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part two hundred and sixteen
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(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 03:03 am (UTC)(link)what is this plot
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 03:03 am (UTC)(link)There is a nasty car accident on the way to Incheon Airport. Jongin miraculously manages to escape it relatively unscathed, but his driver in the clutch doesn't fare very well. Taemin barely has enough time to crawl out of the wreckage of the battered lambo before it bursts into the flames. He's lucky he didn't get burnt into a crisp as well.
"I want to fuck him up," Jongin tells Baekhyun when he pushes through the ornate double doors of HQ, and Baekhyun grins, hands tucked inside the pocket of sweats.
Like this, dressed completely down, a goofy disarming smile on his face and a soft gray hood tucked over his soft hair, Baekhyun doesn't look like much. Certainly nothing that anyone seriously thinking about doing business with the criminal underbelly of Seoul would consider a threat. But there's a reason Jongin keeps the people closest to him in his pocket. Kyungsoo, the deadliest assassin this side of the Han River before someone from Lu Han's Chinese racket cut him down in cold blood. Zitao, a hotheaded punk who came out of nowhere, that Jongin had immediately taken under his wing. Taemin, his right hand man, the one they said had a demon tattooed across his back. And little, unassuming Baekhyun, who talked too loud and took up too much room for his tiny frame and smiled like he was a five-year-old who'd just lost his first tooth. Baekhyun, who could somehow bring down mountains.
"I want to fuck him up," Jongin mutters, fist clenching against the dark wood of his desk, and Baekhyun grins, and says, "Okay."
The first part of every con is the most important. Without the proper foundation, reconnaissance and set-up, even the simplest of two-man confidence tricks can come crashing down on your head. Baekhyun learned that when he was ten and his father took him out after work, for a couple of pints of beer and long rounds of pool in the backs of smoky bars. Baekhyun could barely see over the pool table, then. He'd had to pull a tall bar stool over to the table and climb up to see his father work, the way he tricked the others with his friend from work. How he pretended to be so bad at pool that he was losing all the money he bet on the table—and then, when the others tried to coax him to bet big, he'd straighten up, hands sure and quick around the pool stick, and sink all the balls at once.
"That's called hustling," Baekhyun's father told him. Baekhyun drank it all in with his eyes and stared at the wads of cash in his father's hands every night—and then he told his mother. His parents would get into shouting matches in the kitchen, Baekbeom shielding Baekhyun's ears with his hands, but his father would keep going. He'd keep bringing Baekhyun, until he was too old and too big to be thrown over his father's shoulder when he was run out of the bar by drunk, angry patrons who wanted their money back.
Even then, even ten, Baekhyun had known what he'd wanted to do.
So—reconnaissance. Jongin doesn't usually like doing the dirty work himself, prefers delegating tasks to those beneath his station, but this con is personal. There's business intermingled in it, an old, ugly rivalry simmering beneath the surface, but Jongin never would've tried to infiltrate Lu Han's gang if it hadn't been for the fact that Taemin's in the hospital with a tube down his nose just to help him breathe.
"You're sure about this?" Zitao mutters on the way to the architectural firm that handles most of Seoul's major infrastructure.
"I don't pay you to ask questions," Jongin returns, voice low, and stalks into the building.
Two days later, Baekhyun walks into the biggest private equity firm in Seoul, South Korea, and passes his interview with flying colors. Under the name Kim Jongdae, he's virtually invisible in the system. The thing is—nobody except those closest to Baekhyun actually know what he looks like. What his real name is, how old he is, who he really works for. Baekhyun, whispered people in the underworld. The Lightmaker. "What does that even mean?" Zitao asked him, the first time they met, and Baekhyun had just shrugged and smiled at him, and somehow the only dim light in the center of the room Baekhyun was to be interrogated in had bounced off Baekhyun's shiny teeth and reflected itself tenfold, right into Zitao's eyes.
The point of the game was not to attack Lu Han head-on. Lord knows Jongin's tried enough times in the past. But these things couldn't be rushed. If Jongin wanted to win, he had to play the long con, and that meant bringing Baekhyun into the equation, taking the wiliest, most slippery motherfucker that Jongin could think of and tucking him neatly into the pages of some of Seoul's most influential socialite.
The thing about Baekhyun was that he could become anyone you wanted him to be. And that's what Jongin needs.
Lu Han, in all honesty, has no idea what the hell he's even doing. The reason he'd moved his racket from China to Korea in the first place was because he and Yifan had parted ways, and most of the continent—or, at least, Lu Han's former territory, had ceded command to him. Now that entire sector of the mafia was under the Dragon's control, so where else was Lu Han supposed to go but across the channel toward greener pastures? It wasn't his fault that Yifan got it into his head that the entire People's Republic China wasn't big enough for two criminal underlords, and that Lu Han had to be ousted.
Of course, Lu Han, despite his demure appearance, is something of a magnet for trouble. The first con he'd tried to pull on his own in Korea and he'd stumbled upon Jongin's crew in the form of one Tao. If that was even his real name—tall, dark, menacing. Before Lu Han could even deal with the fallout of his first failure, Jongin had started coming at him with all that he had, all the power and might of the Seoul elite, and Lu Han hadn't even been able to tell him anything about Yifan, about his plans for taking over the rest of the continent. That he was power hungry, and not even Jongin could stop him—unless he had Lu Han.
The Taemin thing wasn't even his fault. The ticking time bomb had originally been beneath Lu Han's car—it'd been set for him. He'd been the one Yifan wanted to kill. At this rate, with the entire Seoul underground looking for Lu Han, he's not sure Yifan won't succeed anyway.
Re: what is this plot
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 03:11 am (UTC)(link)Re: what is this plot
(Anonymous) 2014-07-15 03:23 am (UTC)(link)