and he’s so cold from the downpour that he can’t stop shaking, and walking becomes more than a just a slight problem.
Peter wraps Minwoo up in his jacket and carries him back to the bunker, whispering reassurances the entire walk back. They’re reassurances Minwoo doesn’t hear. He falls asleep soon after, and he doesn’t wake for another two days.
Peter tells him to tell the other boys he’d been learning how to camp with one of Pan’s men, assuming they asked at all. Minwoo agrees, but he doesn’t see the other lost boy for another three of four days, and by that point, he’s thought of a better tale.
When the twins find him in the library a week after he’d first left for the lesson, Minwoo smiles at them over his book on wilderness survival, and he says he’d been in the library. Reading.
It’s not all that odd, and they believe him without further question.
Minwoo just smiles, and he allows them to believe.
Two weeks later, Minwoo asks to try the lesson again.
He returns three days later with a rabbit foot on a necklace made of strips of tree bark, and a rabbit hide that Peter promises to teach him how to cure. The foot and hide both find themselves on the wall of his bedroom -- the trophies of his survival.
The note is left on the main table situated in the middle of the bunker, propped up on a book. It's impossible to miss, and that's why it's been left there of all places.
Hyungs,
Kwangmin needs to get out for a while, and I don't want him going alone, so we're going on a set of supply runs. We shouldn't be gone more than two weeks. I'll take care of him and keep him out of trouble.
When Minwoo doesn’t see Kwangmin for a couple days, he knows something is wrong. He’s used to lurking, to being the shadow in the bunker that no one else sees. So not seeing Kwangmin? That’s not good. It’s worrying, something that sits deep in his gut and niggles at him with quiet demands for attention.
So he goes looking. It’s not hard. Minwoo knows his twins, and he knows Kwangmin is probably squirrelled away in his and Youngmin’s bedroom. And that’s where he is, of course, perched at his desk, looking somewhere between disheveled and distraught.
“Hyung.” Minwoo steps in and closes the door bfore leang against it, cutting off any chance of escape or evasion. “What’s wrong? And don’t say nothing.”
