#25: headspace for three (for yassan)
Title: headspace for three
Fandom: WINNER
Pairing(s)/Focus: Seunghoon/Mino/Jinwoo, Seunghoon-centric
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 9200
Work remixed: rocket red, jet blue by yassan
Summary: The saying goes: one man’s space junk is another alien’s meal ticket. Likewise: what’s Song Minho’s burden to carry across the stars, becomes Lee Seunghoon’s chance at redemption.
Notes/Warnings: Thank you so much r + e + c for being a great support group ;; Thank you ficmix mod for being super gracious and of course, thank you lj user yassan for letting play around in your sandbox of space. I hope I did your original fic justice <3
They’ve made it as far as across the asteroid belt when Seunghoon hears the tank beneath his feet run dry.
To be fair, they’ve been practically running on empty since they left the outer ring of Andromeda, a thousand or so lightyears ago. They’ve done well to make it out this far by thinning the remaining fuel with whatever fluids they could find onboard- expired milk back from March, Seunghoon’s precious hair toner, their own piss.
Minho wouldn’t let him touch the whiskey though. Somehow it doesn’t surprise Seunghoon that they ran out of it before the actual fuel.
Seunghoon hears it first, channeled through his four ears: the sound like someone gasping for air, lungs flooded with sand- only Seunghoon’s never heard her this bad before. She coughs, greasy spittle rattling her frame. Seunghoon places a hand down to read the tremors in her system. There’s a type of machine tiredness in her, reflecting exactly just how little thin carbon-cut steel is between them the expanse of space.
It’s bad.
He does the math with his non-primary brain, fingers skimming over the keys in a hurry- 20 miles up in the air. No safety system. No fuel. Maybe there’s enough backup battery left for a small plasma shield. Something to break the fall with.
He presses down on the keys and the last spark flies out from beneath his fingers. She’s dead.
The entire ship goes dark. “Oops.”
“Stabilizers?” he hears Minho yell behind him. Seunghoon hears him scrambling, swearing up a storm alongside the darkness. Leave it to Minho to spearhead the last minute panic as always.
Humans only have one brain for processing. Accordingly, it takes Seunghoon half the time to deduce what Minho is still struggling to comprehend.
They’re going to crash.
“I think,” he yells. He can barely feel the frantic pulse of communication between his two brains over the rattling of his teeth. “We can assume from here on out that everything is broken!”
He hears Minho cuss a few more times over the sound of his own swearing. The entire floor tilts, gravity suddenly very real. Seunghoon yelps as the chair slides forward, the entire ship pitching forward past the clouds.
“Just so you know,” Minho shouts. He sounds nearby, the air hissing out between his teeth. “First thing I’m gonna do once I get to hell, find you and punch your teeth out one by one.”
“Aliens don’t go to hell,” Seunghoon yells back. The air is too thin for him to force sarcasm and remind Minho that such a thing would require his kind to believe in a deity of any sort. His stomach lurches, a nauseating vertical drop that threatens to expel bile up both of his throats. “We’re pure and innocent angels-“
“You’re ungodly freaks and I hope you die first- Fuck!”
She coughs one last pitiful time and goes down.
And oh boy, does she go down.
---
Seunghoon’s no stranger to crashes, even less of one ever since he started flying with Minho, but his training back at the academy back on Usan taught him how to survive crashes on a standard jet-liner built with premium steel and the very earth of his people.
By comparison, he and Minho have been traversing the galaxy in a glorified egg carton with rheumy rocket fuel (and sometimes not even that) congealed inside. They’ve kept it in flight with equal parts prayer and bravado, fueled mostly by desperation. Seunghoon’s not entirely sure how the prayer part even worked, but by some miracle when the dust settles 20 miles below, they’re both still alive.
Seunghoon’s alien anatomy is adaptable to what the circumstance calls for. He’s not a starfish by any means. He won’t grow his entire body back after being decapitated, but his body can adapt: an extra arm to reach the latch outside after years of training, tougher skin to handle the heat of the prisons on Vercunius, etc.
Minho is an egg in comparison, one that’s been cracked on the head too many times if Seunghoon’s being honest. Speaking of heads, he thinks sluggishly. He hears Minho groaning in pain beside him and at first the sound of it is muffled, ringing in his ears.
Ears. Two of them, which means-
“Dammit not again.”
Seunghoon swings his shoulder to the side and tries not to vomit at the rolling dead weight of his non-primary head. It’s still attached- unlike last time- skin, blood and bones still undeniably there, sloshing aimlessly beneath his skin like too chunky soup in a thin plastic bag. His second spinal cord’s snapped no doubt. 20 miles of concentrated whiplash will do that to you.
He rolls his head back and sees Minho wobble just as unsteadily to his feet. Seunghoon makes an effort to smile. “I fucked up the second head.” It’s not fatal, it never is, but it still stings like a bitch.
“That...that sucks,” Minho says, like he’s actually trying to fathom the pain of half-assed decapitation. It’s a nice gesture, more than what Seunghoon received last time when Minho got them both thrown into an Empire prison for a year. “You okay, though? Besides the…”
Seunghoon tries not to nod, but he has to move around at some point to survey the state of the ship-
His mind freezes at the sight, neurons firing blankly into the space on his shoulder where his second, at times more dependable, head formerly stood. She’s in bad shape, worse than anything Seunghoon’s ever seen her, which is really saying something.
“I know a guy,” Minho says hastily and part of Seunghoon, most parts of him, wishes he had died back there.
“Song, no, don't do this to me-”
But Minho does anyways, because that’s what fucking best friends do.
---
The story of how Lee Seunghoon, former galactic merc for hire and forsaken child of the Empire, landed up co-pilot to Song Minho, galactic smuggler wanted in more galaxies than he could remember out of his constant drunken stupor, is a long one.
The way Seunghoon remembers it- is him tearing out of the Empire fleet hired by Yang in the dead of night two weeks after they’d finished draining the Imdo ocean. Yang had been thrilled, practically dancing in the promise of those sapphires and Seunghoon himself had been one of the soldiers to tap the switch- watching the cool blue of the ocean, the lifeblood of the planet, drip into the dirt jaws of the ground. The whole time his two brains ping-ponging the thoughts back and forth- is this right? is this right? is this okay?, but too scared to do anything until it was too late.
The way Minho recalls it, Seunghoon flew out from beyond the sun- a comet of yellow and black stripes of his fighter jet and rammed into the side of an Empire tank like a kamikaze fireball. Minho had been drunk (surprise, surprise), but seeing Seunghoon emerge from the wreckage had been just as sobering as seeing a ghost...up until the point Seunghoon collapsed on the sidewalk, a sobbing mess, and Minho had no choice but to help him get drunk.
It’s the same story, really. They only really fight the details when they’re drunk off of whiskey or the high of a heist.
Because no matter how they met, at the end of the day Minho wings a smuggling job too big for the two of them to handle and Seunghoon obligingly pilots both their asses out of firing range.
Rinse, repeat, with some intermittent jail time (which was the preferable way to spend a year as opposed to what Kang had lined up for them just outside) and that’s that.
---
The last time Minho had totaled a ship this badly, neither of them had a chance to salvage scraps from the ruins. Granted, they were too busy getting thrown in Empire jail, but at least back then they had enough credits to buy a new ship not too long after getting freed.
“Fucking Song,” Seunghoon grumbles into the dirt. He runs his hand idly down across the weathered steel. There’s not much left of their baby and out of what’s left not even the lowest scavenging dens would be interested in, let alone Kang Seungyoon.
“What’s the point?” he scowls to the right. The silence of the desert draws on and Seunghoon lets out another short sigh. Life’s hard not having a second head, a built in second opinion to gauge his ideas against.
It’s hot out here even in the dead of night.
If Seunghoon peers carefully he can see the red planet’s two moons casting their reflected light across the horizon, making it bright enough that Seunghoon is spared no gory details. His shoulder is in a terrible state: his second skull crushed upon impact and the better half of Seunghoon’s sensibilities along with it.
It’s kind of like having a migraine, but instead of having half your brain in agony, jumping haywire at the slightest pulse in sound waves, it’s Seunghoon’s entire second head- which is actually not as bad as it sounds.
If anything it’s gotten better over time.
By all means the first time it’d gotten blown off, Seunghoon had cried like a little baby. It’s hard to remember the details without his second brain functioning, but Seunghoon had been young- a little starling no more than two planetary rotations old back home when his older sister took their dad’s blaster off the coffee table and blew his second face to stardust, by accident she swears to this day.
Nevertheless it was customary. His parents returned home to a sobbing Seunghoon and had been more concerned about the hole in the wall behind him. It had taken Seunghoon an extraordinarily long time to grow it back the first time and the process seems to have only gotten slower the older he’s gotten.
Looking at the state of his limp head now Seunghoon wonders if it’s worth waiting for the nerves and blood vessels inside to heal up or if he should just suck it up and start from scratch. Besides, Minho’s not around to watch. What’s there to lose anyways?
It takes Seunghoon a second to remember that he won’t get an answer. So he takes a handful of the dying ship’s grease and lathers it around his cold, stiff throat, and then with a deep breath, pulls.
It’ll be morning by the time Minho comes back around, if at all, so Seunghoon takes his sweet time pulling the carcass of his dead head off his shoulder, which is much harder than it sounds. It takes him the better half of the night, all the while cursing Minho, cursing the stars and then the red devil dirt for being cruel enough to swallow their ship whole but only chew him and Minho down to the point they might as well be dead.
The sun rises and the temperature sky rockets before Seunghoon’s second head hits the bottom of their old ship cabin with a satisfying thud- a literal weight off his shoulder. The skin peels like molten plastic, shedding the dead head like loose bedding.
The fresh nerve endings sting, but Seunghoon does his best to scavenge around the rest of the ship. There’s not much, maybe a chunk of metal or two worth saving. It’s not his fault they were broke to begin with. The same way it’s not exactly Minho’s fault either they had the shittiest luck dealing with the worst smuggling scum on this side of the galaxy.
So when Song Minho descends from the dust blown heavens with a brand new hawk, Seunghoon lets it slide.
They’ll call it even, almost.
He misses Bumblebee, but there’s no lost love for Soldier, still smoldering in the ruins of red rock. You learn to move on quick out here in the sand, Seunghoon thinks idly as he hops on board the new hawk with a small bounce in his step.
---
Minho, as it turns out, is not the only one to greet him on board the shiny new hawk.
It’s a pretty big surprise to see Minho alive with his one, fragile spinal cord intact and an even bigger one to see the slight frame of their blue-necked cargo appear from doorway of the main cabin like an apparition of all their Christmas pasts gone wrong.
His name is Jinwoo and something about him is familiar. Seunghoon wonders briefly if they’ve met before. His mind can’t recall anything, which figures because half a brain of memories is a lot to lose. He squints at the sight of Jinwoo’s neck and the way Jinwoo shrinks back leaves a guilty aftertaste in his mouth.
“We’re born like this,” Jinwoo explains to a fascinated Minho. “Apparently our skin used to be completely blue, but almost no one is born like that anymore.”
His neck is a pattern of intricate, blue spirals. Seunghoon’s almost sure he’s seen something like that before. Jinwoo shrinks back from his stare again and Seunghoon watches him duck his head into the collar of his shirt, physically withdrawing from his scrutiny.
“So,” Seunghoon says, fingers playing idly with the ship’s controls. “Where are you from, Jinwo-”
The sudden lurch in the ship’s floor sends the alarm system into overdrive. It’s brand new, inexplicably screechy even to Seunghoon’s diminished hearing.
The controls beep with an incoming message. Seunghoon watches Minho hesitantly lean forward to accept it. From Seunghoon’s position he can only make out the first couple words and even that’s more than enough to know how utterly fucked they are.
He sees Jinwoo shrink back from the message, flinching as Minho mouths over the word prisoner. Seunghoon doesn’t want to make assumptions, but bringing in a military grade vulture is overkill for basic felons like himself and Minho. Jinwoo must be the one they want.
Forget that they’ve known each other for all of ten minutes, no one deserves to be captured by a crew as barbaric as the one on board the vulture. Plus, there’s something about Jinwoo that begs for protection. Whether it’s the soft baby blue patches of his skin or the wide-stricken look in his eyes as the red of the ship’s alarms flash over his face again and again, Seunghoon doesn’t care.
If it were Kang Seungyoon’s intent to blast them into smithereens, he messed up from the start by giving them a ship with actual fuel in it.
Give Seunghoon anything and he’ll make it soar. He just needs a little bit more than 30 seconds which is approximately the amount of time Minho keeps screaming at him to get their asses out of firing range of the vulture.
“Seunghoon.” Minho says, sounding oddly serene, and sober, for the gravity of the situation. “Get us the fuck out of here.”
Which is as per usual, easier said than done. “Give me a second!” The buttons beneath his fingertips are in an alien language (more alien than his own) for crying out loud. “I don’t know how to work this ship! Fuck!”
“Come on,” he hears Minho muttering, “come on come on come on-” and Seunghoon’s more than a little inclined to agree today, given that he’s the one that lost his second head no more than twelve hours ago.
The pulsar behind them glows a demonic red, charging. The glow of true hell. Seunghoon redoubles his efforts, finger flying over the navigation system searching for a path, anything path to escape.
“Get us the fuck out of here!” Minho shouts again and Seunghoon wishes he still had his second head so he wouldn’t have to waste precious processing space to shout back. “I’M TRYING.”
All the while Jinwoo grips the bottom edges of his seat looking faint and bluer than possible until Seunghoon pokes what must be the correct engine button and the ship roars to life.
He lets out a whoop of triumph as the hawk bursts past the vulture’s hulking figure, far outside firing range.
They soar past the system in a blur. Each planet as impressionable as the damp sweat curled on their necks. Past 500 light years or so, Seunghoon lets up on the gas, watching as Jinwoo curls his fingers around his blue patched arms and shrinks into himself alongside the stars.
---
It’s a step towards accelerated friendship, knowing the same person in all the vast galaxy wants the three of them dead. What are the odds? But it’s just as well, because Seunghoon isn’t a big fan of icebreakers to begin with.
“So,” Minho says. Seunghoon can always count on him to break the silence with as much subtlety as a space whale. “I take it Kang wants you dead too.”
“I’m not,” Jinwoo starts, but Minho stares him down with the force of his eyebrows drawn tight. It’s pretty intimidating, Seunghoon admits as someone who’s been on the other end of said eyebrows many times before.
“I mean,” Jinwoo stammers. Minho’s eyebrows refuse to budge and Seunghoon watches Jinwoo physically deflates, letting out a palpable sigh. “Okay. You’re probably right.”
“So, Mr. Blue Neck,” Minho starts. “Who the hell are you that makes Kang Seungyoon so eager to take you out?”
At that Jinwoo’s eyebrows shoot up. “Seungyoon didn’t tell you?” He pauses, and then: “And you’re sure you don’t recognize me?”
At that, the phantom itch Seunghoon’s been repressing for over three systems and counting now surges up like wildfire.
“Have you ever heard of a planet called Imdo?”
Seunghoon’s starts cursing before he even realizes why, but it doesn’t take long for the memories- a blue expanse of ocean, salt crusted corpses, his own hands shaking from the force of the draining dam, the gleam of the Imdo Sapphire caught in Yang’s haughty gaze- to come crashing down like a tidal wave.
He stares in shock at the blue flaps moving in tandem with Jinwoo’s breaths. Gills.
Of course.
---
The planet of Imdo is somewhat of an urban legend out here amidst the stars.
There are always rumors whispering in the wind about the barren planet of Imdo and how it used to be filled with sapphires and a peaceful population of fishermen who could have made a fortune off the sapphires but chose to keep the jewels one with nature. Of course these rumors were always told with a hint of a parable, like a lesson to the scavenger den children about how no good deed goes unpunished.
For most of the universe, Imdo is mostly make believe- the Atlantis of the galaxy so to speak. Seunghoon reckons most travelers will never venture far enough to learn if Imdo exists or not outside the fanciful imagination of some wayfaring elders.
But Seunghoon knows Imdo, knows that it exists as a wasteland of starvation at the mercy of the Yang. He’s intimately familiar with Imdo in a way that is sickening to recall.
Genocide is as ugly a word as the sight of that toothless Imdo infant Seunghoon remembers starving outside of their base. Seunghoon had heard stories of him chewing on dirt out of hunger where the salt in the earth was as sharp as nails and sliced into the infant’s gums and lips until the dirt was moist enough with blood to swallow.
What Yang and the empire had inflicted on the planet had been nothing less than that.
Seeing Jinwoo now in the flesh, his gills fluttering in demonstration to a fascinated Minho, fails to curb that bite of guilt in the least bit.
“They’re not functional now, of course,” Jinwoo says bitterly, looking down on the ground. “If we were in water they would kick in, but off-planet they’re just decoration.” He pauses, and Seunghoon waits for the anger in his voice to come back, but it returns sounding hollow. “I guess they would be planet-side too, now.”
“That doesn’t explain,” Seunghoon says slowly. “Why Kang wants you dead.”
Jinwoo pauses again.
Seunghoon sees him mull his answer over and over again inside his head. All the while Seunghoon can’t stop wondering if it’s fate or divine retribution that saved Jinwoo from drying alongside the masses of his people, rolled into one of those cratered mass graves as the salt crystals clung onto their fading blue skin like dusty diamonds- a beautiful mockery of the sapphires that Yang so sought after.
After a long stretch of silence, Jinwoo finally re-opens his mouth: “Do you remember that assassination attempt a few months ago? The one on the head of the Yang Corporation?”
“Oh.” Minho blinks rapidly, but Jinwoo’s lack of rebuttal is a confirmation in and of itself.
Everything falls in place too sudden and too jarring, but Seunghoon steels his gaze to meet Jinwoo’s eyes. “Why are you here?”
“Yang is hosting a summit a few systems over,” Jinwoo explains calmly. Seunghoon watches him try to grin, but the wobble in his lip is obvious. “They’re going big this time. It’s not just gonna be Imdo. It’s gonna be the whole galaxy.”
He sees Minho look over at him, concerned, but Seunghoon keeps his eyes trained on Jinwoo though, because suddenly nothing else in the world- the entire galaxy- seems to matter as much as Jinwoo’s next few words:
“I intend to be at that summit.”
---
The thing about Jinwoo is that he doesn’t strike Seunghoon as much of a killer.
In fact, he’s every bit the peaceful fisher looking boy from the old station elders’ tales, but circumstance has a habit of changing everyone, not just humans. Seunghoon finds himself staring at the baby blue patches on Jinwoo’s fingers, imagines them bloodstained, and wonders just how much of his doe-eyed gaze is a façade.
Looks can be deceiving, Seunghoon finds. Jinwoo is perceptive, keen for all that he is naïve. Just like how Minho is more or less a cinnamon bun for all his brash exterior and intimidating eyebrows.
They’ve stopped for food a little out of the way since Seunghoon charted their path towards the Empire summit. The food doesn’t suck that much, even though with the few credits they scraped together between the three of them, they can’t afford much more than a few wriggling shrimp and a small basket of French fries.
Jinwoo pops a shrimp into his mouth and looks at Seunghoon curiously. “How did you lose your other head?”
“It’s a pretty normal thing,” Seunghoon shrugs. “They start us training when we’re young, piloting, weapons training, kid’s stuff, real lasers right from the beginning. About once a week we have a kid blasting another’s non-primary head off.”
He sees Jinwoo’s eyes expand. “It’s not fatal,” he reassures. “We’re genetically engineered to be the best in the galaxy. Fast healing and all that stuff. It’s why we make up most of the Empire’s army. Fast reflexes, sharp eyes, two brains.”
“Most of the empire army huh,” Jinwoo comments offhandedly. Seunghoon tenses up and Minho, unsurprisingly, jumps to the wrong conclusion.
“One of the reasons they’re some of the most prized soldiers in the galaxy is that their planet produces the purest tritanium you can get. Their ships are the fastest, their training starts the earliest… Word got out about twenty years ago, and…”
“They mined the planet dry,” Jinwoo concludes. His eyes are still a brittle blue, locked onto Seunghoon’s.
“But at least our ships are faster now,” Seunghoon replies, in an equally brittle voice. There’s no way Jinwoo could know about Seunghoon’s past involvement with Yang, but the sharpness of his gaze sets the stage of something bigger.
He understands that Seunghoon is not the enemy, yet he carries a weariness towards him that Minho is spared. Seunghoon doesn’t even know where he would begin to tell Jinwoo sorry, sorry I didn’t know what I was doing, I never meant to destroy your planet I was just following orders, but none of those words mean anything now.
Now is right here, right now, in front of Jinwoo in this tiny diner as he contemplates their next step.
Seunghoon has to make this right. “Do you want help?”
At that Jinwoo’s eyes go wide. There’s surprise in them, scrutinizing Seunghoon as if he can’t believe his words.
It’s planetary and for that reason alone, Minho won’t- can’t understand. He still stares at them, brows furrowed like he’s trying. Humans and their empathy will never cease to amaze Seunghoon.
“Yes,” Jinwoo says. The look in his eyes is as reproachful as it is grateful. “Please.”
Seunghoon feels a lump in his throat, singular, but he’s sure if his second head were still around something would be caught there too. For a moment the wetness in his eyes stings, as if brimming with sea salt.
Nevertheless when Seunghoon turns to Minho, Minho’s eyes are already set. He’s always been strangely decisive for a human, Seunghoon thinks.
Minho is more than a human though, he’s Seunghoon’s partner- practically his second head. Brash, dependable even while he’s intoxicated during most of their jobs. Seunghoon feels bare, emptier than he can fathom at the idea of doing this without Minho, but Minho beats him to the punch always a half skip ahead.
“Fine,” Minho says flippantly like they’re deciding carpet colors for their new ship. Seunghoon’s eyebrows shoot up and Minho shrugs. “I mean sure, why not?”
“What?” Seunghoon gasps, echoed half a beat later by Jinwoo.
Minho sighs. “I’m not going to stop my best friend and my-”
He pauses, struggling to pick the proper term of endearment to address Jinwoo before settling on- “Recent acquaintance from going on a suicide mission. Even if I tried I doubt I could. Besides-”
He turns back to face Seunghoon, the look on his face fond. “You need someone to babysit you.” Seunghoon snorts, but Minho continues evenly. “Anywhere I go I’m gonna be a target, the Empire, hell, Kang Seungyoon confirmed that. If I’m gonna die, why not do it in style?”
As it turns out, Minho gets his wish a little earlier than expected as they blast their way out of the dingy diner in style. No one dies, or at least from what Seunghoon could tell from their little brawl, no one is dead.
But by the time they stumble back into the hawk, Jinwoo’s eyes are bright, too gleeful to be frightened anymore and Minho limps as crookedly as his grin. Seunghoon’s having trouble seeing out of his right eye, tripping over the navigator chair, but Jinwoo steers him back upright as they get the ship off the ground. Minho helps him chart a path as Jinwoo keeps an eye on their tail.
Three heads are from a numerical standpoint, Seunghoon surmises, better than two. And out here in space, numbers are king.
Minho’s arm is slung over Jinwoo’s small shoulders as the rumble of the hawk’s engine leaves the small crowd of burly hunters tasting their dust- the sound of it like victory, even though they all know it’s too early to celebrate.
They have a summit to catch.
---
Their plan, all things considered, is not a reassuring one.
Considering the gravity of the plot- assassination of the wealthiest man on this side of the coordinate plane, Seunghoon thinks it’s not an absolute outcry to want a plan with a bit more substance in it besides a tiny map with Minho’s heavy handed: ‘BLOW SHIT UP. FUCK SHIT UP’ scribbled on the margins with Jinwoo’s tiny, but far more legible scrawl beside it: ‘shoot him in the head.’
Minho doesn’t do elaborate though. What he does do is buy them all a copious amount of whiskey the night before the summit.
“For the nerves,” Minho explains as he dumps the bottles on the table between the three of them. Seunghoon wonders what he sold off this time to afford it considering that they had already sold the hawk for credits to buy themselves places on a dignitary transport for the summit. Minho and Jinwoo have IDs of the absent dignitaries, sneaking in as “honorary ambassadors” from Earth’s home system which had the most absentees considering the distance and the fragility of most of its inhabitants.
The truth is, Earth and its sister planets haven’t been important for millenniums, but humans are always about respecting the history, their history and ancestors, of its home planets for whatever reason.
Jinwoo, to his surprise, is the first to reach a hand into the center and grab a bottle, pouring them all a shot. He knocks his back before Minho can even get a grip on his shot glass.
“You nervous?” Seunghoon laughs, tipping his shot back as Jinwoo hurriedly pours himself another.
“It tastes different,” is Jinwoo’s only answer. He pauses, running his tongue across his lips in surprise. “Where are the bubbles?”
“You carbonate your whiskey?” Minho wrinkles his nose, throwing back his in wonder. “Why the hell would you ruin good whiskey like that.”
“It’s better that way,” Jinwoo mutters defensively. “You should give it a try it. The way we always made it had bubbles. Back home, the taverns-”
Seunghoon watches him fall mute as Minho’s expression goes increasingly flustered. “Hey, it’s too early for stuff like this. I’m not drunk enough for this.”
“Me neither,” Jinwoo laughs emptily. “Sorry.”
The air between them grows still.
Seunghoon knocks his shot back, watching Jinwoo pour himself a third. Minho lets out a sigh and then in typical Minho fashion grabs a second bottle, uncorks it, and directly takes a hearty swig.
“Tomorrow is gonna suck, huh,” Minho says. He tilts his head back, eyes glued to the darkness outside their room.
“It might not,” Seunghoon adds, feels like he has to add something in to make Jinwoo’s hand stop shaking.
The optimism is wasted on Minho though, who takes another drink out of the bottle. “Maybe.”
“It could really suck for Yang,” Jinwoo adds softly. Minho lets out a hearty chortle at that. “That’s the point, the whole plan.”
“Of which we have none,” Seunghoon adds smartly, chuckling as Minho glares at him in retaliation. “Our plan is a fucking awesome plan.” Minho rises to his feet, bottle swinging precariously close to the edge of his chair.
“Here’s how tomorrow is gonna go.” He rounds on Seunghoon. “You. You’re gonna go talk to your two-headed buddies and sneak in as an extra merc or something, extra security for the summit, something.”
“Something,” Seunghoon echoes trustingly.
Minho takes another drink before turning to Jinwoo. “You and me, we’re gonna blend in with the other ambassadors.”
Jinwoo nods, eyes wide as Minho swings the bottle around. “I look human-” He pauses. “-am human so we’re just gonna have to disguise you, cover up that neck of yours, and pray to god no one knows jack shit about Uranus.”
At that Jinwoo cracks into a huge smile, the edges of his fangs gleaming. “And then we shoot Yang.”
“Bingo,” Minho laughs. He raises his bottle to take another drink, stopping short at the sight of Jinwoo’s confusion. “I mean...it means yes, or right.”
“That easy huh,” Jinwoo mumbles into his empty glass. He leans back, liquid spine slumped against the wall. “So what about after we kill Yang?”
Seunghoon shrugs. He thinks about his family. How the last contact he had with them had been a phone call from the Empire prison which his parents took to as well as you’d imagine. He’s not even sure which system they’ve migrated to by now.
But Jinwoo looks at him so earnestly that Seunghoon has no choice but to answer. “Visit family maybe.”
“You’ve got family around?” Jinwoo asks, brightening up.
“Seunghoon’s got a little sister with the prettiest three feet you can imagine,” Minho blathers drunkenly somewhere from the ground.
Seunghoon doesn’t have a little sister; he did at some point have three feet though. He turns to shrug at Jinwoo whose cheeks have gone rosy and bluish at the same time.
“I miss home,” Jinwoo admits after a little bit, staring at Seunghoon. “Space is bigger than I thought it would be.”
Seunghoon turns over and sees the weight of Minho’s head sagging against the carpet. He pulls a blanket over him, feeling Jinwoo’s curious stare like little pinpricks of ice against the back of his neck.
“Do you miss home?”
“I do,” he starts, taking sip of the whiskey. The burn of it feels good, but it doesn’t lessen the weight of Jinwoo’s stare. “Don’t remember much of it, though.”
“I’m sorry,” Jinwoo says softly after a moment.
“Don’t be,” Seunghoon counters immediately. “Don’t be sorry.”
“To Imdo,” he raises his shot glass. Jinwoo’s eyes are shiny, wet with a fever of revenge but something else too.
“To Usan and Imdo.” Jinwoo’s smile is sad, but no longer laced with poisonous regret as he watches Seunghoon’s hand shake.
“To home,” Seunghoon concludes and Jinwoo meets his glass with a small clink.
---
Seunghoon likes to think of it like a joke they used to tell at the academy.
Knock, knock.
He frowns. Maybe that wasn’t it. His secondary head had always had a better memory for humor. The loss of it’s left him a little sullen.
There are certain memories that are stored in the non-primary. The instructors back at the academy termed them non-vital memories- frivolous things that had no place taking up space in the primary’s brain. But for Seunghoon those memories were more than vital to survival, absolutely crucial to staying sane out here in space. In place of it, he’s anchored himself to the sanity that Jinwoo’s sharp smile and Minho’s boisterous laughter fills him with.
He reaches up an arm and brushes it down where his fingers would have tickled the unruly tangles of his hair- where his mother would pat him and comb his untameable cowlick down with a small pat.
The feeling of a phantom memory like a lost limb fills him with warmth. Seunghoon closes his eyes slowly and breathes.
He remembers now. It goes like this:
A hungover human, a blue-necked Imdo boy, and a semi-headless, two-headed alien walk into an Empire summit.
He pauses, mind throbbing in confusion as the memory clears. It wasn’t a joke he learned at the academy. He’d learned it from Minho.
And then about 3 hours later they did it.
---
There’s another memory, hazy like condensation on the glass of Seunghoon’s mind, but still there all the same:
Two nights before Seunghoon defected out of Yang’s ranks, he had been discharged honorably with a shoulder wound from a rabid Imdo protestor. Seunghoon hadn’t even flinched when the blue bastard took a chunk of flesh out of his arm, ripping veins and arteries out, gnawing him down to the bone before one of the other mercs blasted a hole in his head.
A wound of this sort might have been fatal, or at least cause a permanent disability, to any being not of Seunghoon’s kind. The Empire medic had even been generous in dosing him up and wrote him a discharge letter before he could even ask. The special treatment made it even more bewildering to wake up to the sight of the devil himself clad in one of his infamous gray hats, with newly encrusted sapphires sparkling on his wrist, standing beside Seunghoon’s cot.
It had been a calculated act for sure, a moral boost to the empire soldiers who found it harder and harder to justify the destruction of the planet for a few shiny rocks. Seunghoon knew that too, but it didn’t make any of it less startling to have Yang kneel beside his bedside and mourn his injury firsthand.
Yang had even cried, crocodile tears pearling up in his dark beady eyes. “You remind me a lot of myself, LS0111.” He looked straight into Seunghoon’s eyes on his second head, an intimate gesture on Seunghoon’s home planet. “Completely unremarkable in every way.”
Seunghoon remembers nodding, the itching pain of his arm still prominent with every stretch of his skin. Beneath the bandages he was already healing, his arm ready to destroy more planets at the behest of Yang.
“Please remember, that in the end every struggle makes the universe stronger. It’s for the better.” Yang concluded, wiping his tears. From Seunghoon’s angle down on the bed, Yang might have even looked like something less than a monster for once.
---
Yang looks about the same from Seunghoon’s guard post beneath the podium. The itch of the YANG CORPORATION uniform feels familiar on his shoulder and the weight of a standard issue blaster pains Seunghoon with how comforting he finds it.
It’s uncanny how little Yang seems to have aged, immortal like sin and the devil. Evil itself in human form. Seunghoon tries to suppress the shudder coiling down both his spines as Yang peers out into the crowd and then by some trick of light, makes eye contact with Seunghoon. He pulls his hat down lower, trying to blend into the crowd, but the moment passes and Yang resumes his speech.
Seunghoon only sees Minho and Jinwoo once as they’re shuttled over from the main hall into their designated. Jinwoo’s neck is colored like stain glass, vibrant colors shining within the ridges of his gills. He sees the grim line of Minho’s mouth paired with the stiff angle of Jinwoo’s back and shakes his head.
Relax, he mouths at them, but the line shifts once more and Seunghoon loses them among the waves of the crowd.
---
He’s stuck on guard duty while Yang has dinner and can’t move much more past an inch until the last sip of his coffee is gone.
Seunghoon stares at the ground, bored out of his mind.
He’s missed the fabric of the uniform against his skin, the smell of it freshly pressed, but not like this. He twists his fingers together, itching to move when the guard across from him glares. Seunghoon sees him wrinkle his nose in distaste, the whiskers on it twitching.
The stripes on his uniform are elaborate, indicating pilot status- something pretty high up. It’s rare to have pilots from Hanamju with that species’s inborn propensity for flight sickness, but the figure in front of him looks utterly unfazed as Seunghoon leans in closer, curious.
The people of Hanamju have always been renowned fighters. Good balanced, sharp claws, but Seunghoon’s never seen one acclimated to space like this, fighting alongside his own kinsmen.
He smoothes his fingers out straight, pins his arms to his side like they trained him to so long ago, and aims his winning smile over. “Does he always take this long to eat?”
One furry ear twitches, a shrug if Seunghoon’s ever seen one. “Are you asking for the time?”
“No,” Seunghoon shrugs back. “Just wondering, that’s all.”
“Do you need to pee or something?” the pilot asks dryly, running a through his meticulously parted hair.
“Yes,” Seunghoon lies a little too quickly. “I mean. I guess I can hold it.”
The reply he gets is borderline scathing. “Can I really trust one of you to have control over your bodily functions when you’re clearly missing half your wits? Do the world a favor and just leave.”
“Really?” Seunghoon’s careful to not sound too hopeful. “Thanks man.”
He takes a look at the nametag and grins, showing all his teeth. “Thanks, I owe you one Taeh-” stopping short as the pilot pushes him out the door, hissing. “Just go already.”
---
He waits until nightfall before sneaking out of the barracks, tracing his finger through the hologram until he arrives at their door, key in hand.
Minho has a chair propped up on his shoulder, ready to break the window when Seunghoon slides the door open with a small click.
“Oh hey,” Minho says. He drops the chair back down onto the floor with a small grin. “Did you get it?”
Seunghoon nods, flipping him the small device- a map of the entire summit campus. For something so critical, it had been surprisingly easy to get a hold of. His kind were always more about blasting heads off more than strict security.
He watches the light of the hologram dance across the bridge of Jinwoo’s nose as Jinwoo breaks the device open and traces his finger down to the small red dot in the largest suite.
“We’ve got it.” Beneath Jinwoo’s docile smile is a row of sharp teeth.
Having one head has made Seunghoon really appreciate having Jinwoo around given that Minho’s brain has been knocked just about empty at this point.
Minho looks around, a little lost- maybe nervous even. Seunghoon feels a lump in his own throat and forces his next words out before they can choke. “I’ll keep the mercs distracted as long as I can, but they’re gonna start patrolling eventually. Minho, can you stay on top of them?”
Slowly, Minho nods and that’s all Seunghoon can bear to see before he twists back and hides back into the darkness, determined to not look back.
---
Having only one head makes Seunghoon practically human, suddenly vulnerable. He can’t hear the steps down the corridor as precisely as he used to and it’s definitely a loss to not have a pair of eyes checking the back of his first head when he’s sneaking through a heavily guarded corridor. At the same time, it makes him keener, more on edge, in every sense a better predator.
It’s beginning to make sense to Seunghoon why after all the dust settled from three galactic wars, humans are the species that have reigned supreme.
Humans are the cockroaches of the universe.
They’re not the strongest, not the most suitable to rule the universe, but humans are really fucking adaptable- and Seunghoon’s saying that as the only guy on the ship that can grow his second head back.
Hypothetically speaking: the universe could blow up, leaving nothing but stardust and black holes peppered across the sky and somehow on some tiny rock in the farthest corner of space- there would still be humans, struggling to survive, and with them of course, cockroaches.
Humans learn fast and above all else, they’re resilient.
Case in point- Minho should be dead, but he’s somehow still conscious, repeating a very sullen ‘fuck you’ to the guard interrogating him. Seunghoon suppresses the wince down his throat as Minho receives another resounding slap.
Blood dribbles down his chin, but Minho’s eyes focus on Seunghoon briefly in confusion as Seunghoon readies his gun.
The alarms sound off before he gets a chance to blow holes in Minho’s guard’s back, but that temporary confusion is all he needs to pull Minho to his feet in a gruff manner as the rest of the mercs scramble off to save Yang in the midst of the chaos.
“There’s been an attack on Yang!” someone wails. Jinwoo, Seunghoon thinks numbly. He keeps a straight face as the guard turns to him. “You! Guard the prisoner!”
Seunghoon’s pretty sure he’s never saluted someone so promptly in his life.
Minho’s leg has been in terrible shape since they crashed on the red rock planet and the newest hole blasted in it doesn’t help in the least. Seunghoon carries him down the hall, practically dragging him towards the hangar.
He hauls Minho up the steps to a small hawk and wonders if Minho has always been this light, a featherweight of bruised bones and crooked manners.
“We have,” Minho mutters into his arm. He sounds faint, terribly small and frail. “We have to save Jinwoo.”
“Stay here,” Seunghoon says. He gently places Minho down onto the captain's chair and pulls the safety strap over him. “I’ll be back, Minho, I promise.”
Minho’s head bobs as he slips out of consciousness and a bit of blood bubbles down his chin. Without thinking, Seunghoon curls his fingers around Minho’s cheek, soft. “I’ll be back, I promise.”
There’s no reply. There’s nothing in the cabin but silence as Seunghoon watches his wayward, trusty second head slump even further in his chair.
---
He finds Jinwoo in the air vent of all places.
The metal vent is small, tiny and compact. It’s just big enough for Jinwoo to squeeze through it to the other side as Seunghoon pretends to patrol the perimeter. He sneaks a peek over his shoulder and swiftly fires his blaster into the lock of the adjacent room, pulling Jinwoo in with him.
Jinwoo is shaking. The sweat rolling down his neck is nearly enough to make his gills flutter.
Seunghoon pulls him along the edges of the wall as Jinwoo hangs his head.
“I couldn’t do it,” he mumbles, breathless. “I couldn’t-”
“You’re not a killer,” Seunghoon says. The gun in Jinwoo’s hand shakes.
“I could. Be one,” Jinwoo says, mulling the words over and over. “I could. I deserve to be one.”
“No one deserves that,” Seunghoon replies slowly. He places his hand on Jinwoo’s elbow. “Least of all you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Jinwoo murmurs. His hand is trembling, blue tinged fingers growing whiter by the second. “I hate him.”
Seunghoon wraps his arm around Jinwoo’s shaking shoulders and wishes he knew what to say. ‘Next time,’ is what he wants to say, but it’s a horribly stupid thing to say when they both know that Yang isn’t the real problem- that human greed, that terrible insatiable monster is what truly fuels genocide across galaxies.
After all, Imdo did not collapse to total war. It fell under the sweet gaze of naivety.
The same way Jinwoo has been naive this whole time- not knowing, not thinking about how regardless of who they killed today, that there would always be another man like Yang around to terrorize the world.
But Jinwoo doesn’t need to hear that, not right now. So instead, Seunghoon tucks him under his arm, readies his blaster with his other and pulls them into the light.
“Let’s go home,” Seunghoon calls softly. “Let’s go wake Minho up.”
Slowly, Jinwoo’s hands- those delicate pretty blue splotched hands- curl up into fists and then, unclench. He let’s Seunghoon lead him down the hall and into the hangar where Minho is waiting for them.
---
They’re two blocks away from the hangar when the guards catch wind of their location.
It happens seamlessly. Jinwoo ducks under the guards, and Seunghoon shoots to kill, like he’s been trained to. They dash past the rooms, the fire trailing behind them as Seunghoon pulls Jinwoo into the hangar. The door closes behind them just in time as a dark figure slides into focus, blocking off the path to the hawk.
It’s the pilot from earlier, Taeh- something. Seunghoon sees recognition flicker in those feline eyes, deadly.
“You caught the intruder?” he snaps, voice incredulous.
“Sort of,” Seunghoon shrugs, watching the swish of his tail curiously. “I’ve got orders to turn him in up over there.”
“Really now?” The claws are fully out now, long and deadly.
He must be able to smell something fishy. Seunghoon turns to his side and sees Jinwoo swallow hard, his gills trembling with unease. Of course.
There’s not time to waste. Seunghoon takes out his blaster and fires directly above them as the pilot launches himself towards them. The shot bounces off the ceiling and back down to the ground in a second as Seunghoon fires one after another. The metal of the hangar is strong, reflecting each shot like mirrors back and forth until there’s nearly a wall of light between them.
The ricochet of lasers off the walls sends the metal screaming, high pitched and painful. The pilot drops to his knees, claws nearly shredding his delicate ears as he tries to block off the sound.
Seunghoon’s ears feel like bleeding too. He’s only thankful that he’s got only two ears around this time and that Jinwoo appears completely immune, or otherwise deaf, to this kind of frequency shock.
He pulls Seunghoon with a surprising force, making a zigzag pattern towards the ship. Seunghoon feels a shot singe his arm, hot and dangerous, before Jinwoo pushes them both inside the ship. Seunghoon ducks his head into the cockpit and sees the pilot struggle onto his elbows, still writhing in pain.
“What are you doing?” he yells. Seunghoon can see the red flashing of the alarm glinting off his claws. “That’s Yang’s private hawk!”
Seunghoon’s fingers fly across the keyboard. The system’s been updated but it still molds to his fingertips like soft putty. Jinwoo hovers over his shoulder, teeth carving into his bottom lip.
“Hold on tight,” Seunghoon says, smiling as Jinwoo anchors himself by placing his hands onto Seunghoon’s shoulders.
The guards outside are beginning to fill into the hangar, blasting at the ship at full power. It’s futile, Seunghoon thinks. Metal from Usan doesn’t so much as scratch under intense heat and whoever made this ship specifically for Yang would never have dared to use anything less.
Grinning, Seunghoon guides the ship’s pulsars towards the gate and rockets them through into the night sky.
---
There’s a lot to cover when Minho finally awakens, the main points being-
“Kang Seungyoon?” Minho stutters in bewilderment. “They think he sent us here to kill Yang?”
“More or less,” Jinwoo shrugs. “Wait.” He tilts his head in confusion. “It thought you were the one who told them. Do you remember any of that?”
He waits all of three seconds for that to sink into Minho’s overly beaten head before leaning in again.
“No?” Minho squints. “What else did I miss? What happened to Yang?”
“Not much,” Seunghoon lies. He turns to look over at Jinwoo and nods.
“He’s alive,” Jinwoo says quietly. “I couldn’t,” he says at Minho’s expression, “I couldn’t do it. This summit, this thing - it’s not going away with Yang. I saw their lists, I saw the planets they’re going after next. Minho, it’s… hundreds. Hundreds of planets that are going to die like mine, like Seunghoon’s. It’s was never going to stop with just Yang. And, besides-” he says, looking away.
Minho shakes his head gingerly. Seunghoon watches Jinwoo lean in further, practically feeding Minho air. “It would be a pity if you died.”
“Thanks,” Minho says blankly. He looks confused on so many levels, but there’s so much they need to tell him. “But why aren’t you…” He pauses, searching for the word. “Upset? Angry?”
“Killing Yang doesn’t solve anything,” Jinwoo says after a moment. “Like I said, the only reason why the Empire and Yang can even get away with any of this is because no one dares to talk about it.”
At that Minho rolls his eyes. “Of course they talk about it. People love lost planet gossip. It’s all the space tabloids ever care about anymore.”
“They talk about ’if’, not when or how,” Jinwoo explains simply. “And now we have those exact details.”
He gestures over to Seunghoon and Seunghoon obligingly taps his fingers onto the control panel, pulling up the map. It’s a detailed plan, evil red x’s and everything in place, marking out Yang’s targets one by one.
Minho’s jaw drops as he takes in the expanse of red before him, bloody x’s swarming their vision.
“Sure everyone love speculation, but how many of them do you think will stand to the side and willingly let their own planet fall into Yang’s hands without a fight?” Seunghoon says calmly.
Minho blinks rapidly, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. He turns to Jinwoo and then back at Seunghoon. “How did you get this shit?”
“They left it here.” Seunghoon pats the control panel fondly. “You’re currently sitting in Yang’s personal hawk.”
“No fucking way,” Minho breaths. “How long was I out?”
“Quite a while.” Seunghoon pats the top of his Minho’s head as gently as possible. “You slept like a baby.”
“I think I deserved it,” Minho defends. He arches an eyebrow at the map before them. “So we’re sitting in Yang’s ride, looking at his plans for doom and destruction. What else have I missed?”
“Well.” Seunghoon looks over to Jinwoo as they share a look.
“That’s just the start of it,” Jinwoo grins, smile pointy. “How do you feel about starting a rebellion?”
He says it easily like it was the plan all along and Seunghoon feels the newly grown flesh on shoulder positively tingle. Something settles in Minho’s eyes, dark and swirling as he lets out a laugh and then can’t stop laughing.
There are planets to save, but before they get to that Minho’s stomach lets out a gigantic grumble.
“Fucking starving,” Minho growls. Seunghoon sees him glance longingly at empty bottles of brandy rolling in the corner.
Someday they’ll have enough brandy for Minho to swim in, maybe even discover a brandy filled planet for him to live drunk off of. That would knock out two needs with one, Seunghoon thinks happily. A place for Jinwoo to swim and one for Minho to drink, all in one.
Space is vast, going home is out of the question, but there will always be something out there for him, out there with them.
“Where do you want to start?” Seunghoon yawns. Jinwoo looks confident, a devilfish in slick waters, as he swirls his finger alongside the hologram. His gaze finally settles on a small, blue planet.
“Somewhere small, but important,” Jinwoo replies steadily. He looks over past Seunghoon. “I was thinking Earth, actually.”
That gets Minho attention faster than uncorked brandy on the table. Seunghoon waits for the hysteria to hit, but all they get is a unhinged grin.
“Why the hell not? What’s even left of that shitty blue rock anyways?”
---
Earth is, for lack of a better word, boring.
“This seems like a great place to raise children,” Seunghoon says plainly as the commercial- something about sunscreen and UV rays- plays in a constant loop at the docking station as they disembark the hawk.
It’s ironic that humans, who spent so much effort and energy developing their intergalactic fleets, could have left their home planet alone long enough to let it heal into a backwater state. Seunghoon swallows a lump in his throat and thinks of home- the dusty barren mines and the never ending acid storms. Earth in comparison has never been in better shape.
It’s a small consolation that while the Empire’s been out and about wreaking havoc on the rest of the universe, they couldn’t be bothered to spare a few measly seconds to nuke their home planet into oblivion, again. Yang needs to be stopped.
Minho stumbles out of the ship like he can’t imagine what’s before his eyes. Seunghoon can’t either. Earth is green, so so green and beyond that-
“I can smell the ocean,” Jinwoo says dreamily. There’s something layered in his voice, raw and breathy like disbelief.
Seunghoon loops an arm around Minho to prop him up, watching as Jinwoo grabs Minho’s other arm. The amble down the steps like beggars tied up in a three legged race. The air out here is clean. They will learn to walk on land again, Jinwoo can teach them how to swim.
They will start here, but the war will be a long one.
Fandom: WINNER
Pairing(s)/Focus: Seunghoon/Mino/Jinwoo, Seunghoon-centric
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 9200
Work remixed: rocket red, jet blue by yassan
Summary: The saying goes: one man’s space junk is another alien’s meal ticket. Likewise: what’s Song Minho’s burden to carry across the stars, becomes Lee Seunghoon’s chance at redemption.
Notes/Warnings: Thank you so much r + e + c for being a great support group ;; Thank you ficmix mod for being super gracious and of course, thank you lj user yassan for letting play around in your sandbox of space. I hope I did your original fic justice <3
They’ve made it as far as across the asteroid belt when Seunghoon hears the tank beneath his feet run dry.
To be fair, they’ve been practically running on empty since they left the outer ring of Andromeda, a thousand or so lightyears ago. They’ve done well to make it out this far by thinning the remaining fuel with whatever fluids they could find onboard- expired milk back from March, Seunghoon’s precious hair toner, their own piss.
Minho wouldn’t let him touch the whiskey though. Somehow it doesn’t surprise Seunghoon that they ran out of it before the actual fuel.
Seunghoon hears it first, channeled through his four ears: the sound like someone gasping for air, lungs flooded with sand- only Seunghoon’s never heard her this bad before. She coughs, greasy spittle rattling her frame. Seunghoon places a hand down to read the tremors in her system. There’s a type of machine tiredness in her, reflecting exactly just how little thin carbon-cut steel is between them the expanse of space.
It’s bad.
He does the math with his non-primary brain, fingers skimming over the keys in a hurry- 20 miles up in the air. No safety system. No fuel. Maybe there’s enough backup battery left for a small plasma shield. Something to break the fall with.
He presses down on the keys and the last spark flies out from beneath his fingers. She’s dead.
The entire ship goes dark. “Oops.”
“Stabilizers?” he hears Minho yell behind him. Seunghoon hears him scrambling, swearing up a storm alongside the darkness. Leave it to Minho to spearhead the last minute panic as always.
Humans only have one brain for processing. Accordingly, it takes Seunghoon half the time to deduce what Minho is still struggling to comprehend.
They’re going to crash.
“I think,” he yells. He can barely feel the frantic pulse of communication between his two brains over the rattling of his teeth. “We can assume from here on out that everything is broken!”
He hears Minho cuss a few more times over the sound of his own swearing. The entire floor tilts, gravity suddenly very real. Seunghoon yelps as the chair slides forward, the entire ship pitching forward past the clouds.
“Just so you know,” Minho shouts. He sounds nearby, the air hissing out between his teeth. “First thing I’m gonna do once I get to hell, find you and punch your teeth out one by one.”
“Aliens don’t go to hell,” Seunghoon yells back. The air is too thin for him to force sarcasm and remind Minho that such a thing would require his kind to believe in a deity of any sort. His stomach lurches, a nauseating vertical drop that threatens to expel bile up both of his throats. “We’re pure and innocent angels-“
“You’re ungodly freaks and I hope you die first- Fuck!”
She coughs one last pitiful time and goes down.
And oh boy, does she go down.
---
Seunghoon’s no stranger to crashes, even less of one ever since he started flying with Minho, but his training back at the academy back on Usan taught him how to survive crashes on a standard jet-liner built with premium steel and the very earth of his people.
By comparison, he and Minho have been traversing the galaxy in a glorified egg carton with rheumy rocket fuel (and sometimes not even that) congealed inside. They’ve kept it in flight with equal parts prayer and bravado, fueled mostly by desperation. Seunghoon’s not entirely sure how the prayer part even worked, but by some miracle when the dust settles 20 miles below, they’re both still alive.
Seunghoon’s alien anatomy is adaptable to what the circumstance calls for. He’s not a starfish by any means. He won’t grow his entire body back after being decapitated, but his body can adapt: an extra arm to reach the latch outside after years of training, tougher skin to handle the heat of the prisons on Vercunius, etc.
Minho is an egg in comparison, one that’s been cracked on the head too many times if Seunghoon’s being honest. Speaking of heads, he thinks sluggishly. He hears Minho groaning in pain beside him and at first the sound of it is muffled, ringing in his ears.
Ears. Two of them, which means-
“Dammit not again.”
Seunghoon swings his shoulder to the side and tries not to vomit at the rolling dead weight of his non-primary head. It’s still attached- unlike last time- skin, blood and bones still undeniably there, sloshing aimlessly beneath his skin like too chunky soup in a thin plastic bag. His second spinal cord’s snapped no doubt. 20 miles of concentrated whiplash will do that to you.
He rolls his head back and sees Minho wobble just as unsteadily to his feet. Seunghoon makes an effort to smile. “I fucked up the second head.” It’s not fatal, it never is, but it still stings like a bitch.
“That...that sucks,” Minho says, like he’s actually trying to fathom the pain of half-assed decapitation. It’s a nice gesture, more than what Seunghoon received last time when Minho got them both thrown into an Empire prison for a year. “You okay, though? Besides the…”
Seunghoon tries not to nod, but he has to move around at some point to survey the state of the ship-
His mind freezes at the sight, neurons firing blankly into the space on his shoulder where his second, at times more dependable, head formerly stood. She’s in bad shape, worse than anything Seunghoon’s ever seen her, which is really saying something.
“I know a guy,” Minho says hastily and part of Seunghoon, most parts of him, wishes he had died back there.
“Song, no, don't do this to me-”
But Minho does anyways, because that’s what fucking best friends do.
---
The story of how Lee Seunghoon, former galactic merc for hire and forsaken child of the Empire, landed up co-pilot to Song Minho, galactic smuggler wanted in more galaxies than he could remember out of his constant drunken stupor, is a long one.
The way Seunghoon remembers it- is him tearing out of the Empire fleet hired by Yang in the dead of night two weeks after they’d finished draining the Imdo ocean. Yang had been thrilled, practically dancing in the promise of those sapphires and Seunghoon himself had been one of the soldiers to tap the switch- watching the cool blue of the ocean, the lifeblood of the planet, drip into the dirt jaws of the ground. The whole time his two brains ping-ponging the thoughts back and forth- is this right? is this right? is this okay?, but too scared to do anything until it was too late.
The way Minho recalls it, Seunghoon flew out from beyond the sun- a comet of yellow and black stripes of his fighter jet and rammed into the side of an Empire tank like a kamikaze fireball. Minho had been drunk (surprise, surprise), but seeing Seunghoon emerge from the wreckage had been just as sobering as seeing a ghost...up until the point Seunghoon collapsed on the sidewalk, a sobbing mess, and Minho had no choice but to help him get drunk.
It’s the same story, really. They only really fight the details when they’re drunk off of whiskey or the high of a heist.
Because no matter how they met, at the end of the day Minho wings a smuggling job too big for the two of them to handle and Seunghoon obligingly pilots both their asses out of firing range.
Rinse, repeat, with some intermittent jail time (which was the preferable way to spend a year as opposed to what Kang had lined up for them just outside) and that’s that.
---
The last time Minho had totaled a ship this badly, neither of them had a chance to salvage scraps from the ruins. Granted, they were too busy getting thrown in Empire jail, but at least back then they had enough credits to buy a new ship not too long after getting freed.
“Fucking Song,” Seunghoon grumbles into the dirt. He runs his hand idly down across the weathered steel. There’s not much left of their baby and out of what’s left not even the lowest scavenging dens would be interested in, let alone Kang Seungyoon.
“What’s the point?” he scowls to the right. The silence of the desert draws on and Seunghoon lets out another short sigh. Life’s hard not having a second head, a built in second opinion to gauge his ideas against.
It’s hot out here even in the dead of night.
If Seunghoon peers carefully he can see the red planet’s two moons casting their reflected light across the horizon, making it bright enough that Seunghoon is spared no gory details. His shoulder is in a terrible state: his second skull crushed upon impact and the better half of Seunghoon’s sensibilities along with it.
It’s kind of like having a migraine, but instead of having half your brain in agony, jumping haywire at the slightest pulse in sound waves, it’s Seunghoon’s entire second head- which is actually not as bad as it sounds.
If anything it’s gotten better over time.
By all means the first time it’d gotten blown off, Seunghoon had cried like a little baby. It’s hard to remember the details without his second brain functioning, but Seunghoon had been young- a little starling no more than two planetary rotations old back home when his older sister took their dad’s blaster off the coffee table and blew his second face to stardust, by accident she swears to this day.
Nevertheless it was customary. His parents returned home to a sobbing Seunghoon and had been more concerned about the hole in the wall behind him. It had taken Seunghoon an extraordinarily long time to grow it back the first time and the process seems to have only gotten slower the older he’s gotten.
Looking at the state of his limp head now Seunghoon wonders if it’s worth waiting for the nerves and blood vessels inside to heal up or if he should just suck it up and start from scratch. Besides, Minho’s not around to watch. What’s there to lose anyways?
It takes Seunghoon a second to remember that he won’t get an answer. So he takes a handful of the dying ship’s grease and lathers it around his cold, stiff throat, and then with a deep breath, pulls.
It’ll be morning by the time Minho comes back around, if at all, so Seunghoon takes his sweet time pulling the carcass of his dead head off his shoulder, which is much harder than it sounds. It takes him the better half of the night, all the while cursing Minho, cursing the stars and then the red devil dirt for being cruel enough to swallow their ship whole but only chew him and Minho down to the point they might as well be dead.
The sun rises and the temperature sky rockets before Seunghoon’s second head hits the bottom of their old ship cabin with a satisfying thud- a literal weight off his shoulder. The skin peels like molten plastic, shedding the dead head like loose bedding.
The fresh nerve endings sting, but Seunghoon does his best to scavenge around the rest of the ship. There’s not much, maybe a chunk of metal or two worth saving. It’s not his fault they were broke to begin with. The same way it’s not exactly Minho’s fault either they had the shittiest luck dealing with the worst smuggling scum on this side of the galaxy.
So when Song Minho descends from the dust blown heavens with a brand new hawk, Seunghoon lets it slide.
They’ll call it even, almost.
He misses Bumblebee, but there’s no lost love for Soldier, still smoldering in the ruins of red rock. You learn to move on quick out here in the sand, Seunghoon thinks idly as he hops on board the new hawk with a small bounce in his step.
---
Minho, as it turns out, is not the only one to greet him on board the shiny new hawk.
It’s a pretty big surprise to see Minho alive with his one, fragile spinal cord intact and an even bigger one to see the slight frame of their blue-necked cargo appear from doorway of the main cabin like an apparition of all their Christmas pasts gone wrong.
His name is Jinwoo and something about him is familiar. Seunghoon wonders briefly if they’ve met before. His mind can’t recall anything, which figures because half a brain of memories is a lot to lose. He squints at the sight of Jinwoo’s neck and the way Jinwoo shrinks back leaves a guilty aftertaste in his mouth.
“We’re born like this,” Jinwoo explains to a fascinated Minho. “Apparently our skin used to be completely blue, but almost no one is born like that anymore.”
His neck is a pattern of intricate, blue spirals. Seunghoon’s almost sure he’s seen something like that before. Jinwoo shrinks back from his stare again and Seunghoon watches him duck his head into the collar of his shirt, physically withdrawing from his scrutiny.
“So,” Seunghoon says, fingers playing idly with the ship’s controls. “Where are you from, Jinwo-”
The sudden lurch in the ship’s floor sends the alarm system into overdrive. It’s brand new, inexplicably screechy even to Seunghoon’s diminished hearing.
The controls beep with an incoming message. Seunghoon watches Minho hesitantly lean forward to accept it. From Seunghoon’s position he can only make out the first couple words and even that’s more than enough to know how utterly fucked they are.
He sees Jinwoo shrink back from the message, flinching as Minho mouths over the word prisoner. Seunghoon doesn’t want to make assumptions, but bringing in a military grade vulture is overkill for basic felons like himself and Minho. Jinwoo must be the one they want.
Forget that they’ve known each other for all of ten minutes, no one deserves to be captured by a crew as barbaric as the one on board the vulture. Plus, there’s something about Jinwoo that begs for protection. Whether it’s the soft baby blue patches of his skin or the wide-stricken look in his eyes as the red of the ship’s alarms flash over his face again and again, Seunghoon doesn’t care.
If it were Kang Seungyoon’s intent to blast them into smithereens, he messed up from the start by giving them a ship with actual fuel in it.
Give Seunghoon anything and he’ll make it soar. He just needs a little bit more than 30 seconds which is approximately the amount of time Minho keeps screaming at him to get their asses out of firing range of the vulture.
“Seunghoon.” Minho says, sounding oddly serene, and sober, for the gravity of the situation. “Get us the fuck out of here.”
Which is as per usual, easier said than done. “Give me a second!” The buttons beneath his fingertips are in an alien language (more alien than his own) for crying out loud. “I don’t know how to work this ship! Fuck!”
“Come on,” he hears Minho muttering, “come on come on come on-” and Seunghoon’s more than a little inclined to agree today, given that he’s the one that lost his second head no more than twelve hours ago.
The pulsar behind them glows a demonic red, charging. The glow of true hell. Seunghoon redoubles his efforts, finger flying over the navigation system searching for a path, anything path to escape.
“Get us the fuck out of here!” Minho shouts again and Seunghoon wishes he still had his second head so he wouldn’t have to waste precious processing space to shout back. “I’M TRYING.”
All the while Jinwoo grips the bottom edges of his seat looking faint and bluer than possible until Seunghoon pokes what must be the correct engine button and the ship roars to life.
He lets out a whoop of triumph as the hawk bursts past the vulture’s hulking figure, far outside firing range.
They soar past the system in a blur. Each planet as impressionable as the damp sweat curled on their necks. Past 500 light years or so, Seunghoon lets up on the gas, watching as Jinwoo curls his fingers around his blue patched arms and shrinks into himself alongside the stars.
---
It’s a step towards accelerated friendship, knowing the same person in all the vast galaxy wants the three of them dead. What are the odds? But it’s just as well, because Seunghoon isn’t a big fan of icebreakers to begin with.
“So,” Minho says. Seunghoon can always count on him to break the silence with as much subtlety as a space whale. “I take it Kang wants you dead too.”
“I’m not,” Jinwoo starts, but Minho stares him down with the force of his eyebrows drawn tight. It’s pretty intimidating, Seunghoon admits as someone who’s been on the other end of said eyebrows many times before.
“I mean,” Jinwoo stammers. Minho’s eyebrows refuse to budge and Seunghoon watches Jinwoo physically deflates, letting out a palpable sigh. “Okay. You’re probably right.”
“So, Mr. Blue Neck,” Minho starts. “Who the hell are you that makes Kang Seungyoon so eager to take you out?”
At that Jinwoo’s eyebrows shoot up. “Seungyoon didn’t tell you?” He pauses, and then: “And you’re sure you don’t recognize me?”
At that, the phantom itch Seunghoon’s been repressing for over three systems and counting now surges up like wildfire.
“Have you ever heard of a planet called Imdo?”
Seunghoon’s starts cursing before he even realizes why, but it doesn’t take long for the memories- a blue expanse of ocean, salt crusted corpses, his own hands shaking from the force of the draining dam, the gleam of the Imdo Sapphire caught in Yang’s haughty gaze- to come crashing down like a tidal wave.
He stares in shock at the blue flaps moving in tandem with Jinwoo’s breaths. Gills.
Of course.
---
The planet of Imdo is somewhat of an urban legend out here amidst the stars.
There are always rumors whispering in the wind about the barren planet of Imdo and how it used to be filled with sapphires and a peaceful population of fishermen who could have made a fortune off the sapphires but chose to keep the jewels one with nature. Of course these rumors were always told with a hint of a parable, like a lesson to the scavenger den children about how no good deed goes unpunished.
For most of the universe, Imdo is mostly make believe- the Atlantis of the galaxy so to speak. Seunghoon reckons most travelers will never venture far enough to learn if Imdo exists or not outside the fanciful imagination of some wayfaring elders.
But Seunghoon knows Imdo, knows that it exists as a wasteland of starvation at the mercy of the Yang. He’s intimately familiar with Imdo in a way that is sickening to recall.
Genocide is as ugly a word as the sight of that toothless Imdo infant Seunghoon remembers starving outside of their base. Seunghoon had heard stories of him chewing on dirt out of hunger where the salt in the earth was as sharp as nails and sliced into the infant’s gums and lips until the dirt was moist enough with blood to swallow.
What Yang and the empire had inflicted on the planet had been nothing less than that.
Seeing Jinwoo now in the flesh, his gills fluttering in demonstration to a fascinated Minho, fails to curb that bite of guilt in the least bit.
“They’re not functional now, of course,” Jinwoo says bitterly, looking down on the ground. “If we were in water they would kick in, but off-planet they’re just decoration.” He pauses, and Seunghoon waits for the anger in his voice to come back, but it returns sounding hollow. “I guess they would be planet-side too, now.”
“That doesn’t explain,” Seunghoon says slowly. “Why Kang wants you dead.”
Jinwoo pauses again.
Seunghoon sees him mull his answer over and over again inside his head. All the while Seunghoon can’t stop wondering if it’s fate or divine retribution that saved Jinwoo from drying alongside the masses of his people, rolled into one of those cratered mass graves as the salt crystals clung onto their fading blue skin like dusty diamonds- a beautiful mockery of the sapphires that Yang so sought after.
After a long stretch of silence, Jinwoo finally re-opens his mouth: “Do you remember that assassination attempt a few months ago? The one on the head of the Yang Corporation?”
“Oh.” Minho blinks rapidly, but Jinwoo’s lack of rebuttal is a confirmation in and of itself.
Everything falls in place too sudden and too jarring, but Seunghoon steels his gaze to meet Jinwoo’s eyes. “Why are you here?”
“Yang is hosting a summit a few systems over,” Jinwoo explains calmly. Seunghoon watches him try to grin, but the wobble in his lip is obvious. “They’re going big this time. It’s not just gonna be Imdo. It’s gonna be the whole galaxy.”
He sees Minho look over at him, concerned, but Seunghoon keeps his eyes trained on Jinwoo though, because suddenly nothing else in the world- the entire galaxy- seems to matter as much as Jinwoo’s next few words:
“I intend to be at that summit.”
---
The thing about Jinwoo is that he doesn’t strike Seunghoon as much of a killer.
In fact, he’s every bit the peaceful fisher looking boy from the old station elders’ tales, but circumstance has a habit of changing everyone, not just humans. Seunghoon finds himself staring at the baby blue patches on Jinwoo’s fingers, imagines them bloodstained, and wonders just how much of his doe-eyed gaze is a façade.
Looks can be deceiving, Seunghoon finds. Jinwoo is perceptive, keen for all that he is naïve. Just like how Minho is more or less a cinnamon bun for all his brash exterior and intimidating eyebrows.
They’ve stopped for food a little out of the way since Seunghoon charted their path towards the Empire summit. The food doesn’t suck that much, even though with the few credits they scraped together between the three of them, they can’t afford much more than a few wriggling shrimp and a small basket of French fries.
Jinwoo pops a shrimp into his mouth and looks at Seunghoon curiously. “How did you lose your other head?”
“It’s a pretty normal thing,” Seunghoon shrugs. “They start us training when we’re young, piloting, weapons training, kid’s stuff, real lasers right from the beginning. About once a week we have a kid blasting another’s non-primary head off.”
He sees Jinwoo’s eyes expand. “It’s not fatal,” he reassures. “We’re genetically engineered to be the best in the galaxy. Fast healing and all that stuff. It’s why we make up most of the Empire’s army. Fast reflexes, sharp eyes, two brains.”
“Most of the empire army huh,” Jinwoo comments offhandedly. Seunghoon tenses up and Minho, unsurprisingly, jumps to the wrong conclusion.
“One of the reasons they’re some of the most prized soldiers in the galaxy is that their planet produces the purest tritanium you can get. Their ships are the fastest, their training starts the earliest… Word got out about twenty years ago, and…”
“They mined the planet dry,” Jinwoo concludes. His eyes are still a brittle blue, locked onto Seunghoon’s.
“But at least our ships are faster now,” Seunghoon replies, in an equally brittle voice. There’s no way Jinwoo could know about Seunghoon’s past involvement with Yang, but the sharpness of his gaze sets the stage of something bigger.
He understands that Seunghoon is not the enemy, yet he carries a weariness towards him that Minho is spared. Seunghoon doesn’t even know where he would begin to tell Jinwoo sorry, sorry I didn’t know what I was doing, I never meant to destroy your planet I was just following orders, but none of those words mean anything now.
Now is right here, right now, in front of Jinwoo in this tiny diner as he contemplates their next step.
Seunghoon has to make this right. “Do you want help?”
At that Jinwoo’s eyes go wide. There’s surprise in them, scrutinizing Seunghoon as if he can’t believe his words.
It’s planetary and for that reason alone, Minho won’t- can’t understand. He still stares at them, brows furrowed like he’s trying. Humans and their empathy will never cease to amaze Seunghoon.
“Yes,” Jinwoo says. The look in his eyes is as reproachful as it is grateful. “Please.”
Seunghoon feels a lump in his throat, singular, but he’s sure if his second head were still around something would be caught there too. For a moment the wetness in his eyes stings, as if brimming with sea salt.
Nevertheless when Seunghoon turns to Minho, Minho’s eyes are already set. He’s always been strangely decisive for a human, Seunghoon thinks.
Minho is more than a human though, he’s Seunghoon’s partner- practically his second head. Brash, dependable even while he’s intoxicated during most of their jobs. Seunghoon feels bare, emptier than he can fathom at the idea of doing this without Minho, but Minho beats him to the punch always a half skip ahead.
“Fine,” Minho says flippantly like they’re deciding carpet colors for their new ship. Seunghoon’s eyebrows shoot up and Minho shrugs. “I mean sure, why not?”
“What?” Seunghoon gasps, echoed half a beat later by Jinwoo.
Minho sighs. “I’m not going to stop my best friend and my-”
He pauses, struggling to pick the proper term of endearment to address Jinwoo before settling on- “Recent acquaintance from going on a suicide mission. Even if I tried I doubt I could. Besides-”
He turns back to face Seunghoon, the look on his face fond. “You need someone to babysit you.” Seunghoon snorts, but Minho continues evenly. “Anywhere I go I’m gonna be a target, the Empire, hell, Kang Seungyoon confirmed that. If I’m gonna die, why not do it in style?”
As it turns out, Minho gets his wish a little earlier than expected as they blast their way out of the dingy diner in style. No one dies, or at least from what Seunghoon could tell from their little brawl, no one is dead.
But by the time they stumble back into the hawk, Jinwoo’s eyes are bright, too gleeful to be frightened anymore and Minho limps as crookedly as his grin. Seunghoon’s having trouble seeing out of his right eye, tripping over the navigator chair, but Jinwoo steers him back upright as they get the ship off the ground. Minho helps him chart a path as Jinwoo keeps an eye on their tail.
Three heads are from a numerical standpoint, Seunghoon surmises, better than two. And out here in space, numbers are king.
Minho’s arm is slung over Jinwoo’s small shoulders as the rumble of the hawk’s engine leaves the small crowd of burly hunters tasting their dust- the sound of it like victory, even though they all know it’s too early to celebrate.
They have a summit to catch.
---
Their plan, all things considered, is not a reassuring one.
Considering the gravity of the plot- assassination of the wealthiest man on this side of the coordinate plane, Seunghoon thinks it’s not an absolute outcry to want a plan with a bit more substance in it besides a tiny map with Minho’s heavy handed: ‘BLOW SHIT UP. FUCK SHIT UP’ scribbled on the margins with Jinwoo’s tiny, but far more legible scrawl beside it: ‘shoot him in the head.’
Minho doesn’t do elaborate though. What he does do is buy them all a copious amount of whiskey the night before the summit.
“For the nerves,” Minho explains as he dumps the bottles on the table between the three of them. Seunghoon wonders what he sold off this time to afford it considering that they had already sold the hawk for credits to buy themselves places on a dignitary transport for the summit. Minho and Jinwoo have IDs of the absent dignitaries, sneaking in as “honorary ambassadors” from Earth’s home system which had the most absentees considering the distance and the fragility of most of its inhabitants.
The truth is, Earth and its sister planets haven’t been important for millenniums, but humans are always about respecting the history, their history and ancestors, of its home planets for whatever reason.
Jinwoo, to his surprise, is the first to reach a hand into the center and grab a bottle, pouring them all a shot. He knocks his back before Minho can even get a grip on his shot glass.
“You nervous?” Seunghoon laughs, tipping his shot back as Jinwoo hurriedly pours himself another.
“It tastes different,” is Jinwoo’s only answer. He pauses, running his tongue across his lips in surprise. “Where are the bubbles?”
“You carbonate your whiskey?” Minho wrinkles his nose, throwing back his in wonder. “Why the hell would you ruin good whiskey like that.”
“It’s better that way,” Jinwoo mutters defensively. “You should give it a try it. The way we always made it had bubbles. Back home, the taverns-”
Seunghoon watches him fall mute as Minho’s expression goes increasingly flustered. “Hey, it’s too early for stuff like this. I’m not drunk enough for this.”
“Me neither,” Jinwoo laughs emptily. “Sorry.”
The air between them grows still.
Seunghoon knocks his shot back, watching Jinwoo pour himself a third. Minho lets out a sigh and then in typical Minho fashion grabs a second bottle, uncorks it, and directly takes a hearty swig.
“Tomorrow is gonna suck, huh,” Minho says. He tilts his head back, eyes glued to the darkness outside their room.
“It might not,” Seunghoon adds, feels like he has to add something in to make Jinwoo’s hand stop shaking.
The optimism is wasted on Minho though, who takes another drink out of the bottle. “Maybe.”
“It could really suck for Yang,” Jinwoo adds softly. Minho lets out a hearty chortle at that. “That’s the point, the whole plan.”
“Of which we have none,” Seunghoon adds smartly, chuckling as Minho glares at him in retaliation. “Our plan is a fucking awesome plan.” Minho rises to his feet, bottle swinging precariously close to the edge of his chair.
“Here’s how tomorrow is gonna go.” He rounds on Seunghoon. “You. You’re gonna go talk to your two-headed buddies and sneak in as an extra merc or something, extra security for the summit, something.”
“Something,” Seunghoon echoes trustingly.
Minho takes another drink before turning to Jinwoo. “You and me, we’re gonna blend in with the other ambassadors.”
Jinwoo nods, eyes wide as Minho swings the bottle around. “I look human-” He pauses. “-am human so we’re just gonna have to disguise you, cover up that neck of yours, and pray to god no one knows jack shit about Uranus.”
At that Jinwoo cracks into a huge smile, the edges of his fangs gleaming. “And then we shoot Yang.”
“Bingo,” Minho laughs. He raises his bottle to take another drink, stopping short at the sight of Jinwoo’s confusion. “I mean...it means yes, or right.”
“That easy huh,” Jinwoo mumbles into his empty glass. He leans back, liquid spine slumped against the wall. “So what about after we kill Yang?”
Seunghoon shrugs. He thinks about his family. How the last contact he had with them had been a phone call from the Empire prison which his parents took to as well as you’d imagine. He’s not even sure which system they’ve migrated to by now.
But Jinwoo looks at him so earnestly that Seunghoon has no choice but to answer. “Visit family maybe.”
“You’ve got family around?” Jinwoo asks, brightening up.
“Seunghoon’s got a little sister with the prettiest three feet you can imagine,” Minho blathers drunkenly somewhere from the ground.
Seunghoon doesn’t have a little sister; he did at some point have three feet though. He turns to shrug at Jinwoo whose cheeks have gone rosy and bluish at the same time.
“I miss home,” Jinwoo admits after a little bit, staring at Seunghoon. “Space is bigger than I thought it would be.”
Seunghoon turns over and sees the weight of Minho’s head sagging against the carpet. He pulls a blanket over him, feeling Jinwoo’s curious stare like little pinpricks of ice against the back of his neck.
“Do you miss home?”
“I do,” he starts, taking sip of the whiskey. The burn of it feels good, but it doesn’t lessen the weight of Jinwoo’s stare. “Don’t remember much of it, though.”
“I’m sorry,” Jinwoo says softly after a moment.
“Don’t be,” Seunghoon counters immediately. “Don’t be sorry.”
“To Imdo,” he raises his shot glass. Jinwoo’s eyes are shiny, wet with a fever of revenge but something else too.
“To Usan and Imdo.” Jinwoo’s smile is sad, but no longer laced with poisonous regret as he watches Seunghoon’s hand shake.
“To home,” Seunghoon concludes and Jinwoo meets his glass with a small clink.
---
Seunghoon likes to think of it like a joke they used to tell at the academy.
Knock, knock.
He frowns. Maybe that wasn’t it. His secondary head had always had a better memory for humor. The loss of it’s left him a little sullen.
There are certain memories that are stored in the non-primary. The instructors back at the academy termed them non-vital memories- frivolous things that had no place taking up space in the primary’s brain. But for Seunghoon those memories were more than vital to survival, absolutely crucial to staying sane out here in space. In place of it, he’s anchored himself to the sanity that Jinwoo’s sharp smile and Minho’s boisterous laughter fills him with.
He reaches up an arm and brushes it down where his fingers would have tickled the unruly tangles of his hair- where his mother would pat him and comb his untameable cowlick down with a small pat.
The feeling of a phantom memory like a lost limb fills him with warmth. Seunghoon closes his eyes slowly and breathes.
He remembers now. It goes like this:
A hungover human, a blue-necked Imdo boy, and a semi-headless, two-headed alien walk into an Empire summit.
He pauses, mind throbbing in confusion as the memory clears. It wasn’t a joke he learned at the academy. He’d learned it from Minho.
And then about 3 hours later they did it.
---
There’s another memory, hazy like condensation on the glass of Seunghoon’s mind, but still there all the same:
Two nights before Seunghoon defected out of Yang’s ranks, he had been discharged honorably with a shoulder wound from a rabid Imdo protestor. Seunghoon hadn’t even flinched when the blue bastard took a chunk of flesh out of his arm, ripping veins and arteries out, gnawing him down to the bone before one of the other mercs blasted a hole in his head.
A wound of this sort might have been fatal, or at least cause a permanent disability, to any being not of Seunghoon’s kind. The Empire medic had even been generous in dosing him up and wrote him a discharge letter before he could even ask. The special treatment made it even more bewildering to wake up to the sight of the devil himself clad in one of his infamous gray hats, with newly encrusted sapphires sparkling on his wrist, standing beside Seunghoon’s cot.
It had been a calculated act for sure, a moral boost to the empire soldiers who found it harder and harder to justify the destruction of the planet for a few shiny rocks. Seunghoon knew that too, but it didn’t make any of it less startling to have Yang kneel beside his bedside and mourn his injury firsthand.
Yang had even cried, crocodile tears pearling up in his dark beady eyes. “You remind me a lot of myself, LS0111.” He looked straight into Seunghoon’s eyes on his second head, an intimate gesture on Seunghoon’s home planet. “Completely unremarkable in every way.”
Seunghoon remembers nodding, the itching pain of his arm still prominent with every stretch of his skin. Beneath the bandages he was already healing, his arm ready to destroy more planets at the behest of Yang.
“Please remember, that in the end every struggle makes the universe stronger. It’s for the better.” Yang concluded, wiping his tears. From Seunghoon’s angle down on the bed, Yang might have even looked like something less than a monster for once.
---
Yang looks about the same from Seunghoon’s guard post beneath the podium. The itch of the YANG CORPORATION uniform feels familiar on his shoulder and the weight of a standard issue blaster pains Seunghoon with how comforting he finds it.
It’s uncanny how little Yang seems to have aged, immortal like sin and the devil. Evil itself in human form. Seunghoon tries to suppress the shudder coiling down both his spines as Yang peers out into the crowd and then by some trick of light, makes eye contact with Seunghoon. He pulls his hat down lower, trying to blend into the crowd, but the moment passes and Yang resumes his speech.
Seunghoon only sees Minho and Jinwoo once as they’re shuttled over from the main hall into their designated. Jinwoo’s neck is colored like stain glass, vibrant colors shining within the ridges of his gills. He sees the grim line of Minho’s mouth paired with the stiff angle of Jinwoo’s back and shakes his head.
Relax, he mouths at them, but the line shifts once more and Seunghoon loses them among the waves of the crowd.
---
He’s stuck on guard duty while Yang has dinner and can’t move much more past an inch until the last sip of his coffee is gone.
Seunghoon stares at the ground, bored out of his mind.
He’s missed the fabric of the uniform against his skin, the smell of it freshly pressed, but not like this. He twists his fingers together, itching to move when the guard across from him glares. Seunghoon sees him wrinkle his nose in distaste, the whiskers on it twitching.
The stripes on his uniform are elaborate, indicating pilot status- something pretty high up. It’s rare to have pilots from Hanamju with that species’s inborn propensity for flight sickness, but the figure in front of him looks utterly unfazed as Seunghoon leans in closer, curious.
The people of Hanamju have always been renowned fighters. Good balanced, sharp claws, but Seunghoon’s never seen one acclimated to space like this, fighting alongside his own kinsmen.
He smoothes his fingers out straight, pins his arms to his side like they trained him to so long ago, and aims his winning smile over. “Does he always take this long to eat?”
One furry ear twitches, a shrug if Seunghoon’s ever seen one. “Are you asking for the time?”
“No,” Seunghoon shrugs back. “Just wondering, that’s all.”
“Do you need to pee or something?” the pilot asks dryly, running a through his meticulously parted hair.
“Yes,” Seunghoon lies a little too quickly. “I mean. I guess I can hold it.”
The reply he gets is borderline scathing. “Can I really trust one of you to have control over your bodily functions when you’re clearly missing half your wits? Do the world a favor and just leave.”
“Really?” Seunghoon’s careful to not sound too hopeful. “Thanks man.”
He takes a look at the nametag and grins, showing all his teeth. “Thanks, I owe you one Taeh-” stopping short as the pilot pushes him out the door, hissing. “Just go already.”
---
He waits until nightfall before sneaking out of the barracks, tracing his finger through the hologram until he arrives at their door, key in hand.
Minho has a chair propped up on his shoulder, ready to break the window when Seunghoon slides the door open with a small click.
“Oh hey,” Minho says. He drops the chair back down onto the floor with a small grin. “Did you get it?”
Seunghoon nods, flipping him the small device- a map of the entire summit campus. For something so critical, it had been surprisingly easy to get a hold of. His kind were always more about blasting heads off more than strict security.
He watches the light of the hologram dance across the bridge of Jinwoo’s nose as Jinwoo breaks the device open and traces his finger down to the small red dot in the largest suite.
“We’ve got it.” Beneath Jinwoo’s docile smile is a row of sharp teeth.
Having one head has made Seunghoon really appreciate having Jinwoo around given that Minho’s brain has been knocked just about empty at this point.
Minho looks around, a little lost- maybe nervous even. Seunghoon feels a lump in his own throat and forces his next words out before they can choke. “I’ll keep the mercs distracted as long as I can, but they’re gonna start patrolling eventually. Minho, can you stay on top of them?”
Slowly, Minho nods and that’s all Seunghoon can bear to see before he twists back and hides back into the darkness, determined to not look back.
---
Having only one head makes Seunghoon practically human, suddenly vulnerable. He can’t hear the steps down the corridor as precisely as he used to and it’s definitely a loss to not have a pair of eyes checking the back of his first head when he’s sneaking through a heavily guarded corridor. At the same time, it makes him keener, more on edge, in every sense a better predator.
It’s beginning to make sense to Seunghoon why after all the dust settled from three galactic wars, humans are the species that have reigned supreme.
Humans are the cockroaches of the universe.
They’re not the strongest, not the most suitable to rule the universe, but humans are really fucking adaptable- and Seunghoon’s saying that as the only guy on the ship that can grow his second head back.
Hypothetically speaking: the universe could blow up, leaving nothing but stardust and black holes peppered across the sky and somehow on some tiny rock in the farthest corner of space- there would still be humans, struggling to survive, and with them of course, cockroaches.
Humans learn fast and above all else, they’re resilient.
Case in point- Minho should be dead, but he’s somehow still conscious, repeating a very sullen ‘fuck you’ to the guard interrogating him. Seunghoon suppresses the wince down his throat as Minho receives another resounding slap.
Blood dribbles down his chin, but Minho’s eyes focus on Seunghoon briefly in confusion as Seunghoon readies his gun.
The alarms sound off before he gets a chance to blow holes in Minho’s guard’s back, but that temporary confusion is all he needs to pull Minho to his feet in a gruff manner as the rest of the mercs scramble off to save Yang in the midst of the chaos.
“There’s been an attack on Yang!” someone wails. Jinwoo, Seunghoon thinks numbly. He keeps a straight face as the guard turns to him. “You! Guard the prisoner!”
Seunghoon’s pretty sure he’s never saluted someone so promptly in his life.
Minho’s leg has been in terrible shape since they crashed on the red rock planet and the newest hole blasted in it doesn’t help in the least. Seunghoon carries him down the hall, practically dragging him towards the hangar.
He hauls Minho up the steps to a small hawk and wonders if Minho has always been this light, a featherweight of bruised bones and crooked manners.
“We have,” Minho mutters into his arm. He sounds faint, terribly small and frail. “We have to save Jinwoo.”
“Stay here,” Seunghoon says. He gently places Minho down onto the captain's chair and pulls the safety strap over him. “I’ll be back, Minho, I promise.”
Minho’s head bobs as he slips out of consciousness and a bit of blood bubbles down his chin. Without thinking, Seunghoon curls his fingers around Minho’s cheek, soft. “I’ll be back, I promise.”
There’s no reply. There’s nothing in the cabin but silence as Seunghoon watches his wayward, trusty second head slump even further in his chair.
---
He finds Jinwoo in the air vent of all places.
The metal vent is small, tiny and compact. It’s just big enough for Jinwoo to squeeze through it to the other side as Seunghoon pretends to patrol the perimeter. He sneaks a peek over his shoulder and swiftly fires his blaster into the lock of the adjacent room, pulling Jinwoo in with him.
Jinwoo is shaking. The sweat rolling down his neck is nearly enough to make his gills flutter.
Seunghoon pulls him along the edges of the wall as Jinwoo hangs his head.
“I couldn’t do it,” he mumbles, breathless. “I couldn’t-”
“You’re not a killer,” Seunghoon says. The gun in Jinwoo’s hand shakes.
“I could. Be one,” Jinwoo says, mulling the words over and over. “I could. I deserve to be one.”
“No one deserves that,” Seunghoon replies slowly. He places his hand on Jinwoo’s elbow. “Least of all you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Jinwoo murmurs. His hand is trembling, blue tinged fingers growing whiter by the second. “I hate him.”
Seunghoon wraps his arm around Jinwoo’s shaking shoulders and wishes he knew what to say. ‘Next time,’ is what he wants to say, but it’s a horribly stupid thing to say when they both know that Yang isn’t the real problem- that human greed, that terrible insatiable monster is what truly fuels genocide across galaxies.
After all, Imdo did not collapse to total war. It fell under the sweet gaze of naivety.
The same way Jinwoo has been naive this whole time- not knowing, not thinking about how regardless of who they killed today, that there would always be another man like Yang around to terrorize the world.
But Jinwoo doesn’t need to hear that, not right now. So instead, Seunghoon tucks him under his arm, readies his blaster with his other and pulls them into the light.
“Let’s go home,” Seunghoon calls softly. “Let’s go wake Minho up.”
Slowly, Jinwoo’s hands- those delicate pretty blue splotched hands- curl up into fists and then, unclench. He let’s Seunghoon lead him down the hall and into the hangar where Minho is waiting for them.
---
They’re two blocks away from the hangar when the guards catch wind of their location.
It happens seamlessly. Jinwoo ducks under the guards, and Seunghoon shoots to kill, like he’s been trained to. They dash past the rooms, the fire trailing behind them as Seunghoon pulls Jinwoo into the hangar. The door closes behind them just in time as a dark figure slides into focus, blocking off the path to the hawk.
It’s the pilot from earlier, Taeh- something. Seunghoon sees recognition flicker in those feline eyes, deadly.
“You caught the intruder?” he snaps, voice incredulous.
“Sort of,” Seunghoon shrugs, watching the swish of his tail curiously. “I’ve got orders to turn him in up over there.”
“Really now?” The claws are fully out now, long and deadly.
He must be able to smell something fishy. Seunghoon turns to his side and sees Jinwoo swallow hard, his gills trembling with unease. Of course.
There’s not time to waste. Seunghoon takes out his blaster and fires directly above them as the pilot launches himself towards them. The shot bounces off the ceiling and back down to the ground in a second as Seunghoon fires one after another. The metal of the hangar is strong, reflecting each shot like mirrors back and forth until there’s nearly a wall of light between them.
The ricochet of lasers off the walls sends the metal screaming, high pitched and painful. The pilot drops to his knees, claws nearly shredding his delicate ears as he tries to block off the sound.
Seunghoon’s ears feel like bleeding too. He’s only thankful that he’s got only two ears around this time and that Jinwoo appears completely immune, or otherwise deaf, to this kind of frequency shock.
He pulls Seunghoon with a surprising force, making a zigzag pattern towards the ship. Seunghoon feels a shot singe his arm, hot and dangerous, before Jinwoo pushes them both inside the ship. Seunghoon ducks his head into the cockpit and sees the pilot struggle onto his elbows, still writhing in pain.
“What are you doing?” he yells. Seunghoon can see the red flashing of the alarm glinting off his claws. “That’s Yang’s private hawk!”
Seunghoon’s fingers fly across the keyboard. The system’s been updated but it still molds to his fingertips like soft putty. Jinwoo hovers over his shoulder, teeth carving into his bottom lip.
“Hold on tight,” Seunghoon says, smiling as Jinwoo anchors himself by placing his hands onto Seunghoon’s shoulders.
The guards outside are beginning to fill into the hangar, blasting at the ship at full power. It’s futile, Seunghoon thinks. Metal from Usan doesn’t so much as scratch under intense heat and whoever made this ship specifically for Yang would never have dared to use anything less.
Grinning, Seunghoon guides the ship’s pulsars towards the gate and rockets them through into the night sky.
---
There’s a lot to cover when Minho finally awakens, the main points being-
“Kang Seungyoon?” Minho stutters in bewilderment. “They think he sent us here to kill Yang?”
“More or less,” Jinwoo shrugs. “Wait.” He tilts his head in confusion. “It thought you were the one who told them. Do you remember any of that?”
He waits all of three seconds for that to sink into Minho’s overly beaten head before leaning in again.
“No?” Minho squints. “What else did I miss? What happened to Yang?”
“Not much,” Seunghoon lies. He turns to look over at Jinwoo and nods.
“He’s alive,” Jinwoo says quietly. “I couldn’t,” he says at Minho’s expression, “I couldn’t do it. This summit, this thing - it’s not going away with Yang. I saw their lists, I saw the planets they’re going after next. Minho, it’s… hundreds. Hundreds of planets that are going to die like mine, like Seunghoon’s. It’s was never going to stop with just Yang. And, besides-” he says, looking away.
Minho shakes his head gingerly. Seunghoon watches Jinwoo lean in further, practically feeding Minho air. “It would be a pity if you died.”
“Thanks,” Minho says blankly. He looks confused on so many levels, but there’s so much they need to tell him. “But why aren’t you…” He pauses, searching for the word. “Upset? Angry?”
“Killing Yang doesn’t solve anything,” Jinwoo says after a moment. “Like I said, the only reason why the Empire and Yang can even get away with any of this is because no one dares to talk about it.”
At that Minho rolls his eyes. “Of course they talk about it. People love lost planet gossip. It’s all the space tabloids ever care about anymore.”
“They talk about ’if’, not when or how,” Jinwoo explains simply. “And now we have those exact details.”
He gestures over to Seunghoon and Seunghoon obligingly taps his fingers onto the control panel, pulling up the map. It’s a detailed plan, evil red x’s and everything in place, marking out Yang’s targets one by one.
Minho’s jaw drops as he takes in the expanse of red before him, bloody x’s swarming their vision.
“Sure everyone love speculation, but how many of them do you think will stand to the side and willingly let their own planet fall into Yang’s hands without a fight?” Seunghoon says calmly.
Minho blinks rapidly, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. He turns to Jinwoo and then back at Seunghoon. “How did you get this shit?”
“They left it here.” Seunghoon pats the control panel fondly. “You’re currently sitting in Yang’s personal hawk.”
“No fucking way,” Minho breaths. “How long was I out?”
“Quite a while.” Seunghoon pats the top of his Minho’s head as gently as possible. “You slept like a baby.”
“I think I deserved it,” Minho defends. He arches an eyebrow at the map before them. “So we’re sitting in Yang’s ride, looking at his plans for doom and destruction. What else have I missed?”
“Well.” Seunghoon looks over to Jinwoo as they share a look.
“That’s just the start of it,” Jinwoo grins, smile pointy. “How do you feel about starting a rebellion?”
He says it easily like it was the plan all along and Seunghoon feels the newly grown flesh on shoulder positively tingle. Something settles in Minho’s eyes, dark and swirling as he lets out a laugh and then can’t stop laughing.
There are planets to save, but before they get to that Minho’s stomach lets out a gigantic grumble.
“Fucking starving,” Minho growls. Seunghoon sees him glance longingly at empty bottles of brandy rolling in the corner.
Someday they’ll have enough brandy for Minho to swim in, maybe even discover a brandy filled planet for him to live drunk off of. That would knock out two needs with one, Seunghoon thinks happily. A place for Jinwoo to swim and one for Minho to drink, all in one.
Space is vast, going home is out of the question, but there will always be something out there for him, out there with them.
“Where do you want to start?” Seunghoon yawns. Jinwoo looks confident, a devilfish in slick waters, as he swirls his finger alongside the hologram. His gaze finally settles on a small, blue planet.
“Somewhere small, but important,” Jinwoo replies steadily. He looks over past Seunghoon. “I was thinking Earth, actually.”
That gets Minho attention faster than uncorked brandy on the table. Seunghoon waits for the hysteria to hit, but all they get is a unhinged grin.
“Why the hell not? What’s even left of that shitty blue rock anyways?”
---
Earth is, for lack of a better word, boring.
“This seems like a great place to raise children,” Seunghoon says plainly as the commercial- something about sunscreen and UV rays- plays in a constant loop at the docking station as they disembark the hawk.
It’s ironic that humans, who spent so much effort and energy developing their intergalactic fleets, could have left their home planet alone long enough to let it heal into a backwater state. Seunghoon swallows a lump in his throat and thinks of home- the dusty barren mines and the never ending acid storms. Earth in comparison has never been in better shape.
It’s a small consolation that while the Empire’s been out and about wreaking havoc on the rest of the universe, they couldn’t be bothered to spare a few measly seconds to nuke their home planet into oblivion, again. Yang needs to be stopped.
Minho stumbles out of the ship like he can’t imagine what’s before his eyes. Seunghoon can’t either. Earth is green, so so green and beyond that-
“I can smell the ocean,” Jinwoo says dreamily. There’s something layered in his voice, raw and breathy like disbelief.
Seunghoon loops an arm around Minho to prop him up, watching as Jinwoo grabs Minho’s other arm. The amble down the steps like beggars tied up in a three legged race. The air out here is clean. They will learn to walk on land again, Jinwoo can teach them how to swim.
They will start here, but the war will be a long one.