with @seramiamor
Her name was the last he'd expected to cross his screen at this time of day, especially under the particular circumstances of their crumbling attachment to one another. In the midst of helping his parents pack up their belongings for a capacious, soon to come move, Taeil listens to the urgent buzz of his phone a few more times, measuring his options, turning over stones of the past in his head while removing his gloves in contemplation. What could she be calling about? Or why would she call instead of text? It's not like he wouldn't have responded later. But he wouldn't come to know the answer to these if he doesn't pick up.
Clearing his throat, Taeil snatches up his phone from the edge of the dinner table and swipes the call into acceptance. For the first few beats, though, he remains silent as she offers him little turn to speak. “Taeil, is this you? I got your number right?”
She sounded jostled, her tone edgier than usual. A pang of fear for whatever news she were to bring rattles through his liver, rabbiting all the way up to his throat. “I’m in trouble Taeil, can you come pick me up?”
"Sera? What are you talking about? What sort of trouble—"
Entirely flummoxed by this sudden call for help, Taeil grips his phone tight and, ignoring his mother's worried stare from where she’s stands across their scant living room, brings himself into a secluded space where he can hear better through the phone. "What's going on? Talk to me. Tell me what to do."
“I can’t tell you much on the phone but I need you.. ” She pauses here, for mere seconds, as though someone on the other end is mouthing something to her, or coercing her into saying what they need her to. Taeil has no inkling of what to make of such a deafening silence, or of the haste in her tone. All he knows is that it’s one of the most ominous and throttled ones he’s ever heard, and that it sinks within him in the most violent manner possible.
Sera continue to talk all the while, ignorant of the flames she kindles in her former friend. “I need you to bail me out of jail… in Japan. I did an oopsie and I didn’t know who else to call.. I came here for the weekend to pick up some things and.. here I am, asking you to help me.”
Her voice lowers at the end of her words, growing quiet. Hesitant. But her time was limited. “I am in Tokyo, if you decide to come. Or someone comes.” And then her voice sluices entirely away from the speaker, the receiver. Leaving Taeil flushing colourful in unending pinpricks of sheer confusion, shame and pure, bottomless anger.
"What? You've been fucking detained?”
A bordering outlandish series of unexpected escalations could come from just a few seconds of a meager phone call, and Taeil, inevitably caught within the whirlwind of it all finds himself holding his spinning head through this reality, lest it were to slip off his shoulders.
This abrupt turn of events between them brings him this way and that in the now-barren room, heavy footfalls loud over the phone as he paces from wall to wall, “How the fuck did you manage to get arrested?!" Lowering the boom of his voice doesn't take away anything from the way he murmurs his words, with harsh delivery. He spits all over the floor with the effort of controlling his emotions, to no avail. "Listen, I'm not sending anyone. I'm coming myself. Just... What the fuck, Sera—"
Taeil is no novice to the grip of authority; the manhandling and the rude bastards that sometimes thought themselves more high and mighty than the rest, for carrying their useless badges. He knew well how this worked and in light of that perspective, he could understand why she were calling him in particular.
But to imagine her in that situation? He could feel his anger surging, cutting through every rational thought and action with a visceral sort of tenacity. Like being gutted from the inside out. The line cuts off in his ear before she can say much else, and as if on cue, Taeil starts to move.
As he moves through the boxes still laid around in their massive penthouse, Taeil finds those of his own to pack while simultaneously explaining to his alerted mother the stakes of this emergency. By the aggression he addresses her with, she quickly accepts that there's nothing she can do to deter her son from his abrupt leave of absence, so in the end, she lets him go. Tokyo is a two hour plane ride away and considering how late it was starting to get, Taeil gave her no room to argue. Thankfully, he makes it to Incheon on time and by what he could only consider as luck, manages to purchase a last minute flight ticket to Tokyo.
Two hours suspended in mid-air proved little help at quelling his richocetting nerves, however, the anger in particular only simmering into a dull, buzzing sensation at the back of Taeil's head.
He flexed and relaxed his fists, tried closing his eyes a few times and practice deep breaths to stimulate his nervous system into tranquility, but was only met with images of Sera's face swimming under his eyelids. Knowing that if he'd allowed those to linger, he would've thought of her in worse conditions than normal and by extent driven himself into a hard wall, he kept them peeled open instead. Even on the train to the station, he held the nightmares back, given where she were and what he'd imagined she were arrested for. There was no use to it after all, since he hadn't even seen her yet. Only by the the strain in her voice could he tell that she meant what was said—that things weren't in the best conditions for her. And whether or not her life was in danger, she trusted him enough still, to reach out.
Crushing the coke can he'd bought on his way into the train, Taeil discards it nearby on his way out. At his destination and this awkward hour between light and dark, people going home and other going to work, Tokyo looks as bleak as ever. A trick of the light and his emotions it were, he were sure of it, but still, it made him a slight bit uneasy.
The coming daft of night tickles the tips of his ears with strands of locks that fall loose from his messy bun as he labours through the crowd of smiles and joy, sometimes coming by loud high schoolers or the kind-hearted elderly. He smells dried up rain in between their bodies as he occasionally steps in puddles that'd been made maybe four hours prior. No one looks at him, or hardly do they ever spare him a glance that carry more than innocent curiosity despite his disheveled appearance.
Glad for that chance to blend in, Taeil finally finds the station with diligent determination. He checks his watch- it’s sometime past ten in the evening. After collecting a deep, gut-expanding breath and squaring broad shoulders, he bulldozes through the door. Bail here should work more or less the same as it does at home, he thinks, while explaining himself in sufficient Japanese.
"My name is Yu Taeil, from Seoul. I'm here to pay for my friend, Moon Sera's bail to take her home. You arrested her recently, yes?"
Then come the technicals, a filled forum that Taeil deemed too long for his short fused patience. He reads until his eyes start to tire, and for a moment, he makes the mistake of discarding the officers currently on duty this late out of his sight. Unbeknownst of their intent; how his need for concentration on the kanji in contrast with the priceless value of his wallet would later pay a rather horrible price.
At length when he's done, he asks to go check on Sera while the officer out front reviews the filled information, sorting through his identification. Before they comply, though, they share a suspicious glance which Taeil, jarred by so much Japanese all at once, doesn't bother questioning. A work thing, he thinks of it.
Shortly enough, though, he'd regret that because once they're down the dark corridor that leads to the cells, the officer at his back starts to bark some nonsense. "Hey. You’re Taeil? We’ve have your name on record for a while. It’s for battery, you know. Are you really that guy? How'd you get away?"
He speaks over Taeil's shoulder, tone suddenly slipping towards indignance. He's smaller, slightly shorter, Taeil recalls. But he has a weapon—he's a cop. Maybe not the best or the highest in rank, even among his junior peers but Taeil isn’t in the mood. So he fails to entertain, "You've got the wrong guy, friend. I'm just here to post this girl's bail—"
The cop says only, "Not anymore." And before Taeil could react in time, cuffs one of his wrists, then the other behind his back. He's surprisingly swift and strong for a lanky guy, knowing well when to strike an opponent too large for him to rival, as he then manages to corner a shocked Taeil up against the nearby wall.
"What the fuck, man—" Taeil chokes on his words as his oxygen reserve runs out from the bottom of his ribs and up, tongue twisting violently around his mother tongue now. For a quick second, he's helpless. "Sera? Sera! Are you here!?"
But speaking her name somehow, some way, brings him back to himself. A reminder that he’s her only way out of this wreckage. Putting his sheer size and strength to use against his perpetrator, Taeil starts to struggle as the other junior officer now enters the scene. They begin to yell at each other amidst the chaos–keys fall in a wild scatter across the floor and someone goes scrambling for them from one of the nearby cells. Still, Taeil protests, roughhousing them both despite being struck and slapped repeatedly, until he manages to knock back the hands that were holding him captive. "I don't know what the fuck you assholes think I did, but it wasn't me! Fucking let me go, NOW! I'm going to sue you sons of bitches to hell if you don't!"
In the end, though, like cornering a rabid wolf, they manage to get him in the same cell as Sera is. Battered in cuts and bruises, they walk away, leaving Taeil crawling for freedom and blood in his own palms. Locked behind a cell, once more.
Sera harrows him the second the door is slammed shut on the both of them. A bird and a wolf, trapped in a cage. She heaps a pile of concern by his feet. “What are you doing here–Why are you handcuffed? What?” She questions, looking genuinely dumbfounded at first by what became of whatever that was, which seemed like Taeil were winning. Then she frowns, and he can hear it in her voice. “You are supposed to take me out? Why are you here?”
Her gaze follows the solid lines that make him, soon becoming a spill over his injuries. Particularly the bruises around his wrists which he’d earned by struggling so much in the handcuffs binding him to himself. “Does it hurt? What did I say about you hurting yourself?”
But notwithstanding Sera's expected concern and inspection for injuries sustained, full minutes pass him still motionless by the cell door. To others, including her, it must look as if he'd always been there. Eclipsed by a shock of such magnitude at his own failure it roots him silent, and holds his eyelids peeled until they're near drying, as he stares hard enough to burn a hole into the door’s lock.
This wasn't how it were supposed to escalate—this was hardly part of the plan at all. He’d spent those two hours of his flight running it over and over and over in his head, embodying a broken record for Sera’s sake. Drop in, post her bail if needed and immediately take her home afterwards, without so much as a glance over his shoulder. Nothing more, yet here he were, the wrists cuffed behind his back adding to their misfortune rather than subtracting from it.
Taeil starts to feel betrayed by fate for the umpteenth time this month alone.
This introduces boiled over frustration in quick, successive handfuls, as it flashes through Taeil as a hot-red sliver of light, escalating with clockwork’s precision. Realization snips a loosened cord in his head, and everything starts to fall apart.
He starts kicking the cell door so hard it sends the tiny room into a fit of loud shrieks and dull rattles, his sneakers creasing uglily with the sheer force of his rage. His palms actually begin to bleed from how vice-like his fists are clenched against his nails, albeit them being trimmed, but he doesn't care enough about cuts and bruises to let aggression go. "Fuuuck, why is this fucking happening..." If it weren’t for her counting on him here, he would’ve been more susceptible of crying tears of rage. Would’ve done worse.
In the end, though, when finally, exhaustion trumps his fury, he limps away to find the bench. Cheeks dry as a desert and his fists intact.
Battery. Taeil shoulders past Sera and settles on the bench, graceless and too large for this place. His arms fold uncomfortably behind his back to accommodate wrists that were still bound, but he ignores it in favour of raising his cutting gaze and training it on Sera’s face, like a target, for the first time since landing, “Do you know what they charged you with? God... I don’t even want to fuckin’ repeat it.” The words fall almost flat, yet his solemn tone still echoes clear as day off the walls.
From here, she looked crowded, flabbergasted, taken aback almost beyond belief, though not by her regret but by his presence alone–after that. It’s not her he were angered by, she knows that, yet still, she has the audacity to look at him like she’d just witnessed something positively ungodly. Though she tries best to hide it, he knows well how to read her and does so like thumbing through the Holy bible on a Sunday. His rage made her acquiescent.
“We don’t need another call. I’ll... fix it.” A pause, a sigh, “That’s why you called me, wasn’t it?” She believed she could still rely on his help regardless of any current circumstance of their relationship, which is something, at least, that feels like a silver lining.
In addition to her sentence, the guard had accused him of battery despite Taeil having had little recollection of taking part of any sort of physical altercations within those four or so weeks he’d stayed in Japan. He had gone out with a few co-workers at the start, and though it hadn’t gone anywhere there was honestly this one instance he could vouch for, but otherwise that was it. Had they other information about his possible whereabouts that he didn’t?
Had he finally reached that particular low his parents had warned him countless times about; a situation so inevitable that they couldn’t find a bandage large enough to cover it with this time?
“I’ll post your bail so you can get out while I sort mine. Since your things are sorted already, all you need to do is show up at your trial when they tell you to.” Taeil goes on, “Unless those assholes are just trolling, or scamming. Swear I’ll break their necks if they actually are trying to steal my money...”
After meeting her eyes one more time, urging her to trust him, he pushes himself up towards the door again. This time when he kicks it, it’s to draw a guards attention. “When we’re out of here together, we can worry about how hurt I am. And you, too, obviously. Right now, just follow my lead.”