title: raise your weapon author: aikotters source: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48668674 id: ccIwSapz/m8jey73r/70700E5a1 language: null published: 2023-07-18T04:00:00Z updated: 2023-12-15T05:00:00Z words: 24,740 chapters: 10 status: Complete rating: Mature tags:
Chapter Ten description: |+ Dusk threw away his past, his life, everything, to become a spy to preserve order. He’s now got to don the look of a family man and get a wife and child, all to prevent a war! Meanwhile, Bam is a beleaguered law secretary, struggling with identity. Miseng is a child looking to stop running. Hijinks will ensue. SxF au
Now with art by yole!
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This story was first published on July 18th, 2023, and was last updated on December 15th, 2023.
FicLab ID: ccIwSapz/m8jey73r/70700E5a1
The trade-off was easy. Photos and a promise of payment for a messed up toupee and boom. He had officially delayed negotiations between Wolhaiksong and one of the Great Families by another three months at minimum. Perfect.
Dusk slides the car smoothly onto the road, dodging the upcoming smell of gunfire. There’s yelling behind him, and he tugs his blonde hair back down. A small smirk decorates his face.
Success always feels sweet.
Unfortunately, he still has to dump the man’s spoiled uncultured daughter but there were always snags to complete a mission, so it wasn’t hard. The hardest part was washing out the hair dye.
Lillial Jahad (Lo Po Bia) has a sister who is probably easier to get along with, but wining and dining and subsequently dumping Lillial was a common occurrence for her and she just had to learn to not be so proud when she demanded to stomp on a man. In this day and age it was asking for Khun Eduan or one of his hornier sons to pursue her.
For her sake, he idly hoped that didn’t happen.
He sits down at the local train station with the paper and the local coffee. Ground fresh with hazelnuts and barely any creamer, just how he preferred it. It’s one of his few vices, giveaways even, as a spy.
A stranger in a trench coat walks by and meows before bending down to scoop a kitten from by the upcoming train.
Cipher C then. A simple one. His blue eyes glitter in the sun, his other vice. He cannot forget where he came from, no matter how hard he tries.
He swallows a gulp of coffee, mentally noting to grab something to eat on the train. The creamer is not good for his stomach alone.
But train food is just so heavy.
He really should just learn to cook. Perhaps another time.
He folds the paper and tucks it under his arm. Dusk hands the conductor his ticket and heads to a chair. A kind train staff member passed him two croissant sandwiches from her trolley. He bites into one and winces at the taste of ham. Poorly cut and with a strange cheese. He supposed he should have checked first.
Polishing off the first sandwich, Dusk finally opens the newspaper properly. Reading through the cipher, he hears a child laugh.
Warm nostalgia fills his throat as a mother shushes them down the train. Dusk forces it down with another swig of coffee.
Their voices, their peace, was what he did this for after all. Noble as that sounded, it was something he lost.
And a petty vengeance and power hunger hurt no one.
Dusk, he reads, congratulations on your successful mission. Though you will see no accolades or gratitude, know you are performing a great duty.
… Were they really wasting precious space with this flowery nonsense? Well, whatever, it was fine.
Your next mission will be of crucial detail. A long-term character if you will. You will need to infiltrate the Jahad Institute of Starlight Education. We have suspicions of Karaka Jahad being a member of FUG.
FUG was the organization that flitted in the shadows between Headon and Wolhaiksong. Informants had lost their true name in the last wars. It led a majority of crimes in the nations and sowed chaos wherever it walked. If Karaka Jahad had betrayed Jahad for FUG, it was a big deal, and his organization absolutely needed to know about it. Jahad had so few birth children as it is, it made his monarchy immensely difficult to follow, for the future’s sake.
Still, Dusk trusts his handlers on this, if nothing else. W.I.S.E had given him plenty of opportunities. He wouldn’t consider wasting them.
The problem is that Karaka is notoriously paranoid. He doesn’t even go out in public outside of his armor, and even then, he only removes his armor behind the walls of the Institute to greet his brothers and sisters. With the eldest no longer in the university division, he will visit the adoptive ones, as the middle and upper echelons do not allow guests. That is the only time you will get him. Determine his loyalties to the country and if necessary, kill him.
If necessary? Was there someone else? Still, this mission didn’t sound that difficult. He could infiltrate as a member of staff then—
To do so, you will need to gain a wife and child by the end of this week.
He sceptics all over his newspaper… and the other half of his first sandwich. Thank goodness for his second one.
A wife and child? In this economy?
It made more sense and would be more subtle. No one, not even one of Jahad’s ilk, would prepare for that kind of long game.
He hopes that’s the case, anyway.
The problem was the attachments that would come afterwards. They’d be disposed of somehow immediately once the mission was complete and with no complications either. Bonds were strictly meant to be performative and perfunctory for his ilk. They would not last.
So… this was the mission: infiltrate the school with the child, make the child a successful student so he could investigate and possibly detain Karaka Jahad, all for the sake of regional, and potentially even world peace.
It’s not something he can envision, but it is a dream. Still… fatherhood, family. Those are concepts he’d never dreamed of.
Dusk smiles.
At last, a challenge.
Miseng avoids the other kids in this orphanage too.
It’s easier this way. She doesn’t want to get attached to them. She doesn’t want to get close to anyone. Their thoughts are loud and uneven, skipping from one immediate concern to the next. They aren’t like it was in—
“You can’t play right now, you have to work. What are they saying?”
—Before.
Besides, they were all competing. Everyone wants a da or a ma or both (both is impossible, both is a dream.) So she keeps her distance, listens to them and their dumb thoughts and sees what they see in others. She keeps her zygaena plush in her arms and listens and eats.
She doesn’t get much, so that’s about as much energy as she can spare.
People come and go at all these orphanages. She has to store food, prepare to escape, to keep her things safe. There aren’t many.
Still, she listens. The kids are dumb, way dumber than her, but they know things. They pay attention better than she can.
So she’s prepared whenever potential parents come. They usually like the loudest kids or the quietest ones. The ones that wanted but didn’t say they wanted or the ones that said pick me! Pick me!
Miseng… wants to be picked. But she doesn’t want to dance for it. No one wanted kids who stood out.
After breakfast that morning, she hears the kids whispering. The ones outside ran inside, chatting about a tall blue-haired man, a Khun maybe, coming to adopt. Apparently, this was a big deal. Khuns didn’t really adopt outside of the family or something. She’s not sure. Narae says Khuns don’t adopt outside of the family. It must be important.
Miseng doesn’t get up from her game. If he comes here, it’ll be different at least. She steals a box of crayons and some paper and sits on the floor to make new rules.
Someone whispers about how expensive bread is a few houses away, another complains their husband is with another woman (for snacks?), a man hates his job, and then quiet thoughts.
It will be easier with one who can read and write…
That thought is closer, simultaneously too hard to read but easy to understand. She could read and write, but she didn’t like it. Everyone’s handwriting was all squiggly, including hers!
Maybe I can finally get rid of this one.
She likes this orphanage director. His thoughts don’t lie. He’s grumpy, but he’s not pretending to be nice like the other places. He nudges the door open and so Miseng pays him no mind. Maybe this will be quick. Super Spy Prince is going to be on soon and this episode has the guard and the servant girl supporting the princess about her evil fiance. Maybe they’ll finally find the evid-evidy-evidence so she can marry the man she really likes instead!
“Oi, Miseng!”
Aw, peanuts.
She looks up and sees a tall man with blue hair (oh the one everyone was talking about!) staring at her. His expression was friendly, really nice! He looks cool too, standing in his business suit. His thoughts are fast though, like trains and cars fast. It makes her a little dizzy. She can pick out bits though! Something about world peace? And spies.
“She can read and write, no problem. I’ve seen her. It’s messy though. Doesn’t talk much either.”
She looks a little young…. Jumps out first. Five or six would be best. She looks about four—
“Six!” She shouts with a starburst of inspiration. “I’m turning six!”
Well, that was enthusiastic.
Khun (goodness, he’s so rusty at that name, how many years has it been now?) blinks once, blue eyes meeting blank brown ones. There’s a flower in her dark hair, shiny and new and her pink zygaena plush doll looked like it had seen better days. Her pink and red clothes are definitely too big for her, but she doesn’t seem to care as she stands up.
“I’m six,” She declares, as if it were extremely important for him to know specifically.
… He needs an older child, one who could read and write. Older so he didn’t have to be stricken with grief about his daughter and wife who passed in childbirth, preferably, but young enough to get into Jahad’s Academy.
This was too convenient. The kid could be lying, but what kid was stupid enough to lie and lie well? He’d have to test her. He needs a kid who can read and write and he can’t take the word of this seedy manager. He casts his eyes around for a quick text he could use and spots a newspaper flipped to the crossword. The answers flash into his mind, but before he can even open his mouth or gesture for it, she rushes over to it and fills it out.
…Hm. Interesting. Intuitive maybe? That could work in her favor. And definitely in his.
“What’s your name?”
“Miseng,” she chirps at once. The girl has gone back to clutch her plush, staring with a wide, pleading expression on her face.
Out, it screamed. Save me. Please save me.
Khun exhales. This is what’s necessary for world peace, he tells himself. He smiles up and down at her and the orphanage director.
“Where do I sign?” This is for the mission. It’s for the mission.
He misses the shock on her little face when he turns around.
Three hours later, Khun regrets his decision. He regrets it a lot.
“Papa! What are these?” Said while pointing at beets. “Do they taste good? They look dirty!”
Miseng herself is… a lot. At the least, he can tell she’s not trying to be, but she has one outfit and old shoes and a few quick items. So she needs more things.
Unfortunately, in exchange has more curiosity than she knows what to do with.
The little girl runs into everything. Anything that interests her, she asks a question for, including things he didn’t think he knew about at her age. A child’s curiosity was normal and in fact, Khun knows logically that it should be celebrated, encouraged, even.
“Papa! Can I have this?”
All the same, there needs to be some moderation!
She’s quick, darting from stall to statue to window and back to his legs. She tugs eagerly on his pants, demanding for him to look. Even as a trained spy, he can only keep up with her with use of reflexes and very good prediction and even then she escapes him.
The citizens, the innocent civilians, somehow find her cute, of all things. They coo at her and pat her head or say, “I hope you’re having fun, papa!” like nothing is wrong.
He has new respect for his mother now. She’d raised three children on one man’s child support and her paltry salary and never let it break her.
Khun shakes his head to not think of her now. She was… he had managed… everything was fine. He had to focus on his situation.
At least she was light enough to hold with one arm while he finally did the normal civilian shopping. (Candy was out for the foreseeable future.) He had also picked up a cookbook and after five seconds of thought, some about children and family psychology.
Not a single one is doing him any good. Knives are his weapon of choice, not his use in everyday life! That’s why he has a brain.
By the time he gets her home (home, what a strange feeling), she’s waking up. “Papa?” she says sleepily.
Khun’s heart clenches and he doesn’t like it. Relax, Dusk, now isn’t the time. “We’re back. It’s time to familiarize yourself with our lodgings. Ready?”
“Yes sir!” When he sets her down, she beams up at him, like there’s not a single weird shenanigan planned in her young mind.
“Good.” Khun pauses. “Remember, you’ve always been my daughter and I’ve always been your father. Got it?”
“Yes, papa!”
Good. They may survive this. Next is the wife. But first, he has a report to make.
Just in case, he locks her in with a weight in the way. Better to be safe than sorry. Nothing can go wrong with the kid inside the apartment right?
Even if she had cried a little when he’d left. That was normal. He’d come back. What was she so worried about?
Miseng hadn’t cried.
Her eyes leaked! That’s not crying! Stupid papa!
He has so many thoughts too. Of course he does, he thinks so much she can’t think. But at least he leaves the tv on. That’s nice of him. He locked the door and stuff which wasn’t nice. But it was fine, because he was such a loud thinker that he hadn’t noticed she could read minds, even when she said it! By accident. She’s super good at keeping secrets.
Hence why she knew where all his spy stuff was. So she didn’t bother to sneak (no one was watching anyway, and found a machine right where he left it. It has a lot of keys! She tries to remember what he said the code was… uhm…
Miseng tries. Numbers are hard. Eights squiggle and fours dance. It’s hard. But she gets it right. Hehe. Secret code unlocked! Maybe she can be secret agent Twilight with him and they’ll save the world together!
… But she doesn’t want to save the world. She left, so she didn’t have to. She just wants to play and spend time…
Papa should be home soon. He’s rude, locking her up. He’d need to get her a bunch of snacks.
At least there were peanuts.
Something twinkles in her mind, like lots of dots on the ceiling to look like stars, like a warning thought before a needle.
Then her ears ring and everything goes white.
She wakes up tied and gagged and not alone.
Papa, she thinks, and wishes she wasn’t the one who could read minds this time.
The meeting runs late, as meetings with Isu tend to do. He rambles a lot. Isu is one of the best information gatherers he knows, etc, etc.
So he is, simply put, not prepared to find his home in fucking shambles.
Not that this is the first time, mind, but this time didn’t have a small child as collateral damage.
For a long moment, Khun stares at the wreckage of his plan. At the waste of WISE’s money and resources. It’s recoupable. He can just go to a different orphanage, find another kid, make sure whoever did this received reprimand by a different agent—
Fuck no he couldn’t do that.
Khun searches for the rubble for what he needs and runs.
It doesn’t take long to find. An abandoned warehouse for a grocery store bombed in the last war. They wanted quick, not subtle, which meant lots of bodies not lots of fighters. They thought the quantity was enough.
Heh. For Dusk, it was never enough.
His aim is simple. His mind is quiet. He knows exactly what to do. All he needs is to keep his bullet use light.
He smirks in a way he hasn’t in a long, long time.
She’s not scared. She will not die. She’s not scared at all. The others seem scared. One of them is dead. She needs to run. She’s tied up, she can’t run.
Miseng is going to cry, she already is. She’s scared. She’s scared. That man has a gun, and it’s a real gun and it’s really meant to kill people. (It already has, Miseng! This bad guy already killed someone!) and she’s not a super spy. She’s too little. She needs training.
But papa is a super cool something. He… he’s going to come, right? He picked her for world peace! He’s going to save her… right?
The room erupts into smoke and sound. She squeezes her eyes shut, thoughts getting louder and louder around her. Her head spins with pain. Then something grips her side. She eeps behind the tape before the tape comes off her mouth. And then the world is moving. The sound of a gun (so much louder, so much smellier) cracks by her ear. Wind rushes as smoke clears.
Strong, gentle hands set Miseng on her feet. A hoarse voice whispers. “Start running, your papa is waiting for you.”
Keep running, don’t stop, I don’t need this, I’ll find someone else. I hate crying kids; I hate my own tears; I hate —
Miseng trusts the voices in people’s minds. They’re not honest exactly but they don’t lie. They just talk because no one can hear them and that’s enough. It’s enough to know her papa is a liar.
But that’s okay! They, she thinks as she runs and runs and runs to a place no bad guy would ever look but her papa would surely pass, can be liars together.
When papa picks her up, grimacing at the state of himself and his clothes, she greets him with a smile and takes his hand. It’s warm.
And something, something buried in a chilly place in her papa, starts thawing.
In an uninteresting sector of the City of Gold, Lo Po Bia Elbaba sits at his desk and works.
He’s not supposed to be this busy, but when your family head gives you a task, you do it, like it or not.
So here he is, tired and with cramping hands, but with one more sheet of data for their military animal system. Just a few more lines of code and he could finally get home and go to sleep. It’s for the paycheck, he reminds himself.
A window creaks. Elbaba’s head snaps up, hair falling into his face. He can hear his wife’s voice now, reminding him irritably to ‘cut your hair, what kind of man are you’, well men can wear their hair lon—
Downstairs, a door opens. It closes just a second later, and Elbaba freezes. He looks towards the window. It’s two meters away. If he can just get there, he’ll be in the alley. It’ll be fine. He moves without lifting the chair from the floor, leaving his shoes behind. He slides across the old wood, practiced at not making it creak.
The window slides open with a squeak.
He freezes, all hair rising from his neck. Nothing. As Elbaba nudges himself through the opening, a floorboard creaks in the hall.
Throwing caution to the wind, Elbaba yanks himself up and through the window. He slides down the rooftops, using the gutter to keep himself slow. Panic pitches his breaths fast as he moves, careless in the quiet of the late night hours. Then a soft voice murmurs.
“Lo Po Bia Elbaba-ssi?”
A soft voice reaches his ears. Her words are steady, empty as steel.
He stops on the cobbled streets. “Who are you?” He says, trying to sound brave and not full of sickening fear. “What do you want?”
“My identity isn’t important.” Something gleams in the light of the streetlights. “However, yours… is very important.”
Where is the voice coming from?
A shadow leaps from the side, a monster on two legs. Their jacket swishes in the wind, a blade serene in their fingers. Many blades.
“So please,” they continue. “Are you Lo Po Bia Elbaba-ssi?”
“… What if I am?”
Their stance shifts. “Then Elaine-ssi sends her regards.”
Elaine? What of that filthy trai—
Elbaba’s last sight is a single golden knife and a flowing purple ribbon.
When they find his body in the morning, it’s painted the familiar symbol of two red diamonds.
Painted, of course, with his blood.
The Thorn Prince, F.U. G’s envoy, has struck again.
Miseng studies. She studies hard. She likes to learn, but Khun can tell that the orphanage did her little good. Her reading is fine, but slow. Her writing is awful, a squiggly mass of underdeveloped motor skills. (He reads to make games about it, but he doesn’t really know any games. Reading with her helps.)
But her math?
Her math is worse.
She can count. She can count well even, but outside of visuals, her math skills are… well, it’s a miracle she passed the first exam.
Khun can handle math, but he can’t teach math. Teaching reading and writing, even the visuals of history and sciences, he can do. But math is a subject he’s done in his head since he was young and given his sister’s old abacus. He just understands it.
Then again, considering most of Miseng’s studying has been a struggle of broadness, not even the specifics of teaching may have saved her. He knows the materials all too well.
Khun’s searching for a wife at this point turns frantic.
Is this also because another body of a prominent family has turned up in the streets? Or because the remaining family members in the city vanished? Maybe!! Not that FUG is really active in things Khun actively is working against, but that’s a concern for people paid to deal with it. Not him! And if his way into the school dies, there’s a problem. He cannot go looking for another orphan like “well the last one dad, can you sell me another?” Please!!
Unfortunately, he’s found that the City of Gold has a surplus of honestly terrible sounding women. Not in appearance, he imagines, if a Princess of Jahad has to be conventionally attractive, so does everyone else. However, the sheer amount of Great Family members who made up most of the jobs was enough to make him nervous. His old life shouldn’t affect anything, but he can never be too careful.
And yet.
Miseng bounces in front of him. “Papa!”
“Mm?” She sure recovered from being kidnapping fast. Are all kids this resilient?
“I look cute!” she declares in her new dress. One of like, seven to ten, but Operation Strix had a healthy, healthy budget and children needed clothes. So.
“You do,” Khun agrees absently. She looks better in pink and brighter colors. It’s a shame the academy demands the kids wear black and gold (with occasional red, who the fuck thought that was a good look for kids?). She’d look pale like that.
Maybe the sunny grounds will help. Kids need sun and pleasant weather and exercise, according to one book.
(Had Isu taken pity on him and given him useful books about parenting? Yes, yes he had, and what about it?)
“I want to keep being cute,” Miseng tells him.
“Well, the world’s your oyster,” he points out and she beams. She’s off in seconds and Khun allows himself the dignity of a deep sigh.
“Your daughter has a lot of energy,” says the front desk worker with a chuckle. “She must be hard to keep up with on your own.”
“A little,” he admits like a tired parent is supposed to do. “But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
The clerk nods sympathetically, as if she’s old enough to understand. She looks like a Po Bidau, a young one learning numbers instead of literature. He makes a note. Not a suitable type, too sympathetic, too invested after a single conversation, but a potential source of support would be ideal.
The bell rings and Khun flicks his eyes up to see the customer. The woman lets out a sigh as she enters, bag tight around her shoulder. No heels, leggings under a skirt that reached the knees. A comfortable-looking dress shirt. The giveaway was the black and gold ribbon tying her hair.
Bam… Grace, if he remembered his dossiers correctly. A middle level office clerk at a Yeon family office for the city. They did law consultation, if he remembered right. An orphan, graduated from one of the private schools, had one little brother who worked for the special forces in the Jahad Army, under a princess. Elite of the elite.
There had been nothing in her record showing wrongdoing or anything beyond a plain woman in an office, aside from her lack of marriage prospects.
Well, that and her unusual friendship with Wangnan Ja, younger brother to Karaka Jahad.… Interesting. That had to drive some guys away.
She approaches the desk with a nervous smile. She needed a haircut. He could barely see her eyes.
“Excuse me,” she says. “My name is Bam Grace. I’m here for the order they fit me for the other day?”
As the clerk busies herself in her data sheet, Bam fidgets with a bracelet on her arm. It’s old, the string faded and beads cracked, but her thumb wears over it with long practiced fondness.
“Papa!” Miseng calls, and Khun tilts his head to see her running towards him. Her old pink clothes are gone, hopefully in the bin because seeing them makes his stomach crawl. She’s now wearing something much brighter, patterns on the skirt and shoes that weren’t full of holes.
Khun gets up just in time for Miseng to make a flying leap right into his arms like she’d rehearsed it.
She was so lucky that she was cute. “All done,” he says instead of that.
Miseng nods. “She gave me a bunny hair clip!” She twists her head to show him, in fact, two bunny hair clips. Cheap and cute and where her old hair accessory had been.
“Did she?” Khun turns to the poor woman, who just smiles like children aren’t a problem at all, and nods. “Did you thank her?”
“Uh-huh!” But Miseng isn’t really paying attention. She’s staring at Bam, who is watching them with a nostalgic sort of fondness. (He thinks that’s what it is. That haircut makes it exceedingly hard to tell).
“Da!” she says upon looking at Bam for about two seconds more than is socially appro— what did she just say?
“Miseng!” Khun starts. “I’m so sorry about her. She’s not usually like this?”
The girl gives him a look, which Khun translates from six-year-old as you have known me for three days. You don’t know me, which yes fair, but don’t say that kind of thing!!
Bam, to her credit, only laughs shyly. It’s a shaky sound, from someone who has worked too many hours over too many days and just wants them to be over. Khun can relate more than he wants to admit. “No, no, it’s… it’s all right. I appreciate the name. Thank you, Miseng.”
She addresses the girl directly, and it makes the kid light up like a candle.
“This is my papa,” the little girl says, as if she is not digging the graves of both Agent Dusk and Operation Strix in one fell swoop. “I need a da-ma. I’m going to the Institute.”
She does not lisp it this time, phew.
“My wife passed not long after Miseng was born,” Khun supplies as the clerk rings him up, holding Bam’s order number for the poor fitting attendant. ‘The Institute is particular about families and traditional models.’ He drops his voice so the gossipers in earshot can’t hear as he takes the clothes. “It’s unfortunate, but I’m… well, I’m not really to date yet.”
“Oh, no,” Bam smiles and with her head lifted, he can see the golden eyes. “I understand entirely. My office… my coworkers are obsessed? They demanded I show up to the party with a date and, well…”
She trails off and Khun sees Miseng opening her mouth to cause more problems on purpose. “Perhaps we could make a deal? We can discuss it outside.”
Bam hates the office he works in.
His colleagues are sometimes nice, sure, but most of the time, they’re gossips and nosier than almost everyone around him, even his neighbors. Ehwa is the worst. She breaks coffee decanters and brings food that smells like charcoal, but blames others.
He recalls her crying when Wangnan left without her and holds onto that memory to not strangle her.
That and he’d get fired.
It’s difficult, but he remembers it.
It’s the way Ehwa says she when referring to him, like if she just digs a little deeper, she’ll unveil the ugly (is it really ugly? Is it?) secret burning in his skin, the one where he says, “I’m a man, I think you should stop” at every law-abiding man whose come all too close to tugging at his skirt on the trolley, or every moment she’s caught him staring at a pair of dress pants is a moment too long.
She says nothing, but her suspicion of him is worse than her suspicion of what he does at night instead of house parties and going home to a husband.
Hatz is worried more about the latter than the former. Though he’s suggested a wife, there’s really no winning here. His brother is trying.
Hell, Bam is trying.
Hell, Bam only really figured out he was -wanted? Was? Is? — a guy six months ago, after digging into the old clothes bin and thinking oh, at the outfit inside. It was just a “pants were nicer than skirts” and a poorly held urge to vomit every time he was called a princess or ‘my lady’ at home.
A laundry day and some knitting had fixed it and he’d justified it with “I need a new outfit, the bloodstains are getting hard to wash out” and no one had batted an eye. The girls had laughed and said, “I wish I was that brave,” and it’s not brave. He’s scared, he’s so scared to say the words again—
But then this little girl meets his eyes and said “da!” and oh, oh.
Okay, Bam, do not melt into the floor, do not have a meltdown of happy feelings in the middle of the clothing store. You are buying outfits. You are a functional member of society. Hatz needs you to be strong and adult.
Never mind, his brother has a perfectly respectable government desk job and didn’t need him anymore.
“Da!” Miseng repeats happily once they’re all out of the store, where no one is around and she’s beaming, enthusiastic and sure. Sure, in the way six-year-olds (she seemed a little small for six but who is he to judge, Hatz had seemed easy to crush in his hands at three, as a baby in his mother’s arms) are.
“Miseng,” Khun scolds.
Miseng pouts. “Papa~ You don’t get it!”
“What I get is you’re being rude.”
He’s handsome, Bam thinks absently, seeing his neatly slicked back hair and perfectly pressed suit. I don’t think I could pull off green though… maybe it’s just his complexion. I wish I could wear the jacket…
“I really don’t mind!” Bam reassures. “I’ve been called much stranger. So, uhm, what did you want to talk about?”
Khun disengages himself from the staring contest with the child (cute) and turns to him. “Yes, uh,” He introduces himself again (also cute, stop it Bam!) and explains.
“So, you need a fake wife?” Bam prods. The word wife in his mouth makes his stomach twist.
Khun sighs, rubs his eyes. “Yes, for her to get into the school. I didn’t get to have much of a formal education myself and my wife wished for it.”
Bam can’t help a stab of envy to a person who he’s never met, because Khun looks solemnly at Miseng. She dances in the sidewalk on the cobblestone, happy as can be, and he doesn’t look away.
You’re a sucker, Bam, he thinks. “I could help, if you’d like. I actually… need a date for an office party.”
“You look like someone who would brighten up a room,” Khun says with confusion, clear and real. “Why would you need a date?”
Bam doesn’t mean to laugh; he really doesn’t. “My brother says the same thing,” but with many more insults to the men who worked with him. ‘I’m not particularly eye-catching, and I’m not ready to stop working for at least a few more years.’ And I’m a guy and I might like men, and both are wrong, wrong, wrong to this city. “Old habits die hard.” Unlike elderly people.
“You’re amazing.”
Bam blinks as Khun smiles. It’s a little mischievous, a lot serious, and so much interest. “You stick to the beat of your drum no matter what happens to you or what you hear. You’re a very interesting person. You have yourself a deal. When’s your party?”
Bam flushes, the high of shaking hands and making a deal for a reputation he doesn’t really need warming his skin. “Oh t-tomorrow!”
He thinks he sees the man’s eyes flash with victory, triumph? Then he nods. “Perfect. We can meet here and go together?”
Bam nods, giddiness in his throat. Stop, stop, he thinks. He’s just being nice to a woman to be polite. He doesn’t know anything.
More than anything, the kind Khun (of all the families!) did not know he was an assassin, so it wouldn’t even be a well-built relationship, anyway.
So lost in his thoughts, Bam did not notice the man’s daughter looking at him with stars in her eyes.
… She was very bored from studying all day.
“I’m worried about you, Bam.”
Hatz says this often, and his brother means it honestly. He usually worries over the big brother who raised him all alone, about the brother who wore skirts and worked with Jahad sympathizers and spent every spare moment forgoing school and making money and, unbeknownst to him, killing people. Hatz worried for his older sibling in a lot of ways, but some of it is “will you find someone as you are?”
And Bam had lied and told his brother he didn’t want anyone.
It wasn’t entirely a lie. How could he hide who he was forever from a partner? Most people in the city of gold didn’t like men. Or they thought they could fix him. He remembered a time in the past where a coworker tried to just not wear a suit with a skirt below the knee without leggings. There had been so much teasing in the office. He told them to stop.
He remembers laughter.
At least, he thinks wryly, Ehwa hadn’t laughed about that.
So it was better not to worry about it. Loved ones were for people who weren’t assassins.
Viole grimaces at the clock and the bloodstains on his clothes. It’s after midnight again. At least Hatz won’t call for a few more days. He hasn’t missed him this time.
“My prince.”
Hwaryun’s voice is dry and sweet, like a red wine. Not a hair out of place, delicately framing her elegant eye patch. She’s dressed in scruffy clothes and they make her look beautiful.
Viole turns to look at her. “This one struggled a little.” His voice is wooden, golden eyes boring into her red one as he gestures with a knife.
She smiles. “Good. It can never be too easy for you, my prince. You have a full schedule tomorrow and your laundry won’t do itself.”
Viole wonders why that’s her concern and not the sharpness of his knives, but then, they’ve never had to worry about the perfection of his kills. They’re dead and he leaves them arranged the way his higher ups wanted. Jinsung-nim couldn’t have done it better.
“All right.” It’s not worth arguing about. She has her hangups.
“The money will be in your account tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you.” More into savings, more for his brother. Maybe he can finally purchase a new stove and oven or even a new mattress. Living frugally isn’t hard. He’s slept on the floor before, but it would be nice…
You’re lucky FUG lets you have a bank account, sneers her voice in his head. He wonders how she sounds now.
Viole simply leaves, eager for bed and a break from being on his feet.
Some prince he’s turned out to be. His bed is so inviting.
Khun is late.
Dusk has never worried much on time before. He’s where he needs to be when he needs to be. But Khun Aguero Agnis has a date to make it to, and he’s not going to mess that up! Not for anything, especially not for something as trivial as a poor impression.
But between struggling to make a meal for Miseng (they’d ended up ordering out) and helping Isu track down an important informant that had been trying to off himself, it makes sense he was late.
That doesn’t mean Dusk isn’t cursing himself for it. He has dried blood on his jacket, for fucks’ sake. How unprofessional.
Still, Bam had seemed at least sweet and that she’s not there at the meeting spot (the kindly clerk closing up says she left just a few minutes ago) is a testament of how late he is and that’s a terrible first impression, how is he going to convince her to work with him like this?
The Yeon party is thankfully very obvious, done at a house decorated with gently unobtrusive flames. Dusk wipes the blood from his face and then digs for his spare jacket. The wound trickles on his shoulder. He ties it behind the cover of a tree. Looking at himself, Khun exhales. Not pristine, imperfect, but it’s all he has. It’ll have to be enough.
He introduces himself to the guard in front. Smart, the way he sneers is fitting. Also keeps interesting hangers on out. So Khun runs inside. A spy would walk. A late date who gives a shit would run.
When he reaches the door, a Yeon opens it, a genuine direct line Yeon. the burn marks on the door prove it. Her pink eyes narrow, scrutinizing Khun with a wrinkled nose. “Who are you?” she asks, suspicion edging on rude.
He smiles quickly to avoid bashing her face in. “Hi, I was supposed to come in with Bam, but I had a rough patient.”
The woman’s nose wrinkles, and she opens her mouth to speak. Before she can, a voice comes from inside, full and overwhelmed with relief.
“Khun-ssi?”
Khun leans over the Yeon’s head to see Bam sitting surrounded by who he guesses were coworkers. There’s a young man with blond hair on her right, looking a bit like a deer in headlights. Khun glimpses small bright red horns.
That’s Wangnan Ja, the recent Academy graduate. So she was friends, or at least knew him.
Interesting.
Khun waves awkwardly. “Good evening. Apologies for being late.”
Bam gets to her feet. “Not at all, I’m glad you’re here…” The Yeon girl flashes the oddest look at the two of them before going to another group. Bam laughs a little. “Sorry, Ehwa-ssi thought I was joking when I mentioned you at work.”
It wasn’t just her. As Khun follows Bam, he glimpses the way the other ladies, coworkers, gossiping little seagulls, close around Ehwa like a pack of wolves. One hovers there, sipping finely aged wine and eating bits of crab like a real queen.
Endorsi Jahad? At a common house party? Even a Yeon house party is a party. Something good must be here, or the gossip it’s generating will be worth it for years.
That’s not his mission to focus on, but he can send a message to headquarters when he gets home tonight. He settles beside Bam, who smooths the edges of her neat skirt with practiced fingertips. She has short nails, sure, but her hands have a lot of calluses, even compared to one who cooks. The others are wearing… not exactly inappropriate dress for a party, but almost everyone is in a skirt or dress that ends above the knee and the sleeves are short to non-existent.
Bam is in long sleeves and leggings, with flat shoes and her ponytail braided gently flat on her back. Modesty? Lack of interest in showing off? With Wangnan Ja as a friend, there wasn’t much need to worry about things like that. Reputation would carry a person.
Miseng’s enthusiastic “da!” in the store dings in his mind. Khun dismisses it and ingratiates himself into the conversation. Turns out they’re discussing universities and needling about subject choices. Khun listens and occasionally drops mentions of psychology classes he’s never taken, experiences he’s never even been near remotely.
Bam listens. Her gold eyes are intent on whoever is talking, and no one seems to mind. Though Endorsi’s hazel gaze never strayed towards them for long, the other girls in the group look at them with discomfort and… a hint of meanness.
“Your brother couldn’t make it today?” someone says to Bam suddenly.
Bam laughs. It’s high, a startling crack to it. “He’s working late tonight. It’s the cost of being an honor student. I can’t wrangle him into bed anymore.”
“Don’t remind me,” Wangnan groans.
“You’re not an honor student yet, Wangnan-ssi,” Bam says gently. “But you’ll get there! I believe in you.”
“You should go to college, Bam,” Endorsi says suddenly. “You’d finally meet a man who can keep up with you.”
Khun raises an eyebrow, then takes in the look of unreadable discomfort on Bam’s face. He knows the City of Gold allows women to get certifications, but full on college degrees? That’s reserved for Jahad princesses and whoever they sponsor usually.
“I’m happy where I am for now, but if that’s an endorsement, Endorsi-ssi, I’ll keep it in mind.” Her smile shifts a little and Endorsi just smirks.
“I think it’s admirable,” Khun says suddenly. The response, the counter to her expression, that annoying little smirk, hits him like a train. “There’s nothing wrong with focusing on one’s family and life circumstances. Caring for her little brother when no one else would, there’s nothing particularly amusing about that. It’s just kindness and these days, especially during the war, that’s very rare. I think it’s something to be proud of.”
Everyone stares at him and Khun shrugs, unrepentant. “But then, I’m a single father. A little kindness goes a long way for me, as well.”
The smile sliding off the princess’ face is dangerous, but worth it.
Triumph fades in 0.2 seconds when a loud boom rockets across the mansion.
Khun doesn’t think, misses the way shock fades into calculation and calm. He just grabs Bam’s hand and shouts out, “Fire! Everyone evacuate!”
Most people panic. Bam flattens herself against the wall and shoves Wangnan back with her. He coughs and winces. “Smoke… how did you—”
“It’s either a fire or a bomb,” Khun says. “I recognize that boom. We need to get out and get to safety. Come on.”
Slowly. Bam’s expression seems to still and then she nods. She’s watching the people run and panic even as Endorsi and the local Yeon firebug come to a semblance of order on getting people out. Khun looks for a window. “It’ll be faster to take to the roof, if you don’t mind.” And fewer witnesses.
“You go ahead,” Wangnan pants, covering his nose. “We’ll make sure everyone’s here. Bam, you probably shouldn’t be here.”
And just what does that mean?
Bam nods and eases herself through the open window with a speed that should not be normal for an ordinary office worker, but wouldn’t be out of place escaping orphanages.
… Probably better not to think about that.
Khun moves after her and sees the smoke immediately billowing into the air from the other side of the building. “Which way?”
Bam looks around. “Follow me.” Her steps are light and quick and Khun trails after her before she grimaces and takes off her shoes, stuffing them into her purse and beginning a careful climb down. Tights were expensive, if he recalled correctly.
“You do this often?”
She laughs, a sound between a giggle and a snort. “More than you would expect. Many people go after Ehwa-ssi, but mostly it’s because the others all get very drunk and I cannot keep up, so I shut the window behind me. They tease me before it the next weekend.”
“Strange.”
“But thank you for coming, even so. It was nice to have someone next to me.” She smiles and Khun… wonders. “So about that fake marriage—”
Khun is tired. He’s been up for too many hours on too little sleep and been doing way too much, so it’s not his fault he face plants onto the pavement at the sound of another boom in the distance.
“Khun-ssi!” And then she picks him up and carries him to a bench, oh this is so unprofessional.
“I’m fine,” he manages. “It’s just… it’s been a long day. Rough patients, you know how it is.”
“I do,” Bam agrees, likely just to humor him. “So, about that marriage…”
“Yes?” Khun rasps. He’s so tired and this person is so casual.
“I would be glad to help you,” Bam continues. “It would benefit me in a multitude of ways. However, before you agree, I’d like for you to understand something?”
What? Khun thinks weakly. Are you a super secret assassin?
Bam looks around and then exhales. “I’m a man, Khun-ssi.”
For a moment, Khun’s brain blanks. “You mean like crossdressing as a woman?” he blurts before he can think better of it.
Bam lets out a long breath. “No. I was born a girl and identify as a man.” She — he, okay, switch brain, switch — swallows. “You’re the second person I’ve told.”
“Oh.” Khun wills his brain back on. ‘I see.’ Yes, this isn’t something people like to talk about in the City of Gold, or most places. He knows FUG and Wolhaiksong are more open with it, or accepting, but this place? Jahad’s territory? The Ten Great Families’ war zone? “Why would that inhibit me from wanting to pretend to marry you?”
Bam looks at him with an incredibly thoughtful expression. Then he rubs his eyes. “I still like men, Khun-ssi.”
Oh. Oh.
“I mean, that works for the situation,” Khun points out, fiddling with his jacket pocket. “You’re not exactly shouting it to the rooftops, and even if you could, I doubt you would. This city is rather… stubborn in its ways.”
Bam laughs. “That’s one way to put it, yes.”
“Is there anything I should change? With how I speak to you?” He really needs to know how Miseng clocked it with no hints of anything. It was uncanny. No wonder she was so clever. Book smarts were an easy fix, and with Bam, who had raised a little brother all on his own, that would resolve itself. But street smarts, instincts like that? Natural.
“Not in public, no.” The idea of being out in public as a man makes a complicated expression on a gentle face like that. “But if we were to be in private, and if I could explain it and express myself to Miseng, that would be ideal. But if my circumstances don’t bother you, I’d like to help you fulfill your wife’s and your dream.”
Khun deep down doubts that if he’d had a partner for real, he’d want them that close to Jahad, or anyone involved in the families.
Instead of saying so, he says, as coherently as he can muster. “Then let’s get married.”
Bam laughs again, and it makes Khun’s stomach do a tired flip.
Keep it together, Dusk.
Miseng is, of course, ecstatic. She gets two dads, and one’s a secret assassin dad and one’s a spy dad! Who at school has that?
Bam, drunk on the relief of acceptance, and the possibility of being somewhere where he didn’t have to budget for rent and food and his brother’s university bills (why was he working and studying Bam barely had time to eat between kills some days), and utilities and maybe, just maybe he could take up a hobby now, missed his weekly call with his brother.
This isn’t too uncommon. Hatz misses them at least once every couple of months, claiming to pass out at his desk. Bam usually misses about the same, caught up in a meal prepping for a lunch picnic or for himself.
Unfortunately, this time there was the house fire to consider. So Hatz, heedless of phone call costs and common sense or even just going to his sibling’s tiny flat, rings him incessantly. It forces Bam to get up from his long soak in the bath (hehe, he can take long baths!) and stumble out in his towel to pick up the phone.
“Hello?” he manages, trying not to giggle like a child.
“Hyung???!!” Hatz yelps through the phone. “You’re okay!”
“Hatz?” Bam yawns. “Of course I’m okay. I never stay out late.” A little white lie.
“Yeon Ehwa’s mansion is still on fire! Did she do it on purpose this time?”
“Hatz.” Bam lets out a sigh. ‘Ehwa-ssi doesn’t intentionally burn her house down.’ No, she saves that for target practice and Wangnan’s takeout meals that she pretends to hate because neither of them can cook. “I got out just fine with Khun-ssi.”
“You’re friends with Khuns now??”
Bam almost puts down the receiver. “Hatz you sound very, very high-strung. Are you all right?”
“My big brother did not answer when there was a house fire at a Yeon house. Of course I’m not alright!”
Bam couldn’t help but smile. His brother has taken protecting him all the more seriously since he’d learned the hazard of being able to keep their family name. “I made it out safely and clearly am at home. Khun-ssi walked me home. He asked me out. I accepted.”
“You’re dating a Khun?”
Bam frowns, giddiness giving way to semantics. “I think I’ve married him, actually.”
Silence.
Then Hatz exhales. “How long have you been married to him for??”
“Long engagement,” Bam adds to himself. “So about a year. His daughter was recovering from an awful disease, so we focused on that. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it.”
At more silence from the receiver, Bam utters a good night and hangs up on his brother before the panic fades into rage. That Hatz was yelling and kicking up a fuss probably means he was really worried.
He’ll make him some cookies in the morning to make up for it. His favorites. That should help.
Khun needs to trust his instincts. He tells himself this over a cup of tea (one of his teachers ruined coffee for him forever, the fucking prick) and a newspaper. Bam is sitting quietly next to Miseng. He’s perfectly relaxed, watching a documentary with wonder in his eyes. Miseng, who had complained that morning about watching a story about history, now leans against his thigh, watching and occasionally asking questions.
He’s not sure if that speaks to Bam’s effectiveness or his own ineffectiveness at raising children.
This documentary is important, he knows. Every child needs to know the history of the City of Gold. Everyone needs to know the basics of civics and civility, but every documentary about the City of Gold had been drilled into his skull at least a dozen times by now. They bore him.
And Bam, technically being his new wife now (husband would be better, but they live in interesting times and Khun knows the laws around gender and sexuality here), likely defies the ethics in these videos.
Sure enough, Miseng nods off eventually. Bam gently runs his fingers through her hair as she snores. Khun sets the paper down. He wonders if his own father had been like this before he had child number twelve. He doubts it. His mother was always working, his sister was always working—
Why are you thinking about this now, Dusk? He scolds himself as Bam scoops Miseng up. “I guess it was pretty boring for her. Most of her classes won’t be exciting, however. She’ll have to learn the discipline.”
“In my experience,” Bam murmurs. “That was what school was for.”
Khun, who has never been educated, can’t help but disagree inside. “Sometimes it comes from lived experiences.”
“Usually at the cost of something.”
They’re not arguing. At least Khun doesn’t think they are. He feels too relaxed and the quirk of a smile on Bam’s face is soft and warm. “I suppose you know from experience.”
Bam had warned him the day before he’d moved in (and charmed the landlady) that his brother was having a very mild anxiety attack and was probably trying to find where they were. Since he was a civil servant, he wouldn’t exactly have any trouble tracking them down. So Khun knows. It’s fine, frankly it’s the least of his problems. If he fucks this up, he’s going to have to kill them, dye his hair and find some other way to do it.
Ugh. And it all relied on a hyperactive six-year-old.
No pressure.
Bam regards him and leans over. “You should sit down, Khun-ssi. No need to overwhelm yourself before it even starts.” He presses a gentle hand onto one of Khun’s shoulders. “Sit down and drink some tea. I was nervous about my brother’s entrance exams, but all it did was upset him. With children, with our children, they need to know they’re safe to be afraid around us, not with us.”
His expression is warm and sad with knowing. Khun almost regrets lying to him.
“You should try to call me Aguero,” he says instead.
Bam just smiles and doesn’t do that.
Someone dies at the hands of the Thorn Prince that night.
Khun recognizes the victim a little. A famous politician’s business broker. Lower than the target of a Ten Family head.
“We’re lucky we moved you out when we did,” Khun says, watching Bam adjust his hat and then his skirt. He’s very practiced at it.
Bam blinks, fighting back a yawn. How strange, he’d gone to bed earlier than Khun himself. “Why so? Was the rent going to go up?”
“There was a murder a few blocks away?” Incredulity fills Khun’s mouth, uncontrolled.
Bam’s head tilts. For someone so good at child-rearing, he was oblivious to his own safety, wasn’t he? “Oh!” He taps his cheek. “That one from last night! That one was rather horrid.”
“You make it sound like they happen all the time.” He’s worked outside of the metropolis for a decade and it’s probably true, but he has been too busy to look into much of it.
Bam nudges Miseng into place as casually as breathing. Miseng pouts but remembers to mumble “Mama,” under her breath. Bam’s expression never falters throughout their place in line.
“It depends on where you lived.” Bam dodges a woman swiping at their child, scolding and getting off any dirt. “My brother and I used to roam those areas, but then, our parents were very determined for us to stand on our own feet.”
“Not to rely on the authorities?”
Bam laughs, sweet and airy and elegant, just like Jahad would want to see from those who produced potential wonderful individuals in society. “They’d have rather we didn’t, you understand.”
Khun likes this Bam a lot better. He’s much more surefooted than the woman who had looked down at her shoes.
He wonders what that freedom is like.
Gah, Dusk, you’re losing focus. You can’t lose focus outside the mission. What is the matter with you?
The test starts the same as it does every year.
Hundreds of families fumble over themselves to make their child stand out. Boys for support, girls for the princesses. Even of those who made it today, those who gained gold stars were of the minority, let alone ten. Most graduated with three or four, but the best of the best were where they were for a reason, and they started here.
It was time to see who rose and who fell.
“These all survived the preliminary education test, yes?” Lero-ro’s eyes turn from the window to his supervisor. Hansung Yu sips coffee with the patience of a master.
“Quite a few more than last year, it looks like.”
Quant Blitz gives them both an annoyed look. “What does it matter? This test wipes ’em out, most of the time.”
Hansung chuckles and Lero-ro turns from the window. “You just don’t want to grade papers.”
Quant sputters.
The trouble is, that Quant isn’t wrong. The intellect test didn’t mean much. Most parents cheated and cheated well enough to not get caught (some argued that was the point), and plenty of intellectual children joined here. But most of them didn’t have the physical prowess or emotional acuity that lent well to the strenuous exams as they got older. Most people apply to the Academy for the paid education and materials, not for the sake of their child.
Sometimes it was for the marriages. If only they knew.
Others who did their research, it was for the shinsu. The immensely powerful shinsu. Again, if only they knew.
The first few groups pass through with minor incident. One trips and rips their clothes, and the father saves it with a little well-timed needle and thread. Basic but good.
Hansung continues to drink. How he hasn’t had the runs consistently escapes them all.
The other teachers are watching other candidates from other windows, noting down passes and failures with cheers or boos. They sent some off to do interviews. Quant may never do interviews. Not after last time.
A little pink creature zigzags through the crowd, tripping adults and children alike into the grass.
“Oh, one of the zygaena is loose,” Lero-ro murmurs, almost to himself. “One of yours, Hansung-nim?”
“My eels would never run loose.” The pure offense in the man’s voice gets a few titters, at least. “Those are a Yeon family breed. There are some fancies that even I avoid.”
Lero-ro avoids rolling his eyes only by remembering he would see it in the window. The man knows where he sleeps. “Of course.”
He watches the pink dot. People expected bigger creatures and monsters that threatened to eat their precious ones. Those are their own threat, of course. Still, no one expects something small to trip them up.
Once they trip the brick suddenly explodes mud and dirty water everywhere, or the smaller shinheuh tugging them into walls.
Most of the current group is panicking. One group moves a bit erratically. Their little one dashes forward, racing around and around. She’s intently focused on following something -the baby zyganea, perhaps? — but her legs aren’t strong enough. Then her mother appears and tosses her, gently, elegantly, right in time for the pink dot to slam right into her arms.
She lands safely in who is likely her father’s arms. They’ve even changed their clothes so smoothly, it was like they’d always been wearing that outfit. The child gently pats the zygaena’s flower and sets it down.
Hm.
Lero-ro smiles.
What an interesting crew.
Miseng reminds herself, this is all a lie.
She doesn’t have a mama and a papa. She doesn’t have two papas. Everything is a lie for the sake of world peace. She’s doing this for the sake of papa’s mission and so she’s not running through orphanages anymore. Miseng will never get back to that lab again. Everyone wins!
And yet, her papas have warm hands. Even through gloves, papa is very strong. His thoughts race a mile a minute, focused on the room, the walls, and the people in it.
The words we can do this ring like a bell in her ears, tolling and tolling. We. She’s never been a part of a group like this before. Even if it’s fake, it’s nice.
Da’s thoughts are quiet. There’s an occasional soft, how beautiful or tax money goes to this, but mostly he’s running through the script they’d all practiced.
A soft mama and papa died for this dances in Miseng’s mind, but it doesn’t seem to come from da on purpose. It’s like the voice that said he was a man and an assassin. He doesn’t think about that.
Her papas have lost both of their families then. It must hurt a lot. She doesn’t think that she’s ever had one, except for—
Well, she’s gone now.
They sit on squishy chairs in the meeting room. Three people, one tall, one short, and one in a big furry suit, meet them. Miseng likes the tall one immediately. He looks scary, but he feels fun! The small one… she can’t hear him at all. And the furry one… he gives her a headache.
The questions are simple at first. Da talks softly about being a law secretary. It’s boring, and he admits without hesitation that he hopes to be home with Miseng full-time one day.
It’s a lie, she thinks, but the words burn warm in her heart and stomach. Because even if it is a lie through and through, da means it. He would love to, but he can’t. Miseng looks at her hands.
Then papa says, “I was young during a time of war. Families, friends, soldiers… everyone suffered. In my career, I want to help those people. I don’t want my daughter or any other child to endure that sort of agony.” He smiles bitterly as he speaks, unlike how da just looks solemn and kind, fiddling with a ring he played off as “unsafe to wear at work”, whatever that means.
It’s hot. Her face is hot. It’s a lie and her face is hot. It feels so real and nice.
The two blond misters look quiet. The small one smiles and shares a patient, amused look before turning right to Miseng herself. She swallows and makes herself look at him. “What about your mother, Miseng?”
The world stops.
“Hansung-nim,” chirps the furry one. “That’s not appropriate now, is it~?”
“Losing a parent is traumatic,” the man counters. “Replacing one can be more so. If you had to compare your mother’s, which one would it be?”
All Miseng can hear when she looks around her is raw white noise. Papa’s eyes are wide and she can’t hear anything. Da’s face is stone, blank but an undercurrent of hurt and guilt thrums under is she okay? Am I hurting her? Is she okay?
Her eyes sting, her stomach churns and Miseng feels the stupid, stupid baby tears rise, and she lets out a horrid whimper instead of the answer of I love mama, but she can’t because she’s never had a da before let alone two. How do you do that? She can’t compare a lie that must have changed her diapers to a truth that pats her head and makes the vegetables crunch right and listens to whatever she says. That’s her da.
The white noise builds and builds and builds, overtaking papa’s desperate low, keen to not do it to keep calm and everything — stops.
Papa stands between them and the adults. His expression is eerily still. His fist smokes as the table shatters down the middle.
Oh. Wow.
“I believe,” he says pleasantly. “That we made a mistake. My family would never suggest a school with such inappropriate teachers, who ask questions of that nature. Thank you for your time, but I must cut this short.”
Bam scoops her up and tugs them both out of the room.
“Sorry,” Miseng sniffles once they’ve made it down the stairs.
“It’s not your fault,” papa says fiercely, without looking at her. “It’s their loss. Understand?”
Miseng feels da’s grip on her tighten, warm and a bit scary. But… she doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
Khun doesn’t pace. He is a calm, collected psychologist, a field that no one studied and was therefore groundbreaking and strong. He was confident and focused and had faith,
Dusk did not panic in the face of an impasse.
He does, however, kick himself in the face internally for not keeping under control. It may be for the best, for this child, and for children. Maybe if he spread the word of the kinds of teachers and educators filling the ranks of such a prestigious academy would reach Karaka’s ears and he’d be curious enough to investigate, and then he could slip and Dusk would have him.
He can’t wait a year to do this again. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to find another wife and child, or a better disguise or even—
“They were rather insufferable, weren’t they?”
Bam’s voice cuts through the swirling thoughts holding Khun’s mind hostage. He’s holding Miseng now, who is melting down in low, broken sobs. He can’t tell what she’s saying through the fabric of the dress, likely ruining the pattern of light roses against dark black. Bam doesn’t seem to mind.
“Get a lot of insufferable folks like that in your line of work?” It takes everything he has to look away, to brace with his anger and not say the words battering at his throat. ‘The ones at mine,’ he grits out through his fury. “Usually get intimidated by my lab coat.”
Bam laughs, soft and dry. There’s something cold in it, like a frozen glass. “When I put Hatz in day care, I had many people asking me those kinds of things.”‘Don’t you miss your mum?’ ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a new daddy?’ Lines like that. “Bam rocks Miseng, whose sniffles are dying down.” They were very frustrating. Hatz was too young to remember them, and I was busy worrying about feeding us both. So I usually had to bite my tongue, or I’d have gotten into a lot of trouble. My family needed me, after all. This time was different, though. It’s good you stopped it when you did.”
His hands still as Miseng sniffles. “Sorry,” she croaks.
All his anger dies away as he looks at the two of them. It’s not their fault. It’s not even his. They’ll need to send a new agent, sure, fine, whatever, but there’s still something he can do to help in the situation with them, surely. There are exchange programs throughout the year and clearly she’s academically qualified enough that with enough studying, she could transfer in. This operation is delicate, he mustn’t forget that. He can’t be ridiculous and dooming himself now.
A wry grin smooths his face into something like clouds on a summer day. Khun lets out a long breath and moves over. He pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the snot and tears from her face. “It’s not your fault,” he says, and makes sure it sounds as true as he feels it is. “Okay? That proctor was rude and hurt you.”
He hadn’t really considered the fate of Miseng’s birth parents. Considering how many aliases of hers that Isu had found over multiple orphanages, he’s assuming she hadn’t exactly had any. But maybe she just didn’t remember them. He’s not sure which is worse, to be honest.
“A school that focuses on emotionally bullying children and allows it to pass is not what my wife would have wanted. We’ll fulfill her wishes some other way.” Even if it means transfers or seeing or anything else.
Miseng hiccups. “Papa, I—”
“You’re not at fault for crying. Crying is good for you.” He musses her hair a little, ruining the carefully brushed bob. “And besides, we have no proof they didn’t pass us anyway, though I will want a written apology first.”
That is the truth he keeps in mind. They had walked out mid-interview, but the rest of the test results were still there. It was possible that Operation Strix wasn’t a complete wash, but regardless, they had performed admirably. They had nothing to complain about.
Her splotchy face and puffy eyes crinkle into a nervous smile. “Okay…”
“We’ll wait and see how things go for now. Let’s go have dinner and get some rest.”
Bam smiles. “How do you all feel about some pasta and rolls?”
Miseng cheers up a little more, and their journey home is a lot brighter.
The letter arrives on fancy letterhead and ink that has never smudged. Probably on a typewriter, Bam thinks. He’s only used one of those for work before and they take powerful hands. If it wasn’t for his regular use of knives, he’d probably have a lot more trouble.
Khun -Aguero, it’s very hard to remember, if only because his coworkers never ask about him so he doesn’t get the practice— stares at it like it has a bomb. How silly, bombs are too bulky for that.
Miseng stands on the chair. He gently nudges her down. She sits down with a huff. The thud of the chair clattering makes Khun shift. Then he slowly picks up the envelope.
It’s rather cute, if Bam is being honest. It’s nice to see a man that loves their wife so much to honor their memory like this—
No. Bam shakes his head. That’s not the point. Khun-sis being a good man and husband is irrelevant. This is only a favor for a favor.
Right. Right!
Miseng looks at him with her nose scrunching. He makes to wave her off, but then Khun unfolds the envelope. He swallows and pulls out the thicker paper. Is everything from this school needlessly expensive?
His thoughts must show on his face more than they should because both fake wife and child make a strange noise behind their hands. His mouth twists into a playful scowl as he unfolds it.
Seconds pass. He reads it again. And again. It falls from Khun’s hand and Bam snatches it like a cat batting a toy. Miseng climbs onto his lap, cautiously squinting at the letters. Then Bam’s expression brightens, and he squeezes Miseng into a hug. He’s careful, because otherwise he’ll squish her like he did Hatz as a kid. That wasn’t fun.
“You did it!” He calls, laughing at the delighted squeal that leaves her mouth. Relief washes off of Khun in waves. Miseng whoops and runs around the room, only staying upright through sheer force of will.
“We did it, we did it!” she cheers, rolling onto the sofa. But she pauses, looking over at Khun. “Papa?”
Bam turns to look at him. “Khun?” he says, slowly. It’s almost in complete unison. Khun absently notes it as cute, which is something to unpack for a later date.
Khun lets out a long breath. “Do you want to go, Miseng?”
Miseng shifts on the couch. “Go?”
“Knowing those staff are going to be looking after you,” Khun lets out a long exhale. “Do you want to go?”
Miseng sits there for a long minute. When he’d offered his strength, his life even, to Luslec back then, Bam had lost a lot of choices, even if they’d all tried to make it otherwise. He wonders if this feels the same way. Then she looks up at them both, dull brown eyes sparkling, and nods.
“Yeah,” she says. “I worked hard. I wanna go, I’ll show them.”
Khun’s worn, weary face breaks out into a smile. “Then I suppose we have something to celebrate.”
“I’ll start dinner,” Bam offers, to give father and daughter some time alone. He supposes they’ll have to tell his wife.
It stings a little, but he ignores it.
Miseng told her (fake) parents that she would be all right. And she’d meant it. She was a big kid at a big kid’s school now and they couldn’t protect her in there.
Deep down, she knows they really couldn’t have protected her in many places, since this whole thing, you know, wasn’t really real, but imagining that they could be is nice.
“Are you ready?” Daddy’s voice is soft and encouraging. She reminds herself to call him “mama” when people ask. If she says anything else, he could get hurt or in trouble or have to leave, and all of those are bad. All of those would mess up papa’s operation and he needed to save the world, so it’d be okay.
“Yep!” She adjusts her beret and steps onto the bus. There are so many kids, so many excited thoughts barreling through her brain. Miseng is used to this, and it won’t be for that long. It’s training, she tells herself, to use her power and take over the entire school and become a Princess! A few kids look at her, but not for long, their thoughts sliding in and out and fighting in her brain. It’s easier to ignore the background noise.
Once she finds a seat, Miseng scans the crowd one more time. She sees them, standing out against all the many heads. There are a lot of blue ones, but she can easily see papa’s hat! Daddy leans on papa like they’re really married. Like a proud parent in stories.
If she had a mom, would they have sent her to school like this?
From here she can hear papa’s brain exploding like all the buildings in her favorite cartoons. He really likes daddy. Not that she blames him.
She waves until a big exclamation mark pops up in their heads and they wave back, smaller.
Then the bus rolls away. Miseng faces the front. She’s ready.
Miseng is not ready.
Tuning out the general thoughts of everyone around here is a lot easier. The class isn’t that big, so that should be even easier.
However, she needs to make friends with Prince Jahad. What a dumb name. There aren’t princes anymore, only spies and assassins!
(She forgets a king rules this country.)
She finds him. He’s taller than her, everyone else here is (she’ll get taller, she knows it!), but he’s also surrounded by people. Papa’s brain has a picture of him and his super obvious purple hair and with his nose in the air. He’s all… smug! Ugh.
This is for world peace. It’s for world peace.
“He’s noisy.”
Miseng turns to her left and sees a girl with bright green eyes and cute red ribbons in her hair. She’s holding an octopus. Her words are strong, but she’s smiling. It’s like her daddy’s smile when he’s distracted. “Hi! I’m Verdi. You are beautiful like a doll.”
“Um.” This feels like a thing most kids don’t say. Adults don’t say it for sure and are good adults. Papa told her that. “I’m Miseng!”
She holds out her hand to shake and Verdi lets go of the octopus with one hand to shake it. “You have fun manners. Let’s be friends.” Her voice hasn’t changed at all. Is that normal?
Her thoughts are bouncy, Miseng thinks, each idea rattling around like a candy in a jar for attention. But maybe she just says weird things normally, and this is a thing! “Okay!” She wants a friend. Any allies against Prince will be great!
Then the room shifts a little. She watches Prince looking around. He’s still introducing himself. Is his dad that important? Maybe his dad’s that important to him. Maybe that means he thinks he should have more friends. There are a lot of words about connections and reputation in that head of his.
“What do your parents do?” Verdi asks. She kicks one foot and wiggles an octopus tentacle. “You came in on a bus, right? You don’t get to live at school or driven here? What’s it like? Is everyone loud on the bus?”
Yes, but that’s not bad. She’s used to it being loud. “It’s bouncy,” she says instead of that. “And everyone’s loud, but I like it.”
Someone scoffs. She turns to see Prince. He’s glowering, purple eyes bright. It doesn’t feel like he’s angry, like he’s supposed to be sick? He looks… weird. Like he’s gonna be sick or something.
“You like going on that smelly death trap?” He approaches, crosses his arms. It makes him look like he’s pouting. “Why?”
Miseng blinks. The bus isn’t a big deal… rich people are sensitive. “It’s not for long,” she says, staring at home. “And when I get home, mama will be there, and she’ll say hello and hug me. It’s great.” She makes sure not to mention how happy he looks at home with those clothes papa bought or how her daddy sits and waits for her to need help with things and how papa tests her regularly to make sure she doesn’t feel dumb in these halls where she, an orphan, doesn’t belong. How her papa wipes her tears and lets her rest but also believes, so fervently, that she can do it.
She doesn’t say that this place isn’t very scary until she’s there alone, and she wants to be home, even in the lies, because the feeling is nice.
“I like the bus!” Miseng tells him. “It means I can watch people outside!” And read their thoughts.
Prince scoffs. His uniform is the same as hers, Miseng thinks. Maybe bigger, because she’s smaller, but he’s missing a tooth and his sleeves flap. Like hers. “Commoners are so weird,” he says. Someone laughs behind him. “Who cares about the people outside? They don’t even know who you are.”
“So?” Why is he so rude? Weren’t rich people supposed to have manners?
“So,” Prince drawls, pulling himself up to his full height. (So dumb! She knows she’s tiny!) “Weird commoners shouldn’t be here. I don’t know why they let you in. You should go back on your dumb bus and go home now. We don’t have time for stuff like that. Your weird mommy can teach you!”
Someone laughs again.
Miseng… she doesn’t really hear it. She doesn’t get it. Why is he so mean? What’s his problem?
She takes a deep breath, preparing to crack his mind like one of papa’s eggs on the floor.
Then Prince says, “Why’s a freak like you here, anyway? Did the teachers feel sorry for you?”
Her own head cracks. It’s blank, like a piece of paper. She marches forward, in quick, soft little steps. Verdi opens her mouth and goes unheard. But blood roars in her ears and world peace flies out of her head.
Daddy had gently shown her how to make a fist. Thumb out, fingers curled just right. “I hope you don’t have to,” he’d said, warm and sad. “But with all the murders going on and with kids, well… anything can happen. Don’t start something you can’t finish, okay?”
Miseng marches and without a sound or even a thought, punches Prince Jahad in his stupid face. It’s hard enough that she can feel it, and strong enough it knocks his face to the side. He stumbles back with a shout and Miseng-she, it—
“I’m not a freak!” she shouts. “I’m not! And I’m not stupid! You’re stupid!”
She hates him. She hates Prince Jahad!
About ten minutes into his lunch break, Bam gets a phone call.
This actually isn’t too uncommon. He does special projects all the time, even though his killing usually takes place during the wee hours of the morning. It’s that person’s way of attempting sympathy for him. The bias can be a lot sometimes. But usually it’s his brother or F.U.G.
This time, it’s a little inconvenient. He’d taken it late after Nare had fallen behind with the financial reports for the callers, so he had been desperately downing a sandwich without looking improper. Annoying, but most of his time was on getting Endorsi to stop sniffing about it. (He’s not even sure why Endorsi works here. It’s not like she needs the money… or the position.) She doesn’t like the finance math. Only Xia Xia likes the finance math. That also comes with the bribes and a delightful sense of blackmail.
Bam says nothing about both because Xia Xia bought him the hair ties he loved for his birthday every year and if it was in exchange for silence and an occasional carrot cake on her birthday, he’ll hide the bribery. He has hidden much worse.
Unfortunately, he’d been intending to use his remaining lunch break to take a nap instead because by the time it was over, he was going to do a lot of errands. Instead, Ehwa glares at him with the intensity of a thousand suns and says, “Your date is calling downstairs.”
My date? “Aguero is?” He didn’t slip up this time, yes! “I’ll talk to him. Thank you Ehwa-ssi!”
She grunts. He’s almost tempted to ask her how she’s doing with Wangnan. Almost. He likes his eyebrows where they are. Instead, he picks up the company’s phone and greets his ‘husband’ with a mild hello, instead of “can you cook tonight? I think I need to pass out.”
“Miseng punched a kid’s lights out at school.” Is what falls from his mouth instead of ‘hello’.
The first thing Bam has to do is not laugh because Khun sounds so confused. Like, what do you mean my daughter, child of my loins, part of my life and half my heart, punched a kid’s lights out?
Who taught her to punch kids in the face? Me, Bam thinks but does not say through this invisible argument.
The second thing he has to do is not ask “did they deserve it?” Because the other party never deserves it apparently, especially when you chase them with sticks half your height, Hatz.
So he carefully picks up his most concerned voice and says, “Is she okay?”
“Mostly.” Khun relaxes a little. He probably expected hysteria or something. Goseng-nim would definitely have gotten hysterical because Beta bites people. “Mostly upset. I’m calling from the school, actually. He’s claiming she attacked him for no reason. She says he bullied her. I’m… not sure what to think. She’s never done this before.”
“Is she getting expelled?” Bam gets the sense Khun isn’t talking about the one who got punched on purpose.
“No, because then the other kid would get expelled for provoking a fight.”
“That’s very equal for Jahad.”
Khun snorts, as if he understands. He doesn’t, and Bam knows better than to explain it to him. He’s overwhelmed as it is. “They’re not expelling immediately. There are these… badges, called Third Eyes, that the kids have to wear. If you get eight of them, you get expelled. She has one and so does the kid.”
How does no one get expelled every five minutes? Hatz hadn’t mentioned any of this at his school! Kids do this all the time.
“I can leave now,” Bam offers. “Are you trying to figure out how to scold her?”
“Kind of?” Khun lets out a loose, ragged laugh. “I’m not used to… this part of parenting. She lashed out instead of talking. I thought I’d explained it well.”
“Mm.” Bam has a lot to say about that, but not where nosy coworkers were definitely listening. “I’ll stop and pick up dinner ingredients then and we can plan from there.”
“Thank you,” Khun whispers, and hangs up. For the best, phone calls are expensive.
He puts the phone down onto the cradle and goes to pack up.
“Trouble in paradise,” Rozeal says, sly.
Bam smiles sweetly. “Just a little. Good luck with the rest of the paperwork!”
They yell things at him as he leaves. He’s worked his schedule.
Unfortunately, when it rains, it pours. Bam gets five steps out of work when a familiar voice calls “Noona!”
Oh no.
Hatz waves as he approaches, all smiles and clutching groceries. “I wanted to visit for dinner.”
Bam winces. “You shouldn’t have, Hatz, you have bills.” And he can’t cook. Despite all of Bam’s best efforts, he really can’t cook.
“So do you.” His brother’s voice and eyes are soft and sad. “Let me meet your husband. I don’t want him to hurt you.”
Bam does not trust this to go well. “… All right, but we need to take care of Miseng first. She punched a kid.”
Hatz’s face contorts around a sentence. Bam sighs and falls into step with his brother, mentally apologizing to Khun again. This would be a long night.
It’s taking all of Dusk’s spy training not to scream into his hands. He’s handled multiple crises before. What excellent spy hasn’t? But he doesn’t know how to handle children! That is the entire problem. Isu handles children. That’s his entire hiding place.
He is not prepared to handle a guilty, anxious, frightened child who had simply reacted if she wasn’t lying to save her butt. Kids do that. He was a dumb kid; he did that. And she sounds guilty. She doesn’t want to ruin her papa’s mission, though how she actually knows this is a mission is something to think about when something normal happens in his life.
She’s on the couch, having missed all her classes and sniffling over her worksheets. He can’t tell if she’s still upset about the fight or thinks he’s mad at her (he should be, he really should be, but she’s six years old) and Dusk is too nervous to ask.
At least Bam will be home soon. He’s an excellent buffer, and he’s actually, unfortunately, luckily, raised a child. Even while as a child himself. Khun hadn’t lied when he’d said it was admirable. It was also a gigantic thank god because he’s not a parent, and frankly he doesn’t know how to be one.
“Miseng,” he says. She jolts upright, which isn’t comforting but expected. “Are you okay?”
Her lip wobbles and she cries. Oh no, he was trying not to do that. “I, I’m, I’m sorry papa, I just…”
“He bullied you,” he says because that was the official explanation from witnesses, while the nobler kids and supporters of Jahad said he had been ‘establishing the class hierarchy’ or something as inane as that. “And you fought back.”
“He called daddy weird,” Miseng protests. “And me a freak! He said I didn’t belong there! I do! I did everything he did!”
Khun thinks of Prince Jahad. If he recalls correctly, he’d been adopted at the behest of Wangnan Jahad because of a father who’d accumulated massive debts from taking on other’s debts. Much like the Princesses, Prince may feel pressure or a desperate need to prove himself. How Jahad instilled that in a literal six-year-old, Dusk does not know.
And Miseng will not give a shit. She’s a six-year-old dealing with an equally bratty six-year-old. There’s no such thing as empathy and working around these circumstances after a first impression like that.
So he has to encourage her to stand up for herself some other way.
“Miseng,” he says, slowly, carefully, so she doesn’t mishear anything (she’s done it before). “He was wrong.”
She looks up, puffy-eyed. “Papa?”
He breathes out. “Prince was wrong. Your dad isn’t weird, you aren’t a freak, and we got there, you got to where you stood, through your own efforts. He was wrong, and he hurt you because he wanted to prove he was the best. I’m glad you got angry. You should be angry when people try to hurt you. You should stand up for yourself when people try to tear you down.”
She looks a little more hopeful, chestnut brown eyes warm with relief that no, her dad didn’t hate her. Kids were simple, but he really could not understand them.
“But you shouldn’t have hit him.”
She freezes.
“I understand why you did.” In his mask of a caring father, he moves to sit beside her, far enough that she can escape if she really needs to, but close enough for her to reach. The parenting books said that was right. “And sometimes, our emotions are too big for us to make hard choices. But you are in trouble. For next time, there’s something else I want you to do instead: beat him.”
Miseng swallows. “Papa?”
This is a core rule of the Khun family, true, so it’s not wrong that he tells her. Even his mother had done it before. “If he scores high in school, score higher. Build up slowly, each step at a time, get stronger, get smarter, get better. Show him you belong there just as much as he does. It’s hard, but I’ll help you the whole way.”
“What if he says that stuff again?” she sniffs, not really thinking about what he’s saying… yet.\
Khun smiles. “Then he’s a one-trick-pony, and you’ll show him better. That said… if he or his flunkies hit you, you can hit them back. Okay?”
She sniffles, but she doesn’t seem ready to cry again. “Didn’t… I thought I was supposed to be his friend…”
I’m pretty sure that plan is dead, he thinks, but doesn’t say. Miseng twitches. “I would like you to make friends, and if you make friends with him, I’ll be happy for you.” Khun keeps his tone light as the key turns in the lock. “But I know how hard it is to be friends with someone with a rocky start like that. You can make friends when you’re ready. But you have to apologize for punching him, and he needs to apologize for hurting your feelings. As long as that happens and you’re okay with his apology, I think that’s enough.”
She smiles right as Bam opens the door, calling out a greeting. Good enough.
Khun is about to relax and get some more tissues when he realizes there’s someone else with Bam.
And whoever that person is, they’re hostile. To him or this whole thing, Khun isn’t sure. Bam comes in with groceries and a young man around Khun’s height. His black hair is messy and his build doesn’t look muscular in the slightest. But he has to be. There’s no way he could keep with Bam’s unnatural strength and speed if he was weak. And judging by the soles of his shoes, he had been walking quick and very hard. Avoiding the conversation, which was something he could not blame the other for.
Bam looks exasperated and worried in turns and introduces who is likely going to become such a pain in Khun’s ass. “Apologies for the surprise. This is my little brother, Hatz. He brought groceries for dinner.”
“Nice to meet you,” Hatz says in a voice that makes it clear it isn’t.
“Daddy?” Miseng squeaks. Oh right. She probably thinks her other parent is mad at her. At Khun’s concerned glance, Bam nods with a smile.
“Coming!” he calls before turning to his brother. “Set everything up. Do not touch the stove.”
“It was one time,” Hatz protests. As Khun raises a concerned eyebrow, Bam doesn’t even falter, slipping his shoes off and going towards the bedroom, likely to change.
“It was three that I was there for,” he corrects with the long suffering of someone who has been on their feet too long. “And quite a few phone calls. I’ll be there in a minute. Can you handle the prep part, K— Aguero?”
“Of course,” he says smoothly. He can actually and one-upping this gawky little college honor student suddenly feels vital to the future of his career.
Not that anyone who goes straight into Jahad’s army under the guise of a decent paying office job before graduating is normal, but he’s expecting it.
Bam smiles at both of them like they’re adorable puppies and heads to his bedroom.
Shit, they did not set up things yet to make it look like they slept together. This would be harder than he’d thought.
But adults were easier. Dusk could easily fuck with his brother-in-law a little.
It would be an understatement to say Hatz adores his older brother.
It’d be an even worse understatement to say Hatz worries about his older brother.
His status as a man is dangerous. Hatz knows, he watches the propaganda machine roll on, Jahad and his butthurt anger being a part of everything his then sister had suffered. If Bam ever found out the depths of Jahad’s bullshittery on why their parents died, he’d probably just fall apart. He keeps this secret. He keeps a lot of things from his brother.
But he loves him. He loves that older brother. He doesn’t remember his mother holding him through nightmares, or his father reading to him. Hatz knows these things happened. There are lots of old, faded pictures and one simple reel held safely in the care of a distant uncle’s old projector.
All Hatz remembers is Bam. Bam who came home with blood on his face and the book of maths he needed for school. Bam carefully patching his academy uniform so it didn’t look patched and used. Bam making his lunches when he came home and rocking him through a nightmare. Bam holding a certification and crying at his graduation, standing alone against all the rich families and beaming with pride.
Bam had thrown away his entire life for Hatz and his happiness and future and it was something he was going to pay back with, at the very least, Jahad’s money if nothing else.
So if in return his brother was no longer and never had been his sister, if he wanted to get married and live a normal life with a child of his own and all the love in the world, he would get nothing less than the best.
So when he’d just dropped the bombshell of ‘we had a long engagement and no wedding for sake of this man’s daughter’, it had… hurt, a little. Stung that he hadn’t said anything in their phone calls and let him go on worrying about when he was going to get a partner. He’d known getting a partner would be hard for him though. They wouldn’t just have to be okay with being gay but being with a… he believes the term is transsexual? Transgender? He doesn’t know what the correct terminology is. Hatz doesn’t even think Bam knows or cares.
But then, Bam probably had been holding out for the disappointment. Even before coming out, his brother had avoided most of people interested in dating him because they were strange, in his words, and wanted things he’d never give them.
Looking over at this… Khun, there are so many of them, what is special about this one? He read the file for him, just an ordinary person in the field of psychology, of all the subjects, at the hospital where people regularly are treated after run-ins with FUG or Wolhaiksong. They claim with these departments, that the mind can be repaired similarly to the body, only using different techniques. It sounded ludicrous to him but then, other marvels had been magical before.
Still, Khun Aguero Agnis, widower, child of six years who had been ill for the past year and change, now healthy and accepted into the Institute Bam had wanted him to join but couldn’t afford. Plus they had an obsession with traditional family values.
Hah.
Right now he’s going through the groceries (a chicken pasta dish with roasted broccolini, nothing Bam would struggle with and not that squid ink seafood pasta Endorsi liked that was absurdly expensive to make, and a plain pound cake with that lemon… thing Bam liked to pour on) and rummaging through the cabinets. He pulls out a wooden cutting board, all under the eyes of the supposed spouse.
Hatz risks glancing through the room. Bam still isn’t back yet, he’s probably busy putting on pajamas or bracing himself for the inevitable.
Then he looks at Khun once more. “My brother tells me everything.” He avoids the hostility, the anger, the deliberate test on the word brother. There are three possible options: this Khun knows and has helped him through it, which is unlikely because of the reputation of people like him, he thinks of his brother as a freak or a trophy or a fetish, or he didn’t know and Hatz telling him would spell the end. “He didn’t tell me about you. Did you ask for that secrecy?”
To the man’s credit, Khun only smirks. He probably thinks it’s a smile, the way all arrogant well-to-do people do. “I did,” he says. His voice is sheepish, painfully ordinary. Unlike a Khun at all. Maybe a disowned or bastard Khun, but unlikely, if he affords this lifestyle on his own so close to wartime. Psychology wasn’t exactly well-liked. “My daughter was ill and she’s still bearing the effects now.”
Said daughter is peering around the counter, brown eyes light with curiosity. They look right at him, like they’re going into his soul or something. Maybe children are ending up like that nowadays, who knows.
“She does look rather small for her age.” He can acknowledge that. He sets the vegetables out and the chicken. “Will Bam let you use the stove?”
“I’d rather he didn’t,” Khun admits without hesitation. “Boiled food and water is my limit.”
Hatz has a good sense of liars. He’s had to in the military, in order to work under a princess especially. This person is lying, but he doesn’t know where the lie unravels. Fucking Khuns.
The little one gasps suddenly, but when both the adults turn to look at her, she’s turrned away coloring. Cute.
“Fair enough,” Hatz says instead of suggesting that. “You chop, I can start the water.”
“Your brother said not to touch the stove.” Khun’s expression turns sly. “I get the feeling we should listen to him, for our own safety.”
Hatz doesn’t bristle. No, he refuses to give into this childish man. “Then I’ll chop.”
“Watch instead,” Khun says in what he thinks is a cajoling tone. “Bam’s not said too much about you aside from your grades and hobbies and that you have a government internship. Did I get that right?”
Hatz makes a face. He knows Bam said more than that. Bam once bragged to Endorsi while he was right next to him. Hilarious but so embarrassing. Bam would freely talk a person’s ear off about his family if he could, not to mention that Bam wanted him to see to his own future “before I’m old and gray”. It was half-joke, half “do it for both of us”.
Hah. Fuck this city.
Hmph. No wonder he hadn’t mentioned marriage for a year. Hatz swallows the annoyance and says, “That’s a good amount of information.”
Hatz promptly wipes the thought from his mind.
“What’s your focus?” Khun says instead of responding to that, which… fair enough. He’ll behave a little, there’s a child in here.
Said child continues to stare at him. Why?
“Finance law,” he says with a low, worn sigh. Khun keeps washing the vegetables, listening intently. “It’s uncommon, but I intend to go into policy and educational reform. There are too many private schools and the public school budgets are often handled poorly. They were at my school, and it was a private one. I can’t imagine how it is in public ones. The government internship was a lucky accident.”
“That’s what happens when you study, as I recall.”
Hatz hmphs “Something like that.”
Bam comes out as Khun finishes chopping the vegetables. He’s dressed in his comfiest sweater and pants, the kind he wears, Hatz knows, when he had been upright for too long. Even before discussing… gender with him (and boy had that been a sit down conversation), Bam had preferred pants as loungewear. Not that they usually had guests, but that was besides the point. He goes to check on Khun first. “Remember to flip the board,” he says, leaning just over Khun’s shoulder.
Khun doesn’t react at all to that, but puts the knife down and nods. “Thank you. I can keep going if you want some time with you brother.”
“I can cook and we can talk,” Bam replies with the familiar no-nonsense that he’d grown up with. Khun seems unsurprised by this as he puts the knife down and steps away, hands comically up to show his harmlessness in the situation.
Bam only laughs and swaps spots with him. His hair is tied up a hairstyle that emphasizes the sharpness of his cheekbones. It’s a good look, but most things are on him.
Khun stands back and watches. Not Bam, but Hatz himself.
Thankfully, Bam doesn’t notice or be offended by the staring. He was focused on the conversation. Which was fine. He missed his brother.
Dinner isn’t a quiet affair.
Not that Khun had expected it to be, even with Miseng subdued from punching a kid in the face. She didn’t even get to be proud of it. Even Khun, in both fake and real backstory, had gotten to be proud of it once or twice.
It sounds like Prince is a handful too.
But there’s time. They can work on it. He’d seen worse and weirder situations for a child to get out of.
For some reason, Miseng’s still hunghin shoulders relax a little as she babbles to Bam about… something. Her friend Verdi and her interest in dolls and stuffed animals. Bam nods along, genuinely interested.
That reminds me. “So, Hatz,” he says with a light, easy drawl. “Did Bam ever have to visit your school?”
Bam turns. He blinks at them both.Then he laughs at the look on Hatz’s face. “Oh you’re going to embarrass him I see.”
“Well,” Khun starts casually. “I can’t imagine you haven’t told him something embarrassing about me.”
HE’s sure that Bam hasn’t, actually. Bam doesn’t talk badly about any of the people he talks to, not even the princesses who are all various levels of insufferable and would deserve it. That may be because they would figure him out or because he’s just a nice person.
Bam gives Khun a look as if to say, I know what you’re doing and I don’t appreciate it, masked behind a cute (cute??? What??? Cute??? brain???) smile and a casual hand wave. “Not yet, but you are fun to watch flail about in a kitchen.”
“Gee, thanks dear.”
Bam laughs, soft but brimming with something. He should be careful, this mission can’t go on for that long. He can’t get too invested here.
Hatz clears his throat. “Well, there were times where someone insulted my family’s honor and since they couldn’t do anything about it, I stepped in.”
“Children can be petty,” Bam explains to Miseng. Miseng is nodding along “Like the boy you beat.”
“Don’t say that to her,” he groans. “She’ll get ideas.”
“She already has ideas,” Bam replies lightly. Miseng nods along, though Khun doubts she does have ideas. She’s six, the sadism is reflexive, not planned out. He’s met enough Khuns to know that himself. “We may as well be realistic about them.
Hatz snorts. “She does. I know children, much better than you, apparently.” He shoots a look at Khun, who only raises an eyebrow, nonplussed.
“Miseng is a good kid,” Khun says with a wry smile. “Maybe a bit too curious for her own good, but it’s something to encourage.”
Miseng brightens up and beams at them both. They both smile back.
Hatz clears his throat. “So yes, he did have to help me. That was more embarrassing than the fights.”
“Which you won,” Bam says smoothly and Hatz scoffs.
“Private school kids don’t know how to fight.”
This Khun does know from experience. “It must have been humiliating.”
“On all fronts. But Bam always handled it like an actual adult, unlike them.”
Bam merely sighs, face pink. “I did nothing special, relax, Hatz.”
Hatz looks pleased with himself and opens his mouth to speak. Then Miseng distracts Bam with a wave of her hand and a story and Bam turns away.
Hatz pauses, looks that over, then looks at Khun and says, “You aren’t very affectionate.”
“Most Khuns aren’t,” he says smoothly. This is definitely true. A sweet Khun is uncommon at best. “Bam hasn’t complained.”
“Mm.” Suspicion lingers in those dark eyes. “Kiss him then.”
What. “What?”
“You heard me,” Hatz says. “My brother enjoys kisses, forehead or cheek. If you were really in love, you’d know that and do it.”
What the fuck?
Khun glances at Bam, who is busy helping Miseng from the chair. He collects plates and shoots a look at Hatz, who merely crosses his arms and waits. This is such a power play. What an attempt at bullshit power. This was edging past overprotectiveness into fucking weird. Why was he so intense about it? What was he concerned about? His brother was grown.
Had he found something in his file? Or not found something? He’s pretty sure the Handler has edited their documents pretty well. That doesn’t mean anything, however. Hatz could just be a paranoid asshole of a person. But that didn’t explain this much hostility? Was it Bam being a man? Was it an extra layer of concern? Was it his disguise as a Khun?
All these thoughts swir. The solution is fairly straightforward. He can just kiss Bam and all is solved. But—
“Hatz,” Bam says sweetly as Miseng scampers away to get her pajamas (he distantly hopes this time Miseng doesn’t dunk the stuffed animal in the bath this time, they take forever to dry). “Are you becoming a voyeur in university?”
Hatz sputters and Khun stares at him, a surprised snort leaving his mouth. “Hyung!” he shouts, cheeks pink. “What are you saying?”
Bam sighs. “Well, I just… I don’t mind kissing my husband but in front of you? That’s a new one. Is that something you had to do in university to fit in? YOu said that was a good school?”
“That’s—” Hatz rubs his face. “That’s because this is new. You’re usually more open than this. I don’t want you to, for him to isolate you or worse.”
What happened in schools that caused that? Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Miseng peering out behind the door. He jerks his head to the right and she sticks her tongue out at him. She’s sure gotten bold for barely escaping grounding.
“Aguero has been a gentleman to me.” Bam’s voice sharpens. “Thank you for worrying but I’m really all right.”
Hatz stares back at his brother, stubbornness and concern etched all over his being. If it had a scent, it would be rolling off of him in rust and well water. Khun mentally sighs. This is for world peace, he tells himself before allowing a soft smile to cross his face.
“Bam it’s fine. Let’s humor him.”
It’s not like he minds kissing. He’s done it all the time, for any mission or situation in the moment. It’s just touching mouth and at most swapping spit. He’s even done it in public. It’s just how it is. And yet this time, it feels wrong in some way. It feels like proving a point, like a gotcha.
If he’s going to make out with Bam, even with a fake relationship, shouldn’t this be done with a little more respect? At least as a request from his partner’s brother?
Dusk has never seriously been in relationships but he’s pretty sure this is a lose-lose situation.
Why is he trying to justify not doing this?
Bam turns to him, eyes wide, tugging at his long hair. “If you’re okay with it,” he says and steps forward.
Khun mimics him, taking another step forward. Their height difference is minimal, so Bam barely has to lean up, more likely lean to the side. Then Khun turns his neck, to match mouth for mouth. Instead, Bam leans over and brushes Dusk’s cheek with his lips. He shuts his eyes and opens them. A ghost of a kiss, really, like his mother before school or his sister’s fingers —
Limp in the stretcher—
Gentle on his head before bed.
Then it’s gone, and there’s nothing on his face, but his cheekbones themselves feel warm. Hatz makes a strange noise in the background.
Dusk doesn’t know what kind of expression he’s making. Bam is smiling up into his eyes, warm eyed and bitter as the coffee he drinks on long train rides.
What did Bam see when he kissed his cheek? Surprise? Grief? an impossible standard of mother, generic and unattainable that didn’t exist?
Did he make up a mother and apologize to her memory for nothing at all?
Khun leans down himself before being prompted and presses a kiss on Bam’s cheek. Skin is soft, compared to the hands or the steady muscles on his back. Humans are warm, and the face shows it best. Bam lets out a soft, surprised sound when he does, eyes having closed when Khun moved. They’re open, staring at Khun with his mouth in a small ‘o’
It’s cute, like a puppy.
The door slams shut with a loud crack, startling them both from a daze. Hatz is nowhere to be seen.
Despite everything, they both start laughing for a moment. “I think,” Bam says, wiping his eyes. “I think we embarrassed him. I’m sorry for that. Thank you for the trouble.”
“The trouble?” Khun repeats. “He’s your brother, not a mushroom growing out of a sink.”
“He can be… intense sometimes,” Bam says, which feels like a massive understatement. “Raising him was difficult, and I was protective of him, but as I was before, I was probably in much worse danger than he was back then. So he… overcompensates in life. If he’s not the best and I’m not the happiest, there’s a problem, so he wants to solve it. Usually more honorably than this but I’m glad he didn’t try to duel you into the hospital or something.”
“That’s some intense loyalty,” Khun muses with a smile. “Are you fond of bringing that out of people?” Is there a revolutionary in you somewhere, demanding a pursuit of justice or peace?
Dusk doubts it. Bam’s profile is more ordinary than his brother’s. At the very least, he’s not a spy.
“Ah well.” He stretches and cracks his shoulder. “It’s been a busy day, Why don’t we clean this up and go to bed?”
“That may be for the best, though…” Bam glances at the cake. “He left the dessert. It’s one of his favorites.”
“We can see if it will last until tomorrow and maybe Miseng won’t punch a classmate this time.”
Bam snorts and Miseng eeps behind the door. Khun casts her a wry look. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the bath?”
Miseng stares at them, big eyes and mischief that Bam has somehow avoided his whole time here. She’s like a fox. “I wanna see mama and papa kiss for real,” she says, with no shame whatsoever.
Dusk unfortunately cannot contain the heat that burns his ears, and judging by the look on Bam’s face, your fake child shoving you together like two dolls is infinitely more embarrassing than your muscleheaded brother.
“No,” they say together in varying states of authority.
Miseng puffs out her cheeks. “Aw.”
At least she shuts the door.
Bam snorts again. “I don’t think I did this with my parents.”
“My mother didn’t bring dates home,” Khun replies absently, a truth and a lie. His mother didn’t date, period. She never knew when their father would come calling for something or other, and the last time she’d had a man in her house that wasn’t Dusk himself or a half-sibling it had been… messy.
“Too much to do to date,” Bam agrees without any real inflection on the subject.
They slept in separate rooms, have separate tasks during the day, and at most interact at the end and once in a while to keep up the charade that’s lasted not even a month. By that logic, there should be leagues, chasms between them that they walked on tightropes, impossible distances that could never and should never be closed by anyone, let alone a spy and a stranger and an orphan.
And yet Dusk doesn’t feel distant at all.
He should make a note of that. Attachment was no good for these situations.
Everything aches.
This isn’t new, Bam knows. It usually predates a very busy work day and his body shedding itself from the inside on the worst of days. That mess with his brother (well meaning but so invasive) doesn’t help any. He doesn’t like lying to Hatz (but his brother is wrong that he doesn’t do it easily and often.) But all the same, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. He rolls over in bed and goes to take care of things.
When he returns fifteen minutes later, his window is open. Hwaryun’s sitting on his bed.
He should be more surprised. He hadn’t exactly mentioned his change in address to her, and they usually contacted him at work during his lunch break. But she’s the one who found him in the first place, knowing he could kill before he even knew he could do it. She could easily find his place of residence, even if he wasn’t paying for it.
“Good evening, my prince,” she said. Her red eye bored into him like a bullseye.Bam braced himself. There was a last minute mission and he wouldn’t sleep well tonight. His clothes were clean and knives ready. She just had to say the word and he’d swallow the painkillers and go. He’s done it before.
“Hi,” he says, watching her go back to examining his room. His room with a recently repainted set of walls and nice wooden furniture and actual drawers instead of a big sack that stank of blood. His room that he could keep photos in and hide supplies and no one would break in (well obviously except her.)
“Congrats on your nuptials,” she continues, returning her gaze to him. Her long black dress is held together by a warm red sash, and it terrifies as much as it enchants him. “And further congratulations on keeping it a secret for so long. The Head does hope this does not discourage you in other matters.”
Bam shakes his head at once. “You don’t need to threaten them,” he says, soft and steady. He shouldn’t care. He knows he shouldn’t care, truly. But he can’t help it.
Here is a kind man (with secrets and lies and all people have them, and maybe a lot of his are hidden in grief and strength)
And a mischievous little girl (a kind of girl he’d have liked to be if he was anyone else, maybe, or who he’d have wanted). He cannot help but care for them.
Hatz always warned him that he cared too much. Then again, so did Wangnan, and Ehwa, and Endorsi.
He hopes Khun never tells him that.
“Nothing has to change. It will be more difficult,” he acknowledges. “But I thrived under difficulty. You have nothing to worry about.”
A wry smile turns Hwaryun’s mouth, her red lipstick starting to fade. “I can tell there is no concern on that front. I am merely here to confirm you are ours. Your brother has all the more to lose if you slip.”
“You know how he is,” Bam says. It’s not a threat. FUG — and thus Hwaryun — doesn’t need to threaten him whatsoever. “Everything will be well, for all of us.”
“Everything,” Hwaryun agrees. “Is for the Grace of a future with a better garden, where the roses can bloom.”
Bam feels an itch along his spine. “Always with a new spring,” he intones, though he has never seen a new spring in his life.
She smiles once more, cold and fierce. “Then until next time, my prince.”
He blinks and Hwaryun has seemingly disappeared. He knows her well enough to know otherwise.
Bam lets out a long sigh and closes the window before tucking himself into bed.
He hopes Miseng’s next day of school isn’t this exciting. He doesn’t know how much he can take!
After a few days, Miseng discovers an interesting thing about her school: it quiets people’s minds!
Well, the walls mute people’s minds. Or maybe it’s the lessons. Her first full day of classes is long. There’s so much that she doesn’t know. Verdi is kinda helpful at least… when she’s not talking about dolls. There are words she doesn’t know in there too. She writes them down. Papa helps her spell them correctly at home.
Still, it’s nice to think and learn stuff for real. At the orphanage, no one got to do that. Papa was right! Being better than stupid Prince was the most important thing.
Maybe it’d make him stop staring at her from the other side of the room. His face has a bandaid and gauze on it, which makes her heart sting a bit. He shouldn’t have said all that stuff! It was mean! He needed to know it was mean. And he’d already gotten punched. She didn’t have to do anything else.
Unfortunately, the homework was hard. The pages were words she hadn’t grown up around, unlike everyone else.
Miseng bites her lip and looks around the classroom. Everyone else is paying attention. For her, the professor’s voice is so boring. He drones on and his words jumble together. Whoever taught him to teach didn’t teach him very well. Hmph. This is dumb.
Still, school is doable, and people aren’t as mean as the other orphans told her. She gets to watch cartoons! (If she does her homework). Papa checks it every night and corrects her. (His thoughts get weird and muddled as he goes over it, pulling things like from a cabinet or something. It’s weird, but he knows the answers!)
Daddy doesn’t know as much, but that’s okay. They often solve problems together. Uncle Hatz is smarter, he says, but he has weird thoughts and is super impatient. Miseng doesn’t know if she likes him or not.
Everything is great! She thinks. Other than a Cursed Eye on her uniform anyway that she can’t get rid of. Well, the dumb Prince has one too, so it’s fine!
Everything is going to be just fine! She’s going to make world peace happen! For sure!
… Or she’ll break Prince’s nose next time. He needs to stop staring!
Prince Jahad has never lost before.
Everything he has ever studied at home with tutors, every sport he’s ever played, every single thing he takes care of himself, he’s succeeded in, no matter what it was. He’s had no choice but to be.
He thinks of the rain on a lonely April day and an empty casket. Wangnan’s larger hand holding his, a promise in his eyes. It’d just been the two of them then. Karaka had exams. Michelle had been gone for two years. He didn’t know of any others. They wouldn’t have cared, anyway.
Wangnan had piggybacked him home, like a real older brother. Like he mattered a lot.
Karaka always told them, in place of father, that all of them mattered, all of their accomplishments, their failings. The whole of them, or something.
Wangnan had good grades, but they weren’t as good as Michelle’s or Karaka’s. He spent his time in commoner places, like pubs or something. Gross. Most of his friends were commoners, but there was a girl he liked that was a noble. Or maybe it was a guy. He didn’t care. His brother was nice, but also so gross.
He was kind, Karaka had warned him, too hopeful in this dark word.
But that’s why I’m here. He thinks but doesn’t say whenever this comes up. It’s rare because Karaka-hyung is almost never here, especially now. He’s been so busy, but he used to be around at least. Now it’s just him… and Wangnan sometimes.
Maybe if he does well, Father will come.
Prince carries that idea in his heart. If he does well, like the others did, Father would come and approve. Even Wangnan did that. But in order to do that, he’d have to be top of his class over and over and get into the elite of the elite.
Wangnan hadn’t managed it after all and had gotten his stars through his behavior and not grades. Prince couldn’t risk doing that! No, he had to be the best of the best, as he always has been. He needed to prove it now. Which he could, duh. His grades are great and he’s not in trouble.
The problem was… that commoner girl!
Just thinking of that girl and her bunny hair clips… Prince kicks a rock, startling Nia and the others surrounding him. Nia gives him a scolding look, and Prince ignores him. Of course he does. Nia is just his minder. He gets paid to look after him! He doesn’t know anything!
He kicks the rock again and goes back to his lunch. Miseng and Verdi laugh together on the other side of the yard. They’re trading lunches. What a downgrade. What was so good about a commoner’s lunch? He left those behind for a reason.
“If you want to talk to her, you just should.”
Nia stares at him, arms crossed, green eyes unfazed by his glare. He’s always scolded and ignored any changes in their lives just because they both came from different places. He says “it’s for Wangnan!” But it’s just because he’s jealous. Nia is older and had to learn more. They have to bully him or something.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he grunts, turning away.
Nia coughs. “Okay. I’ll go be friends with her then.”
Prince snaps his head up. “Wait why?”
“She’s a girl,” Nia says reproachfully. “Not an alien.”
“She punched me,” Prince says. The bandage is off now. There’s no bruise anymore, but it still sucked. He never got punched like that before… ever!
“You were bullying her.” Nia says as one of the other kids glares at him. “You said something rude about her parents and others. You deserved it.”
Someone gets up. Prince doesn’t see who. He’s still busy sulking into his own lunch. He’s not all that hungry; his stomach replaced with a lead ball. But they’re trying to loom over Nia. Nia just frowns at him. Then he gets up with the rest of his lunch and walks away, nose in the air.
“Hey!” He shouts, but Nia ignores him. Hmph. Fine, ruin your reputation with those people. He didn’t care! He didn’t care at all!
He cares a lot.
His other friends are fine. They talk about money a lot, and things their parents have bought them. No one buys him anything themselves, but he’s already seen all the things they like and more. Nothing is amazing and new to a son of a king.
But it’s not like he’s forgotten moth eaten cushions and a drafty squeaky window either.
Prince resists the undignified urge to tug on his hair. Someone would notice. He’d get in trouble acting so undignified. Everyone packs up around him, oblivious to the way he looks at the rest of his notes.
He needs to get going. His chauffeur is waiting. He’s supposed to try something Wangnan made. He needs to get going. Just get up. Get up.
“Hey!”
Prince’s head jerks up with a yelp and he almost nearly topples backwards out of his chair. That weird girl stares at him, eyes wide, backpack tight on her shoulders. Verdi, right next to her, is laughing at his misfortune. She’s always been weird!
“Are you okay?” Miseng asks, like she didn’t punch him or disagree with him or anything. She’s biting her lip, looking harmless. Nice. Like she’d never punch anyone, ever.
Prince, what are you thinking? She’s not cute!
“What’s it to you?” he says rudely, crossing his arms.
Miseng’s eyes flare up and she makes a face before taking a huge breath and letting it out. “I’m just being nice,” she says. “You should get going. They gotta clean in here.”
Gosh she even talks like a commoner. Still, she has a point. “Right. Thanks.” Prince hurriedly packs his bag, his pens and pencils hitting the bottom of his bag. He’s keeping Wangnan waiting or something, ugh he’s going to worry.
As he finishes stuffing everything into the bag, Miseng says, “W-wait.”
He turns to look at her, facing big brown eyes with so much sparkle and emotion he’s surprised they don’t just explode.
“What?” Prince says, drawing on his toughest Karaka-hyung voice.
Her fists clench and unclench and then do it again until she says. “I’m sorry I hit you.” She keeps looking at him, even though Prince himself isn’t looking at her. This time, he can feel her staring. “I was mad, and you said awful stuff, but that didn’t mean I should hit you. So I’m sorry, and I want to start over and try to be friends again.”
She’s lying, says a long paranoid, undying voice that kept him and daddy safe.
“I don’t want to be friends with a commoner,” Prince says abruptly, trying to shut that voice up because hah, she can throw a punch and can not get expelled. It means nothing.
“I don’t want to be friends with you either!” She says you like he’s a centipede.
Her eyes burn with tears, but she keeps meeting his eyes. Most kids don’t do that. They look away, stutter, mumble, because he’s strong. She meets his gaze without hesitation and continues, like she hasn’t taken Prince and punched him in the heart! Not literally! He’d punch back this time.
“I don’t wanna to be friends with you either. You’re mean and hate my parents and you don’t know them! I don’t like you! But we’re gonna be classmates and it’s important to world peace so… I’m gonna try no matter what! So….” She glares at him, eyes sparkling and pleading all at once. “So, can we try again?”
Prince stares. She stares back, and it’s like a puppy, not one of the guard dogs at home but a bumbling brown puppy who didn’t realize how powerful she was.
It was cute. He had to be honest. She — commoner — Miseng — was cute.
His face warms, cheeks burning the brightest. He thrusts his hand out before he can think better of it, pointing as ferociously as he can. “I’m not losing to you! I’m going to beat you and prove you don’t belong here.”
Miseng puffs up, her cheeks somehow rounder in offense. It’s really cute, but she might cry for real. He doesn’t want that, no matter how much he doesn’t like her.
“But!” Prince continues. “If you can just as good of grades as me, then you’ll be worthy of being my friend.”
Fear and dismay crosses her face. “Beat you?”
“Yeah!” He grins. “But I’m top of the class. There’s no way you can beat me.”
Her dark eyes light up. “I’ll do it,” Miseng declares. “And then we’ll be friends and save the world.”
She may be cute, but what is she talking about?
Prince gets outside, only to hear a cheerful, familiar voice calling his name where his chauffeur would be. Prince runs over at once, bag bouncing on his back. His friends are already gone, shepherded away because they have curfews (unlike him, father would need to remember him for that).
Wangnan beams at him and hugs him as Prince grabs onto his legs. For a moment, he wishes his brother could pick him up and hug him like before bed. But he knows better. It would be undignified. Adori-noona would never let it go. He’d just… wait until he got home. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. Karaka said he was in the area so I wanted to catch him to take us out to dinner, but of course he wandered off again, so it’s the two of us.”
Prince pretends the prospect of dinner without his stuffy older brother is a disappointment. “What about Adori-noona?”
“She’s off to a different sector all day,” Wangnan explains, opening the car door. He pauses, looking up to see Miseng — ugh. He’d thought he’d left her in the classroom. “Oh, hi! Are you one of Prince’s friends?”
“NO!!” Prince snaps, offended enough that his hair bristles. The embarrassment still stings. “She punched me.”
“Did she?” Wangnan casts an amused smile in her direction. “Did you say sorry? I’m sure he made you mad, but my brother’s a nice kid, honest.”
“Wangnan!” Prince starts, but Miseng hasn’t answered at all, staring at his brother without blinking.
Then she turns and runs away, bolting towards the bus without a word.
“She’s shy,” Wangnan says as she goes.
Prince crosses his arms. “She’s weird. Can we go now?”
“Yes, yes,” Wangnan says with a laugh, and helps him into the limousine.
Prince huffs and puts the weird girl out of his mind for the rest of the day. No way she’d catch up to him anytime soon, if ever.
Khun warned him this morning that he’d be back late tonight. Not that Bam had minded that. Working in hospitals was a thankless, grueling role. Every time he’d ended up in a hospital because of his own carelessness had proven that. It hadn’t been often. He hadn’t wanted to worry Hatz after all, or make him question where the money was coming from. But working late was normal for most professions and they weren’t actually married, so it was more of a concern for Miseng than anything.
So Bam is not worried when he comes home with groceries (it’s his turn) and he’s the only one at the house.
What is concerning is a blond young man with a scarred face sitting on his steps. For a moment he thinks it’s Wangnan-ssi, who has been talking about visiting for a few days now. But he’s busy with school, like Hatz, and has his little brothers and father to think about, not to mention Ehwa, who has been quiet these past few weeks. She’s one of the loudest people he knows. He’ll have to visit her soon.
Once Bam sees the ponytail, Karaka’s expression an uncomfortable frown, along with the messy hair falling over the other’s suit, he relaxes a little. He should tense up, he knows, but even this person knows not to make a fuss outside of someone’s house.
“Karaka-ssi,” he greets, curtsying a little. “I have to pick up my daughter from the bus stop in about an hour. Would you like some tea?”
Karaka stares at him. He’s terrible at controlling his facial expressions, a side effect of spending most of his spare time in a suit of armor where he didn’t have to school his face. He tries, of course, controlling his mouth but not his eyes. Up close, it’s obvious that the two siblings are different. Karaka’s gaze is much, much angrier than a desperate Wangnan.
Then he gets up before saying, “I’m not one who eats from those I do not trust.”
“I hope your cooking skills are better than your brother’s,” Bam returns neatly. Karaka blinks, lip curling.
Bam lets it go and lets him in. There’s no point in keeping him out. If Karaka wants to get in, he’ll find a way. If FUG decides to be involved, they will be.
Which makes him wonder why Karaka is simultaneously being this overt while going incognito. They could have just sent a letter, or Hwaryun, or Luslec-nim would invite him to lunch.
Maybe… This could not be FUG at all, but Karaka having a snit.
Bam sets down the groceries and makes tea, anyway. Karaka is a rightfully paranoid, mistrusting, cultish man with no ability to suffer fools. They’d had the same master in FUG at different times, and for whatever reason, Karaka took that as a personal offense. But even if he doesn’t drink the tea, Bam will and Miseng might (she likes tea and sweet and sour pork and cupcakes, many things that children rarely appreciate when they have money.) Karaka hovers at the entrance to the house. Bam can’t see his expression, but the man is not subtle with his killer intent.
He sets the water to boil before turning around to meet his senior’s gaze. “Karaka-ssi, you don’t usually beat around the bush like this.”
“I have said nothing,” the man says. He’s trying not to sound defensive. And yet.
Bam rubs his eyes. “You don’t really have to. What is FUG’s concern?”
Or rather, what is Karaka’s concern?
Karaka regards him and still doesn’t speak.
Bam sighs and pulls out a couple of mugs. He smiles and watches the kettle for a moment, continuing to prepare to be a good host. “You can sit down, you know.”
He doesn’t mean for the bite in his voice, but the tension cracking in the air snaps to and Karaka exhales.
“Must you always be so impertinent?”
Bam doesn’t bristle or do much more than grip the handle of his mug a little harder than necessary. He breathes out. “It is not impertinent to remind a houseguest to have manners people don’t expect them to maintain.”
He doesn’t need to see Karaka’s face to hear the sharp intake of breath.
Bam forces himself to not raise his voice. “If you kill me, you’ll cause a scene, and our master will be upset.”
And it will annoy FUG if they have to groom another assassin before they get to test Jahad being immortal or not.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Karaka looks around, gesturing with a hand. “This domesticity. Your brother’s needs are still being met and you can enjoy the daytime?”
“I haven’t dropped my body count,” Bam says with a sigh, turning around. “Nothing has changed other than my address. What is your concern?”
Karaka’s nostrils flared. “You will play house with a man and his spawn. Why?”
Bam pours them both some tea, trying to understand where the hell this is going. “Why not?”
“You are a prince,” Karaka stresses. “You are the Thorn Prince.”
“So glad you approve of my gender practices.” The words slip out, coarse and angry, and Bam counts to ten before he dares say another word. “I’m never going to be royalty. Jahad-nim made certain of that. All… All I care about is Hatz having a wonderful life. If I get one as a side effect, I won’t banish it offhand.”
Karaka crosses his arms. His usual ring is nowhere in sight. That is a safety measure more than anything.
“People are less likely to look at a couple for an assassin,” Bam says after a moment of long thought. “Besides, my brother is getting suspicious of me remaining single. This is for the best.”
“Even if they are not who they say they are?” Karaka argues, eyes blazing.
“Am I who I say I am?” Bam points out, meeting his eyes. “Are you?”
He’s going to regret saying that. Karaka’s hair is starting to flare up. “Are you doubting me? My devotion? My cause?”
“For FUG?” Bam shakes his head. “Your intentions with me? Always. Master’s fondness of you has not waned. I don’t see any concern.”
“You wouldn’t,” Karaka hisses. “They’ve sheltered you. You do not know the waves you are making.”
“Are you going to tell me?” Bam asks, blowing on his tea and checking the clock.
Karaka just looks at him, mouth pursed into a line.
Yeah, he didn’t think so. So something about Khun-ssi was a lie. Something about Miseng was a lie. So? It wasn’t as though he was being honest with them. And they didn’t, they weren’t—
It isn’t a repeat of Rachel all over again. As long as it wasn’t like that, Bam figures a sham of a happy life for a little girl’s sake was effectively harmless.
“I need to go pick up my daughter,” Bam says. “We can walk together?”
It does not surprise Bam when Karaka slips away into the crowd without saying a word. He needs to tell Wangnan his brother’s a jerk, but that is way too difficult to explain.
Miseng’s a deep, intense thinker.
For a five-year-old. She looks a little younger than that. Khun said six. She looks and walks like she’s four. She thinks hard, like everything is important; the gravest mission. But she’s also a bundle of energy. He’s not surprised when she notices him and jumps down the bus stairs into his arms.
“Hi d-mama,” she corrects herself, and Bam’s heart swells. She’s a great kid, no matter what she’s not telling him, or even her dad.
“Welcome back,” he says, instead of floating into the sky and disappearing altogether. “Did you have a fun day?”
“I said sorry to that dumb Prince!” she declares as Bam carries her away. Miseng walks soon enough, stopping to hop because she’s so busy talking. “I don’t like him! But he wants to beat me, so I’ll beat him in all his classes and then we have to be friends!”
“Sounds like you’re making progress!” Bam has no clue why Aguero wants them to be friends, but maybe there’s less bullying if you have a rich patron kid covering you. It must have worked with Hatz, because he and Endorsi have been friends for years now.
Or maybe that’s just Endorsi thinking Bam is a girl still. He’s not sure.
“Mama?”
“Mm?” They cross the street slowly, and Bam scans for any sign of Karaka. He probably just came by to be intimidating, considering he didn’t stalk them back.
Miseng pauses for a moment too long. Then she says. “Would your friends be friends with papa? He’s really busy and bad at making friends. He thinks too much about big stuff.”
Aw. What a sweet kid. “That’s up to him,” Bam says instead of ‘yes’ or “no”. “He met a few of them at the party we went to, but he may like some more than others. They’re all very intelligent, like him, in different ways, which may make them clash. Why?”
“I met Dummy Prince’s brother!” God, he hopes that wasn’t Karaka. “He was all happy and had short blond hair! He was nice!”
“Oh!” Bam smiles. “You must have met Wangnan-ssi. He’s very cheerful. You’d like him. He likes spy cartoons.”
Miseng beams, like she solved a piece of the puzzle. “Can he come over?”
“Do you want Prince to come too?” Bam leads her up the steps.
“No,” she says solemnly. “But I want Verdi to come over.”
“Let’s ask your dad,” Bam replies with a smile. She must have come a long way since her recovery to want a sleepover. There was definitely no time to waste. After all, Bam had always sent Hatz to go on sleepovers. It’d be nice to host one someday.
Miseng cheers, though there’s a cautious look in her eyes that wasn’t there.
Once again, Bam dismisses Karaka’s words off-hand and goes to start dinner.
When Dusk gets home, he usually enters an empty apartment, or a headquarters bed, or a cheap hotel that smelled of the garbage from the last tenant.
Today it’s to Miseng waving her finished worksheets with checked scores, a warm home-cooked meal, and Bam sounding out the words in the crossword puzzle. The tv plays the news he had taken part in today, and something generic about the filling animal shelters.
“I’m back,” he says, instead of putting words to the odd, cotton ball feeling in his chest.
“Welcome back,” his fake family says together.
“Miseng wants to have a sleepover,” Bam tells him and Miseng beams.
“A… I’m sorry?” A what? He never had those at home. Why would kids do that?
Miseng laughs. “I want daddy to make a friend! And I made a friend, so it’s gotta be fair if I get two.”
God. This parenting thing doesn’t make a lick of sense does it?
Bam just smiles and Khun… he doesn’t give in. Dusk certainly isn’t, but it’s close.
“I’ll think about it.”
He eats dinner that night and reminds himself that he has a mission to complete. Whatever it takes.
However, it looks. It will be done. They will have world peace, no matter the risks or costs.
It has to be enough.
A piece of mail sits on the table with his name on it. It goes ignored for tonight.