The Kingdom
Title: The Kingdom
Pairing (minor): Hyukmin, Qmi, Shihae, Henber, Onjongho
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~5300
Notes: For starlitbright, a belated birthday present (next year I'll be on time/every year I get closer!) This fic gave me so much grief and everything's probably still wrong anyway, especially the math/military stuff/football stuff for certain. I thought I'd try to be clever and attempt a Matrix AU except with literal meaning, but all I really did was confuse the hell out of black_goose, who contributed a few sentences too! because we love you that much, Cath. Anyway, hope you enjoy -- it's not a very happy story, but -- I'm sure your actual birthday made up for that. ♥ There's also some action scenes blatantly ripped off from The Kingdom, which is where the original idea for this -- as well as the title -- came from.
Soundtrack: Little People's Start Shootin'
Summary: Sungmin never hated math to this extent.
In direct conflict with Sungmin's convenience, it starts raining.
He'd been hoping it wouldn't, like really, really hoping, since the nearest place to buy an umbrella was at Nordstrom's for fifteen bucks, and it's happened too many times, too many pairs of tens and fives shelled out for unnaturally sudden downpours.
But somehow, he always gets caught in the rain.
"You know, it only rains here twice a year," he remarks to a girl standing next to him, waiting for the bus. She's wearing a loaded backpack and a thin white t-shirt. It's rapidly turning transparent. He's trying not to look. "It must be your lucky day."
"I'm from Florence," she replies, startled into a smile. "I know how that feels."
Sungmin frowns. "Oh," he says, and loses interest. It wasn't her, then. And he doesn't even have a red pill to blame.
His interviews needed work, but it's not like he was a born interrogator. Not that he was born anything, his earliest memory only occurring six months prior to knowing how it feels in Florence, capiche? Capiche, fuck capiche: capiche happened the moment he woke up and the chemical smell of tank fluid assaulted his nostrils. Two seconds later a voice was saying, "Hey, welcome to Mars."
Kyuhyun thought he was funny -- which, who knows, maybe compared to other flatline mathmagicians, he was. But out here, in the real world, Sungmin would rather talk to Zhou Mi.
With his personality, you almost forget there wasn't a sun.
Or, correction: there was still a sun, somewhere over the rainbow perhaps, but not within the mathematics. Here, even rainbows were broken down into 41.6 degrees above the horizon at human eye level, a reflection of white light entering a drop of water, red to violet overlapping arches -- not that those were real either. Not that he's ever seen a rainbow, real or within the matrix, because for him, remember, it never stops raining.
A fluke, Kyuhyun had declared, unsmiling, and Zhou Mi had shrugged, gave him a reassuring wink. Only later did Sungmin spot him rubbing Kyuhyun's shoulders with the heels of his hands, trying to combat the worry.
Good things come in pairs. It's why Sungmin had been woken up.
"All souls have a twin," Kyuhyun tells him, then makes a peace sign, and Sungmin isn't sure if he's being cynical or facetious or what.
"I'm confused," he says. "I thought we were dealing with math."
"Once you've lived out here for too long, everything starts to take on a mystical edge," Zhou Mi explains, laughter warm beneath his voice. "Like the Jesuits. You can go everywhere, anywhere; you can save everybody."
"You want to save everybody," Kyuhyun corrects.
"You saved me," Zhou Mi says, and Kyuhyun turns back to the deck, muttering something they can't hear. Zhou Mi grins, reaching up to adjust his glasses. "He unplugged me to help, but then he wanted to keep me. Isn't that cute?"
Luckily, Kyuhyun was useful for other things other than just proverbs. "Here's how things worked," Kyuhyun had told him, after they had calmed him down. It had taken two days for Sungmin's body to adjust to life outside the tank, slumming for forty-five hours and then having a panic attack during the last three. Which, in his opinion was a completely appropriate reaction to being woken up with a hole in the back of your head and a one-sentence statement about how your whole life has been constructed around things that hadn't been there. Also, everything was just so fucking dark out here.
It had been a little disconcerting, to say the least.
"You have a beginning, a middle, an end. You have pairs. We can construct a matrix with these parameters. Say you have the following matrix, a (2,3):
abcdef
Two rows, three columns. A pair for each level. How can we find out the unknown variables and also achieve a single pair of numbers? We have to multiply by three rows, one column, a (3,1) matrix:
ghi
The problem then looks like this:
abcdef x ghi
Going by the rules of the matrix -- simple multiplication, really -- the product will be a (2,1): [ag+bh+ci, dg+eh+fi], or [j, k]."
"A new pair of integers is formed; that's you and Eunhyuk," Kyuhyun tells him, sounding like he was making perfect, logical sense.
Sungmin stares at him; it's a few seconds before he can think of something to say, and when he does, it's a bewildered, borderline hysterical, "What?"
"I know the dimensions seems arbitrary," Kyuhyun says calmly. "But just remember; three stages: beginning, middle, end. Pairs always means two objects. We're trying to achieve a balance. The machines don't understand that: a soulmate, two halves of a whole -- these concepts are only culturally significant to the human race. We're trying to get you back to where you belong." He pauses, then adds, "It's how we'll win."
"And winning is everything?" Sungmin asks slowly.
"Math is everything," Zhou Mi corrects gently. "With the matrix multiplication, that's how you'll travel, to find the other pairs. That's how you'll find your own."
For a moment, Kyuhyun's face seems to take on that of someone else's, someone tired and cynical, but most of all, hoping against all hope that all his theories, all his work, all that he was essentially telling Sungmin to do -- this wasn't a dream, it would be painful, he had been forewarned -- was right. "No," he says softly. "Winning is everything."
He's learned to trust Zhou Mi, if not Kyuhyun, after spending the past couple of months training in what amounted to a tin can hidden underneath the dreamland of an occupied planet. When it's Zhou Mi who's talking about the pairs, it takes on a level of intrigue akin to fairy tales, and Sungmin prefers that to the confusing talk about matrices that comes out of Kyuhyun's mouth.
As he understood it, the gist of it was this: there was inside the mathematics, where Sungmin had spent most of his life, and there was outside the mathematics, where Kyuhyun, one of a few key mathematicians slash marines, was trying to win against the machines.
"You know why pairs are significant," he asks again, rhetorically. "Noah's Ark and all that. The most basic denominator of the human species. A sense of balance, good versus evil. What is good and evil to a machine?"
"So..." Sungmin's learned to ignore these moments when Kyuhyun just doesn't make sense. "I'm going into the mathematics -- the matrices -- in order to find Eunhyuk."
Kyuhyun nods. "Yes."
A few seconds pass, then he bursts out, "I don't even know who he is."
Kyuhyun gives him a look like, not my problem. Sungmin counters with, oh, it so is. Finally Kyuhyun shrugs, then says, "If you succeed, you'll find out."
"And how will I know if I've succeeded?" Sungmin demands. How the hell was he supposed to do something without knowing anything about it? "How many times does it take?"
Kyuhyun continues to clack away at his console, eyes focused on the monitor. "I don't know, it depends. There are clues I can't tell you about -- you'll have to figure them out."
"The fuck," says Sungmin, and Kyuhyun cracks a smile.
"I can't tell you because I can only see them in numbers; I have no idea how it will manifest during your...travels." He eyes Sungmin thoughtfully. "But I think you're ready."
"So I'm just supposed to remember: beginning, middle, end."
Kyuhyun nods. "That's right."
Sungmin sighs. "Great. Do you have an umbrella?"
Zhou Mi presses an umbrella into his hand just before they plug the wires into the back of his head and everything goes black; when he opens his eyes, he's standing in the middle of a downpour on the outskirts of an airfield in Kunming. He opens the umbrella. It's full of holes.
"I can't talk to you," Donghae is saying. "When your hour of self-righteous asshole is up, let me know."
"Cool it, Lee," Siwon replies tiredly, "you know what I meant."
Donghae's hair is slicked back, the collar of his uniform unbuttoned, dark khaki sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He's frowning down at a map, topographic data of undeveloped terrain that Sungmin's unfamiliar with. A battered leather jacket hangs off his shoulders; the name on the breast pocket reads "Choi."
Siwon, hands braced against the table, severe eyebrows drawn to a single point, is looking past the swaying motion of the lamp hanging from the ceiling and straight at Donghae's face.
Sungmin gets the feeling he should be studying the map instead.
He speaks up. "So what year is it, 1945?"
Donghae looks up at him, surprised. "It's 1942." He grins, a few strands of hair falling into his eyes, his teeth straight and neat and perfect; Sungmin suddenly understands why Choi Siwon seems so engaged. "Did someone slip a little acid into your coffee?"
"Maybe you just needed me to be as crazy as you so I'll agree to do the next mission," Sungmin replies, trying to fit his words into the banter. He turns to Siwon, tries a leer. "Search his pockets, Choi."
"He needs permission first," Donghae says, raising his eyebrows, and Siwon blushes, mutters something about a meeting with Chennault, then strides out of the room without a second glance.
The smile he shares with Donghae comes way too easily, considering how he doesn't even know him. "The Flying Tigers take seniority very seriously," Donghae says solemnly, watching Siwon's retreating back, and Sungmin laughs, something he hasn't done in a very long time. Siwon's jacket, carefully tucked around his smaller frame by a second pair of hands, shows three bars compared to Donghae's two.
Later he finds out that most missions are lunatic levels of crazy, but it doesn't matter anyway, since they're all grounded until the hundredth member of their unit gets his passport approved.
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, all waiting on the one guy being held back because of mercenary activities in Spain. Sungmin wonders if the Spanish government knows that they're detaining his other half.
He can't imagine them caring very much.
But grounding ninety-nine guys who are more used to the adrenaline rush of flying at 300 mph up in the sky really isn't the best idea. Thanks to a couple corpsmen, he finds out the reason behind the strange tension between Siwon and Donghae: they hadn't even known each other three months ago, but Siwon was the one who had picked up Donghae's signal when he bailed out after getting shot down in Rangoon. "He's been keeping him like a trophy ever since," the pilot says with a hint of disgust, but Sungmin thinks it's more than that. Beginning flashes through his mind; sometimes there are people you save and end up risking it all for in order to keep them safe. The rest of the pilots are nice enough; they're friendly, had a vulgar sense of humor, spend most of their time painting jagged stripes and shark teeth on the underbellies of their airplanes. It's not like he doesn't like them per se, but after a few days, Sungmin's feeling as restless as they are.
It rains the whole time, naturally.
"Eunhyuk's a senior officer, but half these guys--" Siwon jabs a thumb at a dozen rows of mixed bag navy, marine and army pilots sitting behind him, dutifully eating their dinner. Loudly. "Half these guys, they're great guys, but they lied on their application, they're barely out of flight school. The Old Man spends twelve hours a day teaching them basic tactics. Donghae--" The way Siwon says his name compels the other pilot to look up from his plate, giving an impression that he doesn't use this tone with him often. "Donghae, we're not ready." A pause. "I won't let you go."
Donghae takes his time to wipe his mouth, before folding his hands and bracing his elbows against the table, leaning his face close enough to Siwon's that from far away it looked like they were kissing.
"I'd like to see you stop me," he says softly.
For a few seconds, no one says anything. "I'll go," Sungmin offers, finally. Anything to stop the arguing, or...whatever the hell was going on here. Kyuhyun never told him what to do if things got fucking awkward. But when both of them break off their staring contest to look at him after he speaks up, Sungmin already knows what their answer will be.
"Absolutely not, Min," Siwon says, straightening up again. "You're not going, and neither--" he glares across the table, "are you."
Donghae ignores him, looks at Sungmin earnestly. "You can't go, you have to stay, for Eunhyuk, remember?"
It's almost like he knows. It's also, Sungmin cares to note, the first and probably only thing he'll ever hear them agree upon.
But as it turns out, it's not up to either of them. The siren sounds over the airfield at 07:00, and Sungmin jumps out of his bunk and straight into chaos, frantically pulling on his shirt and pants with the other reserve pilots. His squadron was only supposed to be a safety measure -- they weren't ready, as Siwon had said -- but while the Japanese were still invisible just under the horizon, he could literally hear them, the ominous drone of carrier-launched bombers.
"I thought you wanted me to wait!" he shouts at Donghae as soon as they take off. "For Eunhyuk, right?"
"Let me ask you something," Donghae shouts back, then turns around to respond to a question from the gunner. The rush of air, a dozen P-40s with barely a hundred feet between each wingtip, was more of a trip than he had ever asked for. "Is he worth this?" he yells, facing Sungmin once more. "Is he worth the risk?"
Something wells up in Sungmin before he can even think. "Yes!" he yells back.
"Okay," Donghae shouts, and smiles. "Good to know!"
He doesn't know whether he regrets it or not. Fifteen minutes later, after a spectacular dive and zoom, a Japanese aircraft appears in their direct line of sight. And then Sungmin gets to consider: on the one hand, getting blown up by the Japanese midair is not a nice experience. On the other hand, it boots him right into the next plane, the next pair, where he finds himself standing at the edge of a football field, watching a couple dozen high school kids careen into each other.
TIGERS: 7, RAVENS: 17
"Remember that day in Myrtle?" he hears himself say, during halftime. "You were shimmying up and down the coastline, running five miles back and forth for each meal. It was raining then too -- so suck it up, guys."
"Yeah, but--" Goldstein pulls out his mouthguard, panting. "The field's slippery, and they keep outrunning the edge of our coverage." He scowls. "Aria's too fast. Eunhyuk's taught him new tricks."
Sungmin frowns. "Eunhyuk?" he murmurs, eyes scanning the opposite end of the field, but it's only a hazy sea of purple and white, the official school colors of the Rosemont Ravens.
"Eunhyuk's just a tool for Conway," says a voice on his left, and Sungmin looks over to see Henry grab a towel, then hand another to no. 23, still with her helmet on, standing next to him. "And Conway relies too much on Fahim, who's running the ball every chance he gets. We can do something about that."
"You mean Liu," Goldstein says, grinning suddenly, "Liu can do something," and Henry shrugs noncommitedly.
"Genie in a bottle," he says, winking, and 23 gives him a hard shove.
"Rahn, Wegmann," she says, turning around and tilting her face up to the defensive linemen standing behind her, "help me out, okay? I can't rely on Henry."
"You guys are even on a first name basis, how cute," Jackson coos, and Amber rolls her eyes as the other boys laugh. Sungmin puts a hand on Wegmann's shoulder; halftime's almost over.
"Just make them work hard to move that ball," he tells his team, looking over uneasily to the other side once more. Winning this game, he felt it in his gut, was everything.
"How's it going, DC?" the head coach mutters as Sungmin returns to the sidelines.
"Liu's going to make a miracle happen," he answers, brisk and business-like -- just trying to go with the flow, he thinks to himself. He's already passed the middle. "She'll take them down like LA traffic at five o'clock on a Friday."
"I always hated driving out," head coach says feelingly, then smirks. "Or maybe she'll just imagine Henry's face," and Sungmin grins; the coach was a good sport.
Amber intercepts two minutes in; the crowd goes nuts, and during the next timeout, Sungmin catches Henry plant a two-fingered kiss on her cheek, poking through the cage of her helmet. Which just set off a flurry of residual memories -- a little confusing, Kyuhyun had said, but Sungmin could now recall: it hadn't been easy getting a girl on the team, but Henry had insisted.
"She's incredible," he had told him, wringing his baseball cap in his hands, shifting his weight from foot to foot while standing in the middle of Sungmin's kitchen. "I mean, she's really fast, and her hand-eye coordination--"
"You know firsthand?" Sungmin couldn't help but interrupt, and was satisfied with his prize: it was the first time he had seen Henry blush.
"Dude," Henry said, and Sungmin had snorted.
"I'll see what I can do," he promised; but really, it had been a semester of seeing what Amber could do, a traceable pattern of hard practices and well-placed faith, new approaches to teamwork that, as it turned out, ends up paying off.
Half an hour later, they win, 24-22.
"You're the inflection point, Liu," Henry all but crows as they swarm around each other, hyper off their asses. Amber's finally pulled her helmet off, bangs falling into her face -- for a moment Sungmin feels startled, suddenly reminded of someone else -- smiling widely, sky-high jubilant. The corners of her mouth tuck into surprisingly chubby cheeks as she laughs, waving hi to someone in the stands.
"And you," Henry grabs him by the shoulders, fingers digging into his collarbones. "Now you can go find Eunhyuk!"
Amber's eyes light up. "Yeah -- I saw him just a moment ago," she cranes her neck, squinting at the far end of the field. "Although maybe he's taken off--"
She's interrupted by someone screaming. They all whirl around to see a bulk of purple and white push their way into the stands, a growing mass of angry gestures and rising voices, the Ravens taking the word 'losers' to the ultimate extreme. "What the hell are they doing," Amber murmurs, and Henry starts forward, but Sungmin throws out an arm to stop him, spotting the coach in the distance.
"Get them out," he's shouting, and Sungmin turns to Henry, who's already shaking his head.
"Those are our friends, my brother's over there--" The desperation and anxiety behind the need to find someone is too apparent in his voice, and all too relatable. Reluctantly sympathetic, Sungmin loosens his grip -- only to get hit hard in the back of the head by an accidental elbow as the rest of his team surges past him, anxious to find the people they know.
Henry's eyes widen and he reaches for him, Amber right behind his shoulder, but suddenly the coach is at his side, struggling to hold him up as he tries to blink the stars out of his eyes. "Lee, you okay -- you guys, get inside--" he yells, "McGinley, Rahn, come on -- Lau, get your ass back here--"
"Come on, coach, we're not kids anymore," he can hear Henry say angrily, before he blacks out.
He wakes up with the world turned upside down. Someone's shouting, panicked screams. There's shards of glass and metal dotting his face, tiny cuts the source waters for thin rivulets of blood. The back of his neck is crunched beneath his seat, arms braced against the ceiling, the impact of noise and heat from explosions far too close for comfort.
Arms are extending past his own, reaching for something, desperation in his voice; then a whole body emerges into his vision, and Sungmin blinks in relief at the sight of big eyes in a dark face. It's Minho.
"You okay?" he yells, and Sungmin finds the strength to nod. "Get out of here, get out," he says next, and suddenly his knees join his arms, and he's upside down, and Sungmin realizes what's going on.
He crawls out of the overturned jeep, Minho running off somewhere to his left; Sungmin's first instinct to follow is suddenly interrupted by the sound of gunfire. "Son of a bitch," someone swears behind him; Sungmin swoops down to grab at a M16 lying on the ground, ducking as an older model Volkswagen drives by, several semi-automatics pointed in their direction.
Shots are fired behind him, and he whips around just to see Onew aim a pistol at the windshield, half a second before red splatters wide across its surface. The car stalls, then Onew curses again, dropping to the ground at the retaliatory fire as the vehicle zooms past once more.
"Where the fuck is Minho--" Jonghyun says, fumbling with his rifle, before another jeep skids to a stop in front of him, Minho at the wheel.
"Come on!" he shouts, and suddenly Onew's hand is on his back, pushing him forward towards the rear, Jonghyun jumping in the front seat.
"Don't lose him, don't lose him," he tells Minho, which is pretty unnecessary in Sungmin's opinion, but Minho doesn't answer, eyes fixed on the Volkswagen ahead of them. In the distance, a utility vehicle like a shiny black insect accelerates out of sight.
"Fuck," Onew says breathlessly beside him, hands automatically checking his weapons, "What the fuck--"
"Car bomb," Minho growls from the wheel, eyes barely grazing over Sungmin's in the rearview mirror. "Sorry you caught us on a bad day, hyung."
Finally gaining his bearings, Sungmin shakes his head. He's starting to remember all over again: every transition into the next plane hurt like hell. "Just tell me what to do."
"They took Eunhyuk," Jonghyun says shortly, "He was sitting right next to you." Sungmin groans, and Jonghyun lets out a huff of laughter. "But thanks to Onew, someone got shot, which means--" he grins savagely, "Someone needs help. Somewhere close."
"Thanks to Onew," Minho repeats, keeping his eyes on the road, but a smile lingers on his lips. "Eighties baby getting shit done," he murmurs, and a corner of Onew's mouth lifts up even though his gaze doesn't waver from scanning the surroundings outside his window. "I'll buy you KC's latest when we get back, yeah, Jinki?"
"Wait," Sungmin interrupts, then gets shoved against the door as the vehicle swerves, Minho almost missing the turn, "Wait, why are there three of you? I thought it was only supposed to be two?"
"We're the anomaly," Jonghyun answers with a sharp smile, and suddenly Sungmin realizes: it's not raining. They were in the desert, dry as bone. "This is the end, the home run, which means it's time for some hardcore number crunching." Even Minho laughs briefly at that, before meeting Sungmin's eyes in the mirror once more.
"I'm the football player," he winks. Jonghyun snorts, his hair a mess half covering his eyes, and Sungmin has to blink. Twice.
"Okay, then I get what you're doing here," he says to Minho. "But what about you?" He turns to Onew. "What are you doing here?"
"I, um," Onew says sheepishly, "followed him." He jerks his chin at the driver's seat, and Jonghyun instantly scowls.
"And I followed him," he snaps, "to pound the idea of a lost cause into his head."
"It's meant to be anyway," Minho mutters. "We're supposed to be three--" he breaks off as they turn down a road straight into a group of residential buildings, scattered clusters of retail and other small business shops. "Shit. Shit, this is a bad neighborhood."
"No shit," Onew echoes, then suddenly jerks his head around, twisting in his seat. "Alley on the left, Minho, the black Suburban--!"
"Minho," Jonghyun says warningly, as they slow down and pull up to a nondescript door, the smear of a bloody handprint bright red against the white walls that turn into a darkened hallway; the Volkswagon is sitting right next to them. "Are you sure we have to--"
Something suddenly falls and hits the hood, something heavy and made of metal, and Jonghyun shatters the windshield with his foot, reaches out and tosses it behind them as the rest of them dive out of the car, two seconds before it explodes less than thirty feet away.
"Grenade," he shouts, gritting his teeth, and then they're hit with gunfire.
For the next fifteen minutes, Sungmin covers for Onew as he takes out the snipers, Jonghyun squatting behind another car across the street and Minho disappearing again for a few crucial minutes before it suddenly turns quiet, the fire from above abruptly cut off. Then a shadow falls across them from the top of the roof, and Sungmin aims his rifle up before pulling it back just in time, gasping, as Minho waves anxiously.
"We have to go back in," he says, out of breath, when he joins them on the ground floor once more. Out of the corner of his eye, Sungmin sees a small group of people start to form -- tenants of nearby buildings, perhaps, or the owners of businesses in the area -- wonders what it's like, having this war waged on their doorstep every day of their lives.
"Follow the blood trail," Jonghyun is telling Minho, who nods. "Onew and I'll cover out here. And for fuck's sake," he glances behind him at Onew, who's wrapping a makeshift bandaid around his hand, "keep safe."
"Just keep the crowd away from this building," Minho replies; Sungmin notes how he's staring resolutely at Jonghyun and no one else. "Give them a show if you have to."
"You want us to start making out?" Jonghyun asks, tongue-in-cheek, and Minho rolls his eyes. "Whatever works, Kim."
Sungmin follows him inside a few seconds later, the others disappearing from view along with the sunlight; the last thing he hears before the door slams shut is Onew's voice rising in protest, Jonghyun's voice overlapping, placating. Minho's shoulders stiffen for a second, before he turns around, a finger to his lips, adjusting the firearm in his hand.
"We'll go floor by floor," he says. "Any door where there's a lot of noise behind it..." He doesn't need to finish; Sungmin gets it. The end, the home run. He wipes the sweat from his eyes, nods back. The final stretch is always the hardest.
They walk silently along the first three, from one end of the hallway to the next without hearing a thing. By the time they reach the fourth floor, Sungmin's starting to wonder if there's anyone in the building at all; it was just so quiet.
Suddenly Minho stops. "In here," he whispers, and Sungmin braces himself as the other man kicks open the door, indistinguishable from all the others.
There's no one inside. Minho nods to Sungmin to check around the corners, but it yields nothing; Eunhyuk and his captors were gone. Only there's something strange about the room; Sungmin can't pinpoint what, exactly, but the way it was completely emptied, it almost seemed like it was prepared ahead of time.
"Hang on," he spins around to face Minho. "You said you're the football player, right?"
"I'm also six quarts of blood," Minho answers, looking past him, his face strained. His weapon was on the ground, no longer in his hands; Sungmin hadn't even heard him set it down. "This kind of thing always needs sacrifice. And Eunhyuk is fast."
Something in Minho's words sends a chill up his spine. "But you're faster," he says, his mouth going dry.
Minho nods. "I never lose."
Sungmin inhales sharply. Winning was everything. "There's no anomaly, is there."
"Onew and I were going to try some golfing," the younger man says vaguely instead, gazing around at the walls of the room. "Tee off against the top of the tank."
Sungmin shakes his head. "There has to be another way."
"No," Minho bends over, unsheathes a pistol from somewhere near his boot, tosses it to him, then screws his eyes shut. "Just don't hesitate, hyung."
Kyuhyun had warned him it would hurt, but at this point, he really hopes the war is worth it. "Elias," Sungmin says; the rest of his body is trembling, but his hand is steady as he raises the weapon. "I'm sorry."
"He caught him," Kyuhyun says, surprised.
Zhou Mi smiles. "I knew he could do it."
"That hurts," Hyukjae says, pouting for the cameras, and Sungmin grins reflexly, though he can't remember why his eyes are suddenly moist.
"But it's true," he insists, blinking rapidly, his voice cheerful as he addresses the studio audience. "Eunhyuk's reliable with everything except in looks."
"I never knew you were so shallow," Hyukjae says to him during the water break. He brushes the blonde fringe away from his eyes, a gesture that's supposed to be cool and suave-looking, but Hyukjae just looks like he's flicking away an insect. So reliable, Sungmin thinks, his lips quirking, then looks down as his phone buzzes with a new text.
It's from Minho, saying a quick hi before a showcase in Japan; Sungmin feels an inexplicable sense of relief as he types out a reply, pocketing his phone again before he says, "What are friends for except to stab you from the front?"
Hyukjae scoffs, chin jerking forward. "I'll run away first."
"Please don't," Sungmin says, a little too quickly, and Hyukjae blinks at him, bemused.
"Uh, what?" he asks.
"Nothing," Sungmin shakes his head, then thinks of something else. "Wait, I have your new number, right?"
Balanced on stools underneath bright lights once more, the MC asks a question that Sungmin has to mull over, a professional hold on his smile and head tilt as he leans forward, balancing a hand on one knee.
"How do idols gain strength?" he repeats, then shrugs, glancing over at Hyukjae. "Through the fans, of course."
"An exchange of blood, sweat, and tears," Hyukjae nods earnestly.
"And friendship," Sungmin adds softly, though only he and Hyukjae can hear it.