Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Maniac was in the northwestern part of the city, a standalone building with its name on a fluorescent green sign outside. Felix had looked at that sign enough over the past couple of weeks that he could sometimes see it when he closed his eyes to sleep, tattooed on the backs of his eyelids. It was lit up now despite the fact that the sun had only just begun to set. Felix, tucked into the shadows of an alley opposite the club, tried not to look at it.

He had yet to actually make it inside. At night there were too many people for comfort, and he didn’t have an ID anymore besides, so he had no way of proving he should even be allowed in. He had tried, once, during the day, to talk his way through the staff setting up for the evening, but he did not have the knack of being charming on purpose, or perhaps they just knew to be suspicious of people trying to get inside to talk to their boss. If you give us your contact info and the reason you want to talk to him, we can pass it on, they had told him, wary as they watched him, and Felix hadn’t been able to do any of that so he’d just had to leave without a word.

He’d resorted to his Plan C which was, essentially, stalking. He wasn’t proud of it; actually, he hated it, because as he watched the club night after night it reminded him of how easily someone could be watching him without him knowing about it. How easily someone had watched him, before he’d learned to stay on the move. This time spent lingering around Maniac had been the longest he’d been in any sort of routine in the past six months and it was starting to itch at him. It would be dangerous to let this play out much longer.

The sky above him slowly darkened. Outside the front doors, a member of staff was setting up the barriers that divided the general public on the street from those wanting to get in. There weren’t many people around at this time, but there’d be plenty, later. This street was full of nightclubs and bars, and the area was decent enough that they seemed to draw a clientele of mostly college students or young professionals, those in their twenties who were willing to spend a little extra money on drinks to avoid the thrum of barely hidden violence that happened in other parts of the city. That kind of crowd didn’t discriminate based on the day of the week — Felix had seen as many people waiting to get in on a Monday as he had on a Friday.

His alley looked into the narrow service street that looped around the side of the nightclub, where the side door was opening. The man who stepped out was one that Felix had seen a few times now, coming and going from that employee entrance but never dressed in the employee uniform, all black with the club name on the chest in that same green as the sign outside. He was always dressed casually, and the staff seemed to defer to him, listening carefully when he told them something. Felix did not think this was Chris — there was no way a man like that would be wandering around without some kind of security. But this was, perhaps, someone directly under Chris in the chain of command.

The man leaving the club was wearing a leather jacket, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look particularly tall, even from this distance, but he moved in a way which suggested— power. He turned left out of his side street and strode along the road with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where he was going. Felix glanced back at the entrance to the club, the doors of which were closed again, and came to a split second decision that he hoped he wouldn’t regret. And then he, too, left his side street.

He’d learned, over the past few months, the knack of simply fading into the background. It was not easy to do, when he’d bleached his hair to the point that sometimes he was afraid it was simply going to fall out, but he’d learned through necessity. Most of it, he now knew, was about simply looking like he belonged somewhere, walking with enough confidence as to not draw suspicion, but not so much as to potentially make himself a spectacle. Being furtive, or seeming skittish, would always draw eyes. He’d made that mistake in the early weeks, when he’d been taking the bus to different parts of the city, trying to just stay ahead of anyone trying to follow him. The rest of it was about staying out of direct eye contact with the people around him. This part, he was particularly good at it. He moved, unobtrusive and careful, down the street, tracking the footsteps of the man who helped to run the club.

In spite of his practice over the last few months, he was still a little surprised to not get caught. Good as he was at this point, he had not tested it against someone who might actually be expecting to be followed. He could see the man checking, too, for anyone who might be tailing him, but Felix was apparently inconspicuous enough in the shadows to go unnoticed. Felix followed him through the streets, a looping, somewhat complicated path, until the man checked over his shoulder one more time and then disappeared down a very narrow alley between two buildings, one of which was semi-crumbling down.

Felix stopped, looking up at the other building. It looked disused, most of the lights inside and outside turned off. The first floor had once been a convenience store but all the windows had been bricked up at some point. The second floor had a sign for a hair salon, but half the characters were missing, the paint on the sign peeling off. Above that was a PC room, which had one character of its name turned on, a yellow light that flickered in a way that did not seem to suggest it was open. The top floor didn’t have any signage at all.

There was only one light on in the entire building from this front view, lighting up some of the windows in the third floor PC room. Felix looked down the side alley again, the absolute darkness down there, and then back at the front doors that must lead to the internal stairway of the building. They were made of metal, unusual in this type of building, which usually had glass front doors. He couldn’t be sure what was waiting for him down the path he’d watched the man from the club take, but when he tried this front entrance, it wasn’t even locked. This, he realised, must be the entrance for their clients.

Felix pulled one of the doors open fully, finding it so heavy that it wasn’t particularly easy, and stepped into the front hallway. It was nothing but bare grey concrete, the corners dusty. There was a series of mail boxes against the wall, all of the business names scratched out from the labels. The junk mail that had been stuffed in there was all yellowed with age. Whoever had been willing to enter to put mail in those boxes had clearly stopped long ago.

He took the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the stairwell. He had just passed the abandoned hair salon when he heard another set of footsteps behind him. He turned back around and saw the man from the club climbing up behind him, a gun held steady in his hands, pointing at Felix.

Felix slowly lifted his hands in the air, palms facing out. “Please don’t shoot me,” he said.

“Who the fuck are you?” said the man, still coming up the stairs slowly, watching Felix with a scowl.

“Felix.” Felix resisted the urge to take a step back, kept his feet planted firmly on the ground. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him, after all, and not even the first time it had been an actual threat, but something about this situation struck him as particularly dangerous. “I’m here to talk to— Chris. About uh. A job.” If Chris was even here, if this wasn’t another dead end.

A raised eyebrow in his direction. “We don’t take walk-ins,” the man said, and Felix’s heart skipped a beat. He’d finally gotten it right. “And how the fuck did you even find us?”

Felix decided it was probably best he didn’t answer that last question. “Sorry,” he said. “I would have made an appointment if I had known how.”

This did not seem to mollify the man holding a gun to him at all. He was looking at Felix like he thought Felix was making fun of him, even though Felix was not doing any such thing. He wouldn’t dare, not right now. After a few seconds of just looking at each other, the man motioned at him with the gun. “Take off your backpack and put it on the floor,” he said. Felix hesitated for a moment before he followed the instructions, dropping his backpack to the ground. He hoped he would get it back. It had everything he had to his name at this point and while it wasn’t much, he didn’t want to have to try without any of it.

The gun motioned again. This, Felix understood, was an order for him to turn around. He did so and a second later felt a hand, strong and heavy, clamp down on his shoulder and the barrel of the gun press to his lower back. He went very still. “Okay,” said the man, very close now. “The third floor. No sudden moves.”

Felix nodded, shallowly, the only motion he felt comfortable making, before he continued up the stairs, awkward now he was being held like this. The third floor landing was the only part of the stairwell actually lit up, light coming through the propped open door of the PC room. Felix, after taking a moment to check it was okay, stepped into the room.

It did not look like any PC room that Felix had seen before, but he’d only spent time in these kinds of places over the past few months, the grottier sort that didn’t mind if someone stayed overnight. There was, first of all, a distinct lack of computers, just a couple of rows along the wall directly opposite where Felix had just come in, most of them switched off. There was a boy sitting at the only computer actually on, his back to the door, hood pulled up. Felix couldn’t make out what he was doing but his mouse was clicking furiously.

Most of the room was taken up by a pool table right in the middle, which looked to have been abandoned in the middle of a game, brightly coloured balls still spread out across the top. Behind that was a DDR machine that, like the computers, was turned off. Along the wall with the front door was what had probably been a check in desk but now appeared to be some kind of bar area. There were shelves of liquor behind it, and a few stools in front. Another guy was sitting on one of those stools, and he glanced up when Felix came in, and then did a double-take and shot to his feet. The phone that had been in his hands clattered to the top of the reception desk.

“Hyung,” he said to the guy behind Felix, who was ushering him further into the room, the gun still poking him.

“Yeah,” said the one with the gun. “I know. Jeongin-ah. Jeongin-ah!”

“He’s got his headphones on, give me a second,” said the one who had been on his phone. He walked across the room to the one named Jeongin, somehow managing to not take his attention off Felix the entire time. He tapped Jeongin on the shoulder and then reached around him and turned his monitor off.

“Hyung!” Jeongin cried, and twisted around, clearly intent on giving his interrupter a piece of his mind, but he saw Felix standing still near the entrance and his eyes widened. He pushed his hood back off his head and with it, the headphones he had been wearing underneath. “Who is that?” he asked.

“This is Felix.” The gun was shoved harder into Felix’s back and he headed further into the room, closer to the pool table now, out of the way of the door. “Jeongin, go grab his backpack, will you? It’s in the stairwell. Go bring it back here.”

Jeongin nodded slowly and got to his feet. As he passed Felix, he gave him a curious look, and Felix realised that he was young, younger than Felix himself, but a little taller, with dark hair that feathered over his face. He slipped out of the door and when he was gone, the man with the gun said to the other one, “Check if he’s got anything on him.”

The other guy nodded. He also looked young, around Felix’s age, which surprised Felix just a bit. His hair was dark too, shaved close at the sides, and he had the kind of face that seemed inherently friendly, even when he was looking at Felix with such suspicion. Felix held his arms out without needing to be asked and stood still through the decidedly thorough pat down. There was nothing to be found until a hand went into his back pocket and came up with the USB that Felix had stored there.

By this point Jeongin had come back, standing in the doorway clutching Felix’s backpack in his arms. The man with the gun, still trained on Felix, said, “Jeongin, go look through the backpack, make sure there’s no tracker or gun or something. Jisung, give me that.”

Jisung did so, tossing it over to the man who caught it easily. Felix watched it, holding the protest back in his throat. He couldn’t, not without explaining himself, and he didn’t want to do that yet. But watching that USB disappear into a different pocket hurt. If they refused the job but kept that, he wasn’t sure what he would do.

Jisung went back to searching him, running his hands firmly down Felix’s calves, apparently checking for concealed weapons there. There was nothing. Jeongin was pawing through his backpack, pulling out the few pieces of clothing that Felix had managed to gather since he had left home; there wasn’t a lot of it, and most of it needed to be washed at this point, but he hadn’t been able to find a laundromat that felt safe enough to hang around for the time it took a cycle to wash. There was nothing in his bag, either, except for—

Jeongin pulled out the chef’s knife that Felix kept wrapped in the remnants of the sweater he’d been wearing that last day. He pulled the wrappings off and then looked uncertainly at the blade in his hand. It was sharp, Felix had checked, viciously sharp, despite having been made for, presumably, cutting vegetables. “Uh, Changbin-hyung,” said Jeongin.

Changbin, the one with the gun, glanced at him and then said, “Oh shit, Jeongin, put that down, okay.” Jeongin did so, a little gingerly. Changbin turned back to Felix. “Why are you walking around with a knife in your backpack.”

“Why are you walking around with a gun,” Felix said, perfectly reasonably, in his opinion. “It was the best weapon I could find at short notice, honestly.” In fact he had lifted it from a store in the nastier part of town, where the people who worked in the stores were less likely to pay attention or care that someone was shoplifting. He hadn’t had to use it but he’d been grateful for it, having it close at hand as he tried to sleep.

Jisung had found the money he had stashed in his left sock. He pulled it out, looked through it, and then tucked it back inside. Felix tried not to sag in relief at that. Jisung then straightened up. “He doesn’t have anything other than that USB,” he said.

“And there’s nothing else here,” Jeongin said. He’d put the backpack to one side and was now opening Felix’s wallet. Felix hoped he left the money in there well enough alone, too. It was barely more than what he was keeping in his sock but it was the only other money he had access to at this point. It would probably be more devastating to lose that than it would be to lose the USB, if he really thought about it. But Jeongin bypassed the money entirely and looked at the empty card holder part. “There’s no ID.”

“I lost it,” Felix said. Actually, he’d thrown it away in the trash can of a high end department store and hadn’t been able to afford a forgery. They didn’t need to know that, though.

Changbin sighed, and finally, thankfully, put the gun away. “Jeongin, would you go let Seungmin know that there’s probably nothing to worry about.” Jeongin nodded and ran out of the room again. “Jisung, you wait here and make sure nobody comes and disturbs us. You—” This was said with a hand grabbing Felix again, this time tight around his arm. “Come with me.”

He led Felix through the door at the back of the room, just next to the row of desks and computers. It opened into a slightly narrow hallway, with four doors, two on either side. He knocked on the furthest left hand door and called, “Hyung, I’ve got someone here to see you.”

A brief pause, and then a muffled call back. “What?”

Changbin let go of Felix and opened the door, then motioned for him to go inside. Felix did, not really sure what to expect, considering the PC room portion had been unusual. This room, however, looked like a normal office, albeit one that seemed as randomly put together as the other room had been. There was one window, set high up on the wall, so most of the light came from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a couch pushed against the wall that held the window, covered in some brightly coloured blankets. Along the perpendicular wall was a desk, solid looking, with a computer with two monitors and a tablet set on a stand. Sitting behind the desk was someone that Felix assumed was Chris.

Chris turned out to be a lot younger than Felix had anticipated. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising, after seeing how young the other guys he had met were, but it did surprise him, a lot. He’d been imagining a man more like his own father, austere and cold in his ferocity. But Chris, at least on first glance, just seemed so much more— human. He was handsome, too, even frowning at the door like he was. He was wearing a sweater that had two holes at the stretched out neckline, showing little flashes of collarbone as he got to his feet. On his face a pair of gold-rimmed glasses sat, and his hair did not appear to have been brushed for possibly a couple of days. And yet— he was handsome.

“Changbin,” Chris said. He was looking at Felix with an expression that was, to Felix’s eyes, completely unreadable. “Who is this?”

“Felix,” said Changbin. “He came in through the front door, which was unlocked for some reason. Seungmin’s alarms went fucking haywire, but I guess it’s good to know those front entrance ones still work. You, sit down,” he added to Felix, motioning to the one chair opposite the desk, a hardback, uncomfortable looking thing. Felix sat; it was uncomfortable. “He says he’s here to talk about a job.”

“A job,” Chris repeated. “What job?”

This was directed at Felix. Felix thought about softening it, and then decided to just say it. “I want to hire you to rob the Magpie,” he said.

The unreadability of Chris's face split, revealing shock underneath for a couple of seconds. He sat back down slowly. “You want to rob the Magpie,” he repeated, almost a monotone.

“Yes,” said Felix.

“Buddy, join the queue,” Changbin said, coming around Felix to stand by the side of Chris’s desk. “Hell, we’d do that for free, if we could. What exactly are you wanting to steal, anyway?”

This was the hard part— well, Felix revised. This was one of the hard parts. “I want you to hit Blackbird’s and clear it out,” he said, keeping his voice as bland as possible.

The shocked silence lasted longer now, both of them gaping at him a little bit. Changbin’s appearance of casual disinterest was completely gone. Chris straightened up in his seat, frowning. Now he was looking at Felix in a different way, more appraising. Possibly he hadn’t been taking Felix all that seriously before, and probably still wasn’t, but he’d now recognised that Felix was taking this seriously.

“You’re fucking insane,” Changbin said. Probably, at this point, Felix thought. “It’s impossible. Is this a joke?”

“No,” said Felix. In fact, he had never been more serious in his entire life, although neither of them could know that. “Why is it impossible? What would you need, to make it work?”

“Nothing, because it won’t work,” Changbin said.

“Information,” Chris said, talking across him. He was looking at Felix steadily now. There was an air to him that spoke of being perfectly invested in the conversation, like he listened to a person completely when they spoke. If it was faked, he was doing a very good job. “Money, too, but mostly information. Nobody who doesn’t work there knows how that place works, and nobody who does work there is going to talk to the likes of us. Not if they enjoy having all their fingers.”

“If it’s information you need,” Felix said, “I have it, and I’m willing to give it to you, so long as you promise to do the job for me. You can keep most of the money too, I only want to keep enough to— survive on.”

“And how do you have information on him,” said Chris, mild in a way that Felix suspected was feigned.

Felix steadied his voice, tried to remember how he had sounded all the times he had rehearsed in his head, practised it in various public bathrooms in the days leading up to this meeting. “I used to work for him,” he said. “I used to work behind the scenes at Blackbird’s, on his tech team. I was able to access stuff that most people couldn’t.”

The energy in the room sharpened, turned a little more nasty than it had already been. He’d known that was going to happen, the moment he admitted to having worked for Lee Jaerim. They were less likely to trust him, but he had no other explanation for why he happened to have the information that he did. If he told the truth, they definitely would not trust him. Considering how they had reacted when he walked in the front door, it didn’t seem likely they were going to trust him anyway. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t give him his backpack back, if they just killed him anyway.

“You used to work for him,” Changbin repeated. “So explain to me how you’re here talking to us when, like hyung just said, nobody who does that would ever want to talk to outsiders about it.”

This was the truly tricky part; Felix had included it in his practise but he still wasn’t sure if he could get through it without stuttering or, worse, crying. “I had a younger sister,” he said. His voice, despite the practice, and despite the time that had passed, was still not completely under control. “She’s dead, because of the Magpie. So I can’t work for him anymore, I won’t do it.”

Changbin looked at Chris, a quick little glance that seemed full of meaning. Chris was still looking at Felix, but there was something new there in his face. Something heavy, something that said— this was finally real for him, as it always had been for Felix. “Your sister,” he murmured. “Why did he kill her?”

“I don’t know,” Felix said. That much, at least, was true. “She worked for him too, like I did, and then he killed her.” Chris made a soft noise at that, almost an acknowledgement. “I left, after that, I couldn’t work for him anymore, obviously. I wanted— revenge. I want to hurt him like he has hurt me. And since money is the only thing he cares about, that’s where to hit him.”

“So why come to us,” Changbin said. “There are a bunch of people you could ask for help from in this city, surely.”

“Because I didn’t have any other choice,” Felix said. “After I left, he put out some kind of hit on me. I don’t have the means to move far, and lingering here has proved— dangerous. And I can’t trust the other gangs in this city not to just kill me and pocket the money.”

“But you can trust us to not do that?” Changbin asked flatly.

Felix smiled a little. Chris sat back in his chair. “It’s well known that out of everyone in this city, you guys hate the Magpie more than anyone,” Felix said. None of them had been particularly quiet about it, either. They avoided any outright conflict with Jaerim but they weren’t afraid to intercept deals or get in the way of information. It had always made Felix’s father absolutely furious but he’d never been able to get leverage on them. He’d never even been able to find out where they operated from. “I didn’t think you’d just hand me back over with a smile.”

“That seems somewhat naive,” Chris said.

“Maybe,” Felix said. “But I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I have, quite literally, nothing else to lose.”

He didn’t, either. He had nothing to his name, and if they didn’t do this for him, he had very little hope left. Neither of them looked very convinced by his argument though. Changbin leaned a hand against the desk, too far away from Felix to loom but his posture was intimidating nonetheless.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Changbin said, “because don’t think I didn’t notice you ignoring the question earlier. How the fuck did you find this place?”

“Yes, I’m interested in that as well,” Chris said.

“Oh.” Felix would have preferred to keep waffling around the answer but he couldn’t, not with the two of them looking at him like that. “I uhm. I followed you.” He gestured at Changbin. “From the nightclub. I was waiting for you. I thought maybe you worked for Chris, so I just followed you.”

Changbin cursed under his breath. “Just like fucking Jisung,” he said. “I can’t even blame Jeongin this time either. Please tell me we’re not going to tell Minho-hyung about this.”

“It depends,” Chris said. “Are you going to be more careful next time?”

“If it makes it any better,” Felix said, trying to be helpful, “I’ve been waiting outside the club for weeks now.”

It didn’t seem like it made it any better, judging by the way Changbin and Chris looked at each other for a long drawn out few seconds. Changbin raised an eyebrow. Chris shrugged. Changbin said, “If you can follow me without me noticing, and if you worked with the Magpie, you must be somewhat capable. What are you good at? Can you fight?”

“No,” said Felix. He’d learned taekwondo for years, but to the disgust of his father he’d never quite picked up the trick of actually fighting. He didn’t like the way it felt to hit someone, to hurt them with his hands. He shied away from landing a punch. It did, he could admit, pose something of a problem in this world. He was slightly better with a gun but not by much. He’d made his peace with the knife but he didn’t like the thought of using it. “I’m good with computers, I’m good at getting past security systems and finding data, that kind of stuff. Also,” he added, a little more self-consciously, “I’m good at making bombs.”

“Man,” said Changbin, seemingly mostly to Chris. “That could actually come in handy. That’s something Seungmin can’t do.”

“Yeah, the computer stuff we probably don’t really need but explosives? We could work with that.” Chris looked thoughtful for a few seconds. He really was so handsome, Felix thought, and then had to squash it immediately. “I want something from you,” Chris said. “I want something to show that you— that you’re telling the truth.”

Felix nodded. “You’ve got the USB,” he said to Changbin, who blinked and then pulled it back out of his pocket. It was a small thing, very small, and probably the reason why Felix had spent the last six months in fear for his life. “You guys can have that. It’s got all the blueprints for Blackbird’s on it, for every floor. All the secret passageways, the back rooms, everything. I also know where you can find his personal vault. Most of his money is kept there.”

Chris sat upright in his chair, bolt straight suddenly. Changbin put the USB on the desk like it had shocked him. “You’re just giving this to us?” he said incredulously.

“If you’ll help me, yes,” said Felix. “If you’ll help me, I’ll give it to you, and whatever else I know. But only if you help me.”

“This can’t be real,” Changbin said. “What the hell is really on this USB? Hyung, plug this in and find out what’s on here.” He snatched up the USB, holding it out to Chan, who started to take it when something buzzed, loud and insistent. Changbin got his phone out of his back pocket, thumbed it open and then rolled his eyes. “Seungmin says, do not fucking put that USB into the fucking computer. He sent it seven times in a row.” With great exaggeration, he put the USB back down on the desk, glancing at a corner of the room behind Felix. When Felix quickly checked, he saw a camera nestled up by the ceiling. “I guess Seungmin will look at it later.”

“Fine,” said Chris. He pinched between his eyes for a moment and then looked at Felix again. He really was so young, it was shocking every time Felix realised it once again. “I’m not making a decision now. I need to talk to my team. Why don’t you go wait outside for a bit with the others and I’ll come and get you when I’m ready.”

Felix looked at him, then at Changbin, and nodded. That was good enough for now, although it was a little surprising to hear that Chris was going to discuss it with anyone. He’d already shown more interest in Changbin’s opinions than Felix’s father had ever done in anyone else’s.

Changbin came back around the desk and took him by the arm, saying, “I’ll take him out and get Jisung to keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t go wandering.”

Felix had absolutely no plans to go anywhere, but he didn’t complain about the hand around his upper arm. Changbin wasn’t rough with him, he barely even led him, and once they were back in the PC room he let go again and said, “Jisung, we’ll be a little bit maybe. Watch this guy for us.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jisung. He was laying on the floor now, head tipped back in an uncomfortable way as he looked at them. Changbin nodded and then disappeared back through the door to the hallway. Jisung — and Jeongin sitting on a stool at the old reception desk — looked at Felix. Felix looked back at them, feeling awkward and more shy than he thought he’d ever been in his life.

Jeongin patted the stool next to him. “Come and sit down,” he said, and with no other better options, Felix did as he was told.

——

It was late when Hyunjin got home, full dark outside. Most of the street lamps in this part of town no longer worked so it was easy to keep to the shadows. With his hood pulled up to cover his hair, he faded into the darkness, just another shadow passing through. There weren’t many people out, not at this time, and nobody glanced at him as he made his way through the streets.

He didn’t come in through the side door. He never really did anymore, not after Jisung had demonstrated how to climb up through the fire escape. Hyunjin went into the alley, hopped on top of the empty dumpster they kept around there, and then pulled down the ladder. It was an easy climb at this point, to get to the second floor and disable the security alert that Seungmin had put across all the window ledges. He slid in through the window, set the alert back up again, and then tiptoed over the landing past Minho’s bedroom.

Usually when Hyunjin did this, Minho stuck his head out to check if it was him coming home and not someone he had to kill. The first few times, Hyunjin had made a lot of noise but Minho had said that that was even more unnerving because it was harder to figure out who it was. Now it was almost like a game; testing how silently he could move down the hallway, to see if he could trick Minho into not hearing him. This was unlikely, he knew, to work. Minho was too paranoid to miss something like that right outside his bedroom.

Today, though, Minho didn’t come out when Hyunjin crept past his door, which either meant that Hyunjin had won or Minho wasn’t in his room. The latter was more likely. He gave up on the pretence of quiet and clattered his way to the stairs and then climbed up to the third floor to speak to Chan.

When he came through the door into the PC room, though, there was a stranger sitting on one of the stools at the makeshift bar that Seungmin set up after they first took over the building. Jeongin was sat next to him, talking in that cheerful, non-stop way that he did when someone let him get started. The stranger looked befuddled and overwhelmed, both of which Hyunjin was very used to seeing on the faces of people listening to Jeongin ramble. Jisung lay on the fucking floor next to them, like a heathen; Hyunjin would not even walk on that floor in his socks, never mind lay down on it.

Jisung’s phone was held up over his face, playing a video quietly, but he dropped it on his chest when he saw Hyunjin. “Hi!” he said.

“You’re going to get a staph infection laying on the floor like that,” Hyunjin told him. He shook his hood back off his hair. Then he whirled on the stranger. “Who the hell are you.”

The stranger was, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful people Hyunjin had ever seen, and he looked in a mirror at least three times a day. He had hair that had been bleached to an inch of its life, long enough to be scraped back into a small ponytail, little wisps escaping at the front to frame his delicate features. His nose was dainty and his mouth plush, with a full, boldly shaped upper lip. He had honest-to-god freckles, visible even in the shitty light of the room. The kind of face that made Hyunjin want to slice it off and frame it; the kind of face people would do violence over.

“I’m Felix,” said the stranger. “Nice to meet you?”

“He’s going to work with us!” Jeongin said brightly.

“Maybe,” said Felix. “Your boss is still figuring it out.”

“What the hell,” Hyunjin said faintly. “Why does your voice sound like that?”

“I’ve smoked twenty packs a day since the day I was born,” Felix said, delightfully deadpan.

Hyunjin couldn’t help it; he laughed. In the corner of his eye, he saw Jisung sit up, face tilted in his direction. He ignored it. “You’re going to work with us?” Hyunjin asked, sitting on one of the stools too. “What’s your skill?”

“Uh, I’m not sure it’s a skill,” said Felix. “But I do blow things up.”

“Do we need one of those?” Hyunjin looked at Jeongin, who shrugged. It was so hard to remember, sometimes, that Jeongin was only two years younger than Hyunjin. That he was actually an adult himself. He had this air of innocence about him that was so strong that it almost seemed mocking sometimes. He so rarely questioned what was happening around him, or took umbrage at being left out of things. Merely taking everything as it came. It was like he looked at the world and said: I know you want me to question everything and experience endless existential dread, but I don’t care enough to do so.

Hyunjin wished he was like Jeongin sometimes. But only sometimes.

“I’m also good with computers,” said Felix. “Cyberware, security, that kind of thing.”

“Sure,” said Hyunjin, who had not touched a computer until he was seventeen and even now felt like he was seeing fucking magic whenever he watched Seungmin work. “Well, we already have one of those but you know what I say. The more the merrier.”

He winked at Felix who looked, for a moment, taken-aback. Then he smiled, a slow spread of expression across his face. He looked more human, when he smiled like that. “Who the hell are you,” he said. “I like your hair.”

“I’m Hyunjin. I do not like your hair. Where did you get that bleach job done, your mom’s friend’s trainee daughter’s place?”

Felix touched his hair, pulling a little at some of the wispy bits. Hyunjin was surprised they didn’t snap off. “No,” he said. “I did it myself.”

“Well, it’s terrible,” Hyunjin said. He also did his own hair, in Jisung’s shitty little converted bathroom on the second floor. But he at least knew about things like toners and damage treatment. “I can’t believe you’re walking around like that.”

“We don’t have one of those,” said Jisung suddenly. Hyunjin shot him a look but Jisung was looking at Felix, not him. “Seungmin doesn’t do that kind of thing. The bomb stuff. Did you tell Chan-hyung about that?”

Felix tipped his head to the side, like a little bird. Hyunjin felt the distinct urge to coo at him a little. “No, who is that?” Felix asked.

“Oh,” said Jisung, wincing. “Uh. Chris. Did you tell Chris about it?”

“Yes,” said Felix. “He said my computer skills probably wouldn’t be useful but if I can make bombs that could potentially be utilised.”

“Yeah, no shit,” said Hyunjin. “It might not be useful but we keep a lot of things around here that aren’t useful.” He looked at Jisung, expecting Jisung to laugh, or agree, or turn the joke onto Jeongin who would either not get it or pretend he didn’t get it, but instead Jisung was looking at him now, an intent expression that was disconcerting on Jisung’s face. Hyunjin stared back, a moment of eye contact, before he nodded his head in the direction of Jisung’s phone laying on the floor, still quietly playing something. “Turn that off, it’s annoying.”

“You’re annoying,” Jisung said, which was about the level of maturity Hyunjin expected from him, but he bent and scooped up his phone and tapped at the screen to turn the video off.

Before he could say anything else, the back door opened and Chan stepped out. He paused just over the threshold, looking between their faces as if surprised to see so many of them. He smiled at Hyunjin, though, the way he always did when Hyunjin got home safely from a job. “Hyunjin,” he said. “You got it?”

“Yes,” said Hyunjin. He put his hand in his pocket and flipped the SD card he’d been sent to pick up between his fingers but didn’t take it out, not wanting to show Felix what he had, even if he did instinctively like him. “They won’t know it’s gone for a while.”

“Hmm, good,” said Chan. His eyes flicked to Felix, who was sitting quietly on his stool, his hands tucked up under his thighs. Then he looked back at Hyunjin. “Go put it in the safe in my office. Then will you go and get Seungmin from downstairs? We’re going to have a team meeting in the kitchen.”

Hyunjin glanced at Felix, and then nodded. “You got it,” he said.

——

When they had first moved into this building, Jeongin had felt like the apartment on the fourth floor was the absolute height of luxury. Until then, he had never had a bedroom of his own, never had any space that wasn’t shared with at least Chan, if not other people. All those years of small, cramped apartments, whatever they could afford on whatever small amount of money Chan, and later Changbin, could scrape together, had meant that this apartment, with its four bedrooms that they owned outright, had felt astonishing.

They’d never quite filled it out though, all them just using it as a place to eat or sleep, and he felt that now as he watched Felix look around the open plan living and kitchen area, a little uncertain. The kitchen was the most fleshed out area, with the handful of appliances that people had bought over the years, most of it neat and clean, kept that way by silent agreement. The living room had two couches set opposite each other, both of them actually matching, bought new to replace the ones that they’d had in the old place, ones that Changbin had found on the side of the road.

The dining space, just beyond the island counter in the kitchen, had not been replaced. Truthfully, they maybe should have, but Jeongin liked it too much. The table was old, from the first apartment he and Chan had shared, the surface scratched and worn, and the chairs around it were a random collection that they’d added as needed. The latest addition, which was Jisung’s, was a somewhat nicer dark wooden chair with a light blue cushion, that didn’t at all match any of the other chairs.

“Do you all live up here?” Felix asked, looking at Chan.

“Some of us,” Chan said. “We’re pretty spread out in the building.”

“This is just the only space with enough chairs for a team meeting,” Changbin said. “I still think we ought to gut the PC room and make it a dedicated space.”

Everyone ignored this, mostly because he was right and they all knew it, but nobody wanted to be responsible for getting rid of everything inside the room. It had been difficult enough to get the pool table in there in the first place, Jeongin wasn’t sure if it would even fit through the security door they’d installed afterwards.

Luckily, there was the sound of the keypad outside and then Hyunjin and Seungmin came in, Hyunjin heading straight for his chair at the table. Seungmin stood looking at Felix for a moment or two, then at Changbin, then at Chan. When Jeongin had gone down to let him know that everything was okay, Seungmin had looked like he was a few minutes from having a full-on meltdown. Now he looked perfectly calm and collected.

“Give me it,” he said to Changbin, holding his hand out. Changbin put the USB they’d found in Felix’s pocket into his hand and as soon as it touched his skin, Seungmin snatched it away like he thought someone might take it from him.

“Right,” said Chan, smiling a little, the way he always did when Seungmin — or any of them really — was being a brat about something. “Why don’t we do some introductions and then we can maybe get started?”

“I already introduced myself,” said Hyunjin airily.

“Good job,” Chan told him. Hyunjin spluttered. “Felix, you already know Hyunjin, then. You met Changbin earlier—” Changbin, in the process of hoisting himself up to his usual seat on the edge of the counter island, waved a hand— “and Jisung.”

“Sorry about going in your socks,” Jisung said, getting a soda from the drinks fridge they had.

“That’s okay,” said Felix, very quietly.

“This is Seungmin, our tech,” Chan said, pointing at Seungmin, and then he put a hand to Jeongin’s shoulder and said, “And this is my little brother, Jeongin.”

“Hello,” said Felix. He was looking between Jeongin and Chan the way people always did when they heard they were brothers, searching for the similarities. There were none, Jeongin knew: they looked nothing alike, and by this point Jeongin even had a couple of centimetres over Chan, much to Chan’s chagrin. But it had never mattered that they weren’t biologically related, because in every single way that mattered, Chan was Jeongin’s brother.

“And there’s Minho, but he’s not here right now,” Chan said. “Okay, should we all take a seat?”

“Here, Felix,” Hyunjin said, pulling the seat out next to him. “You can sit next to me.”

Felix glanced at the others and then went tentatively over and took the seat. There was a brief beat of silence, everyone’s eyes flicking to Jisung and then away again. Because that was Jisung’s seat, the one he always sat on during their group meetings, or even just when eating, usually, and Hyunjin had, in typical fashion, very casually handed it over to the new person. Jisung, for his part, took it with his usual style, and just hoisted himself up on the counter island, feet dangling in the air, next to Changbin.

Jeongin took his seat, and Seungmin sat down next to him. He was holding the USB in his hands, turning it around and around with his fingers against the desk. “I know Minho-hyung isn’t here yet,” he said, “but I’ve got work to do. I want to find out what’s on this USB. Can we just get started?”

“He’ll be here,” Chan said patiently, as he took his seat at the head of the table. “I called him and told him that there was somebody here with a job for us.”

“Oh god,” said Hyunjin. “So he’ll be here momentarily then.”

“Quick,” Seungmin muttered. “Someone protect Felix.”

Jisung snorted. Felix, sitting next to Hyunjin, looked startled, like he wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not. Jeongin was just about to reassure him that it was mostly a joke when there was the sound of the keypad outside sliding open, the beep beep of someone putting in the code. Jeongin twisted to look behind him.

“Fuck, see,” said Hyunjin, right before the door flew open and Minho stepped inside.

Wherever he had been, he had clearly run all the way home after the phone call with Chan. He was panting, chest moving quickly, and there was a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. His eyes zeroed in on Felix in an instant, his face in that focused, cold look of anger that he wore so well. Even from across the room, with multiple people between them, the threat was obvious. Minho looked like a previously caged tiger that wasn’t sure if it was going to bother attacking or not.

Jeongin shivered a little. Only years of practice stopped him from showing any other reaction, but he still couldn’t contain everything completely. That barely leashed violence had always gotten to him, and the way Minho was breathing wasn’t helping at all either. He had to look away, for fear that he would reveal himself.

Felix clearly wasn’t having the same unfortunate reaction Jeongin was having. He looked terrified, staring at Minho with wide eyes, face pale. Out of everyone on the team, Minho looked the roughest. A consequence of his years in prison. Changbin could project an aura when he wanted to, but Minho didn’t have to try. It was in the way he moved, written in the scars across his face.

“How did he get in?” Minho demanded, almost snapping the words out, as he stalked further into the room. There was a definite stillness to the energy in the air, everyone waiting to see if Minho would make this physical or not. But he wouldn’t, Jeongin knew — he didn’t even have his gun out.

Of them all, Chan looked the most relaxed. He seemed to have read into the lack of gun what Jeongin had too. “The front door,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“And why,” said Minho, every word crisp and angry as he spoke, “was the front door unlocked?” This he directed at Changbin, who he was glaring at in a way that if looks could kill, Changbin would be six feet under.

“I don’t know,” Changbin said. He sounded exasperated rather than wary, as the energy deflated with everyone realising that Minho was going to just be angry and not actually act on the bloodlust radiating off of him. “Don’t look at me, I didn’t leave it open. Anyway, it was fine, we were on him as soon as he came in. He doesn’t even have a gun, hyung.”

“He had a big knife though,” Jeongin said, helpfully. Minho’s eyes snapped to his face. “In his bag! I found it. But it was just the kind you use for cooking.”

Minho— prowled closer to the group of them around the table, the only word Jeongin could use to describe the way he moved. “You shouldn’t be touching any knives, no matter how big or small, baby boy,” he said.

Jeongin pouted a little at him, which went thoroughly ignored.

Minho came to a stop at the edge of the table opposite Felix, looking down at him. Hyunjin, sitting between them, had brought one leg up and was resting his chin against his knee. Felix glanced at him, then at Minho, and was clearly trying to be as relaxed as Hyunjin now was, but he couldn’t manage it. “Now who the fuck is this,” Minho said.

“This is Felix,” Chan said. “And you don’t need to scare him so much, why don’t you sit down.”

“No,” said Minho, but he did step back away from the table, moving so he was standing, solid and firm, between Jeongin and Seungmin’s seats. He wasn’t close enough for Jeongin to actually feel but his presence there felt like a physical touch somehow, in Jeongin’s mind. Or maybe the ghost of one — he wanted Minho to reach out and put a hand against his shoulder, as firm and solid as his stance.

“Right,” said Chan. “Like I mentioned, Felix has a job that he’d like to hire us for.”

“You told me on the phone that he wants us to rob the Magpie,” Minho said.

That statement sent a ripple through the room. Jisung stopped kicking his feet back and forth. Hyunjin sat up very straight, looking at Felix askance. Jeongin, for his part, just felt mostly confused. How many times had Chan talked about doing just that over the years, of getting revenge for the older brother that Jeongin had never met, only to realise in the end that it was impossible.

“I did tell you that,” said Chan. “That’s the job.”

“And I told you that it’s impossible,” Minho said, almost a snap. “We’ve been through this before, hyung.”

“We’ve never had actual information we can use before,” Chan said.

Jeongin looked at him, carefully, trying to work out if this was just— the same thing it had always been, in the past. Chan got like this sometimes, fixated on vengeance, letting it get in the way of actual logic. He had had this conversation before, with Jeongin, and Minho, and with Changbin more than Jeongin even knew, because they would have it in furious whispers when he was sleeping in the same room. But Chan, right now, just looked perfectly calm and unruffled. Confident. Jeongin didn’t know if he liked that.

“What kind of information?” Jisung asked, his feet swinging a little again.

Chan motioned to the USB in Seungmin’s hands, then to Felix. “Felix here used to work for Lee Jaerim.”

Jeongin didn’t even need to look behind himself to know that that information had sent Minho’s threat level rocketing through the roof. He could feel the tension radiating from him, and he could see that Changbin was watching him carefully. Jeongin wanted to reach around and touch him but he didn’t quite dare.

“He’s willing to give us the information we need in exchange for us doing the job,” Chan added, still sounding calm, like he hadn’t noticed Minho almost having an aneurysm to the side.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me, hyung,” said Minho. He sounded a little bit like he thought this was some kind of hidden camera prank. “This is an obvious set up. He works for the Magpie.”

Felix shifted in his seat. He looked very small, in his oversized hoodie, and when he spoke, his voice was soft but not unsteady. “I used to. I left six months ago. I left after he—” He stumbled here, breaking off for a second before he could continue. There was something a little more unsteady in his voice when he said, “I left after he had my younger sister killed.”

The fact that Chan didn’t react to that let Jeongin know that he already knew about it. It did, he felt, go somewhere to explain why Chan and Changbin had heard Felix out in the first place, and he saw that the rest of the room got it too. They all knew the story.

“Because of something you did?” Jisung asked.

Felix shook his head. “I don’t know why,” he said. “She found out something she shouldn’t have, maybe. He wasn’t about to explain himself to me. He doesn’t explain himself to anyone.”

“Why did you work for him in the first place?” Minho asked. His voice was cold as ice and brittle with it. It was, however, something of a valid question, in Jeongin’s opinion. It was very much common knowledge throughout their city that Lee Jaerim, to put it mildly, sucked. Even the people who worked with him on business stuff didn’t like him.

“Why does anyone work for someone else?” Felix asked. His voice was— bleak, and he was no longer looking at any of them. He was looking at the table, like he was seeing something in the groove of the wood that nobody else could. “Survival.”

It made sense, in a way; Jeongin had never had to worry about that, from the moment Chan started to look after him. He’d had plenty of other worries but it had been Chan who had dirtied his hands in the name of eking out a living. The rest of them, though— they worked for Chan because they believed in what he did, believed in what he stood for. At least, Jeongin had always hoped so — he knew that was the case for Changbin, the first of them to sign up, and he knew that was why Hyunjin had first started picking up jobs, even though he hadn’t needed to. He’d never been fully sure about why Minho chose to continue to stay with them, though.

“So, what is the job, then?” Hyunjin asked. “Like, yes, rob the sick bastard, but what, specifically?”

Chan motioned at Felix, who looked back at him a little unsure. “Blackbird’s,” he said. “I want you to clear it out as best as you can, as much as you can.” Behind Jeongin, Minho cursed under his breath. “And like, uh, Chris-nim said, I have information that will let you pull it off, if you agree to do it.”

“What information do you actually have for us?” Jisung asked, his voice very curious.

“I have the blueprints for the gambling hall,” Felix said. “Every level, including the upper offices where the safes are held. I have the schematics for his security system, but you might not need them, because I’ll be able to get you past it. I basically built the entire thing myself.”

Even as seemingly little as this was, it was far more than they previously had. Chan had only ever managed to get his hands on the most basic blueprint of Blackbird’s, a bad copy of something that had been filed with city hall, the only thing that was available anywhere. It was terrible quality, and showed just the public area of the main floor, and had nothing about the rest of the building.

“Wait,” Seungmin said. He’d sat up a little in his seat at the last thing Felix had said. “You built his security system?”

Felix nodded. Minho said, “And what if he changed it since you left.”

“He probably won’t have,” said Felix. “I may have, uh. Built in some security features that only I’m able to change or switch off. But even if he has changed it, I should still be able to get into it. None of the guys he had working with him were particularly good.” He sounded like he was on more solid ground here, now that he was talking about computers, and the certainty in his voice, the confidence in his skills, made it hard for Jeongin to— not believe him, honestly.

“I also know where his personal vault is held,” Felix added, like this was just a completely normal thing to say and not fucking wild. “It’s where he keeps most of the money that they take in from the gambling hall. I didn’t mention it first because it’d be a higher risk trying to hit it but— I can get you in there, too.”

This led to a much longer silence, everyone trying their best to absorb it. Chan looked at Minho and asked, “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Minho asked scathingly. “I think it’s something of a fool’s errand and I trust this kid as far as I can throw him.”

“That’s probably pretty far,” said Jisung, mock-thoughtfully. “Since he’s so small.” Minho snarled something, barely more than an incoherent growl. Jeongin had to fight down another shiver at the sound of it. Jisung, safe across the table, just grinned.

Chan cleared his throat pointedly. “What do you think about being able to pull it off, though?” he asked Minho, very patiently.

Jeongin turned to look at Minho, who was looking at Chan like Chan was the bane of his very existence. “I mean, sure,” he said. If his tone had a physical form, it would be sharp enough to cut steel. “Sure, it’s probably doable, because all jobs are theoretically fucking doable, hyung. If what he’s saying is right, if he really has the full blueprints for Blackbird’s, and he can get us past the security, and so on and yadah yadah, then fine, sure, we could probably pull off some kind of job. But would it be worth it?”

“Wouldn’t the money make it worth it?” Jisung asked.

“No,” said Changbin. “Not if the Magpie chooses to retaliate.” He looked over Jeongin’s shoulder at Minho, a grim expression on his face.

“There’s— more than just money, in his vault,” Felix said tentatively. “He keeps most of his paperwork there, not at— at the office he has in his house. There’s definitely stuff in there you could use as blackmail material. Having that should ensure he doesn’t retaliate. Some of it is— pretty damning.”

Jisung muttered, “Mutually assured destruction, if you will.”

“It might be worth hitting the vault more than Blackbird’s to be honest,” said Seungmin.

“We could just hit both,” Hyunjin said, looking towards Minho. “Like, could we do that?”

Jeongin wasn’t prepared for Minho leaning in between him and Seungmin, one hand braced suddenly against the table. His body was suddenly very close, his side brushing against Jeongin’s shoulder. He was so warm. The way he was standing, the way he was leaning his weight against the table, meant that the muscles in that arm stood out in awful clarity. Jeongin wanted him to—

“Hyung,” said Minho, his voice not calm but deadly serious. “If this kid’s information is correct and true, and if we really can get into these places and if we can ensure that the Magpie doesn’t just murder us in response, then yes, I can come up with some kind of a plan. But we’ll have no guarantee that it’ll work.”

“We never have any guarantee it’ll work,” Chan pointed out. “Not for any job we pull.”

He still sounded very calm. Jeongin would have expected him to sound excited, like he was anticipating something — or for him to really be pushing the job, pushing them to do it. But instead Chan really had just taken a step back and let them all hash it out as best they could. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen as influencing them. Perhaps, Jeongin thought, a little wryly, only mostly joking, this was what growing up was like.

Minho stood back up, taking his body heat with him. Jeongin tried to not miss it and didn’t quite succeed. It was always so hard to get Minho to be so close to him. “It’ll need everyone on the job, though,” Minho said. He sounded thoughtful, like his brain was already starting to put the plan together. “And it’ll depend on if we want to hit one of the options or both. To be honest, we’ll need to hit that vault in any case. If this kid is right, and there’s anything in there that we can use, we’ll fucking need it.”

Chan finally sat forward on his chair, arms folded against the table. “How about this,” he said, “Seungmin needs to check the USB anyway. Once we know what we’re working with there, you can start putting together something concrete, and if we think it’ll work in the end, we’ll do the job. And if at any point it seems like it won’t work, we can simply pull the plug.”

Everyone looked at Minho, Jeongin and Seungmin twisted in their seats like mirror opposites. It was Minho’s call to make here, since he was the one who always put together the jobs. If he didn’t want to take on the work, it would either fall to someone else to try to figure it out, or they’d have to shelve it. Minho looked at Chan, then at the rest of them, and then back to Chan. “Fine,” he said, eventually. “That sounds okay to me.”

Jeongin looked at Felix, who didn’t look overly happy at the lack of guarantee but mostly just looked— relieved, like he hadn’t really had any hope of them taking the job in the first place. He clearly was desperate to do it. He was not drawing any attention to himself, either, sitting in his chair by Hyunjin’s side. “What about Felix?” Jeongin asked. “Is he going to stay with us?” They had never had a client stay with them before, but then they’d never had a client actually come to the house before either. Felix was proving to be something of an unusual case all around.

“No,” said Minho instantly.

“He’s very welcome to stay with us, if he has nowhere else he needs to be,” Chan said. This, Jeongin thought, was fairly obviously the case. Felix looked like he had not had access to basic living arrangements like food or a bed or a shower in quite some time.

Felix, however, looked horrified by this idea. “No, no,” he said in a rush. “I don’t need to stay here! It’s fine, I’m absolutely fine!”

“So where are you going to go then?” Seungmin asked doubtfully.

“I’ll—” Felix stopped, looking a little sheepish. He did not seem to have prepared a lie in advance and couldn’t come up with one on the fly. “Um. I’ll figure out somewhere to sleep?”

“Like under a bridge,” Hyunjin said, very flat, very unimpressed. Felix gave him a little sideways look which very obviously said that he was absolutely planning something along those lines. Hyunjin rolled his eyes. “Yeah, no. No way. You’ll stay here.”

“Where are we going to put him, though?” Changbin asked. He was frowning, but it was in the way where he was clearly already trying to figure out the solution, his brain turning naturally to the question of domestic matters. This was where Changbin excelled — almost everyone tended to put team matters such as this in his hands and ask him to figure it out. “There’s that little room next to your office, hyung, but it’s kind of—”

“Depressing,” Jeongin said. The thought of putting someone in there for any length of time made him feel like he was going to break out in hives. He’d rather give up his own bed than let a guest sleep there.

“He could just sleep on the couch,” suggested Jisung.

“I don’t want to put anyone out,” Felix said, sounding a little desperate. “I can just take the couch.”

“Hyung,” said Minho. He, too, sounded desperate, in a very different way to Felix.

“He can’t sleep on the couch or in that little room,” Chan said, firmly. The mere idea of it clearly went against his instincts of being a good host. It was funny to see it happen, because they never had anyone here who wasn't literally on the team. “Perhaps a couple people could double up. Changbin, if you—”

“It’s fine,” interrupted Hyunjin. “He can stay with me.”

The silence that filled the room at that announcement was somehow more shocked than it had been at the idea of robbing Lee Jaerim. Changbin looked like he thought he was hearing things, and was glancing at the others as if trying to see whether they’d heard it too; Jisung looked like he’d just been slapped.

“What?” said Chan, after a long stretch of quiet.

“He can stay with me,” Hyunjin repeated. He was using that tone he used when he thought everyone around him was being needlessly dramatic about something, which never failed to annoy everyone in the room because of all people, Hyunjin had no right to call someone else dramatic. “I don’t mind. So long as Felix doesn’t mind sharing with me.”

Everyone’s eyes swivelled to Felix, who was blushing and looked the most uncomfortable he had in this entire conversation. “I don’t mind, but Hyunjin-sshi, really, it’s—”

“See?” said Hyunjin, before Felix could finish. “He’ll stay with me. Is the meeting finished? Good.” He stood, rising gracefully to his feet, and then tugged Felix up by the upper arm. Felix got to his feet looking very confused about what was going on. “Come on, you can take a shower while nobody else is using the bathroom.”

Felix scooped his backpack up from where it was resting against his chair and let Hyunjin lead him into the hallway, the sound of Hyunjin’s bedroom door clicking shut shortly after.

Seungmin stood too. “I’m going to go check out this USB,” he said, already halfway to the door. Jisung, who usually raced out after team meetings too, was still sitting on the counter, staring in the direction of the hallway, a little frown on his face.

As soon as the apartment door swung shut after Seungmin, Minho took his place at the table. Again, that sense of— proximity. Jeongin felt hyper aware of his body in a way he simply had not been when it was Seungmin sitting there. “Hyung,” Minho said, very intently, leaning almost into Jeongin’s space in his attempt at getting Chan to listen to him. “This is a bad idea.”

Chan sighed. “Minho, he has nowhere else to go.”

Minho’s nervous energy was so high that he started tapping his fingers against the table. Jeongin did not think he’d seen him do that in literal years. “I know that,” he said tersely. “I see that. I’d suggest we put him up in a hotel but— I don’t want him out of my sight now he knows where we live. And if Hyunjin is willing to take that risk, then it’s on his head, I guess. I’m just registering my deep objection to everything.”

It was not the first time Minho had registered a deep objection to something, and not the first time Chan had simply ignored it and made a different call. Minho had hated it when Jisung joined too, and he’d gotten over it; he’d get over it with Felix, too, Jeongin thought. He wasn’t sure why, but he liked Felix. There was something about his shyness in the face of them all that made Jeongin inclined to like him. He got a good feeling from him, which he would never be able to explain to the others. If he tried, they would make fun of him, or would tell him that his naivete was getting the better of him. Even Minho wouldn’t take it seriously.

They were too convinced of Jeongin’s inherent kindness, to be honest. They saw the way he was friendly to every new face that Chan introduced to their group and assumed that Jeongin was just like that. He hadn't had a chance to explain that wasn’t— exactly true.

“How do we know this isn’t a trap and he doesn’t still work for that bastard?” Minho asked, his jaw tense, his words clearly coming through almost-gritted teeth.

“Well, if he did still work for Lee Jaerim,” Jeongin said, “then why would they bother sending someone who looks like they haven’t eaten a proper meal in six months to hire us for an impossible job we might not even take, instead of just like, blowing us up?”

He thought this was a very reasonable and sensible question. Chan and Changbin both flinched. Jisung was still not paying attention to any of them. Minho made a noise that Jeongin couldn’t place, and then looked at Jeongin with an expression just a couple of steps off from a glare. He never glared at Jeongin, not anymore, but this was close enough. “Do not say things like that, baby boy,” he said, clearly distressed at the thought.

“But I’m right though, aren’t I?” Jeongin insisted.

“Right or not, it’s a pointless thought exercise,” Chan said. “Seungmin is going to look at the USB. Once he’s done with that, he’ll let us know. Okay, Minho?”

There was a long moment before Minho nodded. He didn’t say anything else, didn’t look at any of them, as he too got to his feet and then left the apartment. Jeongin wasn’t sure where he was going — to his room, perhaps, or maybe back to patrolling. Perhaps to train, to work off some of that energy buzzing inside him. Chan sighed.

“To be honest,” Changbin said, “I think that went quite well.”

——

Originally, Seungmin’s workshop had been the abandoned remnants of a convenience store. The large windows out the front had already been bricked up carefully to keep people out, but the inside just looked like what it was: a gutted store. They’d emptied it out over the course of a week, everything but the freezers which Seungmin had taken the doors off to use as shelving units, and then Seungmin had slowly but surely taken over the entire space. What had once been the back storage room had become his bedroom, a small space barely big enough for his bed, along with the attached employee bathroom.

The workshop itself was a large, open space, the flooring of the store pulled up so that it was the bare concrete that had been underneath. A large part of the room was taken up by his worktable, a huge wooden thing where he worked on the projects that needed manual labour. The others worked here too, at the varied stools they’d collected over the years to be a part of it. Along the back wall he had his computer, four monitors strung up to it. He was working on a fake ID for Felix, listening to music quietly, when he saw Felix himself coming down the stairs on the camera feed playing on the closest monitor. He watched as Felix came to the heavy door of the workshop, hesitated, and then, remarkably, knocked.

Seungmin wasn’t used to people knocking on his workshop door. “Come in,” he called, and then turned in his chair to watch Felix step into the room. The shower had done Felix some good — even just washing his hair meant that he looked younger, less like some kind of helpless waif, although the narrowness of his face, the hollow areas under his cheeks, meant he still very much looked like that. He’d changed his clothes, too, wearing some checked pyjama pants that clearly belonged to Hyunjin, because they’d been rolled up a couple of times at the bottom, and a white t-shirt that was much too big.

Felix’s gaze travelled across all the machinery, somewhat clinical, but his eyes lit up a little when he took in Seungmin’s computer setup. Seungmin watched him silently, until their eyes met and Felix smiled and said, “Hello, it was Seungmin, right?”

Seungmin nodded. “Hello, Yongbok,” he said.

Felix went white in an instant. The panic was clear on his face, and Seungmin thought for a moment that he was simply going to turn tail and run away. But then Felix took a deep breath, obviously pushing down his first reaction, and he said, stutteringly, “I— how did you—”

Seungmin turned back to his computer, turned off his music, and then shut off his monitors. When he turned back Felix was still standing in the same spot, without moving. Seungmin did think better of him for not having run away. He was glad too that Felix hadn’t immediately attacked him. It seemed to bode well for the conversation as a whole.

“Don’t worry,” Seungmin said. He kept his tone perfectly conversational, like it wasn’t a big deal. “Your online footprint is about as small as anyone’s could be. There isn’t even a photo logged on your old schools’ databases, it’s all been wiped. Your father has been very thorough in his security.” When Felix just kept staring at him, he added, “I didn’t think you recognised me. You, however, have a very distinctive face. Don’t you remember? We were in middle school together.”

Felix gave him an obviously bewildered look. Seungmin wasn’t overly surprised by that — it had been a while since middle school for both of them, and at the time it had been very obvious how little attention Felix had been giving the rest of them. Some of the other boys had called him stuck up for it, thought he was acting better than the rest of them because of his father, but Seungmin had never believed that was the case. There had been something in Felix’s face even then, something that Seungmin had recognised earlier, when he had spoken about the man who had apparently been sent to kill him — something haunted, something hunted.

“Oh,” Felix eventually said slowly. “Yes, I— Kim Seungmin? Kim Seungmin, right? You were in my homeroom class. First year?”

“Second year,” Seungmin corrected. “I figured you wouldn’t remember me. You didn’t really pay much attention to the rest of us.”

Felix flushed, even though Seungmin had said it without bite, without any kind of judgement. If nothing else, middle school was over half a decade ago, and Seungmin had gone through a lifetime since then. He didn’t care if Felix hadn’t been particularly friendly at the time. Seungmin wasn’t particularly friendly now.

“Sorry,” Felix said. “I— I still should have recognised you, maybe.”

He didn’t look happy that Seungmin knew who he was, and Seungmin couldn’t blame him. If his plan had hinged on them not recognising his true identity, then it was already scuppered. Seungmin watched him, a little warily but not too concerned, truthfully. It was not that he thought he could take Felix on in a fight, it was that he knew Felix had no weapon and Seungmin could bring the others running at the push of a button. But he did not think Felix likely to attack him. It would expose him more than anything else could.

“It makes sense that you didn’t,” Seungmin said. Probably nobody expected their old middle school classmate to show up in the middle of a den of criminals.

“You didn’t say anything,” Felix said tentatively, looking at Seungmin through his lashes, face tilted down. Unsure. “You didn’t tell them who I was.”

“No,” agreed Seungmin. “I didn’t.”

“Why?” Felix whispered.

Seungmin watched him for a long few moments. “Maybe I thought you were telling the truth,” he said. “Were you? Was what you told Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung true? Apart from how you stepped around your real identity, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Felix. After a moment of hesitation, he motioned to one of the stools around the workbench. Seungmin nodded so Felix sat, his hands held together in front of him. He was almost wringing them, an obvious nervous gesture. “I worked for him. I want you guys to steal everything you possibly can from him. That’s the truth.”

“And your sister?” Seungmin asked. “Was that true?”

He knew why Changbin had asked him to look into the story, to check on what Felix was saying. This story of a sister dead at the hands of the Magpie was a little too perfect, a little too dovetailed into what had happened to Chan. But it was the fact that it was too perfect that made Seungmin inclined to believe it, somehow. After all, the youngest Lee child had died — it had been in the news, the story had been one of a tragic hit and run accident near her after school academy. It was not a lie that she had died.

“It wasn’t a hit and run,” Felix said. His voice sounded particularly grim when he said it, and he didn’t seem like he was going to go into any further details about it. Something about that reluctance, the way Felix wasn’t giving him a story, wasn’t spinning some tale of woe and misery, made Seungmin— believe him more.

Maybe it was more than that, though. He could remember the Felix of middle school. Every time the question of the Magpie came up among them, Seungmin would remember that miserable looking kid who had come to school each day and answered the teachers’ questions in a quiet voice. The one who had not had any friends. The one who, when they had changed for gym class, would have new bruises on his body. He’d wondered how that kid was growing up. Now, apparently, he stood in front of Seungmin — small, as delicate in his features as he had been when he was thirteen, though decidedly more worn. Felix just looked tired, like exhaustion was a part of his bone marrow at this point.

It was probably naive of Seungmin— and he was so rarely naive. But he knew that exhaustion, had lived with it himself, in those long few months after his father’s arrest and suicide, through the destruction of his entire life as he had known it. A story could be faked, a tale woven; a con man could tell Seungmin exactly what he wanted to hear. But tiredness like that couldn’t be faked.

“So your father killed your sister, his daughter,” Seungmin said, watching Felix’s face carefully, taking in the little flinch at the words, “and now you want us to help you get your revenge?”

“Yes,” said Felix.

“Okay,” said Seungmin. “Of course, it’s not like you said, is it? You didn’t work for him as part of his team or whatever. You worked for him as his heir. Is that the real reason you have whatever is on that USB?”

Felix nodded. “I wasn’t lying about what’s on it,” he said. “It’s got the blueprints, and some other stuff. Some financial records. It’s not a lot, to be honest, just what I needed to do my work for him. It’s what I had on me, the day I— I left.”

“Right,” said Seungmin. “Speaking of that USB.”

He rolled his desk chair over to the corner of the room nearest his bedroom door, where he had set up an old computer on a desk that was almost falling apart. This particular computer usually stayed in storage, but he’d dug it out the moment he’d ascertained that he was going to be responsible for checking this USB, and set it up. The computer was about fifteen years old, and did not even have the capability to connect to WiFi. He kept it as far away from ethernet cables as possible like he was afraid the internet could jump into it that way. It had taken ten minutes to start up.

“Wow,” said Felix, climbing off his stool and coming over to the computer. “How old is that thing?”

“Now that is a question,” Seungmin said dryly. “That’s not important. What’s important is this.”

He wiggled the mouse and the screen flickered to life. He had spent most of the time that Felix was showering and changing his clothes and whatever else he had been up to upstairs trying to get into this USB. He’d gone into it thinking it shouldn’t be too hard — he had programs to figure out encryption on files, and he’d been given seemingly impossible tasks in the past that he’d been able to crack. His record was something taking him fifteen minutes to break into, and that had been kind of embarrassing at the time. He’d been trying for almost an hour to get into Felix’s USB and nothing seemed to be working.

“Yeah,” said Felix, looking at the folder open on the screen. “That’s why I came down, I figured you might need my help getting into it.”

“I don’t need your help,” Seungmin said. “At this point, I need your mercy. How the hell did you manage this?”

Felix shrugged. The most galling part of it was that he didn’t even look like he was particularly proud of it. If Seungmin had built something that the best in the industry couldn’t get into, he’d ride that smugness for the rest of his life. “Here,” he said. “I’ll let you in.”

He bent over the computer and started typing. Seungmin watched him and just about managed to keep up. If Felix was self-taught like Seungmin was, then he’d dedicated himself to this line of work much more fully than Seungmin ever had — but then Seungmin had been forced to spread himself out as much as he could without sacrificing the quality of his work. Techs who could really only do one thing were functionally useless, unless they were working for one of the bigger gangs. That probably explained why Felix had had the leisure to get this good at it.

“There,” said Felix, stepping back and motioning to the monitor, where the folder was now showing a short list of files. “That’s everything.”

Seungmin looked at the folder, read the file names in a quick scan. None of the files were named anything that made sense, at least not if Felix was right about what they were. But that was something Seungmin would have done, too, so he didn’t think much of it. He’d have to look through them one at a time to check everything was right. “Okay,” he said, already settling in front of the screen. “You can go now.”

Felix looked a little surprised at that — perhaps at his bluntness, which was something that people didn’t always like about Seungmin. People expected a certain level of antisocial behaviour from the techs in this industry but Seungmin tended to cross the line. It had caused problems in his first team, before he had proven himself, but here everyone had mostly just shrugged over it. It was probably lucky that Minho had already been working for them before Seungmin had arrived and sometimes, compared to Minho, Seungmin was positively bubbly.

But Felix just nodded after a moment or two and then turned to the door. Seungmin listened to his footsteps get further away, the sound echoing in the room. He wasn’t surprised when they stopped again, and Felix said, “Seungmin.”

Seungmin looked at him over his shoulder. Felix was by the door, his fingers twisted together. “Will you really not tell the others?” he asked. “About who I really am?”

Seungmin just kept watching him, keeping his expression cool and detached. Inside, he felt like he was going mad between a rock and a hard place. But the truth of the matter was that he simply didn’t want to tell them about Felix, because he thought— no. He knew, at worst, they’d kill him. At best, they’d throw him out, and Felix would probably die anyway, one way or another; if nothing else got him, the winter would. And Seungmin would be responsible for that, in a way, enough so that he could not live with it on his conscience.

Because in the end, he believed Felix. Which meant that if Felix paid the ultimate price, it would be for something he’d had no control over. Felix had not asked to be the Magpie’s son. It would be nothing more than the early death of an innocent, who’d endured so much violence already in his short life.

No, Seungmin was many things, but he could not condemn Felix to death.

“I really won’t tell them,” Seungmin said. “Not unless I have to.”

Felix nodded again. “Thank you,” he whispered. Seungmin thought about telling him to not bother but Felix had already slipped out of the workroom, the metal door clanging shut after him. Seungmin watched the door for a long few seconds, hoping that he was making the right decision, something that wouldn’t come back to bite him down the line. If he was wrong about this, he was risking more than his own life.

Eventually he sighed and turned back to the computer and opened up the first file. Holy shit, he thought, as the pictures unfolded on the screen. It really is the fucking blueprints.

——

Seungmin had barely stepped into Chan’s office before Minho asked, “Was he telling the truth?”

Seungmin stopped just inside the doorway and gave him a cool little look. In the interest of staving off one of their fights, Chan said, “Why don’t you let Seungmin come in and he’ll tell us.”

Minho huffed but settled down against the back of the couch. He had come in here as soon as Chan had texted him, even though a specific time had been given for the meeting. Chan had been a little worried that Minho had gone off prowling the streets after he’d left the team meeting earlier but apparently not. Instead he had spent the last ten minutes sitting on the couch like a dark stormcloud, doing nothing but watching the door. He had seemed to take Changbin being the next one to arrive as a personal affront from Seungmin.

Seungmin came in and let the door swing shut behind him. Changbin had taken his usual position leaning against the back wall, so Seungmin took the chair opposite the desk, rather than sit on the couch next to Minho. Chan kind of expected him to make a show of getting settled, just to drag it out, but Seungmin sat down and said, “He was telling the truth about what was on the USB, yes. It’s got the blueprints for Blackbird’s on it and as far as I can tell, they’re both unredacted and accurate.”

There was a short silence, Chan absorbing that. He could feel it, inside him, the rising excitement. He had spent the past few hours trying very hard to not let it get the better of him, so he could keep his mind focused on the facts. How many times had he let his emotions run away with him, only to feel it so much harder when his pie in the sky dreams crumbled around him? It did not matter that this was the best information they’d had in years, or ever. He was too old to let it go off the rails.

“It includes every floor?” Changbin asked.

“Every floor,” Seungmin confirmed. “All the back passages, too, and the upstairs offices, including which one is the Magpie’s office in the building.”

“Christ,” said Chan. He felt a little faint at the thought of it. “No wonder someone got sent to kill him, walking around with that in his pocket.”

“Yes,” said Seungmin, looking a little thoughtful. “If the Magpie knew he had this on him, then he’s been wandering around with a target on his back.”

“And now we have it,” Chan said. “We have it, which means we can do the job. Right,” he added to Minho. “Do you think we can do it?”

Minho looked like he was one step away from rolling his eyes directly in Chan’s face. “Let me put together that fucking plan first,” he said. “Then I’ll let you know.”

“If he was telling the truth about designing their computer systems,” Seungmin said, “then we’re going to need his help on this job, because even with the basic schematics he has on the USB to study from, I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to get past his security.”

Chan blinked at him. Minho said, a little scathing, “You won’t be able to get past his security? Aren’t you supposed to be the best?”

“I am the best,” Seungmin snapped. “Ask any person in this stupid city and they’ll tell you that, and yet I still had to get him to let me in to this USB. I couldn’t get into it myself.”

“What?” said Changbin. “Like, you couldn’t guess his password or something?”

Seungmin gave Changbin a nasty look, like he wanted Changbin to drop dead and he was going to do it through his eyes as best as he could. “I will end you,” he said, very darkly. “You don’t have the right to talk to me after you almost plugged the damn thing into Chan-hyung’s computer.”

“Would it make you happy if I went and knelt in the corner with my arms above my head in supplication?” Changbin asked, the grin obvious in his voice.

“It depends,” Seungmin said. “Would it make the lesson stick to your teflon brain?”

“Alright, alright,” Chan said. “Calm down.” Seungmin did settle, but he was still squinting at Changbin, who, when Chan glanced over his shoulder at him, was smiling. Chan shot him a quick warning look. Nothing good ever came from baiting Seungmin; he could get belligerent or simply refuse to work if pushed too far. They needed him, right now, perhaps more than they ever had.

“I don’t like that we’ll have to rely on him to get us past his own systems,” Minho said.

“I don’t particularly like it either,” said Seungmin. “But we don’t really have much of a choice in the matter, if we want to do this.”

That, Chan thought, was the main sticking point for Minho. He liked to have other options, liked to have exits available at every point. Chan thought he probably had an exit planned for this team, too— or perhaps planned was too strong of a word. He had no doubt that Minho had an idea of what he would do if anything ever went wrong here. That was just the kind of person he was.

“Fine,” said Minho. “Print all the stuff off for me so I can look through it and I’ll come up with something. It’s going to take a few days, though, hyung. Maybe more. I’ll need time to figure it all out, and I want to talk to that kid about what else he can give us.”

Chan nodded. To Seungmin, he said, “I assume you’re running some kind of background check on Felix.”

He said it with a smile, because Seungmin did background checks on everything. He’d almost certainly done them on this team before agreeing to join, although Chan didn’t know what exactly he would have found at the time, considering both Jeongin and Hyunjin had fallen off any kind of official radar at very young ages. The only reason Chan had not wiped himself off was because he had known he’d need a trail for his future business. It was hard to get a bank account when the government thought you were likely dead.

Seungmin, however, blinked for a moment and then said, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking into him. Right now everything he told us checks out.”

Chan nodded again. “Okay,” he said. “You can go, if you want. Once Minho has a plan, I’ll let you know what we need from you.”

Seungmin got to his feet. Changbin pushed himself off from the wall and said, “If you’re going down to the workshop, I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind? I want to check out what’s on the USB myself.”

Seungmin narrowed his eyes at him but said, “Yes, you can come down. I’ll try to teach you about computer security again.”

They disappeared out the door together. Chan hoped that Changbin didn’t actually piss Seungmin off, like he seemed to be determined to do tonight. He looked at Minho and said, “I’m gonna lock up. Sorry to dump more work on you, by the way.”

Minho did roll his eyes at that, as he got up from the couch and headed to the door. “Hyung,” he said. “I’d be more surprised if you didn’t give me more work.”

Chan winced; that was fair. He followed Minho to the door, shut and locked it after them. “I know,” he said, starting to lead them down the corridor to the PC room. “But you have to admit, you’re the best at it. And I couldn’t give it to Seungmin, he’d revolt at this point.”

“Yes, well,” said Minho. He sounded very sardonic, as they stepped into the PC room, all the lights off and everything powered down. “There’s a reason I do this work and the others are the ones going into the field, isn’t there.”

Chan didn’t wince but it was only through long practice at not doing so. Yes, there was a reason for that, a reason they’d seized on Minho’s job planning skills as soon as they realised he possessed them, using them more than they used the other, more specialised skills they’d originally hired him for. There just wasn’t much call for a pile of dead bodies on most jobs, as it turned out.

The stairwell was quiet, the overhead lights humming. Chan was a little surprised to find that, rather than head downstairs to his room, Minho turned to come upstairs with him. Chan looked at him, an eyebrow raised — it was, after all, getting very close to the time that Minho usually disappeared into his room, if not slept — and Minho said, “I want to search his bag myself.”

It would be pointless to stop him — if nothing else, stopping this felt a little unfair to Minho, who really was having to deal with so much by having Felix stay with them in the first place. Chan had already had to ride roughshod over Minho’s boundaries, and he really didn’t want to have to keep doing it, when the task felt relatively harmless. They’d already thoroughly violated Felix’s privacy anyway.

The apartment was very quiet, very still. No doubt Jeongin was already asleep. In his early teens, Jeongin had kept the latest hours of them all, coming up to bed in the early hours of the morning. That had changed, later, as he got older. Now he went to sleep before any of them, and Chan was sometimes relieved by that, to know, now, exactly where Jeongin was during the night. That felt a little wrong of him sometimes, though, considering he knew exactly what the instigating event had been.

He half expected Minho to bang on Hyunjin’s door but instead he very politely knocked. Chan was not sure if this was because he wanted to avoid disturbing Jeongin, whose room was next door, or because he had decided to be nice to Hyunjin, who sometimes got a little skittish about people coming to his room at night. In either case, he knocked and then waited the few seconds it took for Hyunjin to open the door with something like a modicum of patience.

Hyunjin did not look upset about finding them both outside his door, but he didn’t look particularly impressed either. “What,” he said in greeting. “It’s past Felix’s bedtime.”

“Hyunjin-sshi,” they heard Felix say from somewhere in the room.

“I want to search his bag,” Minho said. “Can I come in?”

“Not if you’re going to insist on wearing your shoes,” said Hyunjin, motioning to where Minho was still wearing his sneakers. This was an ongoing feud between them: Minho refused to take off his shoes anywhere other than his bedroom — and they were having to assume he took them off there, since nobody had ever been inside his room — and it drove Hyunjin up the wall that he kept wearing them inside the apartment too. Minho’s only capulation to the fight had been to buy what Changbin referred to as his house sneakers.

“Fine,” said Minho, his jaw rather more tense now. “Then bring his fucking backpack out here and I’ll do it in the kitchen.”

Hyunjin opened his mouth, probably to deny the request, but the door swung open a little further and Felix sidled past him out into the hallway, holding his backpack in his arms. “Here,” he said, holding it out to Minho. “You can look, I don’t mind.”

It was very clear that no matter what Felix did, Minho was going to treat it as suspicious. If he’d refused to hand it over, that would have been a disaster, but his willingness seemed to strike Minho as very odd. He took it from Felix’s hands and then strode purposefully off to the kitchen.

The rest of them trailed after him, Hyunjin with his arm slung around Felix’s shoulders. Seeing that easy touch made Chan’s brain feel a little wobbly. Felix looked very small indeed tucked under Hyunjin’s arm like that, although maybe that was just because Hyunjin had dressed Felix in his clothes and they were not the same size. Hyunjin often went slightly too large with what he wore, and on Felix right now it looked a little like a kid playing dress up in his dad’s clothing.

In the kitchen, Minho already had the backpack open and was pulling things out one at a time. Each piece of clothing he turned inside out, pressed his fingers against the seams like he thought some absolutely miniscule listening device could be sewn into them, and then dumped it on the table next to him. He was not being careful with any of it, but nobody said anything about it.

If this was the grand sum of Felix’s possessions, it was a particularly paltry amount. Chan and Jeongin had had more to their name when they’d ran away from the group home, and they’d had basically nothing. If any of the clothing Minho was currently off-loading had been bought new, it had been worn enough that it didn’t look like it anymore. One of the t-shirts had a hole near the bottom hem that Chan could probably fit two fingers through. Most of it needed to be cleaned, too.

Minho emptied out the backpack and then turned to Felix. He was too far away to loom but the effect was the same, and Chan watched Felix lean a little into Hyunjin’s side. It didn’t help that the scars on Minho’s face gave him a sort of permanent snarl, puckering and tugging at one half of his mouth. Chan had grown accustomed to it, could read around how the scarring warped Minho’s features, but a newcomer wouldn’t be able to tell. “Where’s your phone?” Minho demanded.

“I don’t have one,” said Felix. “That’s everything.”

Minho squinted at him, then looked back at the clothing. Felix’s wallet, as battered as the rest of the stuff, lay on top of it. Minho opened it up and flicked through it, but he didn’t seem to care much about it, perhaps seeing, like Chan could see even from near the hallway entrance, that it was already held together by tape that Felix had found somewhere.

He’d been like this when Jisung had arrived, too. They’d avoided it with Seungmin, perhaps because Minho had recognised a fellow paranoid spirit in him, but Jisung had been given this exact treatment, and then more, because Jisung had arrived with a lot more stuff. Minho had gone through all his clothing, scanned all his shoes, inspected his duffel bag, and then taken a pocket knife to the lining of Jisung’s suitcase. That had been the point that Jisung had protested, asking if Minho knew how expensive suitcases were. It had not deterred Minho in the slightest. He had, at the very least, allowed Jisung to save his photos and files to a USB provided by Seungmin before he’d dumped the phone in a bucket of water and made Chan get Jisung a new one.

Felix was, all things considered, getting off pretty lightly, but that was only because he didn’t have things.

Minho turned back to the backpack and started to turn it inside out, apparently determined to give it the same treatment he’d given Felix’s clothes. It did not quite fall apart in his hands but it was a close enough thing — one of the seams along the side ripped, a long hole opening up. The sound of it was a little shocking in the quiet between them all. Felix winced.

“Hyung!” said Hyunjin, scowling at Minho, who looked a little surprised at how easily the bag had broken. “What the hell? You owe poor Felix a new backpack now.”

Minho glanced across at them. “Fine,” he said, the surprise falling from his face, which settled back into blankness. “Does that mean I can go throw this in that dumpster three blocks away so I can know it’s out of the fucking house?”

Everyone looked at Felix, who did not look happy at the attention. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You can throw it out.”

“But you have to get him a new one,” Hyunjin insisted.

“I’ll get him a new one,” Minho said, teeth sounding a little gritted. He put the ruined backpack back on the table and then said, “Okay, where are your shoes? I need to run a metal detector over them.”

“You are so ridiculous,” Hyunjin complained, but Felix had already slipped out from under his arm and headed to the door, where their shoes were all piled up. He picked up his sneakers and brought them over to the table and set them on top of the backpack, clearly trying to not let the soles touch the surface.

“There you are,” he said, as they all looked at the shoes. Much like everything else Felix seemed to own, they looked like they’d either been bought second hand or worn to the point of ruin. The laces were an awful grey colour rather than their original white, the ends of them fraying. It would not be possible for anything to be concealed inside the soles of them, because as far as Chan could tell, they no longer had soles. They’d been worn away almost completely. “Those are the only shoes I have.”

Oh, thought Chan, the thought striking somewhere deep, deep inside, as he looked at those sneakers, with the hole in the left one where the sole met the rest of the shoe. Oh, I’m so glad he’s here, actually. He needed this, I think he really needed us.

Minho looked at the shoes, then at Felix’s face, and said, “Fine. Fine! I’m not going to bother with that.” He pointed at Hyunjin. “Get him to look up what bag he wants and then send me a link. No,” he added, as Hyunjin opened his mouth, looking excited. “No designer shit, I’m serious, Hyunjin.”

Hyunjin started trying to barter with him. Chan tuned them out, trusting that Minho wouldn’t get too annoyed over Hyunjin being a brat about something, even if it was this close to his bedtime. Instead, he was watching Felix, who had quietly picked his shoes back up and carried them to the door and was walking back to the table, perhaps to tuck himself back under Hyunjin’s arm. Their eyes met, though, before Felix was halfway across the room, and he stopped, and looked back at Chan.

He really was so pretty, Chan thought, unable to stop himself. He’d thought it the moment Felix had stepped inside of his office. In the hours since, the hours that he had not spent looking at Felix, he’d almost managed to convince himself that he’d been making it up, that it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought; his brain was romanticising, he’d told himself, as it was wont to do. But now, here, Felix looking at him with those eyes, his hair fluffy and clean, dressed in Hyunjin’s cosy looking pyjamas, it was impossible to deny or downplay — Felix was beautiful.

Maybe this is going to be a problem, he thought, somewhat grimly.

Felix looked away first. He did go to Hyunjin, who had managed to eke an actual monetary amount out of Minho for the bag, and was looking very pleased with himself. Minho looked like someone who had named a value just to make the conversation stop. Hyunjin started pulling Felix’s stuff into his arms, and Felix followed suit. It was so little that it was easily carried by the two of them. “We’re going to go sleep now,” said Hyunjin. “Nobody better disturb us for the next nine hours so Felix can sleep.”

“Hyunjin-sshi,” said Felix, exactly like how he had said it earlier: a little exasperated, a little amused, mostly like he didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“Nobody will disturb you,” Chan said. “Goodnight, Hyunjin. Goodnight, Felix,” he added to Felix, who looked startled by it and murmured something which sounded like a goodnight too, before Hyunjin towed him away down the hall and his bedroom door slammed shut behind him.

There was a stretch of silence, Minho just looking at the torn backpack. Then he picked it up, holding it like the thing offended him. “I’m going to go patrol,” he said. “Throw this away.”

“Okay,” said Chan. He didn’t remind Minho of how late it was, or point out how tired Minho looked. He was a grown man, he could do what he wanted. What he did say was, “I’m going to test him, tomorrow. See if he can fight or shoot a gun. More than the resources he can bring us, I want to know what we’re working with in him.”

Minho nodded. “Okay, hyung,” he said. “Let me know.”

——

Felix stood as Hyunjin set his pile of Felix’s clothes on the top of the set of drawers in his room, on the little bit of space that wasn’t taken up by boxes of pencils and a painting of flowers. “Here,” he said, holding out his hands for the clothes in Felix’s arms too. “I’ll find you some space in my wardrobe tomorrow, this can do for now.”

“It’s really okay,” Felix murmured, but Hyunjin wasn’t even listening to him.

“I can’t believe he broke your bag,” he was complaining, as he put the clothes carefully with the others and then hunched down to open the bottom drawer. “Minho-hyung is like that, sometimes, you should have seen what he did to Jisung’s stuff, but still! When you only had that one bag.”

His outrage over it tickled Felix a little. He would be more upset about it if Minho hadn’t immediately agreed to buy him a new one. If he was staying here, then he didn’t need to keep everything packed into a backpack, and it sounded like he was going to get a much better one out of the deal. “It cost me ten thousand won,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter, Hyunjin-sshi.”

“It does matter,” said Hyunjin. He stood up, holding a pair of shorts in his hands, grey flannel things, and a new t-shirt. They were clean but clearly well-worn, old things he must use for pyjamas. “Here,” he said, holding them out to Felix. “You can wear these for bed.”

“Oh,” Felix said, surprised. “But you gave me these to wear, I thought—”

“Not when you’ve been down to Seungmin’s workshop with them on,” Hyunjin said. “That room is covered in stuff I don’t even want to think about. You can wear these to sleep in.”

Felix took them, feeling unsure about all of this. It had been bad enough when Hyunjin had given him the clothes after his shower in the first place; every piece of kindness felt like something Felix simply didn’t deserve. He had expected the bare minimum when he had come here, he hadn’t even been sure they would take the job in the first place. The fact that they were opening up not only their home but their bedrooms to him felt just a step too far.

“Right,” said Hyunjin. He had this way of talking that was so self-assured that Felix could see how easily a person could get swept up in it. He could feel it happening to himself: the way it was easier to just do as Hyunjin said, rather than try to argue differently. It helped that Felix didn’t want to argue differently, because doing as Hyunjin said had, thus far, gotten him a shower and clean clothes and some leftover kimchi fried rice sitting warm and welcome in his stomach. “I’m going to go brush my teeth while you change into those. Don’t touch any of the painting stuff because some of it isn’t dry.”

Felix nodded, and Hyunjin swept out of the room. Felix changed slowly into the new clothes, looking around the room. Not touching any of the painting stuff was going to be something of a difficult task, because Hyunjin’s room had the air of a space that had once been a bedroom but was now being consumed by an art studio of some kind. There were two easels set up, both with canvases on them. One of the canvases showed a sunset over a beach; the other seemed to be a half-finished picture of Jeongin.

There was a large window along the outside wall and under that was a desk, long and sturdy looking. There wasn’t a computer on it but instead an incredible amount of pots filled with pencils and paintbrushes and at least one set of make-up brushes. There were three sketchbooks that Felix could see, and random pieces of paper everywhere. In the middle sat a small vase filled with the same flowers that were on the painting atop the drawer set, slightly wilted now. He had a couple of wooden figures, the moveable kind that Felix recognised from middle school art class, but these were strung with random pieces of jewellery.

He stood next to the bed, pushed against the wall furthest from the window, and looked around at everything. It felt like a remarkable amount of personality shoved into a not especially large space, but Felix liked that he had known, as soon as he walked into the room, what kind of person Hyunjin was. He had photos strung up on clothes pegs along the wall behind his desk, and from here Felix could see one of Hyunjin and Jeongin laughing together, one of Changbin half-looking away from the camera. Here, Felix thought, was someone creative, someone who loved the team he worked with.

Would any of his father’s men choose to hang up pictures of the people they worked with? The thought made him let out a bark of laughter, which he hoped Hyunjin, in the bathroom next door, couldn’t hear. This kind of sentimentality wouldn’t fly in Felix’s father’s world. His own bedroom back at his old house had been utterly bare, apart from a couple of decorations used to showcase a version of himself aimed at pleasing his father. Anything of note, anything special or important to him, had been kept in a locked box hidden in the base of his wardrobe.

Hyunjin came back into the room, his hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. He’d changed too, into a different pair of shorts that came down to his knees and a black t-shirt. He looked very tall and slim in those shorts, now that Felix could see the bones of his knees when he moved. “You can take the inside, if you don’t mind,” Hyunjin said, when he saw Felix just standing there. “I’d prefer to be on the outside.”

Felix blinked at him. It took him a couple of seconds to parse out what Hyunjin was saying, because it was so unexpected. “You mean on the bed?” he asked.

“Yes, on the bed,” said Hyunjin. “Why the confusion?”

“I just thought,” Felix said, feeling a little flustered, “I would be sleeping on the floor or something. Like, with a sleeping bag.”

Hyunjin looked as baffled as Felix had felt a few moments earlier. “What the fuck, Felix,” he said. “Why on earth would I offer to let you share my room if I was just going to make you lay on the floor? The couch would be way better than that.”

Felix wasn’t sure why he had thought that, honestly, because when Hyunjin pointed out how stupid it sounded, he realised that it did sound completely stupid. But he had not even contemplated that Hyunjin would mean that they should share his bed. He supposed the shocked expressions on the faces of the others made a little more sense now. “But, Hyunjin-sshi—” he started.

“Okay, first of all,” Hyunjin interrupted, holding up a hand to cut him off, “don’t call me that, you’re going to make me break out in hives. When were you born?” Felix told him the lie he’d prepared in advance, only the year accurate. Hyunjin nodded. “Right, so we’re the same age, so just call me Hyunjin, please. Second of all, I’m not arguing with you about this. We’re both sleeping in that bed, it’s large enough for us both.”

It was, but Felix still wasn’t happy about it. “But,” he said, talking over Hyunjin when Hyunjin made a spluttering noise at him, “it’s your bed! I really can just take the couch, I know Chris-nim wasn’t—”

“God, do not call him that,” Hyunjin said. “The hives, Felix.”

“Chan-nim,” Felix tried.

Hyunjin gave him a flat look. “You’re killing me here.”

“Well, what am I supposed to call him?” Felix asked. He really had no idea. His father’s men all called him boss or something even more polite. Clearly Chan wasn’t interested in being called that, but Felix couldn’t just call him Chan, or even Chan-hyung like Hyunjin did.

“Call him hyung,” Hyunjin said. Felix gave him a particularly beseeching stare. How was he supposed to do that? Hyunjin huffed at him, and patted his head. It felt— nicer than maybe it should have. “Don’t give me that look. I’ll literally text him right now and get his permission, okay?” He pulled out his phone, tapped at it for a long few seconds, and then pointed at the bed. “We’re going to sleep now.”

“Fine,” said Felix. He was too tired to keep arguing about it. Hyunjin pulled the covers down and Felix climbed onto the mattress. It was— soft, some sort of memory foam, maybe. When he settled down on his back, his arm touching the wall, it felt like the most comfortable thing he had laid on in literally months — and that was because it probably was. None of the hotels he’d stayed at for a single night over the past six months had been interested in the comfort of their guests. Some of them hadn’t even provided bedding.

Hyunjin turned the lights off and clambered in after him, his body weight only moving the bed a little under Felix. With the lights off, and the heavy curtains drawn over the window, it was very dark. The only light was the glow of Hyunjin’s phone as he, too, settled on his back, phone held up above his head. It illuminated his face in strange ways, the cut of his jaw suddenly very sharp.

Felix turned on his side to look at him. Maybe it was a little weird, but this just felt— good. It was not at all where he’d expected to end up when he’d woken this morning from a half-sleep in a bus shelter in a different part of the city. To be warm and clean like this felt like something of a miracle. And it should have been weird, to be laying in a bed with another person who he had just met, but it didn’t. It didn’t feel weird at all. It just felt very comfortable.

“Hyunjin,” he said very softly. Hyunjin made an inquisitive sound at him. “Thank you.”

“Why are you thanking me?” Hyunjin asked, not looking at him but instead squinting at his phone screen. “Oh look, there, see? Chan-hyung says you can call him hyung. I told you.”

Felix thought about telling him that he didn’t have to sound so smug about it, but his eyes had already slid shut. Sleep took him with a swiftness that would have shocked him if he’d been conscious enough to realise it.

BONUS TEXT MESSAGES:

chan: yeah he can call me hyung!
chan: of course

hyunjin: cool.
hyunjin: aw he already fell asleep
hyunjin: he’s so cute
hyunjin: his hair is so fluffy
hyunjin: thnx for letting me keep him hyung

chan: he’s not a pet hyunjin
chan: don’t leave me on read hyunjin.