Tilted (11/15)
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Joonmyun’s heart rate doubled as he read the message over several times before he slowly got up and turned off the TV. Lu Han’s office was close enough to walk to in nice weather, but tonight, rain pounded on Joonmyun’s windshield as he navigated to the little building, tucked away behind some shabbier looking apartments and stores.
“What have you got for me?” Lu Han asked when he let Joonmyun in.
Joonmyun shook out his umbrella and Lu Han glared at him when the droplets got on the carpet. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Um...Yixing lied to me about where he was going tonight.”
“I’m not surprised,” Lu Han said.
“Of course you’re not,” said Joonmyun. “I’m guessing somehow you already knew that?”
“No, I didn’t, but considering where he is, it’s not such a difficult conjecture to make.” Lu Han got comfortable in his desk chair and Joonmyun took it as permission to sit down too.
“Where is he, then?” Joonmyun asked.
“He’s with Sehun,” Lu Han answered breezily, “at his apartment.”
Joonmyun watched the detective uncomprehendingly. “What? Why would he be with Sehun after they...broke up...or whatever, and why would he lie to me about it?”
“Let’s get the story straight here, Joonmyun. First of all, they were never really ‘together,’ and secondly, he probably lied because whatever he is discussing with Sehun is something he doesn’t want you to know about.”
Joonmyun blinked. “Like what?”
“I can’t say for sure.” Lu Han tapped his fingers on the desk.
Not satisfied with that answer, Joonmyun pressed, “But...you must have some idea. You told me he has an ‘agenda,’ and it has something to do with Sehun, or people Sehun knows...or something. You told me to distance myself, which I’ve been trying to do, and I still don’t know what the reason is.”
Lu Han looked out the window at the lights of the traffic below them, blurred by the rain. “You can’t rush an investigation like this, Joonmyun. Facts will reveal themselves in their own time.”
Joonmyun looked carefully at Lu Han’s side profile, at the muscle working in his surprisingly strong jawline. “You do know more than you’re letting on,” Joonmyun realized at the same moment he said it.
Lu Han stared at his jar of paper stars for a long time while Joonmyun shifted in his seat. “You’re right,” Lu Han said finally.
Joonmyun finally felt like he had some kind of power over Lu Han - which he did, since he was technically his employee, after all - rather than being at the mercy of whatever he chose to tell him. “I hired you to find out if there’s a chance to save my relationship with him, not ruin it.”
“I think you pretty effectively ruined any real chance of that all by yourself when you went behind his back and hired me to snoop around instead of being honest with him about what you want.” Lu Han’s words fell heavily on Joonmyun and he stared hard at the desk, noticing all the little variations in the wood. “Look, I didn’t ask you here tonight to have it out with you. I asked you here to give you the information you hired me to get. That is, if you still want to know.”
“What is it? I told you when we first met, I want to know the truth.”
“Okay...it’s just...the truth might be a little…well...let me just say first, normally, in these kinds of situations, I wouldn’t even be telling you this. I would make up some great, satisfying story, the kind of thing that people want to hear, like...he’s a ninja assassin, or he’s on the run from a gang of loan sharks, or...what have you, I don’t know, creativity isn’t my strong point.” Lu Han paused as if to gauge Joonmyun’s reaction so far, but he was just struggling to sit still waiting for him to get on with it. “But in this case, I think you need to know.”
“Tell me,” Joonmyun insisted, and then he fell silent. He waited for Luhan to get the words out.
He took a breath. “Yixing’s not from China. He’s...from another world.”
Joonmyun stared at him. Hard. “When you say creativity’s not your strong point…” he trailed off, laughing with no real amusement.
“I know how it sounds,” Lu Han said, “but it’s the truth.”
“Prove it,” Joonmyun said, starting to wonder if Lu Han was actually crazy.
Lu Han looked at him with a straight face. “Do you know the Legend of the Guardians?”
“Of course,” said Joonmyun, “but...Lu Han...it’s not real. That’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
“Let’s just stick to hard facts for a minute here.” Lu Han pulled out Joonmyun’s old clipboard again, where he’d first described everything he knew about Yixing in detail. “March 31st, 2018, the day you met Yixing. Also, coincidentally, the night of the blue moon when its power was strongest. He shows up at the jazz club where you work, orders a drink but then apparently realizes he has no money to buy it. A little odd...is it possible he left his money in his other wallet? Maybe.”
Joonmyun opened his mouth, but found that he couldn’t string together a sentence. Lu Han continued on as if he hadn’t noticed. “Later, you find him sleeping in his car, as if he’s traveling and has no place to stay and no money for a hotel. He also doesn’t speak Korean well. His appearance and clothing suggest an upper middle class background, not typical of a poor traveler. He’s recently homeless, then. Or he was unknowingly robbed minutes before he entered the club. However...he doesn’t voluntarily share any of that information with you, the person who gave him a free drink and kindly volunteered to take him in. So whatever happened, it’s something he doesn’t want to talk about...or something he thinks you won’t believe.”
Joonmyun finally felt like he might drown in all of the private investigator’s words if he didn’t say something. “Lu Han, wait. None of that means--”
“Please just hold all your comments until I’m finished, Joonmyun, and then you can poke holes in the story all you want,” Lu Han commanded and Joonmyun found himself closing his mouth again.
Lu Han flipped to the next page on the clipboard. “Yixing stayed with you a second night after he abruptly left the club to make a phone call, even though you found out later that his phone was broken. Cell towers don’t reach across worlds, let me point out. This was also, coincidentally, the night the blue moon ended. He came back and told you he’d be staying in Seoul indefinitely, but did not give a reason or explanation."
"Yixing has mentioned names of his friends and family to you, doesn’t seem to be on bad terms with any of them. So, if he was in a foreign country with no money, what could be the reason he can’t ask any of them for help? Are they also poor? Didn’t really seem like it, with what I said about the upper middle class clothes and car, and that apparently he was an art student at a relatively prestigious university, although he’s never once mentioned the name of the school, or even the city in China he’s from. Hm.”
Lu Han leaned forward in his seat, placing his elbows on the desk. “That brings us to more interesting facts. I am Chinese, Joonmyun. I was born in Beijing and lived there for most of my life. I studied Chinese language, history, and literature in school. Yixing’s accent when he speaks Korean and his dialect when he speaks Chinese are not similar to any of the 56 ethnic groups in China.”
Joonmyun pressed his lips together to keep from interjecting again.
“There was also that funny little Lake Cassiopeia incident when you asked about his phone wallpaper. There is, in fact, no Lake Cassiopeia anywhere in China, which you so cleverly found out yourself, so I know you won’t argue with me on this. That picture was taken somewhere else, then. It’s either incredibly important that you don’t know the true location of his family’s lake house (more evidence that he isn’t poor, by the way), or it is simply...somewhere that doesn’t exist in this world.” Lu Han laced his fingers together under his chin. “Now you may comment.”
Now that he was permitted to speak, it took Joonmyun a moment to compose what he wanted to say. “Okay...I’ll admit it makes sense, when you put it all together like that. But...another world can’t be the only explanation, can it? What about the loan sharks? That still seems plausible.”
Lu Han took a pencil from a mug on the desk and began sketching something on a piece of paper that Joonmyun couldn’t make any sense of. It just looked like a bunch of lines intersecting with each other.
“Thousands of worlds exist, Joonmyun, parallel to ours. I can only draw in two dimensions, obviously, but think of it like geometry: Each of these lines represents a world, lying in its own plane, crossing over or under all the others but never touching them.”
“That’s not proof, Lu Han, that’s theory,” Joonmyun said tiredly. “You can’t prove that parallel worlds exist.”
“But you can’t prove that they don’t exist.”
“Lu Han…”
“Yes, okay, I understand, but listen to this. I happen to know from his conversations with Sehun that Yixing is very interested in the Legend. He’s asked Sehun twice for information regarding the parallel worlds. I have reason to believe his interest in finding out who I am is motivated by a certain file in the cabinet in Sehun’s office with my name in it, which contains all the dates of the blue moons along with when people outside their own worlds have been located and returned to their own.”
“Wait...what?” Joonmyun spluttered. This was getting too out there for him to process. And those filing cabinets were supposed to be for company business only, damn it.
“There’s a little more to the story of how Sehun and I know each other,” Lu Han said slowly. “I didn’t lie, when I said that our families knew each other, but the reason for that isn’t because we lived on the same block as kids. Far from it, actually.”
Lu Han chuckled, but Joonmyun wasn’t seeing the humor. “What does your connection to Sehun have to do with the Legend of the Guardians?”
“Sehun and I...are Guardians of the worlds.”
Joonmyun considered Lu Han’s straight face, the sincere way he delivered the admission, and thought that Lu Han didn’t seem like an insane person. Everything he’d said had been logical, but then again, didn’t some insane murderers also use logic to justify their crimes? He didn’t know what to think or what to say.
In the wake of Joonmyun’s disbelief, Lu Han went on, “More specifically, I’m a Guardian, Sehun’s an Enforcer.” He fidgeted with his hands as if he was self-conscious under Joonmyun’s stare. “I’ve known about Yixing for a while. I’m sorry for not telling you all this sooner, Joonmyun, but my identity is supposed to be a secret. And it's not easy to explain...my work...to someone who can’t feel what I can. I don’t expect you to take my word for it.” There it was again. That surprisingly gentle tone in Lu Han’s voice as he reached across the desk for Joonmyun’s hand. It was only a brief touch, but again Joonmyun’s skin stayed warm where Lu Han’s fingers had brushed. “Maybe you should actually talk to Yixing. With your walls down.”
Joonmyun placed both his hands in his lap. Crazy or not, Lu Han was coming from an honest place now. “I don’t know if I can,” he said, hating how weak his voice suddenly sounded.
Lu Han studied him for a moment, in which Joonmyun thought Lu Han’s eyes were like spotlights, or magnifying glasses, that could see every thought, every feeling he hid from the world and from himself. “What if you didn’t have to do it alone?”
*
Yixing left the apartment well before 9:00, simply because he was filled with too much nervous energy to wait around anymore. He killed almost an hour just aimlessly wandering around the city, watching the rain splash the ground in front of his feet where he walked. It was a rather long walk to Sehun’s apartment, especially in the rain, but he would rather walk than drive or take public transportation. He didn’t want to sit still.
Yixing knocked apprehensively on Sehun’s door. At this point he felt like he was being pulled along by Sehun on a string and swung in any direction he decided he wanted Yixing’s emotions to go.
“Thanks for coming,” Sehun said in greeting, gesturing for Yixing to come inside. He suddenly noticed how Sehun’s eyes looked red, as if he hadn’t slept well in a while, and his normally impeccable glossy hair was sticking up in random places.
They sat at the kitchen table in the same chairs as they had the last night Yixing was here.
“What do you need to say that you couldn’t tell me at the company?” Yixing asked, not wasting time with small talk.
“Wait,” Sehun said. “I want to say something else first.”
Yixing just stayed quiet to show he was listening.
“I didn’t want you to leave, Yixing, I hope you know that, at least. Coming to my office every day isn’t really the same without you there.”
“Yeah, I know, you have to make all your own copies now,” Yixing joked, even though he felt like this was meant to be a serious conversation.
Yixing watched Sehun smile at him and it felt like a memory. “Do you know that you’re the only one besides Jongin who’s been able to make me laugh this year?” He looked down at his hands on the table where he had his fingers hooked together. “Truthfully, I haven’t been happy for a long time. I don’t think I even remembered what it was like. You helped me.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Yixing said, amazed to hear Sehun speak so honestly about himself.
“You made me want to be with you,” Sehun said, some of that shyness coming through that he rarely let anyone see. It was the closest thing to a confession that he’d made, and it was after he’d already said there was no future between them.
“I still want to be with you," Yixing admitted. As he said it, he realized that maybe Sehun had been right, when he'd said that Yixing was different from when they'd first met. In the more than two decades he'd lived in his own world, he'd never had the courage to fight for a relationship that the other person said would never work.
“But you can’t," said Sehun decisively. "I still want to be with you, too. But I can’t.”
Sehun was still looking down at the table and Yixing was aware again of how he seemed somehow familiar. The feeling was always there, but now he only really noticed when he focused on it. Yixing looked at him and he saw all the things he always saw - the dark hair that lay unevenly across his eyebrows and sometimes fell in his eyes, the pale skin and the pretty pink of his lips, the high bridge of his nose, but it wasn't any of his features that made Yixing feel like he knew him from somewhere. It was something else, something that he didn't have a way to explain.
Just watching him from across the kitchen table, not even looking in his eyes, Yixing could also see that Sehun wasn't wearing his armour, now. He thought of that first time he'd walked him home, the way he unspokenly gave him his jacket and complimented him when he was half asleep, the careful first kiss, all the ways Sehun cared and didn't know how to tell him. But he was telling him now, and that meant Yixing had a chance to tell him everything he hadn't known how to say last time, or had been afraid to.
"I know that I'll have to leave," Yixing finally said, "but what if we can be together until then?"
"I want to," Sehun said gently, as if he knew Yixing was scared to ask, "but I told you, it’s dangerous. I've never seen it work before."
“‘Before?’” Yixing repeated. “You mean...you’ve known other people from parallel worlds?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Sehun grabbed a handful of his bangs and shoved them back so he could see Yixing clearly. “You see, I’m--”
The buzz of the doorbell interrupted Sehun and he stared toward the front door, eyes razor sharp. “Who the hell is that?” He got up to cross the apartment and looked through the peephole. Yixing didn’t expect him to open the door for whoever it was, but in the next moment, Joonmyun was standing in Sehun’s living room, his blonde hair dampened from the rain. Another man Yixing didn’t recognize followed him inside.
“What the hell are you doing here, Lu Han?” Sehun demanded, ignoring Joonmyun altogether. Yixing slowly made his way to the divider between the kitchen and the living room to observe, unsure if Joonmyun had noticed him yet, but then they made eye contact. He hadn’t fully realized just how tenderly and warmly Joonmyun’s eyes would crease every time he caught Yixing’s eye and smiled, until that moment when he looked at Joonmyun and saw him looking back with nothing but a stiff neutral expression.
Yixing didn’t have long to dwell on it, though, with the mysterious Lu Han who he’d pondered over for a year now standing right in front of him.
Sehun seemed less intrigued by the sudden appearance of his “old friend.” “You may have been my superior once and I know you still think you’re above me, but you can’t just show up here like...like…” His sentence faded into stammering and his expression only became darker as Lu Han smiled like Sehun’s anger bounced right off of him.
“Hello to you too, Sehunnie.” Lu Han shrugged off his rain jacket and hung it up next to Sehun’s on the rack with a natural ease as if he’d done the same thing many times. “I think we have a few things to discuss with Yixing and Joonmyun, here.”
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