exomeme | part eighty

part eighty

EXO COMEBACK EUREUREONG

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one more

He passes out again. This time, when he wakes up, it's to two unfamiliar hitmen standing guard at the warehouse door and a tin basin filled with murky water about a foot away from his head. Baekhyun rolls over. He scoots toward the basin, bites back a yelp at the terrible, cutting pain in his torso, and sticks his face in the bowl. It tastes like spring water from a mountain stream, soothes the parched lining of his esophagus all the way down to his stomach.

He keeps his mouth clamped around the rim of the bowl for a moment, ears straining toward the guards. They're murmuring to each other. Baekhyun picks out headquarters and Tokyo from the low Russian, but it's pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and it's getting increasingly difficult for him to think with his head dizzy and spaced out from lack of sustenance.

He slips into a sort of half-waking daze, tremors ripping through his body. He wonders if the others are okay. Perhaps they've relocated—underground, scattered to Asia's furthest corners. If Taemin's involved, it means none of K's safehouses are really safe anymore, let alone main headquarters where Baekhyun'd been kidnapped, but there are places he doesn't know about outside of Korea. Not everyone's privy to everything—Taemin not knowing Jongin's status until Baekhyun told him attested to that. Hopefully no one else has been captured. Or killed.

A long shiver courses down his spine. His eyesight's going a little funny, his optical nerve where it connects to the retina sparking like a fuse. Everything turns weird colors. Baekhyun lets his head fall back, neck craned upward, and—

There's movement at the vaulted ceiling. Baekhyun manages not to make a noise. Maybe he's just hallucinating, now—but no, this is real. This is happening. Something dark and quick drops down from the second floor of the warehouse, right behind the first hitman, and takes him out with two quick blows to the back of the head. The second guy goes down a little slower, but whoever it is rams a fist into his solar plexus and another against his temple and he crumples into the floor.

The intruder turns. Baekhyun blinks the stars out of his eyes as he pads closer, and almost smiles. Then he scowls, remembering. "I can't believe—" He coughs, spitting a sticky wad of gunk from his mouth. "You're a piece of shit, you know that?"

Jongin crouches down next to him. Doesn't touch. Good boy, Baekhyun thinks. Moving him might make things worse. "Is that how you treat everyone who comes to save you?" he asks, voice pitched low. Amused, and worried.

"I don't owe you any gratitude," Baekhyun retorts. "You—you were the one who fucking disappeared in the middle of an assignment—I thought—" He shakes his head weakly, vision swimming. "It was Taemin. This whole time."

Jongin's jaw clenches. "Yeah. Yeah, I—I know. That's why I," he makes a lame gesture, here, and Baekhyun still has the presence of mind to find it incredibly endearing. "I figured it out in Busan. I thought I could put that job on hold to figure this out. Then I heard you disappeared and. Well. I came back."

"Sweet of you," Baekhyun croaks. He struggles to sit up. Jongin's hand brushes against his stiff shoulder. "Oh, Jesus, my head." The hand reaches out to brush a stray tear off Baekhyun's cheek. "How long have I been gone?"

"Five days."

Shit. "How are the other kids?"

"Safe. We moved out immediately after Joonmyun found your office door hanging off its hinges."

"Where, though?"

"Sehun helped. He knew about this place SEA used to use that was never in the database." Jongin smiles. "Smack in the middle of Gangnam."

Baekhyun lets out a rattle of laughter. "Bet Lu Han loved that."

"I think they've temporarily settled their differences," Jongin says, shrugging smoothly, at the same time the walkie-talkie tucked in one of the unconscious guards' belts crackles to life.

Baekhyun sinks against the wall. Jongin strides to the door and fumbles with the device. "You don't have a lot of time," he rasps. "What's the plan? What else do you know about this Taemin stuff? Tell me everything."

Jongin makes an apologetic noise when he gets close again. Someone on the walkie-talkie's yelling in Russian, expletives and warnings pouring through the fizzing feedback. "I can't," he mumbles, smoothing a finger down Baekhyun's dirty cheek. "The less you know, the less you can tell them."

"Asshole," Baekhyun mutters, turning his face into Jongin's palm. "Stayed strong for this long. You underestimate me—"

"No," he interrupts. "I just don't want them to kill you because you refused to talk. It's me they want."

Baekhyun meets his steady gaze, eyes shaking into focus for a couple of exquisite seconds. Jongin looks gaunt, cheeks hollow, skin sallow. He's biting his lip. "I'm sorry, for the record."

"What for?"

"Sending you away. Was stupid."

Jongin grins. Baekhyun's eyes go out of focus again, the entire world turning into a blur of overlapping color. "It's forgotten. Just—stay alive, okay? Don't you dare die on me now."

"Thought this was a rescue mission," Baekhyun says feebly. His eyelids droop. There's another crackle of feedback from the radio.

"Just a little bit longer," Jongin says. "I promise."

Baekhyun watches him lean down and brush his mouth against the crown of Baekhyun's head. "Gross," he grumbles, trying to make himself more comfortable against the wall. "I haven't showered in like a week."

"Your priorities, hyung," Jongin says, choking on a laugh. He steps away. "I'll be back for you, okay?"

Something warm bursts in his chest. Maybe it's a punctured lung, he thinks with dark humor, but he tilts his head anyway, lips crooked upward. "Yeah. I trust you."

Baekhyun hears Jongin's breath hitch. "I know," he says. And then he's gone.

The way everything ends is honestly pretty anticlimactic, all things considered. Baekhyun's unconscious throughout the big showdown. At one point, he'd apparently been used as some sort of human shield to get Jongin to surrender himself, but the rest of K had outmaneuvered Taemin's men. Jongin and Taemin disappeared on their own. Only Jongin came back.

Baekhyun finds out after the fact, in the reports from his men and through word of mouth, because the next time he wakes up fully lucid, it's in the hospital. Probably signed in under a fake name. He's hooked up to a billion different machines monitoring his heart rate and blood sugar levels. It's ostensibly Lu Han's turn to keep watch, because he's folded in a plastic chair next to the gurney when Baekhyun rouses.

"Hey," Lu Han says, without looking up from his phone. "You're awake."

"What happened?"

Lu Han thinks it over for a second. Then: "You want the real version, the short fake version, or the long fake version?"

Baekhyun snorts. His ribs ache. "Cut the crap, Lu Han."

"Yo, it's a legitimate question!" He steeples his fingers. "This shit is gonna run the rumor mill for the next six months, man."

"Not you and Sehun kissing and making up?"

Baekhyun chuckles drily at the affronted expression that crosses Lu Han's face. A moment later, the laugh turns into a hacking cough. Lu Han jumps up and pours a glass of water out for him. Baekhyun drains the first cup, and then another, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He feels a little more human.

"I'd like the real version, please and thank you."

"Ugh. You're no fun."

"Would you rather be the one confined to a hospital bed?" Lu Han shakes his head and wrinkles his nose. "You can tell me whatever you've concocted after you tell me what really went down."

Lu Han launches into a story so embellished that Baekhyun just sighs into the rim of his glass and waits for it to pass. He chokes again when Lu Han starts saying something about a one-on-one pistol duel. Lu Han just grins and keeps going. "And then Kai was like, you should always count your bullets, Taeminnie, and shot him through the heart."

"Yeah, that totally happened," someone says from the entrance of the hospital room.

Baekhyun swivels his head toward the voice. Jongin's standing in the frame, arm in a sling, and something heavy settles in the back of Baekhyun's mouth. Lu Han stands up and gravitates to the door. "You can tell the rest," he says, still grinning. He pats Jongin's shoulder. "Better to hear it from the man himself."

"Hey," Baekhyun says. Jongin sits down in the empty chair. Baekhyun tries to smile, but his face feels frozen. "I don't remember a thing."

"You were pretty out of it," Jongin agrees.

"How long have I been here?"

"Four days."

The fingers of his right hand play with the plaster on his left arm. They're quiet for a while, Baekhyun scanning Jongin for any other signs of injury and still struggling to fit all the pieces together. Finally: "So are you going to tell me or not?" he snaps. There's no heat to it, and Jongin smiles, cheek dimpling a little, eyes crinkling into slits.

"So demanding."

"Can you blame me, though?"

"No," Jongin says. "No, not really." His expression sobers. "There's not much to tell. In March—"

"The Minho thing."

"Yeah. You remember what exactly went wrong?"

Baekhyun breathes out through his nose. "Minho wanted to test out a new bomb. Jonghyun kept telling him it was volatile but Minho said the suppliers and the contacts were both safe, so we went ahead and did it. Then—well, you know the rest."

"The information—it came from J branch." Jongin's shoulders hunch in. "Taemin found out after—after the accident. It fucked him up, you know? Your entire team gone, the rest of the company moving on." He looks up at Baekhyun, eyes glittering underneath the sterile lights. "I wasn't involved. Didn't even hear about the job till after it went south. But he figured out who I was and then, I don't know, I guess he got it in his head that I was the contact and." He spreads his hands, shrugging. "Tried his best to find me."

"Oh," Baekhyun says lamely. "I see." He leans back in the pillows and chews on his bottom lip for a minute. "What was he going to do to you?"

"I don't think he even really knew. I—we were—"

"Best friends, yeah, I know." Jongin stares at him, surprised. "Ran a background check on you before I got office-napped. How else do you think I found out about Taemin?"

Jongin shakes his head, palms his face. "Right."

"Is he—dead?"

"Yeah," Jongin says.

"How?"

Jongin stares at him for another long moment, and doesn't say a thing.

Baekhyun makes a face. "Keep your secrets, then. You know this is why Lu Han's making a killing off you out there."

Jongin's lips turn up. "I need to maintain a little aura of mystery," he says, "or you'd never come back for more."

"About that," Baekhyun says. He tries to sit up again but the bandages around his torso shift weirdly and something in his ribcage throbs. He lets out a whimper. "Fuck—"

Jongin jumps up and curls his good hand around the back of Baekhyun's neck to ease him against the pillows again. "You aren't well," he mutters, but his face is really all too close. Baekhyun feels a lump of emotion drop into his chest and spread out to fill it. Jongin blinks. Baekhyun watches the trajectory his eyelashes make as they flutter through the air.

There's a noise at the door. Baekhyun sees Sehun's gangly body from around the edge of Jongin's head. "Whoa," Sehun says, managing to sound bored and intrigued at the same time. "Am I interrupting something? I thought it was my turn to keep watch—"

"Go away, Sehun," Jongin snaps, and then bends down to press his mouth against Baekhyun's.

It's a really shitty kiss. Baekhyun's mouth tastes gross as hell and Jongin's lost movement in his left arm, so they can't really do anything. Their teeth clack together. But Jongin's tongue is warm and soothing. His eyes are open.

They pull back gasping for air. Baekhyun wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Sehun taps his foot against the floor. "God, find a room."

"We have one," Baekhyun returns, as Jongin flushes. "This is mine. Get out, Sehun."

"Yes, hyung," he says sullenly, swiveling on his heel. "I'm gonna go find Lu Han—"

Baekhyun stiffens. "If you tell Lu Han anything about this, I'll put you on guard duty for the next two months."

"Bye, hyung," Sehun says, waving.

"That shit." Baekhyun shifts in the gurney, winces again at the ache in his torso. "We should—probably not do that again."

Jongin scowls at a speck of dust on Baekhyun's blanket. "Oh."

"I meant," he amends hastily, "I meant we should probably not do that again until we're both well enough to handle it."

"Oh," Jongin says. He's smiling again. Baekhyun shakes his head, and can't help smiling back.

rolls around nad loves you 5eva

oh my god

i love this thank you omg

ilu sfm :*

please marry me even though i am unworthy ;;

:*** thank you for reading anons! ♥

burying myself in this fic tbh

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part eighty

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)

^^^

Re: hg: hitman au pt. 10/10 (team kai)