DAY 1: this town ain't big enough!
Title: this town ain't big enough!
Written by: colorfunk
Pairing: Sehun/Lu Han
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some violence
Summary: Lu Han's a thief and Sehun gets kidnapped a lot. (half D.E.B.S, half X-Men AU)
"I lost my read on him," Kyungsoo's voice crackles over the earpiece.
Jongin stands in front of the empty hole in the wall where storage unit 12 used to be. He reaches for the note left in its place. "About that."
"I'm not interested," Kyungsoo says. "Let me live in a world where Oh Sehun isn't always being abducted by bad guys."
"They're not really abductions anymore," Jongin says as he scans the message. "They're more like playdates."
"I hope they playdate themselves off a cliff," Kyungsoo mutters.
come and get him xoxo xiao lu
"You don't have to be brave," Lu Han says as he digs his fingers into Sehun's armpits.
Sehun curls in on himself against the attack, gasping for air. "Stop, get off of me-"
Lu Han rolls away triumphantly. "We're getting jajamyun."
"We always get jajamyun," Sehun protests, his hair in his face, chest sore from laughing.
"Don't forget you're my hostage and I don't have to feed you at all," Lu Han says, and tousles Sehun's hair again before disappearing into the hallway to make the order. He is, by objective measures, kind of annoying. The things Sehun likes never make any sense.
Sehun sits up and glances around the bedroom. This is a new base, one he hasn't seen before. Lu Han has had a handful of them around the city, plus safehouses out in Beijing and, oddly enough, Changsha. The three that Sehun has visited so far have all looked the same: alarms everywhere, unsentimental, ready to be evacuated. For a while Lu Han'd stayed in Sinchon long enough to gain a lost cat for a pet, until something went wrong with someone else and Lu Han fell off the grid for two months. He'd dropped the cat off at Sehun's S.M.E. dorm. Sehun pretended not to recognize her, but he was the only one on the team that she liked, so he scratched her under the chin and renamed her Kai's Bane.
Officially, Lu Han, moniker Xiao Lu, loans out his telekinesis for profit, is rumored to be responsible for three deaths during a stint in Canada ("they caught hypothermia," Lu Han groans, "it was Canada"), and Sehun's team has on ten different occasions failed to apprehend him. Unofficially, every so often Lu Han kidnaps Sehun so they can eat jajamyun and watch old movies and flirt badly with each other. Sometimes Lu Han strays from their pattern, once to take Sehun to COEX aquarium. While Sehun pressed his face to the tanks and marveled at electric eels, Lu Han snuck pictures of security cameras. Two endangered sharks went missing later that week. Sehun still felt kind of bad about it.
He'd strayed, too, when he had more beer than he'd needed to and started to lean in. The reality was that he was a teenaged lightweight, no matter what he said. Lu Han inserted his palm between their mouths, not unkindly. "Let's not make this any more complicated for you than it already is."
"Right," Sehun said, his head fuzzy, so he laid it in Lu Han's lap, "because you're evil."
"That's overstating it," Lu Han said.
Sehun sighed drunkenly, "You're my Lex Luthor, not my Lois Lane."
"Okay," Lu Han laughed, "I don't even want to kiss you anymore."
Sehun grinned up at him, "Liar." He extended a breeze to gently stir Lu Han's hair.
When mutations activated thirty years ago in 7% of the population, the superpowered crimes that accompanied them were contained to petty misdemeanors, a small jump in manslaughter. Then a few years down the road came the syndicates and mutant supremacists and anti-mutant fundamentalists and occasional costumed megalomaniacs. That was when S.M.E. (Specialized Mutant Enforcement) Academy began recruitment.
They discovered Sehun when he was twelve, after he'd conjured up a derecho so he wouldn't have to go to school. The windstorm crippled five districts' power grids, removed roofs off buildings, and killed some trees that almost killed some people. "I didn't mean to," Sehun tried to explain, his face hot from the effort not to cry. His brain felt like it'd been blown apart and sewn back together with live wire. "I just-I didn't finish my math homework."
One of the women in suits laid a hand on his shoulder. "Kid," she said, "you've got something real special."
By thirteen Sehun could scale it down for smaller stunts, sweeping kites out of trees and redirecting birds who were about to fly into glass windows. At fourteen he learned to lift himself a meter off the ground. His mom found him on the balcony hanging their laundry out to dry, and hissed with predictable maternal alarm, "Sehun, are you flying?"
"Kind of?" Sehun said, teetering in mid-air, and accidentally blew his damp underwear off the line, into the faces of some pedestrians below.
There were mornings he woke up thinking he'd leveled the entire city this time, and then he had to sit with his head between his knees, counting to sixty. Other mornings he couldn't focus enough to create a single draft, and that was worse. Years of living with a wild gift inside of him that he didn't know how to harness or use, and on his first day of high school they came to him again, calling it potential like they could show Sehun what to do with it, and what to do with himself.
The first time Sehun met Lu Han, he told him: "I wrote my thesis on you."
Lu Han sped through another traffic light. "Really?"
"I mean," Sehun amended, "I did it on the offensive application of TK, but you were in half of my examples."
The force shackling Sehun's ankles to the car floor began to ease off. He wiggled his toes inside his standard issue boots. S.M.E. was strangely big on fashion-conscious matching outfits. Encouraged, he continued, "The way you made that bank vault in Hong Kong explode-that was really cool."
"That was Yixing," Lu Han laughed. "I keep getting credit for that one." TK was all about concentration, and Lu Han's was flaking. Sehun was gaining his body back in centimeters, one twitch of movement at a time, in his left elbow, his knees. All he needed was his hands. When he tested them, the invisible grip on his wrists constricted. "Don't do that, okay?"
From anyone else it'd be threatening, but Lu Han's TK proficiency was the only reason S.M.E.'s radar had locked onto him. He left people with bruised ribs, mild concussions, a twisted ankle at worst (not including the Canadians). Jongin used to help Sehun pore through research when his own got too boring. "What's the deal with this guy?" he'd said, skimming a report of Lu Han's latest contracted diamond heist. "And what's the deal with your big crush on him?"
"Whatever," Sehun'd scoffed. "Tell me again how Kyungsoo-hyung is so great."
These were some of the things that didn't make it into Sehun's thesis: that Lu Han specialized in theft but would dip his toes into a dozen other crimes, taking odd jobs for the Hellfire Club, anarchist groups, private interests. That Lu Han could do incredible shit with TK, but there was no direction to it, no ideology, so there was no danger. Sehun's thesis didn't talk about how Lu Han wasn't making a criminal name for himself so much as he was figuring out what that name was, but Sehun had this story memorized. It felt familiar, like an echo.
"Are you gonna tell me why S.M.E. dropped by to ruin my date?" Lu Han asked as they made it off Banpo Bridge, sans car chase.
"We heard you'd teamed up with an assassin." Just recon, Kyungsoo'd said. Half an hour into it Huang Zitao was trying to shoot Jongin's head off, and in the chaos Lu Han was dragging Sehun out through the restaurant's kitchen. Sehun backtracked. "What do you mean date?"
"I met Taozi at poker night and he asked me out," Lu Han said. "It was going pretty well until your team showed up."
"Oh," Sehun said, dumbfounded. "Sorry."
"Could've been worse." Lu Han drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and glanced at Sehun with a sunny interest that made Sehun's entire body feel captive. That wasn't the TK. "But if you want to make it up to me, you can be his stand-in. Are you hungry? I didn't have the chance to finish my dinner."
"There's no logic to it," Kyungsoo says. "Not to mention it's weird."
"Half the time taking a hostage isn't even necessary," Jongin adds. "Does he think we're some Oh Sehun rental service?"
"Hang on," Sehun interrupts, "are you saying you'd have better peace of mind if he just killed me?"
"I'm trying to look out for you," Jongin says.
"I'm never going to call you hyung, so you can give that up."
"Keep your personal conversations off the fucking comms," Kris says over the earpiece.
The three of them are positioned on a warehouse rooftop with a clean view of the shipyard, where people are selling body parts to the highest bidder on one of the docked boats. Sehun hates assignments like these, the brutal ones that ask them to be brutal in return. For the past few months, S.M.E.'s top priority has been this cult of ordinary human psychopaths who've been cutting mutants open, harvesting organs and limbs. Around the academy, they're called bodysnatchers. After the fifteenth mutilated corpse, the responsibility of burning them out went to Kris. Kris' team is S.M.E's bruiser, collectively good-looking, disarmingly vicious. Chanyeol's a firestarter who cheats at cards and Baekhyun's a powerhouse in a tiny 60 kilo package. Kris' job is simply holding onto their leashes.
"Looks like they're almost done down there," Kyungsoo says. Across the dock, the yelling has died down. An explosive arc of fire surges against the control room window, shatters it. Sehun can feel the radius of searing heat from here.
"We got some swimmers," Baekhyun's breathless voice comes through. "Can you guys take care of it?"
"Be careful, Oh Mija," Chanyeol says. "Don't talk to any strangers." He sounds wired from the fight, almost high. Jongin can get the same way, a certain shine in his eyes.
If power is in the blood, Sehun often feels like his body's rejecting it. But his friends are relying on him. He gathers the air to himself, edged into a whip. Kyungsoo singles out the dark shapes escaping into the water, aims him like a gun, and Sehun lashes forward and does what he's been taught.
Another time Sehun was kidnapped, before Lu Han trusted him enough to show him where home was, he treated Sehun to bubble tea. This was early on, and Sehun wasn't 100% sure it wasn't a real kidnapping, but it was hard to be intimidated by Lu Han's futile efforts to suck a trapped tapioca pearl up his straw. Eventually Lu Han lifted the straw from his glass, licking the bottom half clean. "Can you help me with this?"
Lu Han's bubble tea was lychee-flavored, and the tip of his straw tasted sweeter than Sehun's own. Sehun sucked, hard, but the tapioca didn't budge, so he switched tactics and, focusing his power, blew instead. The pearl flew out and bounced off Lu Han's nose. Lu Han gave him a hilariously affronted look and used TK to flick droplets of bubble tea in Sehun's face. Sehun, still laughing, hid behind his hands.
"C'mon, that's really immature-"
"You don't get to use that word," Lu Han said. "How old are you, eighteen?"
"Nineteen this April," Sehun said.
"You're kind of young to be doing what you do."
Sehun tried to shrug off a brief spark of defensiveness. "I'm older than when I started." Everyone at the academy was young; mutations hadn't even been around for a full generation. Sehun was S.M.E.'s favorite age, young enough to train, old enough to weaponize.
Lu Han leaned forward. He had long eyelashes, Sehun noticed, registering it in his brain first, then down in his chest and stomach and the center of his palms. "You never wanted to do anything else?"
"Honestly?" Sehun licked his bottom lip. "I dunno, I was twelve when I signed up. My power was all over the place. I just wanted to know how to use it."
For something that should've been messy, being around Lu Han was like finding a room of decompressed air, somewhere Sehun could open and expand. Lu Han laced his fingers together and tucked them under his chin. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be a dinosaur," he said. "And a soccer player, and an astronaut, and then I had a rebellious period when I wanted to be a ballerina. I think I've wanted to be everything at one point or another, but I guess I ended up better at being a thief than anything else."
Sehun felt comfortable enough to hijack the rest of Lu Han's drink. He grinned around the straw. "I wanna hear more about the ballerina."
Through Lu Han, Sehun learns more about TK than he did during any of the all-nighters he'd fought through with Jongin, two bags of potato chips, and 60ml of orange soda. He learns that Lu Han can direct his TK inwards to give himself superstrength, flight. After a week of shitty training sessions, as Sehun shoveled commiserative jajamyun into his mouth, Lu Han spoke up, "Do you want private lessons?"
"I change my mind!" Sehun shouted ten minutes later, as Lu Han floated him back and forth on the high-rise roof at a distressing height.
"You're doing good," Lu Han encouraged. "It's like exerting your power on any other object. Just concentrate and when I let you go-"
"When you-hyung, you can't-hyung-"
Sehun didn't die. Panicking, he grasped for the right wind current and molded it into a column under his feet, wobbly but higher than he'd ever managed before. He still had no momentum, couldn't push forward without losing altitude, but the city looked lit-up and perfect from there. The air was cold and clear in his lungs.
He learns that using so much mental force can give someone killer headaches. The day Lu Han went after Park Jinyoung's entire Caillebotte collection was the day he made Sehun turn all the lights off as he laid prone on his couch, threatening to swallow a bottle of ibuprofen. Easy to overpower, if Sehun wanted to. Instead he braved the kitchen to recreate the ginger tea his mother used to make for him. "Maybe it's time for a career change," Sehun said, offering Lu Han the mug. Lu Han sat up, the heel of his hand pressed against his temple, saying, "Then how would I get to see you?"
He learns that on very, very good days, Lu Han can play with water and dust particles, refracting light to create holograms. "Same process behind bending security lasers," Lu Han said, "except, you know, harder." He was forming a street block in his palm, shimmery and green, the shapes breaking and reforming as he tried to sustain them. Sehun could make out small compact buildings with clay roof tiles, old architecture, the narrow cobblestone street. One of the taller buildings started to thin out while the rest disintegrated, growing a long pair of legs, a mop of bed-hair, a sour expression that, once Lu Han finished constructing the face, turned into a smile that made the eyes crinkle too. "Sometimes I think I want to make things," Lu Han mused, "and not just steal them."
Back when Sehun'd lived at home, he'd kept his family cool during the summer months. He thought of the way his older brother would give homework guidance in exchange for five minutes slumped blissfully beside Sehun as he worked up a breeze. That Sehun seemed like an artifact now, a fossil record waiting to be excavated from the miniature version of himself in Lu Han's palm, hazy green and undefined.
The bodysnatchers bullshit is neverending. Kris puts their team on retrieval. They track down the white service van past midnight, parked down a dark shoddy road three kilometers out from an equally shoddy gas station. Kyungsoo leads them to it, shoes stripped off so he can get a better sense of the earth beneath his toes. He sinks the wheels, dropping the van into the dirt with brusque efficiency. The van jerks to the side uselessly. Jongin flashes on top of it, silent, and Sehun inhales once and slices a current through the metal under Jongin's feet.
Then: gunfire, and shouting, equipment breaking, glass and metal all smashing against each other. Between flashes, the cloud of smoke and sulfur that he leaves behind, Jongin snarls, "What the fuck is that," and for a second Sehun's afraid, but Jongin sounds furious more than anything else.
Then: Sehun lifts the three men out of the van. He clenches his fists, cuts off the air, and slams them into the trench that Kyungsoo's carved out. Kyungsoo buries them to the waist but one of them has this-arm, glowing white under his black gear. Sehun's moving before he can finish the thought; he throws Kyungsoo down just as a shock of lightning hits the line of trees behind them. The bark crackles and begins to burn.
Then: Jongin reappears behind the man and crushes his face into the ground. Sehun flinches at the snap of bone. The stretch of road goes quiet as the man breathes harshly through his mouth. Jongin places a heavy boot on his right wrist, applying pressure. There's another crunch. The man screams.
"Jongin," Kyungsoo says, trapping the other two men down to their necks to stop them from struggling, maybe to keep them away from Jongin, "leave it."
"If you think I'm going to fucking leave this-" Jongin rips off the man's armored sleeve with a knife to bare the arm underneath. Pale scar tissue marks the change in skin tone above the elbow, illuminated by a halo of smashed headlights. It hits Sehun, The arm isn't his, and the nausea bends him over his knees, an acidic taste in his mouth.
Last month, half of a twenty year old was found in an alley. S.M.E. identified him as a student at Dongguk, music major. Had him in their records under electrical energy. They'd approached him when he'd just turned sixteen and he'd smiled and said, "No thanks, I have plans."
Jongin's first year at the academy, no one understood why he'd been recruited. Teleportation was a limited trick. At the end of the year evaluations, everyone watched as he flashed forward to bisect one of the training robots on his own hand, straight through where its heart would've been. The same Jongin who played DDR and traded Sehun the best parts of his lunch. Sehun remembers watching and thinking, I'll never be able to do that, and not knowing if he should feel sorry. Now, watching as Jongin buckles his belt tight around the man's upper arm, all Sehun feels is stark relief that it isn't him. "Mutie scum," the man is spitting blood, swearing, "think you're better then the rest of us, think you can play god-"
Jongin looks up at Kyungsoo, then Sehun, angry and shaken and powerful. He flashes away and takes the arm off with him.
They arrive home before sunrise and Jongin heads for the shower. Sehun wanders the kitchen, setting some food out for Kai's Bane, but when he retreats to his room, she follows at his feet. He passes Kyungsoo, who's outside the bathroom door with Jongin's towel in his arms, waiting for a dam to break. Earlier, as Kyungsoo checked in with Kris, Jongin fell asleep on one of the infirmary beds, curled up against Sehun. There would be psych evaluations and meetings with Joonmyun later, but right then, Jongin wasn't dreaming. Sehun didn't think any of them would. The man would live. This wasn't the worst thing Jongin'd ever done.
Sehun falls into bed. There's no way he can sleep. He thinks he should call his mother, he hasn't been home since New Years, but the idea of hearing her voice right now, telling him that she misses him, she's proud of him, makes his throat burn. He picks up Kai's Bane instead, holds her above his head, and peers into her big green eyes, the studded collar that she'd shown up with. "I know you're bugged," he says.
Kai's Bane blinks down at him, and reaches a gray paw down to bat at his cheek. "If you're listening," Sehun continues, "I really want to see you."
Kai's Bane says nothing, growing restless in his grip. Sehun sets her back down and kisses the top of her head. "Alright, go fart in Jongin's bed some more, you dumb cat."
Fifteen minutes later, he receives a text from an unknown number: let's go fishing ♡
The last time Lu Han was here, he broke five laws and enraged every animal protection group. Today he's wearing a black coat, glasses, and his hair is a few shades darker; it's not much of a disguise, but security doesn't know his face. Sehun takes a seat next to him on one of the benches in the lobby. "You never told me what the sharks were for."
"Wasn't my job to ask," Lu Han says. "Besides, if I tell you, isn't that a conflict of interests?"
Sehun pretends to be shy. "Are you calling me an interest?"
Lu Han looks over, and his retort slips into a small frown. "What happened?"
"I haven't slept," Sehun confesses, shoving his hands into his hoodie pockets. "We had this job. I'm still processing."
He doesn't know what else to say about it. The imprint of seven hours ago lingers on him like a bruise. He keeps pressing against it, revisiting the white spark of the man's arm, the bleeding stump that Jongin'd left behind. Lu Han doesn't push; he has this sixth sense for knowing what other people need. There's next to no one in the aquarium on an early Wednesday morning, which gives them free reign. Sehun makes faces at the piranhas through the glass and Lu Han discovers a soft spot for otters, so they spend some time standing in front of the habitat, watching them play. Sehun only speaks up to motion towards a smaller one twisting around as it grooms itself, scrubbing at its face until the fur fluffs up beyond saving. "That one's you."
Lu Han points at a clump of sea kelp. "Well that's you."
They end up in the underwater tunnel, a 180 degree view of the sea. The speakers are playing the type of new age yoga tree spirit music Sehun'd usually make fun of, but today he's okay with it. He cranes his head back to stare up at the thick bars of light striating the water above him, and thinks about being special, the ways people starve for it, abuse it, protect it, and all the while Sehun's still discovering what it means. He thinks about Jongin's jagged belief in what he was about to do, and wonders what the hell he believes in. What it is that keeps him here. The water dwarfs him, sharks overhead casting shadows at his feet. There's so much world still out there, places Sehun's wind speed has never reached. It's kind of a nice realization.
Without his coat, Lu Han's only wearing a thin tank top, as if he rolled straight out of bed to meet Sehun here. Goosebumps rise along his arm, so Sehun searches for the tunnel's floor vents. Lu Han has to notice when the AC airflow cuts off, but he doesn't mention it.
"I don't know where I should be," Sehun says. "I thought I'd found it, but it doesn't feel right anymore. You know what I mean?"
He can feel when Lu Han nods, the nudge of his chin against Sehun's shoulder. Lu Han trapezes around East Asia and lives out of places as homely as museums. He has his own alloy of being self-serving, being kind, whichever one had made him grab Sehun in the restaurant that night, after Sehun'd built a windstorm in his hand, met Lu Han's eyes, and held back. "You don't have to start with the big picture," Lu Han says. "Start small. Start with where you are right now. How does it feel?"
Right now he's a mile underwater with Lu Han, surrounded by giant sea turtles and ripples of blue-green light. "Pretty average," he says, and kisses him.
It's his second first kiss, after spin the bottle in sixth grade. He does it before he can consider another option, because he wants it in a way he isn't used to wanting things, full-bodied, alchemical, like Lu Han took the stationary molecules inside him and sped them up. At first he just fits their mouths together, and it tastes cold from the stupid AC, but soon Lu Han's leaning into him, opening up, the inside of his mouth slick and warm, and when he curls his tongue against Sehun's, Sehun feels both completely outclassed and rocked by the acute clarity of belonging.
Afterwards, Lu Han licks his lips, eyes on Sehun's mouth. "Does this make me Lois?" he says.
"I was drunk," Sehun wrinkles his nose, "and now I'm taking my kiss back."
"You can't," Lu Han insists. "You already gave it to me."
"Fine," Sehun says, shy for real, "keep it." He can't tell if he should feel different; he always feels different around Lu Han, a little more his age. A stingray glides above them, eclipsing the light before it swims past. Sehun puts his head on Lu Han's shoulder and watches the fish.
Joonmyun recommends a ten day suspension. For a week and a half, Sehun doesn't wake up until noon. In the afternoons, he and Jongin duke it out over the rec room's air hockey table while Kyungsoo occasionally comes out to half-spectate, half-play on his phone. "Sehun's cheating," Jongin calls out after Sehun uses a puff of air to blow the puck into Jongin's goal. Without looking up, Kyungsoo stomps one socked foot against the floor. The targeted seismic vibration throws Sehun onto his butt and jolts the electronic scoreboard, putting Jongin up by 700 points. Jongin victoriously gyrates his hips in Sehun's face. Sehun laughs until his cheeks hurt.
But Jongin's already restless to get back in the field, the instinct alive inside him, putting roots down. Even Kyungsoo's stealing peeks at mission briefs for something to strategize and solve. Sehun waits for the dark twist in his stomach that comes from being walked away from, but there's none. Instead it's a vacancy, like someone wrecked a tornado through him but the dust is beginning to clear. Maybe he's done some growing up. Maybe this is about him peeling away towards his own path too.
They run into each other again at the Seoul Museum of Art. It's the last day of the special Degas exhibition, and S.M.E.'s looking out for a mutant-unfriendly legislator that the MLF wants dead, while Lu Han just can't resist a good Impressionist. He's here dressed like one of the wait staff, and Sehun watches him lift a keycard off the head of security before he intercepts him on his way towards the storage wing, plucking a flute of champagne off Lu Han's tray.
Lu Han is unfazed. "Are you sure you don't want juice instead? A glass of milk?"
"That joke's as old as you are," Sehun grouses.
"Wait, this one's better." Lu Han snaps his fingers. "Baby's first tux."
"You're so lame," Sehun says, "I don't know why I want to run off with you."
"You want to what?" Lu Han says.
Sehun takes his earpiece off and, before he can chicken out, drops it into the champagne. "I don't want you to give me back anymore."
Every inch of him is buzzing, lodged up in his throat, as Lu Han glances at the glass, then back to him. Sehun stands his ground, because Lu Han has said before that they're a complication when really they're the one choice Sehun's made on his own. When Lu Han finally smiles back, it's one that takes over his whole face and rings through Sehun's chest like a wind chime. He places the key card neatly next to the champagne, and pawns off the tray on an actual waiter walking by. "Do you like Florence?"
Sehun releases a breath. "I love Florence." He doesn't know shit about Florence.
Down the exhibition hall comes the sound of the Mutant Liberation Front crashing the gala. People start yelling. Chanyeol sets something on fire. "Pit stop in Rome first," Lu Han says as he takes Sehun by the wrist, pulling him through the surge of the frenzied crowd. "I want to retire with my own Fabergé."
"I don't think we should rob the Vatican," Sehun says, but there's something that feels terrifyingly good about the we.
When Sehun was twelve, he shut down his school and the schools in every surrounding district for three days until the power came back.
When he was thirteen, he found a bird with a crushed wing outside his apartment building, and sat there in the grass until the sun went down, trying to lift it back into the air.
Sehun is nineteen and most days he still doesn't know what kind of person he wants to be, but he thinks: Start small. Wind's just motion and gas particles. Sehun's the weather vane. He can spread wildfire and carve rock, or he can shift air through Lu Han's hair like an extension of his own hands. He can finish figuring out this flying thing.
Written by: colorfunk
Pairing: Sehun/Lu Han
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some violence
Summary: Lu Han's a thief and Sehun gets kidnapped a lot. (half D.E.B.S, half X-Men AU)
"I lost my read on him," Kyungsoo's voice crackles over the earpiece.
Jongin stands in front of the empty hole in the wall where storage unit 12 used to be. He reaches for the note left in its place. "About that."
"I'm not interested," Kyungsoo says. "Let me live in a world where Oh Sehun isn't always being abducted by bad guys."
"They're not really abductions anymore," Jongin says as he scans the message. "They're more like playdates."
"I hope they playdate themselves off a cliff," Kyungsoo mutters.
come and get him xoxo xiao lu
"You don't have to be brave," Lu Han says as he digs his fingers into Sehun's armpits.
Sehun curls in on himself against the attack, gasping for air. "Stop, get off of me-"
Lu Han rolls away triumphantly. "We're getting jajamyun."
"We always get jajamyun," Sehun protests, his hair in his face, chest sore from laughing.
"Don't forget you're my hostage and I don't have to feed you at all," Lu Han says, and tousles Sehun's hair again before disappearing into the hallway to make the order. He is, by objective measures, kind of annoying. The things Sehun likes never make any sense.
Sehun sits up and glances around the bedroom. This is a new base, one he hasn't seen before. Lu Han has had a handful of them around the city, plus safehouses out in Beijing and, oddly enough, Changsha. The three that Sehun has visited so far have all looked the same: alarms everywhere, unsentimental, ready to be evacuated. For a while Lu Han'd stayed in Sinchon long enough to gain a lost cat for a pet, until something went wrong with someone else and Lu Han fell off the grid for two months. He'd dropped the cat off at Sehun's S.M.E. dorm. Sehun pretended not to recognize her, but he was the only one on the team that she liked, so he scratched her under the chin and renamed her Kai's Bane.
Officially, Lu Han, moniker Xiao Lu, loans out his telekinesis for profit, is rumored to be responsible for three deaths during a stint in Canada ("they caught hypothermia," Lu Han groans, "it was Canada"), and Sehun's team has on ten different occasions failed to apprehend him. Unofficially, every so often Lu Han kidnaps Sehun so they can eat jajamyun and watch old movies and flirt badly with each other. Sometimes Lu Han strays from their pattern, once to take Sehun to COEX aquarium. While Sehun pressed his face to the tanks and marveled at electric eels, Lu Han snuck pictures of security cameras. Two endangered sharks went missing later that week. Sehun still felt kind of bad about it.
He'd strayed, too, when he had more beer than he'd needed to and started to lean in. The reality was that he was a teenaged lightweight, no matter what he said. Lu Han inserted his palm between their mouths, not unkindly. "Let's not make this any more complicated for you than it already is."
"Right," Sehun said, his head fuzzy, so he laid it in Lu Han's lap, "because you're evil."
"That's overstating it," Lu Han said.
Sehun sighed drunkenly, "You're my Lex Luthor, not my Lois Lane."
"Okay," Lu Han laughed, "I don't even want to kiss you anymore."
Sehun grinned up at him, "Liar." He extended a breeze to gently stir Lu Han's hair.
When mutations activated thirty years ago in 7% of the population, the superpowered crimes that accompanied them were contained to petty misdemeanors, a small jump in manslaughter. Then a few years down the road came the syndicates and mutant supremacists and anti-mutant fundamentalists and occasional costumed megalomaniacs. That was when S.M.E. (Specialized Mutant Enforcement) Academy began recruitment.
They discovered Sehun when he was twelve, after he'd conjured up a derecho so he wouldn't have to go to school. The windstorm crippled five districts' power grids, removed roofs off buildings, and killed some trees that almost killed some people. "I didn't mean to," Sehun tried to explain, his face hot from the effort not to cry. His brain felt like it'd been blown apart and sewn back together with live wire. "I just-I didn't finish my math homework."
One of the women in suits laid a hand on his shoulder. "Kid," she said, "you've got something real special."
By thirteen Sehun could scale it down for smaller stunts, sweeping kites out of trees and redirecting birds who were about to fly into glass windows. At fourteen he learned to lift himself a meter off the ground. His mom found him on the balcony hanging their laundry out to dry, and hissed with predictable maternal alarm, "Sehun, are you flying?"
"Kind of?" Sehun said, teetering in mid-air, and accidentally blew his damp underwear off the line, into the faces of some pedestrians below.
There were mornings he woke up thinking he'd leveled the entire city this time, and then he had to sit with his head between his knees, counting to sixty. Other mornings he couldn't focus enough to create a single draft, and that was worse. Years of living with a wild gift inside of him that he didn't know how to harness or use, and on his first day of high school they came to him again, calling it potential like they could show Sehun what to do with it, and what to do with himself.
The first time Sehun met Lu Han, he told him: "I wrote my thesis on you."
Lu Han sped through another traffic light. "Really?"
"I mean," Sehun amended, "I did it on the offensive application of TK, but you were in half of my examples."
The force shackling Sehun's ankles to the car floor began to ease off. He wiggled his toes inside his standard issue boots. S.M.E. was strangely big on fashion-conscious matching outfits. Encouraged, he continued, "The way you made that bank vault in Hong Kong explode-that was really cool."
"That was Yixing," Lu Han laughed. "I keep getting credit for that one." TK was all about concentration, and Lu Han's was flaking. Sehun was gaining his body back in centimeters, one twitch of movement at a time, in his left elbow, his knees. All he needed was his hands. When he tested them, the invisible grip on his wrists constricted. "Don't do that, okay?"
From anyone else it'd be threatening, but Lu Han's TK proficiency was the only reason S.M.E.'s radar had locked onto him. He left people with bruised ribs, mild concussions, a twisted ankle at worst (not including the Canadians). Jongin used to help Sehun pore through research when his own got too boring. "What's the deal with this guy?" he'd said, skimming a report of Lu Han's latest contracted diamond heist. "And what's the deal with your big crush on him?"
"Whatever," Sehun'd scoffed. "Tell me again how Kyungsoo-hyung is so great."
These were some of the things that didn't make it into Sehun's thesis: that Lu Han specialized in theft but would dip his toes into a dozen other crimes, taking odd jobs for the Hellfire Club, anarchist groups, private interests. That Lu Han could do incredible shit with TK, but there was no direction to it, no ideology, so there was no danger. Sehun's thesis didn't talk about how Lu Han wasn't making a criminal name for himself so much as he was figuring out what that name was, but Sehun had this story memorized. It felt familiar, like an echo.
"Are you gonna tell me why S.M.E. dropped by to ruin my date?" Lu Han asked as they made it off Banpo Bridge, sans car chase.
"We heard you'd teamed up with an assassin." Just recon, Kyungsoo'd said. Half an hour into it Huang Zitao was trying to shoot Jongin's head off, and in the chaos Lu Han was dragging Sehun out through the restaurant's kitchen. Sehun backtracked. "What do you mean date?"
"I met Taozi at poker night and he asked me out," Lu Han said. "It was going pretty well until your team showed up."
"Oh," Sehun said, dumbfounded. "Sorry."
"Could've been worse." Lu Han drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and glanced at Sehun with a sunny interest that made Sehun's entire body feel captive. That wasn't the TK. "But if you want to make it up to me, you can be his stand-in. Are you hungry? I didn't have the chance to finish my dinner."
"There's no logic to it," Kyungsoo says. "Not to mention it's weird."
"Half the time taking a hostage isn't even necessary," Jongin adds. "Does he think we're some Oh Sehun rental service?"
"Hang on," Sehun interrupts, "are you saying you'd have better peace of mind if he just killed me?"
"I'm trying to look out for you," Jongin says.
"I'm never going to call you hyung, so you can give that up."
"Keep your personal conversations off the fucking comms," Kris says over the earpiece.
The three of them are positioned on a warehouse rooftop with a clean view of the shipyard, where people are selling body parts to the highest bidder on one of the docked boats. Sehun hates assignments like these, the brutal ones that ask them to be brutal in return. For the past few months, S.M.E.'s top priority has been this cult of ordinary human psychopaths who've been cutting mutants open, harvesting organs and limbs. Around the academy, they're called bodysnatchers. After the fifteenth mutilated corpse, the responsibility of burning them out went to Kris. Kris' team is S.M.E's bruiser, collectively good-looking, disarmingly vicious. Chanyeol's a firestarter who cheats at cards and Baekhyun's a powerhouse in a tiny 60 kilo package. Kris' job is simply holding onto their leashes.
"Looks like they're almost done down there," Kyungsoo says. Across the dock, the yelling has died down. An explosive arc of fire surges against the control room window, shatters it. Sehun can feel the radius of searing heat from here.
"We got some swimmers," Baekhyun's breathless voice comes through. "Can you guys take care of it?"
"Be careful, Oh Mija," Chanyeol says. "Don't talk to any strangers." He sounds wired from the fight, almost high. Jongin can get the same way, a certain shine in his eyes.
If power is in the blood, Sehun often feels like his body's rejecting it. But his friends are relying on him. He gathers the air to himself, edged into a whip. Kyungsoo singles out the dark shapes escaping into the water, aims him like a gun, and Sehun lashes forward and does what he's been taught.
Another time Sehun was kidnapped, before Lu Han trusted him enough to show him where home was, he treated Sehun to bubble tea. This was early on, and Sehun wasn't 100% sure it wasn't a real kidnapping, but it was hard to be intimidated by Lu Han's futile efforts to suck a trapped tapioca pearl up his straw. Eventually Lu Han lifted the straw from his glass, licking the bottom half clean. "Can you help me with this?"
Lu Han's bubble tea was lychee-flavored, and the tip of his straw tasted sweeter than Sehun's own. Sehun sucked, hard, but the tapioca didn't budge, so he switched tactics and, focusing his power, blew instead. The pearl flew out and bounced off Lu Han's nose. Lu Han gave him a hilariously affronted look and used TK to flick droplets of bubble tea in Sehun's face. Sehun, still laughing, hid behind his hands.
"C'mon, that's really immature-"
"You don't get to use that word," Lu Han said. "How old are you, eighteen?"
"Nineteen this April," Sehun said.
"You're kind of young to be doing what you do."
Sehun tried to shrug off a brief spark of defensiveness. "I'm older than when I started." Everyone at the academy was young; mutations hadn't even been around for a full generation. Sehun was S.M.E.'s favorite age, young enough to train, old enough to weaponize.
Lu Han leaned forward. He had long eyelashes, Sehun noticed, registering it in his brain first, then down in his chest and stomach and the center of his palms. "You never wanted to do anything else?"
"Honestly?" Sehun licked his bottom lip. "I dunno, I was twelve when I signed up. My power was all over the place. I just wanted to know how to use it."
For something that should've been messy, being around Lu Han was like finding a room of decompressed air, somewhere Sehun could open and expand. Lu Han laced his fingers together and tucked them under his chin. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be a dinosaur," he said. "And a soccer player, and an astronaut, and then I had a rebellious period when I wanted to be a ballerina. I think I've wanted to be everything at one point or another, but I guess I ended up better at being a thief than anything else."
Sehun felt comfortable enough to hijack the rest of Lu Han's drink. He grinned around the straw. "I wanna hear more about the ballerina."
Through Lu Han, Sehun learns more about TK than he did during any of the all-nighters he'd fought through with Jongin, two bags of potato chips, and 60ml of orange soda. He learns that Lu Han can direct his TK inwards to give himself superstrength, flight. After a week of shitty training sessions, as Sehun shoveled commiserative jajamyun into his mouth, Lu Han spoke up, "Do you want private lessons?"
"I change my mind!" Sehun shouted ten minutes later, as Lu Han floated him back and forth on the high-rise roof at a distressing height.
"You're doing good," Lu Han encouraged. "It's like exerting your power on any other object. Just concentrate and when I let you go-"
"When you-hyung, you can't-hyung-"
Sehun didn't die. Panicking, he grasped for the right wind current and molded it into a column under his feet, wobbly but higher than he'd ever managed before. He still had no momentum, couldn't push forward without losing altitude, but the city looked lit-up and perfect from there. The air was cold and clear in his lungs.
He learns that using so much mental force can give someone killer headaches. The day Lu Han went after Park Jinyoung's entire Caillebotte collection was the day he made Sehun turn all the lights off as he laid prone on his couch, threatening to swallow a bottle of ibuprofen. Easy to overpower, if Sehun wanted to. Instead he braved the kitchen to recreate the ginger tea his mother used to make for him. "Maybe it's time for a career change," Sehun said, offering Lu Han the mug. Lu Han sat up, the heel of his hand pressed against his temple, saying, "Then how would I get to see you?"
He learns that on very, very good days, Lu Han can play with water and dust particles, refracting light to create holograms. "Same process behind bending security lasers," Lu Han said, "except, you know, harder." He was forming a street block in his palm, shimmery and green, the shapes breaking and reforming as he tried to sustain them. Sehun could make out small compact buildings with clay roof tiles, old architecture, the narrow cobblestone street. One of the taller buildings started to thin out while the rest disintegrated, growing a long pair of legs, a mop of bed-hair, a sour expression that, once Lu Han finished constructing the face, turned into a smile that made the eyes crinkle too. "Sometimes I think I want to make things," Lu Han mused, "and not just steal them."
Back when Sehun'd lived at home, he'd kept his family cool during the summer months. He thought of the way his older brother would give homework guidance in exchange for five minutes slumped blissfully beside Sehun as he worked up a breeze. That Sehun seemed like an artifact now, a fossil record waiting to be excavated from the miniature version of himself in Lu Han's palm, hazy green and undefined.
The bodysnatchers bullshit is neverending. Kris puts their team on retrieval. They track down the white service van past midnight, parked down a dark shoddy road three kilometers out from an equally shoddy gas station. Kyungsoo leads them to it, shoes stripped off so he can get a better sense of the earth beneath his toes. He sinks the wheels, dropping the van into the dirt with brusque efficiency. The van jerks to the side uselessly. Jongin flashes on top of it, silent, and Sehun inhales once and slices a current through the metal under Jongin's feet.
Then: gunfire, and shouting, equipment breaking, glass and metal all smashing against each other. Between flashes, the cloud of smoke and sulfur that he leaves behind, Jongin snarls, "What the fuck is that," and for a second Sehun's afraid, but Jongin sounds furious more than anything else.
Then: Sehun lifts the three men out of the van. He clenches his fists, cuts off the air, and slams them into the trench that Kyungsoo's carved out. Kyungsoo buries them to the waist but one of them has this-arm, glowing white under his black gear. Sehun's moving before he can finish the thought; he throws Kyungsoo down just as a shock of lightning hits the line of trees behind them. The bark crackles and begins to burn.
Then: Jongin reappears behind the man and crushes his face into the ground. Sehun flinches at the snap of bone. The stretch of road goes quiet as the man breathes harshly through his mouth. Jongin places a heavy boot on his right wrist, applying pressure. There's another crunch. The man screams.
"Jongin," Kyungsoo says, trapping the other two men down to their necks to stop them from struggling, maybe to keep them away from Jongin, "leave it."
"If you think I'm going to fucking leave this-" Jongin rips off the man's armored sleeve with a knife to bare the arm underneath. Pale scar tissue marks the change in skin tone above the elbow, illuminated by a halo of smashed headlights. It hits Sehun, The arm isn't his, and the nausea bends him over his knees, an acidic taste in his mouth.
Last month, half of a twenty year old was found in an alley. S.M.E. identified him as a student at Dongguk, music major. Had him in their records under electrical energy. They'd approached him when he'd just turned sixteen and he'd smiled and said, "No thanks, I have plans."
Jongin's first year at the academy, no one understood why he'd been recruited. Teleportation was a limited trick. At the end of the year evaluations, everyone watched as he flashed forward to bisect one of the training robots on his own hand, straight through where its heart would've been. The same Jongin who played DDR and traded Sehun the best parts of his lunch. Sehun remembers watching and thinking, I'll never be able to do that, and not knowing if he should feel sorry. Now, watching as Jongin buckles his belt tight around the man's upper arm, all Sehun feels is stark relief that it isn't him. "Mutie scum," the man is spitting blood, swearing, "think you're better then the rest of us, think you can play god-"
Jongin looks up at Kyungsoo, then Sehun, angry and shaken and powerful. He flashes away and takes the arm off with him.
They arrive home before sunrise and Jongin heads for the shower. Sehun wanders the kitchen, setting some food out for Kai's Bane, but when he retreats to his room, she follows at his feet. He passes Kyungsoo, who's outside the bathroom door with Jongin's towel in his arms, waiting for a dam to break. Earlier, as Kyungsoo checked in with Kris, Jongin fell asleep on one of the infirmary beds, curled up against Sehun. There would be psych evaluations and meetings with Joonmyun later, but right then, Jongin wasn't dreaming. Sehun didn't think any of them would. The man would live. This wasn't the worst thing Jongin'd ever done.
Sehun falls into bed. There's no way he can sleep. He thinks he should call his mother, he hasn't been home since New Years, but the idea of hearing her voice right now, telling him that she misses him, she's proud of him, makes his throat burn. He picks up Kai's Bane instead, holds her above his head, and peers into her big green eyes, the studded collar that she'd shown up with. "I know you're bugged," he says.
Kai's Bane blinks down at him, and reaches a gray paw down to bat at his cheek. "If you're listening," Sehun continues, "I really want to see you."
Kai's Bane says nothing, growing restless in his grip. Sehun sets her back down and kisses the top of her head. "Alright, go fart in Jongin's bed some more, you dumb cat."
Fifteen minutes later, he receives a text from an unknown number: let's go fishing ♡
The last time Lu Han was here, he broke five laws and enraged every animal protection group. Today he's wearing a black coat, glasses, and his hair is a few shades darker; it's not much of a disguise, but security doesn't know his face. Sehun takes a seat next to him on one of the benches in the lobby. "You never told me what the sharks were for."
"Wasn't my job to ask," Lu Han says. "Besides, if I tell you, isn't that a conflict of interests?"
Sehun pretends to be shy. "Are you calling me an interest?"
Lu Han looks over, and his retort slips into a small frown. "What happened?"
"I haven't slept," Sehun confesses, shoving his hands into his hoodie pockets. "We had this job. I'm still processing."
He doesn't know what else to say about it. The imprint of seven hours ago lingers on him like a bruise. He keeps pressing against it, revisiting the white spark of the man's arm, the bleeding stump that Jongin'd left behind. Lu Han doesn't push; he has this sixth sense for knowing what other people need. There's next to no one in the aquarium on an early Wednesday morning, which gives them free reign. Sehun makes faces at the piranhas through the glass and Lu Han discovers a soft spot for otters, so they spend some time standing in front of the habitat, watching them play. Sehun only speaks up to motion towards a smaller one twisting around as it grooms itself, scrubbing at its face until the fur fluffs up beyond saving. "That one's you."
Lu Han points at a clump of sea kelp. "Well that's you."
They end up in the underwater tunnel, a 180 degree view of the sea. The speakers are playing the type of new age yoga tree spirit music Sehun'd usually make fun of, but today he's okay with it. He cranes his head back to stare up at the thick bars of light striating the water above him, and thinks about being special, the ways people starve for it, abuse it, protect it, and all the while Sehun's still discovering what it means. He thinks about Jongin's jagged belief in what he was about to do, and wonders what the hell he believes in. What it is that keeps him here. The water dwarfs him, sharks overhead casting shadows at his feet. There's so much world still out there, places Sehun's wind speed has never reached. It's kind of a nice realization.
Without his coat, Lu Han's only wearing a thin tank top, as if he rolled straight out of bed to meet Sehun here. Goosebumps rise along his arm, so Sehun searches for the tunnel's floor vents. Lu Han has to notice when the AC airflow cuts off, but he doesn't mention it.
"I don't know where I should be," Sehun says. "I thought I'd found it, but it doesn't feel right anymore. You know what I mean?"
He can feel when Lu Han nods, the nudge of his chin against Sehun's shoulder. Lu Han trapezes around East Asia and lives out of places as homely as museums. He has his own alloy of being self-serving, being kind, whichever one had made him grab Sehun in the restaurant that night, after Sehun'd built a windstorm in his hand, met Lu Han's eyes, and held back. "You don't have to start with the big picture," Lu Han says. "Start small. Start with where you are right now. How does it feel?"
Right now he's a mile underwater with Lu Han, surrounded by giant sea turtles and ripples of blue-green light. "Pretty average," he says, and kisses him.
It's his second first kiss, after spin the bottle in sixth grade. He does it before he can consider another option, because he wants it in a way he isn't used to wanting things, full-bodied, alchemical, like Lu Han took the stationary molecules inside him and sped them up. At first he just fits their mouths together, and it tastes cold from the stupid AC, but soon Lu Han's leaning into him, opening up, the inside of his mouth slick and warm, and when he curls his tongue against Sehun's, Sehun feels both completely outclassed and rocked by the acute clarity of belonging.
Afterwards, Lu Han licks his lips, eyes on Sehun's mouth. "Does this make me Lois?" he says.
"I was drunk," Sehun wrinkles his nose, "and now I'm taking my kiss back."
"You can't," Lu Han insists. "You already gave it to me."
"Fine," Sehun says, shy for real, "keep it." He can't tell if he should feel different; he always feels different around Lu Han, a little more his age. A stingray glides above them, eclipsing the light before it swims past. Sehun puts his head on Lu Han's shoulder and watches the fish.
Joonmyun recommends a ten day suspension. For a week and a half, Sehun doesn't wake up until noon. In the afternoons, he and Jongin duke it out over the rec room's air hockey table while Kyungsoo occasionally comes out to half-spectate, half-play on his phone. "Sehun's cheating," Jongin calls out after Sehun uses a puff of air to blow the puck into Jongin's goal. Without looking up, Kyungsoo stomps one socked foot against the floor. The targeted seismic vibration throws Sehun onto his butt and jolts the electronic scoreboard, putting Jongin up by 700 points. Jongin victoriously gyrates his hips in Sehun's face. Sehun laughs until his cheeks hurt.
But Jongin's already restless to get back in the field, the instinct alive inside him, putting roots down. Even Kyungsoo's stealing peeks at mission briefs for something to strategize and solve. Sehun waits for the dark twist in his stomach that comes from being walked away from, but there's none. Instead it's a vacancy, like someone wrecked a tornado through him but the dust is beginning to clear. Maybe he's done some growing up. Maybe this is about him peeling away towards his own path too.
They run into each other again at the Seoul Museum of Art. It's the last day of the special Degas exhibition, and S.M.E.'s looking out for a mutant-unfriendly legislator that the MLF wants dead, while Lu Han just can't resist a good Impressionist. He's here dressed like one of the wait staff, and Sehun watches him lift a keycard off the head of security before he intercepts him on his way towards the storage wing, plucking a flute of champagne off Lu Han's tray.
Lu Han is unfazed. "Are you sure you don't want juice instead? A glass of milk?"
"That joke's as old as you are," Sehun grouses.
"Wait, this one's better." Lu Han snaps his fingers. "Baby's first tux."
"You're so lame," Sehun says, "I don't know why I want to run off with you."
"You want to what?" Lu Han says.
Sehun takes his earpiece off and, before he can chicken out, drops it into the champagne. "I don't want you to give me back anymore."
Every inch of him is buzzing, lodged up in his throat, as Lu Han glances at the glass, then back to him. Sehun stands his ground, because Lu Han has said before that they're a complication when really they're the one choice Sehun's made on his own. When Lu Han finally smiles back, it's one that takes over his whole face and rings through Sehun's chest like a wind chime. He places the key card neatly next to the champagne, and pawns off the tray on an actual waiter walking by. "Do you like Florence?"
Sehun releases a breath. "I love Florence." He doesn't know shit about Florence.
Down the exhibition hall comes the sound of the Mutant Liberation Front crashing the gala. People start yelling. Chanyeol sets something on fire. "Pit stop in Rome first," Lu Han says as he takes Sehun by the wrist, pulling him through the surge of the frenzied crowd. "I want to retire with my own Fabergé."
"I don't think we should rob the Vatican," Sehun says, but there's something that feels terrifyingly good about the we.
When Sehun was twelve, he shut down his school and the schools in every surrounding district for three days until the power came back.
When he was thirteen, he found a bird with a crushed wing outside his apartment building, and sat there in the grass until the sun went down, trying to lift it back into the air.
Sehun is nineteen and most days he still doesn't know what kind of person he wants to be, but he thinks: Start small. Wind's just motion and gas particles. Sehun's the weather vane. He can spread wildfire and carve rock, or he can shift air through Lu Han's hair like an extension of his own hands. He can finish figuring out this flying thing.