Round 14: Let us be true to one another

[olymficsmod]

Title: Let us be true to one another
Team: AU
Rating: NC17
Fandom: Big Bang
Pairing: G-Dragon/TOP
Summary: vaguely a mr. and mrs. smith au. title from dover beach by matthew arnold.
Author's Note: thank you to e for the beta read and constant encouragement! warnings for violence, swearing, and sex.
Prompt Used: EXID - Every Night


It's high summer in Belize, or Panama, or Costa Rica—wherever the fuck he is today, which could be any of a number of places. Jiyong's a little too hopped up on caffeine pills at the moment to be sure, but it's definitely some exquisite tourist trap on the Central American coast: miles of sandy beachfront, briny water as far as the eye can see, and a gun-trafficking kingpin he really needs to put a bullet (or three) through before sundown.

The job itself is kind of laughably easy. Jiyong is very good at what he does, and the poor bastard goes down with nothing more than a surprised look on his face. It's getting out of the city that's difficult, especially after he blows the entire compound to bits as part of evidence cleanup. Sajangnim isn't happy, but the higher-ups should really be thanking Jiyong for destroying all the illegal weaponry in one go, too.

Afterwards, police swarm the streets, alarms blaring, choppers hanging low in the sky around the blast zone. Jiyong's left at the grimy bar of the hotel he's staying at, attempting to drink himself into a stupor so he won't have to be conscious coming down from the caffeine high. He's barely gotten through one drink, though, when armed police burst into the lobby. Jiyong drains the rest of his glass, crunches ice in his teeth to clear his head, and jams his sunglasses on.

"We're looking for foreigners traveling alone," someone shouts, clipped and tense.

Well, shit. Jiyong's busy calculating the chances of successful evasion—say, if he were to hypothetically jump off the second story balcony into tree cover, or maybe weave through the wine cellar below the building and come up through the sewers—when one of the uniforms notices him and hurries over. Jiyong spares half a second to regret that he isn't small enough to squeeze into one of the room service carts anymore before trying to focus on the situation at hand.

"Sir, are you alone?"

Jiyong slips a hand behind his back to palm the pistol tucked in his jeans and pretends to be extremely interested in his copy of the local newspaper.

The cop frowns and grabs his shoulder. "We need to see your identification papers."

When Jiyong looks up again, a couple of policemen on the far side of the lobby are accosting another tourist: tall, dark-haired, beginnings of a sunburn painting his cheekbones red. Handsome—distressingly so. He's staring over their heads, straight at Jiyong. "Do you have your travel documents with you?" Jiyong hears them ask the stranger. "A passport we can look at? Are you alone?"

"No," the man says, and there's a meaningful edge in the word, the deliberate lift of his thick eyebrows.

Ah—of course. Jiyong's lips lift.

He tilts his head to the side, lets go of the handgun and tugs his shirttails down. "Hey, it's fine. He's with me," he says in fluid Spanish, sauntering forward. "We're together. Come on."

The police back off uncertainly. Jiyong slides past them.

Tall-dark-sunburnt lets Jiyong grab his arm and tug him up the stairs into the relative safety of his suite on the third floor. Jiyong sighs as the heavy door swings shut, lacquered wood cool and solid behind his back. The cops are checking individual rooms now, but he doesn't think they'll bother with him. He plucks his shades off and tosses them onto the floor, presses the heels of his palms against his eyes before casting a sidelong glance at the stranger.

He's staring at Jiyong with a thoughtful expression on his face. "I'm Seunghyun," he says at last, and sticks his hand out. The husky timber of his voice shoots straight to Jiyong's dick.

Jiyong takes the soft hand, shaking firmly. "Jiyong—but everyone either calls me GD or some variation on the theme of hey, sexy, so whatever works for you works for me, I guess."

That manages to rustle a startled chuckle out of Seunghyun's mouth, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Jiyong beams. He hasn't let go of Seunghyun's hand yet. Jiyong's fingers curl meaningfully under the delicate bones of Seunghyun's wrist, thumb brushing over the soft skin there, eyebrows jumping.

He figures the worst that could happen is a punch in the face, which—physical trauma is sort of a recurring motif in his life as a direct side effect of his entire fucking line of work, so. Not a big deal, all things considered.

Seunghyun doesn't punch him.

The open-air bar across the street from the hotel serves some of the best tequila Seunghyun's ever had. They've put away four shots apiece by the time the sun starts going down over the horizon, and Jiyong's rambling a mile a minute, leaping seamlessly from topic to topic, as if the Kennedy assassination conspiracy has everything to do with the current state of his grandmother's health and Los Angeles real estate fair market values in the twenty-first century. He seems to know a little bit about everything under the sun.

Seunghyun usually finds talkative types grating and difficult to parse—they always had so much to say that none of it meant anything anymore after a while—but Jiyong's words flow over his ears with a sort of soothing intensity that he's surprised to note he enjoys. He doesn't say much in reply, but Jiyong seems content to speak enough for both of them.

Seunghyun isn't sure why he's still here—except that he might be excessively interested in the way that Jiyong's face moves when his mouth curves up, smile tinged with something playful and wicked, or the air of casual confidence he exudes that's so unlike anything Seunghyun is familiar with. Part of him wants to make a case study of Jiyong; the rest just really wants to fuck him into the nearest flat surface.

Then again, it's not like these things are mutually exclusive.

Seunghyun's vaguely aware that the alcohol's finally gotten to his head when Jiyong manages to coax him into some terrible bastardization of a slow dance. "I don't dance," he says, and Jiyong just laughs at him. He can't really bring himself to care about acting the fool, though—not when Jiyong's back is plastered against his chest, arms reaching behind him to tangle over Seunghyun's shoulders, breath a shallow puff across his neck.

Seunghyun doesn't realize it's raining until the thin material of his shirt's already drenched straight through, waterlogged almost transparent, and Jiyong's rubbing a probing hand against the muscles of his back. He's usually more alert than this, but the job Seunghyun was sent here to do is done—body disposed, loose ends taken care of—and he deserves a little break, doesn't he?

Somehow they both make it back to Jiyong's suite in one piece, mouths slamming together before they've gotten halfway up the stairs. Seunghyun rams his elbow into the doorframe when they fall inside the bedroom and Jiyong chuckles into his mouth as he mumbles a curse. They fuck on the king-sized bed and get rainwater all over the sheets. Jiyong sucks dark red spots into the skin of Seunghyun's neck, falls asleep with a leg thrown over Seunghyun's waist, warm and damp, breath skating across his collarbone in fluttery pants.

Jiyong wakes up with a headache pounding at his skull like a timpani. He stretches carefully, toes curling, and cracks his eyes open. Light streams in through the bay windows and a faint sound of shouting floats in from the street. The other side of the bed is empty.

He cringes at the thought of getting up, but he drags himself out of bed and pads to the bathroom anyway, pisses for what feels like a fucking hour. He splashes water in his mouth to rinse out the sour taste of yesterday's alcohol.

He notices an unopened bottle of Aspirin on the bedside table when he trips out the bathroom again. A crumpled napkin sits beneath the painkillers, phone number scribbled across it, along with sorry i had to go. early flight out of the city. call me—it's international ^^v penned in underneath the digits. He snorts a little at the emoticon.

Jiyong doesn't call him—but he does, after a moment of deliberation and downing two Aspirin dry, save the number.

The next time they meet is in Malta, on a docked ship in Valletta maybe three months later. Seunghyun doesn't recognize him at first because his hair's dyed bright red and he's got smoky eye shadow caked onto his face—but then he smiles that sharp smile at one of the patrons in the cruise liner's bar and Seunghyun feels his abdomen go a little tight as he inhales, thrown back for a moment to the hotel room in Belmopan, the remembered feeling of waking up with Jiyong's heavy weight on top of him.

When he returns to the present, Jiyong's halfway across the room and coming straight at him. He slips into chair across the table. Seunhyun tries not to stare at the jut of his clavicles, framed by the open collar of the silk shirt he's wearing.

"Hello, stranger," Jiyong says, and for all his outer appearance has changed, he sounds exactly the same.

Seunghyun feels a smile pulling at his lips. "You didn't call," he remarks, leaning back against his chair. He tucks his hands into his pockets.

"Sorry," Jiyong offers. "I meant to. Couldn't find a right time." He tilts his head to the side, the dangly earring in his cartilage catching the light as it swings. "You look good." There's a question laden in the perfunctory nicety that Seunghyun really shouldn't answer: what are you doing here? And what would he say, anyway? My employers for the night have contracted me to kill some bigwig worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Buy you a drink?

"I'm here on business," he says, hoping it's enough.

"Oh," Jiyong says, tapping his lips with an index finger. "Me too." He doesn't probe further. In retrospect, Seunghyun should've known then—but he's too distracted by the way Jiyong leans forward on his elbows into Seunghyun's space, faint whiff of cologne filling Seunghyun's nose.

"Business," he repeats, licking his lips, "but it's a pleasure to see you," and Jiyong's laughing, palm covering the lower half of his face. Seunghyun runs a hand through his hair, embarrassed.

"For some reason I remember you being a lot smoother, last time."

"That was definitely the alcohol talking." And the adrenaline rush from a fresh kill, he doesn't say.

"I see," Jiyong says, corner of his mouth jumping.

They end up crammed inside one of the bathroom stalls on the first deck, Jiyong's lips wrapped around his cock and Seunghyun's hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to bruise. He doesn't let Seunghyun pull out when he comes, swallows everything before pulling away with a smile and wiping saliva off his mouth with the back of his hand. Seunghyun pins him against the stainless steel to jack him off, tastes himself on Jiyong's tongue when their mouths find each other, teeth scraping along the bow of Jiyong's lower lip.

Jiyong straightens himself up as best he can and slips out first. He looks back over his shoulder as the bathroom door swings shut, and then he's gone, the lingering smell of his cologne the only indication he was ever there at all.

At midnight, Seunghyun strolls into a wine bar in the city and feigns intoxication to get into a shady VIP poker game. Five hands later, after a lot of backslapping and beer-chugging and lost money, his mark walks in through the door. Seunghyun shoots him point blank, hands steady and calm. He kills the other four players, too. Collateral damage. Nothing else he could do, really.

There's a text message waiting on his phone when he gets out, heart banging in his chest like he's just run a marathon. hope your business went well, it reads. Seunghyun grins and adds him in his address book.

it did, he taps out in reply. thank you.

The company sends Jiyong to Macau with Seungri in the early spring. "Training for a month," sajangnim explains, and scowls at Jiyong when he complains about being saddled with dead weight. "Youngbae's on a long-term mission in Japan," he points out. "It has to be you."

They're just supposed to be doing general reconnaissance work on some Triad enclave in the city. Seungri isn't terrible—is pretty resourceful, actually—but Jiyong's always preferred working alone, and having an earnest puppy of an assassin dogging his steps isn't the most convenient thing in the world.

Luckily, Seungri takes up with a pretty Cantonese girl near the end of their stint, and Jiyong gets some time to himself. He walks into the Casino Lisboa on a Thursday night and spends half an hour idly playing the slots before he spots a familiar face at the blackjack tables. Seunghyun's dressed down, suit and tie swapped out for leather jacket and dark-wash jeans, hair falling around his face without the customary gel. He still looks good—better, Jiyong thinks, than he has any right to.

"Twice is a coincidence," Jiyong says conversationally, coming around behind him, and watches Seunghyun jump in surprise. "Three times is a pattern. We've got to stop meeting like this."

Seunghyun squints at him. "Are you stalking me?"

Jiyong's lips twitch. "No. On business again?"

"Something like that."

They drift to one of the restaurants on the ground floor. Seunghyun orders three different entrees and inhales it all in about the same time it takes Jiyong to get through half of his sandwich. "Jesus," Jiyong says, taking another bite. "Slow down. Nobody's going to come up and steal your food."

Seunghyun laughs around the rim of his wineglass, low and scratchy, and something in Jiyong's chest goes a little warm.

"You know," he continues, casting around for a viable topic of conversation, "the night we met in Malta—someone killed the Hammerhead, that Russian mob boss. It was all over the news the next morning." YGE put out feelers to try and find whoever did it, but none of their contacts had known a thing.

Seunghyun's expression flickers. "Really?"

"Investigators found his body in a wine bar downtown," Jiyong says, leaning forward. He remembers belatedly to put on a scandalized face, but can't quite iron the undercurrent of respect out of his voice. "One bullet straight through the head. There were four other dead men in the same room, killed with single gunshot wounds to the chest. Quick. Clean." Jiyong's all about flashy explosions and putting on a show, sending messages loud and clear with his kills. The Hammerhead job required a sort of quiet, premeditated finesse he isn't interested in himself but could admire in someone else's work.

Seunghyun raises his eyebrows. "What is it that you do again?"

"I'm a freelance journalist," Jiyong says, his oldest cover in the book flying out of his mouth with practiced ease.

"And what are you covering here?"

Jiyong grins and shakes his head. "Confidential information. But if it works out, you'll see." Some lies, he thinks, are beautiful because they're inherently true.

Seunghyun kills his mark on the ferry from Macau to Hong Kong, a balding man with a handlebar mustache and a gold incisor who's involved in human trafficking on the continent. It takes longer than usual, is a little messier (he has to strangle the guy and dump his body overboard into the channel), mostly because Jiyong's words keep swirling around his head on loop. When he gets to Hong Kong, he checks into The Ambassador and pulls up all the international news articles he can find that mention Belize in July and Malta in November.

He catches the name Jiyong Kwon in a couple of bylines and runs a hand through his hair. Even before he became a contract killer, befriending someone who made a living out of spectacles was never on his list of things to do. Now—

His phone buzzes. He lifts it. On the screen: free tomorrow night, if you'd like to have dinner.

Seunghyun shoves it into his pocket and emails Daesung.

Jiyong wraps a string of jobs on America's west coast and racks up a pretty hit count for the spring quarter. Seunghyun never showed up for dinner, but he does send Jiyong intermittent texts with random photos attached: the Louvre in Paris and Madame Tussaud's in London and once, a blurry picture of a bearbrick exhibit in Tokyo. Jiyong forwards a couple of them to Seungho in technology, who says the phone's untraceable.

"Maybe he's a government official," Youngbae offers over a video call.

"Yeah," Jiyong says, and sends a text to Seungho asking for a full background check if he has the time. "Maybe."

"You should probably kill him before he gets too close," he continues, and Jiyong sends him a flat glare.

"That isn't helpful, dude."

"I'm just saying."

Since Jiyong was twelve and sajangnim took him off the streets, all his friends have been like him: orphan kids groomed to perfection, trained to become paid assassins for the company. This thing he has with Seunghyun is weird and new and he has no idea what to do with it. He knows how to charm the shit out of the people that matter, knows how to get them to do exactly what he wants them to do, knows seven different ways to kill someone with the heel of his palm—and what's tripping him up is real, genuine human interaction.

Fuck, he thinks, rubbing his eyes. Youngbae's gaze softens into concern on his computer screen. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he repeats, with far more confidence than he feels. "I'll be fine."

June is kind of a clusterfuck from start to finish. Daesung gets back to him, sends Seunghyun all the information he can find about Jiyong Kwon in an encrypted email, with a dry note at the end to do his own dirty work next time. None of it is new, and none of it tells Seunghyun anything of worth.

Jiyong responds to his texts with photos of his own that only confuse Seunghyun more. He isn't used to sustained contact with anyone who doesn't want him for his very particular skill set. He only knows Daesung because he's the best intelligence consultant in the business, and even then everything is about the next job, the next mark, the next kill.

At the end of the month, in Venice, Seunghyun fumbles cleanup and brings half the city's police crashing down on his head. Seunghyun isn't fucking built for elaborate chases over slipshod rooftop tiles—he's sweaty and shaking by the time he makes it far away enough from the sirens that they aren't ringing in his ears anymore. Blood that isn't his drenches his dress pants all the way up to the thigh. When he staggers into a plaza and sees Jiyong's face, tight with irritation and concern (his hair is half-pink and half-blue now, what in the world), he thinks it must be some sort of hallucination.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Jiyong asks first, and Seunghyun lets him grab his wrist and strong-arm him out of the open, into a spacious cathedral sanctuary that echoes with their steps. "You have to leave."

"What are you—" He sucks in a noisy gulp of air and tries again. "What are you talking about?"

Jiyong's gaze darts around in agitation. "It isn't safe—"

His hand slides down one of Seunghyun's legs and comes away bloody.

"Holy shit—"

"Not mine," he manages.

Jiyong's eyes shutter. "Then who—"

Seunghyun swallows, throat clicking drily. He'd left his Glock at the scene of the crime—stupid, stupid—but he unsheathes the knives from the holsters strapped to his forearms and pulls himself out of Jiyong's grasp. "It's a long story."

Jiyong steps away, shoulders tensing, face unreadable. "You—"

Before he can finish the thought, the large wooden doors at the back of the sanctuary slam open again, and what Seunghyun vaguely recognizes as a large subset of the Italian mafia's muscle steps inside, guns blazing.

Jiyong dives for Seunghyun and they fall behind the pews as the shooting starts.

"What the fuck," Seunghyun yells over the gunfire. He ducks hastily as wood chips fly everywhere.

Jiyong shoves at his ass and points to the back exit. "Go, go now, run, idiot—"

Seunghyun dodges between two splintering pews and sprints out of the sanctuary. He navigates through a maze of hallways and resurfaces in the sun. He looks over his shoulder; Jiyong isn't following him, but he can hear rapid Italian bouncing off the stone, so he keeps running. By the time he's two blocks away, the explosion that blows the cathedral sky high nearly knocks him off his feet.

There's a story about it in the papers that night. Serious blow to the mafia, the headlines say. No survivors. Seunghyun reads about it in the relative safety of his apartment in Milan. He flips through the Belize and Malta articles again on a hunch. UNDERGROUND WEAPONS-TRADING IN BELMOPAN UNCOVERED BY MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSION in July, and the public assassination of an EU ambassador involved in a similar gun-trafficking plot, days after Seunghyun'd left the city. Something cold twists in his stomach as it drops.

are you trying to kill me? Seunghyun types into a text, over and over again. He ends up deleting it all, and Jiyong's phone number too. Seunghyun doesn't even know if he's still alive.

"We finally found the Hammerhead guy," Seungho tells Jiyong when he flies back to Seoul. "Well, kind of."

"What does that mean? You either found him or you didn't. Which one is it?"

Seungho pulls at his lip ring and spins in his chair. "Word on the street is that his code name's T.O.P."

"TOP?" Jiyong snorts. "He's just asking for someone to come along and take him down a couple of pegs."

"Better than the Dragon," Seungri sniggers from the back of the office, and Jiyong sends a half-hearted middle finger in his direction.

"Not the same thing, asshole. I didn't ask for that nickname. This guy just calls himself TOP." He turns back to Seungho, frowning. "Is that all you know?"

"We got a grainy CCTV shot off Daesung," Seungho says, pulling it up on his monitors. "Traded it for some intel on the Triads." Jiyong leans forward on the balls of his feet and watches the time-lapse video freeze on a frame. "There."

"Oh," Jiyong says, heart jumping into his throat, blood roaring through his ears like a tidal wave. "Oh."

Seunghyun knows before he even sees the face underneath the bright blond head of hair. It's late October, the middle of the wet season in Bogotá, and Jiyong is alive. The restaurant he's just strolled into is packed for dinner, glasses clinking, utensils scraping against porcelain plates, the loud chatter of happy people filling the room.

"I liked the red better," he drops over a silk-clad shoulder. To Jiyong's credit, he doesn't look startled at all. Seunghyun slides around and sits down across the table, regarding him quietly.

"Noted," Jiyong says, picking a steak knife off the table. Seunghyun goes tense and Jiyong just smiles, starts cutting into the bloody steak on his plate. "What brings you here?"

"Business," he replies.

"Of course," Jiyong says, inclining his head. "What is it that you do again?"

Seunghyun's foot jerks forward almost of its own volition, comes out to knock against Jiyong's ankle, blade in the sole of his shoe pressing hard against the skin there. Jiyong winces. Seunghyun cocks his head to the side. "I kill people for money."

"Funny how that works," Jiyong says levelly.

Seunghyun's brow furrows. "You aren't a journalist."

"No," he agrees, and spears a piece of meat with his fork. "Are you going to kill me?"

Seunghyun licks his lips. "I don't want to. But I don't know if I can trust you." A pause, and then: "I thought you were dead. After—"

"The cathedral?" Jiyong scoffs. "Come on. It'd take more than a couple of well-placed nitroglycerin bombs to fuck me up." The corner of his mouth twitches. "Did you cry for me, Argentina?"

Seunghyun's jaw clenches. His foot presses more insistently against Jiyong's ankle.

Jiyong hisses. He slides a casual hand underneath the table and places it on Seunghyun's thigh. "You aren't the only one with knives," he says, flexing the hand. Seunghyun lets out a low grunt of pain as the tip of a kunai slices through the material of his pants and nicks his skin.

"Are you going to kill me?"

Jiyong tucks a bite of steak in his mouth and chews thoughtfully. "I don't want to," he mimics, and Seunghyun scowls. "It depends."

Seunghyun blinks slowly. "On what?"

Jiyong swallows around his food. "Did you kill the Hammerhead?"

Seunghyun almost chokes on his own spit. He rattles through a million different scenarios in his head and can't come up with a single explanation. "Yes," he replies at last, folding his hands in his lap.

"The people I work for want to offer you a long-term job," Jiyong explains. "I'm here to vet you."

Seunghyun's eyebrows rise.

Jiyong smiles. "They don't know that I already know what you're like."

"And what am I like?"

Jiyong's eyes shine. "Tall and awkward and kind of dumb. Two left feet. Really nice face. Pretty good in bed."

Seunghyun relaxes a little, snorts at the last bit. "Only pretty good?"

"Don't fish," Jiyong says, serene.

He bites a nail. "None of that shit has to do with my job."

Jiyong rolls his eyes. "If you really did kill the Hammerhead, that's all I need to know."

"I read your article about it," Seunghyun remarks. "After." Jiyong's blond bangs fall into his eyes as he leans forward with interest. "It was very detailed."

"Sorry to disappoint," Jiyong says, "but I don't actually write any of those stories. The journalism thing is a cover. Company takes care of it."

Seunghyun hums. "On second thought, the language did seem a little too calm for you." Jiyong throws him an annoyed look and he chuckles.

"Can you get your foot off my ankle, now?" he asks a moment later.

"Oh," Seunghyun says lamely. "Right. Sure." Jiyong retracts his hand and goes back to his food. Seunghyun fiddles with the cuff of his jacket, at a loss. "So are you going to tell me about this mysterious company, or do I have to figure that out myself?" He exhales. "How do I know this isn't part of some elaborate ruse that'll end with me lying in a ditch somewhere?"

"You don't," Jiyong says simply. "You just have to trust me. Take a leap of faith." He tilts his head. "If I was supposed to kill you, I would've done it already, you know? I've had plenty of chances." He sucks a bit of grease off his thumb and Seunghyun follows the bob of his Adam's apple down to the bathroom stall in Malta, impressions of a wet mouth enveloping Seunghyun's dick, and the sound of Jiyong's high moan as he came in Seunghyun's hand.

"I guess that's true," he says, managing to keep his voice steady.

"So," Jiyong prompts. "Will you come with me?"

Seunghyun has never been very impulsive. He likes thinking situations through every possible permutation of events before making a final decision, but something about Jiyong makes him stupid and reckless, sends skitters of spontaneity skipping down his spine. "Yeah," Seunghyun hears himself say, and the sharp smile Jiyong sends him makes his heart thud in double-time. "I think I will."

Poll Round 14: Let us be true to one another