Super Junior AU; Various Pairings; Love/War
Title: Love/War (8/?)
Fandom: Super Junior AU (Mafia)
Pairings: Siwon/Hankyung/Heechul (Hankyung/Heechul), Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kangin/Eeteuk, Tablo/Eunhyuk
Pairings in Chapter: Slight Kangin/Eeteuk and Kibum/Donghae
Word Count: 3,536
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Kim family and the Choi family are the two oldest families in Seoul: where other families have been born, grown, and then fell apart, they remain strong. Unfortunately, they are mortal enemies, and where one lives alongside the law, the other is beyond any control. It's up to the new generation of members to destroy the violence between them - even if it means destroying one family in the process.
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's commented so far - I'm only not replying to comments because I know that I'll end up trying to tell people things and ruin the story :\
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8
Eeteuk’s head shot up from where he had been resting it against the wood of his desk - that made it sound like it was through choice, though really he had just fallen asleep due to a late night spent finishing up some rogue paperwork that Heechul had lost and which had just resurfaced - the amount had ended up being a lot more than they had realised, and Kangin had fallen asleep around an hour before Eeteuk had done so himself.
It took him a moment to work out what had dragged him from the (very happy) state of sleep he had been under, and then the shouting and banging from outside registered. It was coming from outside the house, that much he could tell, and every so often it would stop, as if the sound was being carried to him on the wind. He glimpsed Kangin out of the corner of his eye, still asleep with his head on his own desk, and then the door to the office was flying open and Yehsung bursting through.
“Hyung,” he said, so frantic and loud that Kangin woke with a start. “Hyung, there’s two people at the front gates demanding to be let in.”
“Are the gates locked?” asked Eeteuk, standing up slowly.
“Yeah,” said Yehsung. “The guards aren’t letting them through, but hyung - it’s weird, they’re refusing to go. One of them keeps saying that the other needs our help. They just keep shouting! Heechul, Kibum and Ryeowook are already down. We didn’t know whether it would be safe for Hankyung and Zhou Mi.”
“I’m on my way,” said Eeteuk, hitting Kangin over the head on his way past to wake him up some more - Kangin was apparently more awake than Eeteuk had previously thought because he immediately reached out and tugged Eeteuk’s shirt, pulling him back. Eeteuk glared at him, Kangin shrugged, and Yehsung started jumping from foot to foot in agitation.
“Go get Eunhyuk and Shindong,” Eeteuk told him. “I don’t know what this is, but we’ll need everyone awake to deal with it.”
As they rushed through the house to find out what was going on, Eeteuk glanced at Kangin and saw that he, too, looked tense and drawn - it was at times like these that Eeteuk needed Kangin there to reassure him. Mostly it was to reassure him that he was over-reacting, but some times, like this, it was to reassure him that he wasn’t over-reacting.
“Do you think it’s got something to do with Hankyung?” asked Kangin tensely, as they neared the main doors.
“I’ve got no idea,” said Eeteuk honestly. “But I really hope not.”
The lights at the end of the drive were on, casting harsh yellow onto the figures standing near the gates. Eeteuk checked his watch - two am. Even if he had been asleep, it made sense that most of the others were still awake; sometimes he wondered if his family was made up of nothing more than insomniacs. Nearing those who were waiting, he noted that Heechul looked white in the spot-light quality of the lamps.
“I don’t know what this is,” he said, voice brittle. “I don’t know if this is just some ruse or something - and I think that it’s not and we’re over-reacting every time we take a knock at the door to be a heist - but if it is just a ruse, it’s a fucking good one. Even I’m willing to just open the door and damn the consequences.”
As if on a cue, the shouting started up again from outside the gates - a young man or a teenage boy, perhaps, shouting through obvious tears. “Please - help us! We need your help, he’ll die!”
Eeteuk neared the wooden gate cautiously. “What’s your name?” he called, noticing that Kangin had drawn his gun, and that Ryeowook already had his out, held in shaking hands.
“We’re from the Lee family,” came the reply to Eeteuk’s question.
“The Lee family hasn’t existed for nearly three years,” said Eeteuk, frowning.
“I didn’t know,” the boy shouted, almost wailing. “We escaped and there wasn’t anything there, just an empty, destroyed house, and then he collapsed - and please, I don’t think we’ve got time!”
Kyuhyun came out of the guard house. “They’ve got the camera outside to focus on them. I think we’d better let them in, hyung, regardless of where they say they come from. It really is just two guys, and one of them is on the floor; I don’t think he can stand. I don’t think he’s even awake, and the other one doesn’t look much better.”
Eeteuk looked at Kangin, who nodded and said, “Open the gates.”
The gates were opened, and Kyuhyun was right - it was just two guys, both young and thin, and if one had been standing before, neither was now: the one who had clearly been shouting was now kneeling on the floor next to the one who was quite obviously unconscious. He looked up, realising that the gates had been opened.
“Thank you,” he said, with the silver tracks of tears stained onto his face from the glare of the lights on the driveway. “I don’t know - I think he’s really ill, I can’t get him to wake up.”
Eeteuk signalled with a hand, and Kibum darted forward to kneel on the other side of the unconscious boy, using the medical training that he had thought would be helpful to learn in his job to its full extent. Kyuhyun moved forward to put his hands on the other boy’s shoulders, in an attempt at getting him to let Kibum do what he needed to, while Heechul followed, ready to cover him in case this was still just a trap.
“I don’t know what happened,” said the boy tearfully, looking at Kyuhyun but not seeing him. “I knew he was hurt but he seemed okay. And then we were looking around our house and he just collapsed.”
Kibum felt the forehead of the boy - burning up, an obvious fever - and lay a hand on his neck to check his pulse - weak. He was just to pull back when a dark mark on the skin of his neck caught his eye. Curious, he lifted the material of the boy’s careworn t-shirt and froze - what he had taken for mud in the bad light, with his own shadow covering most of the boy’s body, was in fact blood, stained through from countless cuts over his stomach and abdomen, his body covered in bruises of all shades.
The boy stirred, and opened his eyes a fraction, fogged over with pain. He looked unseeingly at Kibum, and struggled to move his arms up to push him away, then moaned, low in his throat. “Go away,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I can’t - please, go away.”
His eyes fluttered shut again, body going slack. “Hey,” said Kibum desperately, wanting to shake him awake but worried that there might be internal injuries or broken bones that this movement could aggravate. “Hey!” There was no response. He turned to Eeteuk. “Hyung, we need to get him to a hospital. This isn’t just an illness, he’s been beaten, badly.”
Watching Eeteuk’s eyes widen in shock, Kyuhyun turned to the boy that he had hold of. “Hey,” he said, shaking him to get his attention off the unconscious boy and on to Kyuhyun. “Where have you been, what’s happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” whispered the boy. “He just stumbled into my bedroom like that, and said that he knew a way to escape. I don’t know what-”
“Where?” growled Kyuhyun. “Escape from where?”
“The-”
“Sungmin?”
Yehsung had arrived with Eunhyuk and Shindong. Eunhyuk had paused, and when Yehsung and Shindong had looked back to see what was stopping him, he had said the name of the cousin that had been lost to him three years earlier - the one that everyone knew the name of, but not the face of. The boy that Eunhyuk was staring at pulled out of Kyuhyun’s hold, gone slack from confusion, and stared back, bewilderment clear on his face. “Hyukjae?” he asked, a little incredulous.
A wide grin broke out of Eunhyuk’s face, as he rushed forward with a joyous yell of “Sungmin!” and pulled his cousin into his arms, hugging him close. Sungmin began to laugh and cry at the same time, trying to hug Eunhyuk closer and yet pull away at the same time to tell him something.
“Donghae,” he said breathlessly. “Hyuk, it’s Donghae.”
“I couldn’t find him,” said Eunhyuk, not noticing that Sungmin was trying to say something else, too busy hugging him. “I looked for him but I never found out who he’d been sold to-” And then he froze as he looked over Sungmin’s shoulder and noticed Donghae lying on the floor with Kibum trying desperately to get him to wake up.
“Donghae?” Eeteuk has seen some sights in his time - impossible not to, in the job that he has - but in all honesty, he still thinks that the way Eunhyuk looked in that moment, realising that this was his cousin, but not knowing what was wrong, honestly broke his heart; he was back to looking like that lost teenager who had been sold to them, unsure of what was happening, nothing like the happy young man with a constant smile that he had become - and Eeteuk’s heart had broken.
“Donghae?” Eunhyuk repeated, and then, as if a switch at been thrown and the lights had gone out only to come back on a few seconds later, he was suddenly kneeling at Donghae’s side, crying and trying to clutch him to him, while Shindong tried to calm him down and Kibum tried to get him to let go.
“Please,” Eunhyuk sobbed to Kibum, taking him as someone who could help in this situation, though the normally stoic Kibum looked like he was on the verge of tears himself. “Please, he’s my cousin, you have to help him, please, I can’t lose him, not now-”
Heechul had to turn away.
Donghae was placed in the hospital that the Kim family members usually used, and while Sungmin was looked at, he was able to be released after getting stitches for a cut he had obtained when he fell over carrying Donghae to the house. Donghae, however, was in the hospital for two weeks, was unconscious for three days, and when he woke, it was Kibum who was sitting by his bed - it was sheer coincidence, others had been there during the time, but it was Kibum, and when Donghae awoke, it was Kibum that he saw. It was Kibum who stayed there throughout the next few weeks.
Still, even now, no one knew what had happened to Donghae, beyond the clinical diagnosis that the doctors gave them in the hospital (“Severe injuries most likely obtained from beatings obtained over a long period of time, and clear signs of sexual abuse.”), but Donghae never told them what had happened. He refused to give the name of his abuser, or talk about anything that happened in the three missing years from when he was sold to when he turned up, half dead, on the Kim family doorstep. Sungmin couldn’t help either - all he could knew was that Donghae, like him, had been sold to the Choi family, but they had been separated once they got there. He had seen very little of Donghae since that time.
“Sometimes,” said Eeteuk in a low snarl to Kangin, and while Eeteuk didn’t get angry often, when he was angry, he was angry, “I want to just blow the entire Choi family estate to smithereens.”
Whoever it was, and whatever had happened, it affected Donghae. It was hard to see, to begin with, when the boy flinched from anyone who came near him or who spoke to him, but eventually, as they helped him through, Eunhyuk and Sungmin bolstering him along, Donghae recovered. Unfortunately, something about Kibum ended up dragging on him, pulled him down, made him transform back into the meek, submissive person that he must have been when he was at the Choi house. Whether it was because Kibum reminded him of the person who held him captive, or simply because Kibum was the one he saw when he first woke up - and then was subsequently nursed back to health by, because the others were busy a lot, and Kibum got bored a lot - nobody knew.
***
Siwon was white when Heechul finished telling him the story, knuckles white as he clenched the arms of his chair. “The Choi family?” he asked hoarsely.
“Bastards, aren’t they?” said Heechul casually, tapping his nails against the table in front of him. “According to Eunhyuk, Donghae was always a bit weird and happy-go-lucky, but apparently it’s nothing like now. He jumps from one thing to the other, always thinking and changing his mind, always hyper, and always desperate for affection, so he’s always hanging onto people.” His fingers stopped drumming the table sharply, as if the noise was annoying him. “It’s cute, but you’ve got to remember where that springs from.”
“And Kibum?”
“Kibum hates it,” said Heechul with a sigh. “He sees the way that Donghae acts around other people, sees the way that he smiles and laughs, but he’s never been like that with Kibum, not for a long time, much as Kibum would like it. It’s hard to know with Kibum, but I think he likes Donghae when he’s being himself. Likes in that way, I mean.”
“Oh,” said Siwon softly, still white, his fists clenched in his lap.
“I think if any one of us found out who was the one who did that to Donghae, we’d kill that person.” Siwon glanced at him, found that Heechul’s mouth was twisted into a sneer, eyes hard - if no one else did, then Heechul would.
“He still won’t say?” asked Siwon softly. “You just know that it was someone from the Choi family?”
“That’s all Sungmin knew, and Donghae won’t give us anything else. I think he’s trying to forget that anything ever happened.”
“The Choi family disgust me,” said Siwon, so harshly that Heechul raised an eyebrow at him.
“Sounds like a grudge,” he said casually.
“They don’t know how to act at all,” said Siwon.
“Well, that’s not true,” said Heechul, standing up and pressing imaginary creases from his trousers. “They certainly know how to act like bastards. Living here, you’ll soon see. We always seem to be cleaning up their messes.”
***
Shindong grinned and cheerfully put a pile of papers onto the desk in front of Siwon, before hopping up onto the desk behind him and kicking his legs back and forth. “Do your best,” he said in a sing-song tone. Siwon’s smile was actually not forced at all, as he reached for the top paper. Shindong made an approving noise.
“I need to do this, right?” Siwon raised his head and grinned. “If you’re going to trust me with actual family business?”
“Paperwork is a bit of a ritual,” said Shindong. “Everyone does it, but newcomers always do the most. Even Eeteuk did, once.”
“I don’t mind,” said Siwon. “I want to do what I can.”
Shindong looked at him appraisingly. “You surprise me,” he said, tipping his head to the side. “Is your doing the paperwork just your bit for the family?”
“Yes.”
“Your level of loyalty would make Heechul scornful,” said Shindong and noted with a wry smile the way that Siwon glanced at him at the mention of Heechul’s name and then quickly away, biting his bottom lip. “Ah,” said Shindong softly. “I see.”
“What?” asked Siwon, too quickly, too nervous.
“Heechul?” asked Shindong. “Really?” Siwon looked away. “I mean, you probably already know the problems there, what with Hankyung and all, but there’s another one, that you probably haven’t already thought of.”
“Questioning my reason,” said Siwon quietly, putting his pen down. “I’ve already thought about it.”
“Exactly,” said Shindong. “Why join up, if not to try to get Heechul? People will ask you that. Or worse, they’ll expect you to have joined up simply to be close to him, in which case your reason is pathetic, at best.” He grinned. “Although Sungmin will think it’s the cutest thing ever.”
“I have other reasons,” said Siwon.
“Private reasons, no doubt,” said Shindong with a shrug. “I don’t expect you to tell me.” He frowned. “But Heechul, really? Sometimes I wonder about this little thing called taste that everyone around me seems to be missing.”
“No,” said Siwon hesitantly. “Not just Hee-”
Shindong’s mobile phone sprung into life with a sudden outburst of music signalling a phone call. He jumped off the table and checked the ID - Eeteuk. “Yeah?” he asked, after he had flipped it open and held it to his ear.
“I need you to come down the office, now,” said Kangin curtly, and then hung up. Shindong blinked, and then pulled a face - he hated it when his two bosses swapped phones, it always made answering his phone more difficult.
“Kangin needs to see me,” he said to Siwon, who was looking at him curiously. “Will you be okay here?”
Siwon jumped up out of his seat. “Can I come?” he asked. “I need to ask him about some paperwork that needs his signature, but I haven’t been able to find him the past few days.”
“I think it’ll be okay,” said Shindong doubtfully.
Opening the door to Eeteuk and Kangin’s office showed that actually, it probably wasn’t okay. Eeteuk was sitting on the sofa talking in a low voice to a girl with her head held in her hands, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. Kangin was sat behind one of the desks, filling out a form and he looked up when Shindong and Siwon came in - and then he frowned at Siwon.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He didn’t seem particularly annoyed, just curious but was too wound up to take the annoyance from his voice.
“I had something I needed you to sign,” said Siwon nervously. “But I can come back later if you want?”
“Shindong,” said Eeteuk, motioning for Shindong to come closer. “I need you to take her to the hospital.”
“Ours?”
“Yes,” said Eeteuk. “But before you do, take her to one of the guest rooms and get her to change out of her clothes into something else. Keep the clothes as evidence.”
“Oh,” said Shindong, as if he understood, and he hunkered down to smile in a friendly manner at the girl, who raised her tear-stained face to look at him. Siwon noticed with a sharp jerk in his stomach that she was young, merely in her late teens, her cream blouse ripped along the front - she was forced to clutch it closed with one hand. “Come on,” said Shindong in a kind tone. “We’re going to get you sorted out.”
“Here,” said Kangin, and handed Shindong the insurance form for the girl to give in at the hospital, the one that would give her the very best medical examination paid for by the Kim family. When the door closed behind Shindong and the girl, Kangin sighed heavily and turned to Siwon. “What do you need me to sign?” he asked heavily.
“Just these,” said Siwon quietly, and handed Kangin the pile that he needed to finish. Kangin sat down and began to sign them systematically, not looking at what he was signing. Eeteuk sat and stared at the coffee table in front of him. “Um,” said Siwon, a little tentative. “That girl-”
“Raped,” said Eeteuk bitterly. “From the description, it sounds like one of the men from the Choi family, though we don’t know most of their names. It was near the river, which means that they’ve come into our territory, again.”
“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” said Kangin, voice tense. “They’re getting too cocky. It’s been like this ever since Choi Sikyu took over the family just before my father died. The Choi family was a wild, out of control thing even then, but ever since then…”
“Choi Sikyu?” Siwon bit his lip. “The head of the family?”
“That’s him,” sighed Kangin. “You’d think he was training his family to be animals.”
“Is this sort of thing normal?” asked Siwon.
“Remarkably so,” said Eeteuk, staring still at the coffee table, unseeing. “We find the murdered bodies of people who owe them debt and who didn’t pay up in our streets or in the river that runs through our territory. We find girls, and sometimes men, wandering the streets after having been attacked by members. And we only know what happens in our side, nothing about what happens over there. It may be worse, and we don’t know.”
“It is,” said Siwon softly. “I just never realised that it would affect this family too.”
“Good job that you got out,” said Eeteuk with a weak smile.
Siwon looked stricken by that. “Yeah,” he said, and then took the finished papers off Kangin and quickly left the room. Eeteuk raised an eyebrow at Kangin.
“Probably worried about his family,” said Kangin.
Fandom: Super Junior AU (Mafia)
Pairings: Siwon/Hankyung/Heechul (Hankyung/Heechul), Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kangin/Eeteuk, Tablo/Eunhyuk
Pairings in Chapter: Slight Kangin/Eeteuk and Kibum/Donghae
Word Count: 3,536
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Kim family and the Choi family are the two oldest families in Seoul: where other families have been born, grown, and then fell apart, they remain strong. Unfortunately, they are mortal enemies, and where one lives alongside the law, the other is beyond any control. It's up to the new generation of members to destroy the violence between them - even if it means destroying one family in the process.
A/N: Thank you to everyone who's commented so far - I'm only not replying to comments because I know that I'll end up trying to tell people things and ruin the story :\
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8
Eeteuk’s head shot up from where he had been resting it against the wood of his desk - that made it sound like it was through choice, though really he had just fallen asleep due to a late night spent finishing up some rogue paperwork that Heechul had lost and which had just resurfaced - the amount had ended up being a lot more than they had realised, and Kangin had fallen asleep around an hour before Eeteuk had done so himself.
It took him a moment to work out what had dragged him from the (very happy) state of sleep he had been under, and then the shouting and banging from outside registered. It was coming from outside the house, that much he could tell, and every so often it would stop, as if the sound was being carried to him on the wind. He glimpsed Kangin out of the corner of his eye, still asleep with his head on his own desk, and then the door to the office was flying open and Yehsung bursting through.
“Hyung,” he said, so frantic and loud that Kangin woke with a start. “Hyung, there’s two people at the front gates demanding to be let in.”
“Are the gates locked?” asked Eeteuk, standing up slowly.
“Yeah,” said Yehsung. “The guards aren’t letting them through, but hyung - it’s weird, they’re refusing to go. One of them keeps saying that the other needs our help. They just keep shouting! Heechul, Kibum and Ryeowook are already down. We didn’t know whether it would be safe for Hankyung and Zhou Mi.”
“I’m on my way,” said Eeteuk, hitting Kangin over the head on his way past to wake him up some more - Kangin was apparently more awake than Eeteuk had previously thought because he immediately reached out and tugged Eeteuk’s shirt, pulling him back. Eeteuk glared at him, Kangin shrugged, and Yehsung started jumping from foot to foot in agitation.
“Go get Eunhyuk and Shindong,” Eeteuk told him. “I don’t know what this is, but we’ll need everyone awake to deal with it.”
As they rushed through the house to find out what was going on, Eeteuk glanced at Kangin and saw that he, too, looked tense and drawn - it was at times like these that Eeteuk needed Kangin there to reassure him. Mostly it was to reassure him that he was over-reacting, but some times, like this, it was to reassure him that he wasn’t over-reacting.
“Do you think it’s got something to do with Hankyung?” asked Kangin tensely, as they neared the main doors.
“I’ve got no idea,” said Eeteuk honestly. “But I really hope not.”
The lights at the end of the drive were on, casting harsh yellow onto the figures standing near the gates. Eeteuk checked his watch - two am. Even if he had been asleep, it made sense that most of the others were still awake; sometimes he wondered if his family was made up of nothing more than insomniacs. Nearing those who were waiting, he noted that Heechul looked white in the spot-light quality of the lamps.
“I don’t know what this is,” he said, voice brittle. “I don’t know if this is just some ruse or something - and I think that it’s not and we’re over-reacting every time we take a knock at the door to be a heist - but if it is just a ruse, it’s a fucking good one. Even I’m willing to just open the door and damn the consequences.”
As if on a cue, the shouting started up again from outside the gates - a young man or a teenage boy, perhaps, shouting through obvious tears. “Please - help us! We need your help, he’ll die!”
Eeteuk neared the wooden gate cautiously. “What’s your name?” he called, noticing that Kangin had drawn his gun, and that Ryeowook already had his out, held in shaking hands.
“We’re from the Lee family,” came the reply to Eeteuk’s question.
“The Lee family hasn’t existed for nearly three years,” said Eeteuk, frowning.
“I didn’t know,” the boy shouted, almost wailing. “We escaped and there wasn’t anything there, just an empty, destroyed house, and then he collapsed - and please, I don’t think we’ve got time!”
Kyuhyun came out of the guard house. “They’ve got the camera outside to focus on them. I think we’d better let them in, hyung, regardless of where they say they come from. It really is just two guys, and one of them is on the floor; I don’t think he can stand. I don’t think he’s even awake, and the other one doesn’t look much better.”
Eeteuk looked at Kangin, who nodded and said, “Open the gates.”
The gates were opened, and Kyuhyun was right - it was just two guys, both young and thin, and if one had been standing before, neither was now: the one who had clearly been shouting was now kneeling on the floor next to the one who was quite obviously unconscious. He looked up, realising that the gates had been opened.
“Thank you,” he said, with the silver tracks of tears stained onto his face from the glare of the lights on the driveway. “I don’t know - I think he’s really ill, I can’t get him to wake up.”
Eeteuk signalled with a hand, and Kibum darted forward to kneel on the other side of the unconscious boy, using the medical training that he had thought would be helpful to learn in his job to its full extent. Kyuhyun moved forward to put his hands on the other boy’s shoulders, in an attempt at getting him to let Kibum do what he needed to, while Heechul followed, ready to cover him in case this was still just a trap.
“I don’t know what happened,” said the boy tearfully, looking at Kyuhyun but not seeing him. “I knew he was hurt but he seemed okay. And then we were looking around our house and he just collapsed.”
Kibum felt the forehead of the boy - burning up, an obvious fever - and lay a hand on his neck to check his pulse - weak. He was just to pull back when a dark mark on the skin of his neck caught his eye. Curious, he lifted the material of the boy’s careworn t-shirt and froze - what he had taken for mud in the bad light, with his own shadow covering most of the boy’s body, was in fact blood, stained through from countless cuts over his stomach and abdomen, his body covered in bruises of all shades.
The boy stirred, and opened his eyes a fraction, fogged over with pain. He looked unseeingly at Kibum, and struggled to move his arms up to push him away, then moaned, low in his throat. “Go away,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I can’t - please, go away.”
His eyes fluttered shut again, body going slack. “Hey,” said Kibum desperately, wanting to shake him awake but worried that there might be internal injuries or broken bones that this movement could aggravate. “Hey!” There was no response. He turned to Eeteuk. “Hyung, we need to get him to a hospital. This isn’t just an illness, he’s been beaten, badly.”
Watching Eeteuk’s eyes widen in shock, Kyuhyun turned to the boy that he had hold of. “Hey,” he said, shaking him to get his attention off the unconscious boy and on to Kyuhyun. “Where have you been, what’s happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” whispered the boy. “He just stumbled into my bedroom like that, and said that he knew a way to escape. I don’t know what-”
“Where?” growled Kyuhyun. “Escape from where?”
“The-”
“Sungmin?”
Yehsung had arrived with Eunhyuk and Shindong. Eunhyuk had paused, and when Yehsung and Shindong had looked back to see what was stopping him, he had said the name of the cousin that had been lost to him three years earlier - the one that everyone knew the name of, but not the face of. The boy that Eunhyuk was staring at pulled out of Kyuhyun’s hold, gone slack from confusion, and stared back, bewilderment clear on his face. “Hyukjae?” he asked, a little incredulous.
A wide grin broke out of Eunhyuk’s face, as he rushed forward with a joyous yell of “Sungmin!” and pulled his cousin into his arms, hugging him close. Sungmin began to laugh and cry at the same time, trying to hug Eunhyuk closer and yet pull away at the same time to tell him something.
“Donghae,” he said breathlessly. “Hyuk, it’s Donghae.”
“I couldn’t find him,” said Eunhyuk, not noticing that Sungmin was trying to say something else, too busy hugging him. “I looked for him but I never found out who he’d been sold to-” And then he froze as he looked over Sungmin’s shoulder and noticed Donghae lying on the floor with Kibum trying desperately to get him to wake up.
“Donghae?” Eeteuk has seen some sights in his time - impossible not to, in the job that he has - but in all honesty, he still thinks that the way Eunhyuk looked in that moment, realising that this was his cousin, but not knowing what was wrong, honestly broke his heart; he was back to looking like that lost teenager who had been sold to them, unsure of what was happening, nothing like the happy young man with a constant smile that he had become - and Eeteuk’s heart had broken.
“Donghae?” Eunhyuk repeated, and then, as if a switch at been thrown and the lights had gone out only to come back on a few seconds later, he was suddenly kneeling at Donghae’s side, crying and trying to clutch him to him, while Shindong tried to calm him down and Kibum tried to get him to let go.
“Please,” Eunhyuk sobbed to Kibum, taking him as someone who could help in this situation, though the normally stoic Kibum looked like he was on the verge of tears himself. “Please, he’s my cousin, you have to help him, please, I can’t lose him, not now-”
Heechul had to turn away.
Donghae was placed in the hospital that the Kim family members usually used, and while Sungmin was looked at, he was able to be released after getting stitches for a cut he had obtained when he fell over carrying Donghae to the house. Donghae, however, was in the hospital for two weeks, was unconscious for three days, and when he woke, it was Kibum who was sitting by his bed - it was sheer coincidence, others had been there during the time, but it was Kibum, and when Donghae awoke, it was Kibum that he saw. It was Kibum who stayed there throughout the next few weeks.
Still, even now, no one knew what had happened to Donghae, beyond the clinical diagnosis that the doctors gave them in the hospital (“Severe injuries most likely obtained from beatings obtained over a long period of time, and clear signs of sexual abuse.”), but Donghae never told them what had happened. He refused to give the name of his abuser, or talk about anything that happened in the three missing years from when he was sold to when he turned up, half dead, on the Kim family doorstep. Sungmin couldn’t help either - all he could knew was that Donghae, like him, had been sold to the Choi family, but they had been separated once they got there. He had seen very little of Donghae since that time.
“Sometimes,” said Eeteuk in a low snarl to Kangin, and while Eeteuk didn’t get angry often, when he was angry, he was angry, “I want to just blow the entire Choi family estate to smithereens.”
Whoever it was, and whatever had happened, it affected Donghae. It was hard to see, to begin with, when the boy flinched from anyone who came near him or who spoke to him, but eventually, as they helped him through, Eunhyuk and Sungmin bolstering him along, Donghae recovered. Unfortunately, something about Kibum ended up dragging on him, pulled him down, made him transform back into the meek, submissive person that he must have been when he was at the Choi house. Whether it was because Kibum reminded him of the person who held him captive, or simply because Kibum was the one he saw when he first woke up - and then was subsequently nursed back to health by, because the others were busy a lot, and Kibum got bored a lot - nobody knew.
***
Siwon was white when Heechul finished telling him the story, knuckles white as he clenched the arms of his chair. “The Choi family?” he asked hoarsely.
“Bastards, aren’t they?” said Heechul casually, tapping his nails against the table in front of him. “According to Eunhyuk, Donghae was always a bit weird and happy-go-lucky, but apparently it’s nothing like now. He jumps from one thing to the other, always thinking and changing his mind, always hyper, and always desperate for affection, so he’s always hanging onto people.” His fingers stopped drumming the table sharply, as if the noise was annoying him. “It’s cute, but you’ve got to remember where that springs from.”
“And Kibum?”
“Kibum hates it,” said Heechul with a sigh. “He sees the way that Donghae acts around other people, sees the way that he smiles and laughs, but he’s never been like that with Kibum, not for a long time, much as Kibum would like it. It’s hard to know with Kibum, but I think he likes Donghae when he’s being himself. Likes in that way, I mean.”
“Oh,” said Siwon softly, still white, his fists clenched in his lap.
“I think if any one of us found out who was the one who did that to Donghae, we’d kill that person.” Siwon glanced at him, found that Heechul’s mouth was twisted into a sneer, eyes hard - if no one else did, then Heechul would.
“He still won’t say?” asked Siwon softly. “You just know that it was someone from the Choi family?”
“That’s all Sungmin knew, and Donghae won’t give us anything else. I think he’s trying to forget that anything ever happened.”
“The Choi family disgust me,” said Siwon, so harshly that Heechul raised an eyebrow at him.
“Sounds like a grudge,” he said casually.
“They don’t know how to act at all,” said Siwon.
“Well, that’s not true,” said Heechul, standing up and pressing imaginary creases from his trousers. “They certainly know how to act like bastards. Living here, you’ll soon see. We always seem to be cleaning up their messes.”
***
Shindong grinned and cheerfully put a pile of papers onto the desk in front of Siwon, before hopping up onto the desk behind him and kicking his legs back and forth. “Do your best,” he said in a sing-song tone. Siwon’s smile was actually not forced at all, as he reached for the top paper. Shindong made an approving noise.
“I need to do this, right?” Siwon raised his head and grinned. “If you’re going to trust me with actual family business?”
“Paperwork is a bit of a ritual,” said Shindong. “Everyone does it, but newcomers always do the most. Even Eeteuk did, once.”
“I don’t mind,” said Siwon. “I want to do what I can.”
Shindong looked at him appraisingly. “You surprise me,” he said, tipping his head to the side. “Is your doing the paperwork just your bit for the family?”
“Yes.”
“Your level of loyalty would make Heechul scornful,” said Shindong and noted with a wry smile the way that Siwon glanced at him at the mention of Heechul’s name and then quickly away, biting his bottom lip. “Ah,” said Shindong softly. “I see.”
“What?” asked Siwon, too quickly, too nervous.
“Heechul?” asked Shindong. “Really?” Siwon looked away. “I mean, you probably already know the problems there, what with Hankyung and all, but there’s another one, that you probably haven’t already thought of.”
“Questioning my reason,” said Siwon quietly, putting his pen down. “I’ve already thought about it.”
“Exactly,” said Shindong. “Why join up, if not to try to get Heechul? People will ask you that. Or worse, they’ll expect you to have joined up simply to be close to him, in which case your reason is pathetic, at best.” He grinned. “Although Sungmin will think it’s the cutest thing ever.”
“I have other reasons,” said Siwon.
“Private reasons, no doubt,” said Shindong with a shrug. “I don’t expect you to tell me.” He frowned. “But Heechul, really? Sometimes I wonder about this little thing called taste that everyone around me seems to be missing.”
“No,” said Siwon hesitantly. “Not just Hee-”
Shindong’s mobile phone sprung into life with a sudden outburst of music signalling a phone call. He jumped off the table and checked the ID - Eeteuk. “Yeah?” he asked, after he had flipped it open and held it to his ear.
“I need you to come down the office, now,” said Kangin curtly, and then hung up. Shindong blinked, and then pulled a face - he hated it when his two bosses swapped phones, it always made answering his phone more difficult.
“Kangin needs to see me,” he said to Siwon, who was looking at him curiously. “Will you be okay here?”
Siwon jumped up out of his seat. “Can I come?” he asked. “I need to ask him about some paperwork that needs his signature, but I haven’t been able to find him the past few days.”
“I think it’ll be okay,” said Shindong doubtfully.
Opening the door to Eeteuk and Kangin’s office showed that actually, it probably wasn’t okay. Eeteuk was sitting on the sofa talking in a low voice to a girl with her head held in her hands, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. Kangin was sat behind one of the desks, filling out a form and he looked up when Shindong and Siwon came in - and then he frowned at Siwon.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He didn’t seem particularly annoyed, just curious but was too wound up to take the annoyance from his voice.
“I had something I needed you to sign,” said Siwon nervously. “But I can come back later if you want?”
“Shindong,” said Eeteuk, motioning for Shindong to come closer. “I need you to take her to the hospital.”
“Ours?”
“Yes,” said Eeteuk. “But before you do, take her to one of the guest rooms and get her to change out of her clothes into something else. Keep the clothes as evidence.”
“Oh,” said Shindong, as if he understood, and he hunkered down to smile in a friendly manner at the girl, who raised her tear-stained face to look at him. Siwon noticed with a sharp jerk in his stomach that she was young, merely in her late teens, her cream blouse ripped along the front - she was forced to clutch it closed with one hand. “Come on,” said Shindong in a kind tone. “We’re going to get you sorted out.”
“Here,” said Kangin, and handed Shindong the insurance form for the girl to give in at the hospital, the one that would give her the very best medical examination paid for by the Kim family. When the door closed behind Shindong and the girl, Kangin sighed heavily and turned to Siwon. “What do you need me to sign?” he asked heavily.
“Just these,” said Siwon quietly, and handed Kangin the pile that he needed to finish. Kangin sat down and began to sign them systematically, not looking at what he was signing. Eeteuk sat and stared at the coffee table in front of him. “Um,” said Siwon, a little tentative. “That girl-”
“Raped,” said Eeteuk bitterly. “From the description, it sounds like one of the men from the Choi family, though we don’t know most of their names. It was near the river, which means that they’ve come into our territory, again.”
“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” said Kangin, voice tense. “They’re getting too cocky. It’s been like this ever since Choi Sikyu took over the family just before my father died. The Choi family was a wild, out of control thing even then, but ever since then…”
“Choi Sikyu?” Siwon bit his lip. “The head of the family?”
“That’s him,” sighed Kangin. “You’d think he was training his family to be animals.”
“Is this sort of thing normal?” asked Siwon.
“Remarkably so,” said Eeteuk, staring still at the coffee table, unseeing. “We find the murdered bodies of people who owe them debt and who didn’t pay up in our streets or in the river that runs through our territory. We find girls, and sometimes men, wandering the streets after having been attacked by members. And we only know what happens in our side, nothing about what happens over there. It may be worse, and we don’t know.”
“It is,” said Siwon softly. “I just never realised that it would affect this family too.”
“Good job that you got out,” said Eeteuk with a weak smile.
Siwon looked stricken by that. “Yeah,” he said, and then took the finished papers off Kangin and quickly left the room. Eeteuk raised an eyebrow at Kangin.
“Probably worried about his family,” said Kangin.