Chapter Text
The day after Ilpyo arrived in New Korea, Mori walked him to Seungchul’s lab. It was an odd morning for Ilpyo, he mused while strolling alongside Mori, who was humming happily to himself back in his Mori Dan form, just to keep the profile low.
Odd and domestic. Ilpyo thought.
The moment Ilpyo’s eyes fluttered open, the brightness of the sunrays burning through the curtains made him agitated. In a sleepy daze, he pawed at the sheet and heard a snicker coming from the doorway.
“Whaee?” Ilpyo grumbled, peeling his eyes open to glare, but the ferocity was somehow lost when he was covered by fluffy blankets under the soft hue of sunrise.
Mori visibly bit back another snicker and padded over with a coffee mug, looking too smug and too awake for Ilpyo to not wrinkle his nose in annoyance.
“Why are you so refreshed this early in the morning?” Ilpyo pushed himself up, didn’t even have to check the time. His biological clock was luring him back to sleep, so it couldn’t be that late.
Mori handed over the mug, which Ilpyo accepted gratefully, and shrugged, “I don’t sleep that much nowadays.”
Ilpyo hummed, blinking clear the haze caused by the hot drink. With eyes too calculative for a person who just woke up, he asked, “dreams?”
“What? No. Just training.” Mori laughed casually. Too casually. “I have a routine now,” He pointed out, scratching the back of his head as if it were something embarrassing. A secret behind a fact, hiding.
So, dreams . Ilpyo thought to himself and nodded, “Training under a regime has helped you back in shape. I’d like to join you sometime.”
“You would?” Mori was immediately elated.
Ilpyo nodded again, taking another sip of his coffee before one corner of his mouth curled up in what could only be classified as a smirk, “I can’t let you just win and run. You had your revenge match in 17 years, and I’d like mine.”
Mori blinked at Ilpyo’s open acknowledgment of his triumph, and slowly, he returned that smirk, “is it a challenge I’m hearing?”
Ilpyo only smiled.
It was indeed an odd start of a day, in a good way. They didn’t talk about what happened last night, not about the conversation left unfinished, the small touch on the wrist that burnt, or the way their bodies nestled together like they were made for it. Inside that small apartment with a dropped ceiling, they almost didn’t talk.
Ilpyo dragged himself to the kitchen after a quick shower and took over the pan Mori had been using to scramble eggs, while the other man moved away from the stove to brew more coffee. When Ilpyo turned to sprinkle salt over the cooked food, Mori pushed the pepper shaker into his other hand. At some point, Mori tried to sneak around Ilpyo to steal a strayed piece of egg, only to be kicked at the back of his knee. He sank like a stone, pouting and swearing and laughing.
As natural as it was terrifying, the two of them worked together, in tandem, and in silence, like old couples using telepathy. As if there were no words that needed to be said.
It felt almost surreal, like in a dream, or in another life, where Ilpyo Park didn’t plot against the freaking president of the whole world, and Mori Jin wasn’t a damn god walking amongst mortals. It was, however, not until the moment when they walked out of the tiny apartment Ilpyo never knew he had, with Mori bounced from his left foot to the right waiting for him to lock the door, had Ilpyo realized that he might have been wanting this for a long, long time.
A place to come back.
A sudden unbearable urge filled him, screaming and begging for Ilpyo to snatch Mori’s hands right then and there. He wanted to hold onto them. He wanted to look into Mori’s warm eyes – where the stars lived – and tell him everything. And he…
“Do you think Seungchul will give you an office?” Mori’s voice summoned Ilpyo back to reality.
Ilpyo blinked, “what was it?”
Mori arched an eyebrow and touched him on the wrist, again. “I asked a question.” He didn’t let go. “Are you alright?” Somehow, Mori sensed that during their walk, Ilpyo had traveled away from him.
No.
“I’m fine.” It was such a faintly veiled lie that even Mori looked unimpressed.
Ilpyo sighed, “it’s nothing. I was just thinking.”
“About?” Mori pushed. He would usually leave the other people’s business alone, but not with this. Not when Ilpyo looked so troubled.
“About the X-syndrome.” This time, fabricated facts came to Ilpyo easily.
“Oh.” Mori backed off. Ilpyo’s skin felt cold and withered without his touch.
So Ilpyo Park had chickened out, like what he did this morning. Sue him. He was not ready. He would never be ready. And he didn’t even know what he was readying for.
“You don’t have to come with me.” Ilpyo decided it’s time to change the subject, diplomatically.
Mori shrugged.
“I thought you had school?”
Another shrug.
That had caught Ilpyo’s attention, he twirled to give Mori a careful look, who was wearing an innocent expression.
“You were kicked out,” Ilpyo observed, eyes widened in surprise.
Mori’s expression turned sour, “I was NOT!”
Ilpyo stuck his bottom lip out to stuff a smile that was dangerously close to a laugh and nodded, utterly unconvinced.
Mori mumbled something under his breath about Ahan and her nerd friends. “It’s not even real school, more like kids in a study hall,” He complained.
Ilpyo inclined his head in feigned acknowledgment, “what did you do?”
Mori shot him a glare, but grumbled an answer anyway, “I honestly don’t know. They were really mad when I made that comment on that statue of liberty dude.”
Ilpyo choked an incredulous laugh that almost sent him spluttering. Ahan must be livid to find out that Mori had confused the statue’s gender since day one.
Mori had a flicker of alarm in his eyes before he lifted his chin in petulance, daring Ilpyo to disagree, “I’m still not wrong. He was ugly!”
-------
Seungchul did give Ilpyo an office. And enough work to compensate for space twice that size.
Mori was not amused. He didn’t like the way Ilpyo buried himself under paperwork, behind flashing screens, typing furiously, and forgetting about everything. Ilpyo worked like a mad scientist. And Mori had thought that Seungchul was the only one who assumed this role in their small gang of misfits.
Mori started to stop by with food cooked by Daewi or Ahan, because Ilpyo would literally forget if he had had lunch, or breakfast, or dinner from last night.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the researchers working at Seungchul’s lab to get used to the blue head following around their latest (and profoundly helpful) addition to the team like a baby duck.
The first time Seungchul caught Mori slouching over the small desk he had stolen from the receptionist and pushed into Ilpyo’s office, Mori had sneaked in a family of stray cats who made his backpack their home.
Ilpyo stopped midway from feeding them milk and walked calmly back to his own table – piled up with digital pads, scratch paper, and coffee mugs – with a face that was so straight people would feel guilty to assume he had not been working diligently all this time.
Seungchul shot him a dirty look, “is that my milk?”
Ilpyo’s smile was angelic, “I’m not sure. I didn’t see a label on it.” He did.
Seungchul took a deep breath and glared at Mori, “and what are you doing here?”
Mori beamed at him with a shit-eating grin, “I’m earning my eggs!”
He was dragged out by the security, kicking and screaming. There was a lot of meowing involved.
Nobody said Mori was not allowed to come back. So he came back to his post, day after day.
-------
Mori was still worried.
His worries soon deteriorated into extreme concerns when he found Ilpyo wobbling out of his office like a vampire hunting for food, and staggering into the kitchen area, mumbling to himself about gene sequence, and staring greedily at the coffee machine while it poured a cup.
“He looks like a drug addict.” Mori hissed to Seungah on the phone, “it’s not healthy.”
Seungah smiled on the other side, “that’s the Ilpyo I know. He was like that back in school when he had two papers due on the same day.”
“I thought he’s smart.” Mori glanced up from his hiding place behind the potted plant underneath Ilpyo’s window. He got kicked out because he was making too much noise and Ilpyo needed to fucking focus.
“He is very gifted, but he’s always hardworking,” Seungah said, but Mori had stopped listening as soon as Ilpyo Park started to suck on a pen.
“Hmmm,” Mori said, eloquently.
“He’s a stubborn brat, so don’t even try to convince him otherwise. Just cuff him over the head and drag him…” Seungah was still talking, but all Mori could think of was to rip that pen out of Ilpyo’s mouth and tell him how distracting he had been, and Mori needed to fucking focus.
Catching up on what was happening, Seungah huffed, “he’s sucking on a pen, isn’t he?”
“Hmmm?” Mori blinked, a bit dazed.
Seungah laughed, “He does that when he’s thinking.” And then she added helpfully, “or when he wants to be annoying.”
“Hmmm,” Mori agreed, still staring.
Seungah hung up.
--------
Mori was not the only person who had found Ilpyo’s workaholic tendencies disturbing. Despite all the jabbing words and inhuman composure, Seungchul did have a heart.
“Go home.” He said coolly, in the middle of a night when Ilpyo decided to camp (again) in the office. Mori was a snoring mess on the floor. Seungchul kicked him, startling him awake.
Ilpyo blinked dizzily from his several floating monitors, all running multiple calculations on the complex algorithm he wrote.
“What?”
“You are useless when you are making mistakes.” Seungchul told him.
“I’m not making mistakes.” Ilpyo said, too tired to not take it personally. He had been working on this for a while and it was almost a breakthrough. The first wave of children with X-syndrome were entering their final phase preparing for transportation. Ilpyo needed to make sure nothing would go wrong in the lab. Not under his watch.
Seungchul pointed at a figure that all of sudden decided to stick out with a RED BOLD alarm on one of his screens.
“I don’t need a sleep-deprived workaholic with too much blood in his caffeine system floating around my lab. And making mistakes.” Seungchul walked away without even giving Ilpyo a chance to remediate the error in his coding.
“Leave,” He ordered. “Don’t come back until you are ready.”
“But how do I know? I’m ready now and you are forcing me out!” Ilpyo shouted after him, just to make a point.
“Well, you heard the boss.” Mori stretched on the floor, grinning. “Can we go now?”
Ilpyo leaned back in the chair with his arms crossed, and he bit out, “Make me.”
Mori snorted and thwacked him over the head before carrying a spluttering Ilpyo all the way home.
Ilpyo put him on trash duty for a whole week. He deserved it.
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On the day of the first wave of X-syndrome children were scheduled to arrive, Ilpyo was radiating nervousness. He and Mori were tasked to wait at the borderline to coordinate with the transportation team. Mori caught Ilpyo rubbing his palms up and down his thighs in obvious unease.
Sensing the mounting tension in the air, Mori tried small talk, “Seungah is not coming, right?”
Ilpyo’s shoulders sagged, “Not this time. I need her to keep an eye on the rest of the children who are still under the world government’s treatment.”
Mori nodded. He knew how Ilpyo had felt about the children suffering from X-syndrome. The guilt that kept him awake at night. Every night.
Out of nowhere, their radio transmitter crackled alive.
“…lp…pleas…atta...” The noise it made was slower than the smell of blood traveled in the air. “…mission compromised, repeat, we are under heavy attack by multiple Charyeok users, man down, man down…”
Mori cursed. Ilpyo was already gone.
There were few things nowadays in this world that could make Mori Jin pause, yet at that very moment when he dashed into the battlefield where their people were fighting with Charyeok users from the world government, he couldn’t help but stop dead in his tracks and shudder.
Ilpyo had taken on his Charyeok form the second he stepped into the heart of the field. His silver hair was already bloodied, golden eyes glistened with a streak of vicious malice, canines bared in a snarl, and he danced with fire on the tip of his bare toes like death. Mori could almost hear his hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing that turned snow into raven.
Nine tails blossomed, humming and vibrating in silent anticipation for the coming bloodshed.
There was a frail cry sent Mori sprinting, his eyes darted across the commotion and locked on the source. An infant survivor, who was cradled and sheltered in the arms of a dead guard who had wished to protect until his last breath. Mori gently picked the tiny bundle up and looked at Ilpyo, who was looking right back at him with eyes as red as blood.
Mori nodded. Ilpyo turned to tear through his unfortunate opponents like a burning knife slicing through butter, sizzling and melting. They begged; he did not stop. It was Ilpyo’s war, and he got tired of leaving enemies barely alive only to be stabbed later when they came back, again and again. The very edge of his fire turned dark. Almost violet. Almost pitch black. Mori picked up that color immediately. A strike of pseudo pain traveled from his left shoulder all the way down to the right side of his hip bone like thunder. Jaecheondaesong could recognize that fire in his worst nightmares.
The fire that ended with half of the heavenly realm in shambles, and burnt and burnt and burnt.
Hojosa’s fire.
Finally, the earth ceased shaking, and Ilpyo stood in the middle of a massive crater burnt bare, trails of destruction snaked from the heart of it all the way to the depth of the woods. Cheeks stained with blood and eyes wild, he mourned.
Mori Jin had never seen anyone as beautiful, and as deadly as Ilpyo Park in this moment in any of his three lives.
“Meet the person who is living hell so you can have a life.” Mori told the innocent soul in his arms, maneuvered them up so they could watch.
The child giggled when Ilpyo peeled steel off of the armored vehicle that stored the rest of the incubators, his face grim. Ilpyo was eerily calm. So calm it was alarming. Until there was something that caused his eyes widened in sudden amazement, Ilpyo gasped before leaning forward into the tumbled vehicle and pulled.
As Mori walked closer, Ilpyo turned back with an armful of sleeping babies, healthy and intact.
Mori watched him making a cooing sound while holding them close to his chest, as if feeling their warmth. As if Ilpyo was the one who was saved out there by their tiny fingers and curled toes.
And then, Ilpyo smiled, teary and gentle and sweet.
And Mori thought.
I want to see him smiling like this for a year and a day, and an eternity after.