Survivability 07: Carousel [KPop / Bleach]
Title: Survivability 07: And the Carousel Spins On
Author: verocity
Fandom: SHiNee / Super Junior M / Dong Bang Shin Ki / Bleach
Featuring: JongHyun / TaeMin / Onew / Zhou Mi / JunSu / ChangMin / SeungGi / YeoSeob
Pairings: -none-
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Harsh language, scenes of combat
Genre: Action, AU, Cross-over
Summary: (... I have no idea how to summarize this. Familiarity with the past chapters would be very helpful.)
Word Count: 12,170
Winter is coming...
JongHyun snapped to attention and looked around wildly. That voice...
"Yes, Kim JongHyun?" Mr. Ock, the history teacher, asked sharply.
JongHyun turned to smile at him, hoping that was enough of a peace-offering for both sleeping in class and the sudden grabbing of attention, and slouched back down over his desk without waiting to be acknowledged. Around him, the rest of the class sniggered silently enough to sound innocently ignorant yet loudly enough for JongHyun to hear. He ignored them. Just a few minutes more and he'd be home free...
He must have been hearing things. He closed his eyes again and readied to continue singing the Departure Aria of the La Traviata in his dreams. It was such a moving song...
Winter is coming...
JongHyun's eyes snapped back open. The voice came from inside his head.
"Yah," YeongIl, his seatmate, whispered while keeping his eyes on the teacher. "Anything wrong, hyung?"
From his slouched position, JongHyun stared up at him and wondered if insanity started like this. "Hey, how far away is winter?" he asked casually.
YeongIl's forehead knitted in confusion, although JongHyun had to admit it was almost a permanent look on his seatmate. "Winter, hyung? Are you that obsessed with snow? It's still the middle of summer."
"That's what I thought." JongHyun sighed and cursed the facts that he was taking supplementary academic courses during summer break, his favorite season was half a year away, and there was a stranger saying weird stuff in his head.
He wouldn't have been bothered about the last one if the voice had said something sensible.
~*~
TaeMin pushed and pulled himself through the water until he bumped the edge of the pool. He turned, the other way, kicked himself off the wall, and tried to work on his strokes. "Yah, TaeMinnie!" he heard as he surfaced for a quick breath.
He swam on until he finished the lap and swiftly pulled himself up the pool edge and collapsed, panting, on the wet tiles.
"You're pushing yourself too hard again!" his cousin chided.
TaeMin just laughed and spat out the water that made it inside his mouth. "DongUk-hyung, help me up." He raised a hand and looked imploringly at his cousin.
DongUk grinned and pushed TaeMin back into the pool with his foot. There was a surprised "Yah!" followed by a loud splash of water. TaeMin feigned difficulty in raising his head above the water and yelled urgently. "Hyung! I'm drowning! Help me!"
DongUk stuck his tongue out at him and tapped his glasses smartly. "Won't fall for that one. And these are new jeans." He sat on one of the poolside benches and watched as TaeMin rose up the steel bars on the other end of the pool and walked, dripping wet, to the towel rack. "One of your friends is down at the lobby," DongUk told him.
"Oh? Which one?" TaeMin asked as he toweled his hair dry.
"You have more than one?"
"Hyung!"
"Your friend from your dance classes."
TaeMin contemplated this. "KiKwang? He told me was going home to the provinces... Huh. He must've missed me," he said in a tone that obviously tried to imply bitterness that his cousin was less than desirably affectionate.
DongUk rolled his eyes with enough exaggeration to communicate Why would I miss you, brat? with aggression built on fondness. "No, someone darker. The one who used to dance offbeat?"
"Offbeat?" TaeMin asked blankly as he pulled on a bathrobe. "Oh, JongHyun-hyung!"
"That one." DongUk tossed TaeMin's phone at him, which his cousin deftly caught.
"JongHyun-hyung isn't a dancer," TaeMin said defensively. "He's part of the chorus. He just asked me for dance lessons for fun."
"Maybe you should ask him for singing lessons in return," DongUk said innocently as they walked towards the rooftop elevators. "Then maybe the rest of us won't be so tortured whenever you take a bath."
"Hyung!"
~*~
Back when they first met, JongHyun had a lot of affection for TaeMin. The younger boy was smart, witty, ambitious, a great dancer, a crappy singer, and - most important of all - shorter than JongHyun.
But as months passed and as their friendship blossomed into a deeper camaraderie of verbal snipes and mutually shared ambition, JongHyun learned to like TaeMin less despite the brotherhood that cemented their connection. It had nothing to do with TaeMin's singing (which got better, yes, but not well enough for his standards) or unique way of being innocently sarcastic (JongHyun recognized that he needed a challenger to keep him on his toes) or even TaeMin's way of absorbing dance steps like he was born knowing them (JongHyun could hit notes an entire octave higher than TaeMin ever could, and that was good enough for him). It was because, in a span of three short months, TaeMin erupted from a runt that barely reached JongHyun's nose to a giant that JongHyun could only talk to if he tilted his head upwards.
JongHyun once considered that he may have made the wrong decision about whom to befriend among his fellow opera house trainees, but by then they were too comfortable with each other that breaking up the friendship just didn't seem worth it. Besides, there were such things as heel-lifts.
Deep inside, the romantic in him remarked that, had it not been for them being both guys, it would have been a dramatic match made in heaven. It was a friendship bound with music and art, of the manifestation of human beauty, of wit and sarcasm and knowing when to say sorry and when to say nothing at all, and - the weightiest of all - of farting contests (which JongHyun always won, be it by loudness or sheer olfactory malevolence) and spit bombs (JongHyun swore that his left hear had never been the same ever since they discovered TaeMin's impeccable aim). Fortunately, nobody ruined everything by falling in love with the other party and causing the oniony depths of their relationship to develop into something flowery that caused birds to suddenly appear every time he was near.
Not that JongHyun had anything against that kind of romance. He'd long accepted that some guys simply rolled that way, but he was also confident that he's not one of them. He really didn't need anything to make his self-concept more complicated when he was at the stage of his life where everything in skirts just seemed to turn him on. So it would help if a certain feminine someone would stop bringing up that he was pretty enough to be a girl if he just grew his hair longer, because JongHyun's dreams were confused enough as it is, thanks. (He once dreamed of being chased by a killer cabbage with the teeth of a tiger. He considered seeing a psychiatrist about why that turned him on so much until he realized he'd have to recollect the dream, and that was that.)
Sometimes, onions were just better than flowers and lovebirds.
"Hyung!" TaeMin called excitedly as soon as the elevator door opened.
JongHyun stood up from the lobby's sofa and tossed the fashion magazine he was browsing through onto the rack. "Took you long enough," he said, punching TaeMin on the arm when he got close. He led the way out of the apartment complex and into the bright sunlight.
"Where are we going? Are you taking me out on a date?" TaeMin asked, bewildered. "If you are, I'm letting you know here and now that you're my hyung and I don't judge you for being like that and I only look like a girl but- ow!"
"Don't flatter yourself," JongHyun said as he rubbed his knuckles. It momentarily skipped his mind that TaeMin was so bony. "Grow tits and then worry about me taking you on a date."
TaeMin furrowed his forehead thoughtfully. "Doable," he decided.
"What?!"
"Kidding! So where are we going?" TaeMin asked hastily when JongHyun seemed unwilling to let go of his disbelief.
JongHyun shook his head. He really had to be on guard at all times against TaeMin's wit. "Nowhere," he answered. "I just wanted to go out. School's driving me nuts!"
TaeMin puffed his cheeks. It wasn't the sympathetic reaction JongHyun expected, but he was feeling better already. It was harder to feel bothered about the possibility of having a surprise tenant in his head when TaeMin was around. Verbal spars between them took concentration.
"But supplementary classes are good for you!" TaeMin told him. "At least this way you won't have so much trouble in school."
"Not likely," JongHyun admitted. "Even my superior intellect can't remember everything I'm being taught when half my mind is preoccupied with just seizing the day and making the most of the season."
"And by 'making the most of the season', I assume you mean going to the beach and ogling at all the girls in bikinis?" TaeMin asked nonchalantly.
"Got that right."
"I dunno, hyung..." TaeMin said, pouting thoughtfully. "How would you hide your heel lifts at the beach?"
JongHyun frowned. "Why would I wear heel lifts to the beach?"
"You expect the girls to ogle you back when they can't even see you down there? Ow!"
"I'm adorably petit!"
"So's Mickey Mouse, and no one's swooning over him. Ow!"
"You know, you're a good friend, TaeMinnie," JongHyun said honestly. "It's like having my own personal punching bag that follows me around."
~*~
Their circuitous route around town led them to two different arcades, an ice cream store, a clothes shop where JongHyun pined for a jacket that was deliciously flattering for his figure but was too expensive even though it was already on sale, a music store where JongHyun bought a new A tuning fork because his old one was going slightly flat, another arcade where TaeMin absolutely creamed his hyung at a dancing game, a food stall where they binged on barbecued pork intestines and chicken gizzard, another arcade where TaeMin miraculously beat JongHyun at the karaoke machine by singing loudly instead of artfully, and by the time they reached the soda parlor the sky was burning with the colors of sunset and their feet were screaming bloody murder at them.
By then, TaeMin had figured out that JongHyun was bothered about something, but it didn't cross his mind to wait for any revelation. They never shared serious problems with each other until after it was resolved. He didn't know how it worked out that way, but it was good enough for him.
TaeMin was sipping his strawberry-vanilla float and trying to figure JongHyun out without looking like it when snatches of conversation from some people at the counter drifted over to where they were seated. JongHyun caught his eye and silently agreed to eavesdrop.
"... but the opera ... only been three..." a tall, lanky boy said in the soothing voice mothers used on excited children.
His companion, a shorter, round-faced boy sounded exasperated. "... long enough! Why don't ... we're useless or anything!"
"They have ... of time."
"Whatever." The two made their way to a table on the other side of the parlor and their conversation became too muted to hear.
JongHyun raised an eyebrow at TaeMin. "They were talking about the opera house, right? Our opera house?"
TaeMin took another sip and unknowingly earned a cream mustache. "Closed for three weeks? I'd say so."
JongHyun glanced at them and saw the smaller boy looking dejected. "Think they know something about why it was abruptly closed down?"
"Hard to say. Why don't we go over and find out?"
As one, they looked at their quarry again and sized them up. "The shorter guy looks like a wimp," JongHyun assessed.
"I think I recognize him," TaeMin said. "Lives about two blocks from my house. I pass by his place on my way to school."
"Doesn't look strong at all. I can take him if things turn ugly."
"Not that I don't admire this overt display of masculinity, but why don't we think of another approach first?"
JongHyun thought about this. "A fun approach or a subtle approach?"
"A sane approach?" TaeMin hinted strongly.
"Also known as the boring approach," JongHyun retorted.
TaeMin gave a theatrical sigh. "Fine. What's the fun approach?"
JongHyun's grin was equal parts adventurous and manic. "Wanna visit home sweet home?"
TaeMin's first thought was to say 'No, absolutely not. We were told the place was dangerously unsafe for mysterious reasons, we'd be breaking and entering, and we don't know if other people are in there doing unspeakable stuff like... whatever unspeakable stuff people do in action dramas.' But the truth was, he missed the opera house. Whenever there was a production, he and JongHyun practically lived there with all the other performers. The chorus, the dancers, the orchestra... the only thing that bound their family together was art. Without opera, everyone drifted apart to their own worlds. He was lucky enough to still have JongHyun around, and there were rare moments when he and KiKwang were able to relive some old dances together just for the heck of it, but that didn't deny the overwhelming moments at three in the morning when he'd wake up filled to the brim with the sadness of missing his secondary family of artists.
So even when the rational part of his head was screaming against the idea, three weeks' worth of pent up emotions made him say yes.
It was just as well that they didn't consider asking the people they eavesdropped on about the topic, because the tall one was armed with a memory modification device and he wasn't afraid to use it.
~*~
They stood before the dark building under the creeping twilight sky.
TaeMin shifted uneasily. "Tell me, hyung, has home ever looked so..."
"Welcoming?" JongHyun hazarded uncertainly.
"I was thinking more like 'foreboding', but sure, let's go with that."
The opera house loomed before them. It was the most basic of all architectural designs: a dark gray cube with balconies and pillars and gargoyles and spires added as mere afterthoughts, as if the architect realized the tasteless irony of people absorbing the artistic drama of opera in a building so drab. The over-all effect was that of a decades-old cake decorated by an over-enthusiastic five year-old, but none of the patrons minded as long as the place looked discouragingly elite.
But JongHyun and TaeMin had to admit this much: without spotlights, torches, candles, or any light source to liven the place up, the building looked as close to vampiric as possible in center of the city. And it preyed on their imagination.
"It's still the same building, right?" TaeMin asked, trying not to betray the apprehension in his voice.
JongHyun gulped, and spoke more to convince himself than his friend. "Come on, it's still home. We've been here at much later times, right? Midnight, even."
TaeMin nodded a bit too enthusiastically. "Yeah, yeah. Good times, those."
"Yeah."
Winter...
JongHyun twitched.
Some people, when confronted by the thought of something terrible after a bad day, could rationally decide that enough was enough and just indulge in some hot cocoa in front of the TV while the rest of the world confronted its own nightmares. And if JongHyun was one of them, this would have been a much shorter story.
"Let's go. Fighting!" he said a bit too shrilly, but that was enough. He pulled out his phone and used it as a flashlight. TaeMin followed quickly behind him, and soon they were shrouded in the darkness of the alley beside the building.
The main entrances were obviously barred. But JongHyun and TaeMin lived in the opera house for months that felt like years, and they knew entrances and passages that wouldn't have been noticed if they weren't specifically being sought. There were, for example, slightly convenient vacancies in the brickwork that could, with some effort, be used to climb up the wall to a second-story balcony with a door whose lock always opened to a strong enough thump. The two adventurers employed this now, and JongHyun noted with some slight resentment that TaeMin didn't have to reach up for the handholds as much as he still did.
But soon, resentment or not, and slightly drunk with the adrenaline of breaking into a place that somehow still felt like home even with all the shadows, both boys treaded the familiar hallways with no idea where to head first.
"The dorms?" TaeMin suggested.
"All the way up to the seventh floor?" JongHyun continued.
"Not the dorms, then."
JongHyun nodded. "How about the rehearsal studios?"
"Which ones?"
JongHyun tried to control his shiver, but he wasn't sure if he succeeded. "Not that I'm scared or anything-"
"Of course not, hyung."
"-but I don't think I can deal with your studio right now. There are mirrors everywhere."
TaeMin squeaked at the imagery. He gulped. "Good idea. So... the chorus studio?"
JongHyun shrugged, trying to tease the nonchalance back into his stature. "As good as any, I guess."
The past three weeks had not been kind to the building: there was a fine coating of dust everywhere. And if TaeMin had chosen to pay attention to the faint nagging at the back of his mind, he'd have realized that dust was not supposed to glitter at the lights their cellphones made. But he was too busy not thinking of the many things that could be hiding behind the shadows.
That was the thing about the dark: one could know a place like the back of his hand under the reassurance of light, but at the moment of darkness, one can never be sure if it's still the same place. Or if there are people lying in wait for him to act on that confidence.
They made their way to maze of rooms and corridors behind the stage and found the familiar yet darkly alien studio where JongHyun had spent countless hours honing his voice with people of similar talents and inclinations. He entered and made his way to the harpsichord. There was a piece on the stand.
"Hyung," TaeMin said, alarmed. "Don't wander off."
"I'm not wandering off, I'm just here," he said loudly, his courage boosted by the distraction the room offered. "Celeste Aida. The last thing we were studying before we were ushered out so abruptly."
TaeMin softly pressed a key on the harpsichord. The instrument breathed a reedy semblance of its former life.
Winter is...
JongHyun jerked around and stared at the door. The voice sounded... different. But before he could dissect how different, he was knocked back against the wall by a flurry of lanky and bony limbs. JongHyun's ears rang with a loud scream of terror as TaeMin wrapped himself around him, teeth chattering and breath going shallow.
"TaeMin, what the hell-"
"Someone's crying out there!" TaeMin chittered between breaths and clicks of teeth.
JongHyun froze. "What? Crying? When?"
"Just now! Didn't you hear it was faint and scary and hyung we have to get out of here it's scary and there it goes again!"
"Then shut up and let me listen" JongHyun yelled.
And there it was. If he turned his ears to the right direction, he heard the faint wailing at the very edge of his hearing. A cry full of sorrow. A cry in an empty auditorium.
But JongHyun's ears were sharpened by years of exposure to the musicality of sound, and the first thing that popped into his head (apart from the sudden spike of fear and adrenaline that is) was that it wasn't a human cry.
"That's a violin," he whispered as he fought to slow his heartbeat. "Someone's playing a violin out there."
"Hyung..."
JongHyun strained his ears. Fa sharp above middle C. He hummed it in falsetto.
TaeMin clung to his tighter. "Hyung! Stop it, it's creepy!"
JongHyun steeled his resolve. "Come on, it's probably one of the violinists from the orchestra."
"What would they be doing here?" TaeMin asked, at the edge of tears.
"Same reason as ours? Maybe? Stop being such a big baby," JongHyun scolded. "Come on, I want to see who it is."
"Hyung..."
JongHyun forced TaeMin's arms open and wriggled free. "Then stay here if you want. I'm checking who it is." And he walked steadily towards the door with TaeMin wiping at his eyes and following not centimeters behind.
~*~
Zhou Mi squinted through the desktop magnifying glass as he gently, carefully, delicately nudged an almost microscopic shard of lee stone using a strand of his own hair. The stone was brittle enough at its natural crystal sizes; manipulating a sliver that's thinner than a human hair onto a paper-thin silver disc was proving to be one of his toughest challenges yet.
Behind him, JinKi was focusing all his concentration on trying not to be a distraction. Easier said than done, considering he still hasn't gained full control over the subconscious surges and tides of his spirit pressure.
A loud chord of shamisen music blared over the speakers.
"Damn it!" Zhou Mi hissed.
"It wasn't me!" JinKi yelled preemptively. "I was just sitting here minding my own business and I didn't do anything I swear-"
"Shut up," Mi told him distractedly as he ran to the walk-in closet that hid the communication transponder that established lines between worlds. He pressed a short sequence of buttons that caused the screen to brighten and show a concerned shinigami on the other end of the line.
JinKi was expecting a correspondent from Soul Society. Maybe even Lieutenant JunSu since he and Zhou Mi seemed to be have found some semblance of productive and professional balance. But he recognized the face on the screen: it belonged to the shinigami who was stationed to protecting this part of the city. JinKi would have sniggered at the odd camera angle as if they were watching SeungHyun's face from below (he could practically see up the shinigami's nose!), but he'd craved for anything exciting to happen ever since his powers awakened, and if he behaved properly he might just be able to get his wish.
"SeungHyun," Mi said tensely to the somewhat distorted face on the screen. "There's been a breach at the opera house."
They saw SeungHyun nod. "I'm on it." The video shifted to quick blurs as SeungHyun began moving too quickly for the spirit technology to render. Flash Steps.
Zhou Mi ran to his supply closet and pulled out the bag containing his crossbow, and a small cylinder of something silvery that JinKi had never seen before.
"You're just leaving me here?" JinKi almost complained. But he'd successfully removed the whine from his voice, just in case there was still a chance things could work his way.
"I can't drag you along," Mi said tersely. He reached into a drawer, plugged something into his ear, and tossed another piece to JinKi. "Put it in," he instructed and ran out of the shop.
JinKi did. He could hear faint buzzes through the ear piece. He heard a tinny version of Zhou Mi's voice crackle to life. "You're too valuable to bring to battle," Mi's voice explained as he panted. "I've already sent a message to JunSu that something's up, and I'm guessing SeungHyun's sent an alert to his division."
"What, you want me to just stand here and record everything I hear?" JinKi asked blankly.
"Not the time to be an idiot," Mi's voice said irritably. "Scout the opera house with your powers. Conserve your energy. Don't waste it on fine details."
JinKi nodded. He didn't know that adrenaline highs could also be experienced vicariously through someone else, but somehow he also caught the excitement despite being stuck in Zhou Mi's shop. And now that he came to think about it, that was the entire point of his abilities: he could experience things from afar. (There was also a small nugget of truth about him being totally useless in battle because he didn't even know the first thing about combat, but that piece of information was ignored for the sake of his ego.)
He threw his mind to the mental direction of his target. "Two people. Human people," he clarified. "Wait. There's a small hint of spiritual awareness in one of them. But not awakened."
Zhou Mi's panting was falling into a rhythm as his body got used to the effort. "Are you sure? That wouldn't have set off my alarms."
JinKi frowned. "I'm telling you what I can sense. But really, that's all."
"Then there's something else that you can't sense," SeungHyun's deep rumble said right in JinKi's ear, which spiked JinKi's heart rate through sheer surprise. "Remember, your powers are limited to the world you're currently in."
JinKi scolded himself for not realizing that Zhou Mi would have thought that three-way communication was needed. "But the opera house is in our world," he said.
"Maybe," was SeungHyun's frustratingly short answer.
Mi's voice spoke on. "Just keep monitoring the opera house. And wait for any response from JunSu on the transponder. If anything goes wrong tonight, you are to go with him to the spirit world."
JinKi decided he mustn't have heard that right. "Wha-"
"Was I not clear enough?" Mi's voice cut in sharply.
"I'll die there! I won't even be able to breathe!" There was a definite whining component in JinKi's voice this time.
"We've found a way around that," Mi assured him. "JunSu knows what to do."
JinKi froze. Something was... "But Zhou Mi-"
"Listen-"
"No! They're gone! The opera house is empty!"
The sudden radio silence unsettled JinKi. Long enough for tendrils of doubt to seep in and wonder if their communication was suddenly cut off. "Damn this," JinKi muttered.
"What do you mean, 'empty'?" SeungHyun asked quietly, and JinKi breathed a long sigh of relief. "I've been on the rooftop for the past half minute. No one left."
"I don't know!" JinKi wailed. "They're just gone! They were there and suddenly they weren't!"
"Tell us where they were last," Zhou Mi said, his breathing more audible that earlier. Softly, in the background, JinKi heard a deep twang - Mi was testing his crossbow.
JinKi closed his eyes and opened the gates of energy that he knew were regulating the flow of his spirit. He urged the rivers of power that welled up his pressure to flow faster, harder... and suddenly the world around him that rose and fell with the ebbs and tides of previously unseen particles grew so much sharper than before. JinKi cast his mind to the opera house once more and read the echoes of shapes and edges that flowed back to him. Standing by the staff entrance in an alley behind the building was Zhou Mi, whose spiritual presence was unbelievably gigantic compared to JinKi's own. Then there was SeungHyun's weaker but more polished field of influence at the rooftop.
And inside the building... Traces. Like streaks of white left by fingers dipped in chalk dust and wiped on a blackboard. Faint, growing fainter, but still distinct enough to be followed...
Into a vacuum of energy, the likes of which JinKi had never been told of before. A section where JinKi's senses felt distorted and confused. A hole in spirit space.
No, not a hole, JinKi thought with conviction. A mouth. Hungry. Still chewing on something. A chill ran through his whole body.
"They were on the stage," he whispered shakily. "There's something there. Something bad. Zhou Mi, it's bad. Get out of there!"
Silence again, but his senses told him that the ones he was talking to were deep in thought. There came a short but numbingly sharp flare of SeungHyun's power, which vanished too quickly to be read but JinKi still tasted the thoughts that molded that flash. It was a message. And there was only one reason for SeungHyun to leave a message.
He wanted to tell them that there were times for bravery, and there were times for heroism, but this was just a time to get out while they still can... and if he was calmer, perhaps he could have thought of the words to say so.
"We're going in," SeungHyun's deep rumbling voice said in JinKi's earphones.
"But-"
"We'll be careful," Zhou Mi assured him.
"But!"
"You stay there," Zhou mi interrupted again. "Whatever happens you are to stay there until JunSu fetches you. Understood?"
JinKi gulped. He'd quite forgotten that Zhou Mi wasn't there to see, but he nodded all the same. He watched the scene in his mind unfold. And minutes later, when both Zhou Mi's and SeungHyun's presence also vanished into the void, JinKi wondered if he was a coward.
~*~
TaeMin woke to the feeling of sand in his mouth and pressed against the sides of his face. Was he at the beach?
It didn't even taste like sand, he thought. Nothing like the times when he fell asleep while sunbathing at the beach and he unknowingly rolled over and breathed in sand through his mouth.
And the air smelled wrong. It wasn't salty like at the beach, where even the air was filled with the scents of life and death happening every second at every scale. The air here was... flat. It wasn't even stale. Like there had never been anything to smell or go stale for... ever.
And now that his mind was gathering momentum, TaeMin realized that he couldn't hear anyone laughing. People were always laughing at the beach. JongHyun-hyung's stupid laughter could-
JongHyun.
TaeMin blearily opened his eyes and pushed himself off the white sand.
At the back of his mind, he noted that this wasn't the whiteness of sand made from corroded rocks. No, this was sand - he shivered visibly at the thought - with whiteness like sun-bleached bone. With every grain rounded to perfect smoothness by wind.
But no wind was blowing. TaeMin looked up to check the clouds, but there were none in the sky. Neither were there stars or the moon. In fact, the sky was not the rich, deep purple of the night that he had gazed up to every time. No, what loomed above him was the true blackness of the dark when there was no light by which to see.
And yet, he could see. He had no trouble seeing.
Not that there was anything to see. All around him, there was nothing but the unbroken uniformity of sand that was bleached by a sun that wasn't there, rounded by winds that didn't blow. He could make out the faint outlines of what could possibly be mountains far into the distance, but they were too faint for him to be sure.
Not that he was in any state to be sure of anything.
When he turned, he saw lying behind him the prone body of his hyung.
TaeMin pulled his body to attention and crawled over. "Yah," he said dryly. "Hyung, wake up. JongHyun-hyung?"
There was no answer, but TaeMin could see JongHyun's chest rise and fall to the beat of deep slumber. TaeMin prodded him repeatedly to no avail.
He wiped at his dry mouth and ignored the way the sand grated against his lips. How did they get here?
Somewhere, from so far away that TaeMin knew no sound that soft could have possibly traveled that far, was a faint crying. It was-
The same sound from the opera house. The same note, at least. He couldn't tell about the texture, but JongHyun-hyung said it was a violin. He could probably check again... if he was awake.
He poked JongHyun hard at the waist. "Yah," he added for good measure, but it was a half-hearted effort. If hyung was going to wake, he would at his own time. If at all.
TaeMin chased the last thought away from his mind and stood up uncertainly. No searing pain anywhere, no broken bones, no pulled muscles... his body didn't seem in any way injured, just weak and fragile. His throat felt dry but not parched. His muscles felt numb but they were always like that whenever he'd just woken up. It could be because of the sleep. How long had he been asleep, anyway?
His watch had stopped ticking. He patted his pockets for his phone. No luck. JongHyun-hyung's phone wasn't anywhere, either.
TaeMin reviewed his situation, such as it was: he was effectively by himself in a strange desert under blackness so profound that the night would have been afraid of it. But he could see. And there was music from far away. Such as it was. He remembered being afraid back at the opera house, up until... what happened anyway? He'd heard something crying and JongHyun-hyung said he was going to check it out, so they walked quietly to the wings... and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a desert.
He wondered what happened to his fear. Did he suddenly just go brave out of the blue?
He could just wait here. He could just lie back down and wait for JongHyun-hyung to awaken. He'd know what to do. If he wakes up.
TaeMin shook his head. No. That didn't seem like a good idea. He dragged to mind the motto that he lived his life by lately. WWJD. He wore an armband bearing those letters so he could see it every day. What Would JongHyun Do?
Feeling somewhat foolish that this wasn't how things were normally supposed to be, and then feeling even more deeply foolish for wondering about normalcy at a time like this, TaeMin wrapped JongHyun's arms around his neck and lifted his hyung on his back. Not that he'd ever say it out loud, but this was another reason to be thankful for JongHyun's height - he was heavy enough with his muscles and all. Being taller would have just made things worse.
He walked toward the violin music. Or at least toward the direction he believed the music was coming from. It was hard to tell. He reasoned that it was as good a direction as any, and there was something comfortable about walking and huffing and puffing because of the weight on his back: it distracted him, for now, about what could be waiting for him once he reached the music's source.
But he knew it was the better option. He felt with absolute conviction that if he chose to stay, he'd have waited forever.
It was a good thing that he didn't continue thinking about what happened to his fear. The human mind is a very delicate thing. It filters out what it deems too bothersome or too harmful for its own sake. Some things were just too small to bother with, like the fine details of how ink spiked on paper fibers. And like how swimming in an ocean felt exactly the same as swimming in the sea, some things were just too big to notice at all.
~*~
JunSu kicked his office door open.
He wasn't angry. It just so happened that his arms were full of more discarded reports that he'd scrounged from all over his Division. They would fit in nicely in the small hedge maze he'd been constructing in his office. That ought to earn him a few more points in the anti-neatfreak race.
"Love what you've done with the place, JunSu," SeungGi said as he trailed along. He, too, carried an armful of unclassified 12th Division paperwork. He was willing to help the other lieutenants in their little contest, provided that they weren't actually threats to his own progress. "Very... modern. Definitely worth the effort, I'd say."
JunSu grinned proudly as he navigated their path through the twists and turns of his personal labyrinth. "It's just a matter of not throwing anything away. It helps to have a nearly obsessive-compulsive captain."
He heard the shrill, insistent beeping from the console on his desk as he turned the last corner. SeungGi noticed it, too.
"Is that the communication device the human mechanist invented?" SeungGi asked with pronounced interest. "I've always wanted to see one. The 6th Division won't even let me go near theirs."
"That's because they know you'll take it apart as soon as you look at it," JunSu said. He walked over to the console and, arms still laden with his latest acquisitions, pressed the reception button with his toe. Being flexible really had a lot of benefits. He dragged an empty chair away from its corner with his feet and tried to balance his pile of paper on it while the connection was being established.
A double beep told him it was time to talk. "Hey, Zhou Mi, sorry for getting back to you kinda late. Everyone's kind of busy with-"
The shout from the console nearly caused him to tip his pile of paper over. "Zhou Mi's in trouble!"
JunSu ran to his desk and stared intently at the screen, with SeungGi peering over his shoulder. "JinKi?" JunSu asked, surprised. "Where's Zhou Mi? What happened?"
"There was- there- I was going-"
"Shhh. Deep breaths, as much as you need," JunSu consoled.
On the screen, JinKi nodded tersely and gulped in huge mouthfuls of air until he was calm enough to speak. "He was working on something when one of his alarms went off. The ones at the opera house. He and SeungHyun went over to check on it, and they're gone!"
"Gone?" JunSu repeated for clarification.
"They're gone!"
JunSu fought down the irritation. "Where do your powers say they went?"
"I don't know! They just disappeared! The mouth just swallowed them!"
"Mouth?" JunSu asked, getting more confused. Zhou Mi really didn't have his work cut out for him with this kid.
SeungGi coughed politely behind him, the universal signal for wanting to say something without knowing how to segue flawlessly. "What tripped off the alarms?" he asked the screen. JinKi's eyes darted to him and then clouded over with remembering.
"There were two kids in the opera house," JinKi said. "But they were gone even before Zhou Mi got there. The mouth must have got them, too! One of them had spirit awareness!"
JunSu blinked, and just like that he entered his Serious Business mode. "Okay, listen: stay at the workshop, and whatever you do, do not go after them. We'll take care of it. Clear?"
JinKi nodded manically on screen. JunSu flicked the device off and turned to consult SeungGi. "Two human civilians missing, along with a 6th Division officer and a human with the spirit level of a Lieutenant in a site with a notably dangerous spiritual history."
SeungGi's eyes narrowed. He knew the shinigami protocol by heart, including the ones that most officers thought didn't leave their Division headquarters. "Normally, just a routine dispatch with a Lieutenant escort would suffice. According to normal operations."
JunSu's eyes travelled to the blank screen. "I have confidential reason to believe that the opera house is the site of the first known human-hollow spiritual symbiosis. As a Lieutenant of the Special Ops Division, do I have the weight to override that level of protocol?"
SeungGi chose his words carefully. It wasn't enough to do the good thing; in Soul Society, you also had to do them right. "You would if I back you up. Human-hollow symbiosis is unheard of. That sounds like hollowistic evolution, and the R&D is interested in that."
"Then let's go," JunSu said. "Two lieutenants ought to be enough."
"Better to be over-prepared than under, don't you think?" SeungGi asked. And with a chant softly muttered beneath his breath, he spoke straight into JunSu's mind - as well as every other Lieutenant's - with the Tenteikura.
Link to part 2
Click for Fic Request Thread! Post your prompts/kinks/requests today! (Anonymous allowed)
Author: verocity
Fandom: SHiNee / Super Junior M / Dong Bang Shin Ki / Bleach
Featuring: JongHyun / TaeMin / Onew / Zhou Mi / JunSu / ChangMin / SeungGi / YeoSeob
Pairings: -none-
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Harsh language, scenes of combat
Genre: Action, AU, Cross-over
Summary: (... I have no idea how to summarize this. Familiarity with the past chapters would be very helpful.)
Word Count: 12,170
Winter is coming...
JongHyun snapped to attention and looked around wildly. That voice...
"Yes, Kim JongHyun?" Mr. Ock, the history teacher, asked sharply.
JongHyun turned to smile at him, hoping that was enough of a peace-offering for both sleeping in class and the sudden grabbing of attention, and slouched back down over his desk without waiting to be acknowledged. Around him, the rest of the class sniggered silently enough to sound innocently ignorant yet loudly enough for JongHyun to hear. He ignored them. Just a few minutes more and he'd be home free...
He must have been hearing things. He closed his eyes again and readied to continue singing the Departure Aria of the La Traviata in his dreams. It was such a moving song...
Winter is coming...
JongHyun's eyes snapped back open. The voice came from inside his head.
"Yah," YeongIl, his seatmate, whispered while keeping his eyes on the teacher. "Anything wrong, hyung?"
From his slouched position, JongHyun stared up at him and wondered if insanity started like this. "Hey, how far away is winter?" he asked casually.
YeongIl's forehead knitted in confusion, although JongHyun had to admit it was almost a permanent look on his seatmate. "Winter, hyung? Are you that obsessed with snow? It's still the middle of summer."
"That's what I thought." JongHyun sighed and cursed the facts that he was taking supplementary academic courses during summer break, his favorite season was half a year away, and there was a stranger saying weird stuff in his head.
He wouldn't have been bothered about the last one if the voice had said something sensible.
~*~
TaeMin pushed and pulled himself through the water until he bumped the edge of the pool. He turned, the other way, kicked himself off the wall, and tried to work on his strokes. "Yah, TaeMinnie!" he heard as he surfaced for a quick breath.
He swam on until he finished the lap and swiftly pulled himself up the pool edge and collapsed, panting, on the wet tiles.
"You're pushing yourself too hard again!" his cousin chided.
TaeMin just laughed and spat out the water that made it inside his mouth. "DongUk-hyung, help me up." He raised a hand and looked imploringly at his cousin.
DongUk grinned and pushed TaeMin back into the pool with his foot. There was a surprised "Yah!" followed by a loud splash of water. TaeMin feigned difficulty in raising his head above the water and yelled urgently. "Hyung! I'm drowning! Help me!"
DongUk stuck his tongue out at him and tapped his glasses smartly. "Won't fall for that one. And these are new jeans." He sat on one of the poolside benches and watched as TaeMin rose up the steel bars on the other end of the pool and walked, dripping wet, to the towel rack. "One of your friends is down at the lobby," DongUk told him.
"Oh? Which one?" TaeMin asked as he toweled his hair dry.
"You have more than one?"
"Hyung!"
"Your friend from your dance classes."
TaeMin contemplated this. "KiKwang? He told me was going home to the provinces... Huh. He must've missed me," he said in a tone that obviously tried to imply bitterness that his cousin was less than desirably affectionate.
DongUk rolled his eyes with enough exaggeration to communicate Why would I miss you, brat? with aggression built on fondness. "No, someone darker. The one who used to dance offbeat?"
"Offbeat?" TaeMin asked blankly as he pulled on a bathrobe. "Oh, JongHyun-hyung!"
"That one." DongUk tossed TaeMin's phone at him, which his cousin deftly caught.
"JongHyun-hyung isn't a dancer," TaeMin said defensively. "He's part of the chorus. He just asked me for dance lessons for fun."
"Maybe you should ask him for singing lessons in return," DongUk said innocently as they walked towards the rooftop elevators. "Then maybe the rest of us won't be so tortured whenever you take a bath."
"Hyung!"
~*~
Back when they first met, JongHyun had a lot of affection for TaeMin. The younger boy was smart, witty, ambitious, a great dancer, a crappy singer, and - most important of all - shorter than JongHyun.
But as months passed and as their friendship blossomed into a deeper camaraderie of verbal snipes and mutually shared ambition, JongHyun learned to like TaeMin less despite the brotherhood that cemented their connection. It had nothing to do with TaeMin's singing (which got better, yes, but not well enough for his standards) or unique way of being innocently sarcastic (JongHyun recognized that he needed a challenger to keep him on his toes) or even TaeMin's way of absorbing dance steps like he was born knowing them (JongHyun could hit notes an entire octave higher than TaeMin ever could, and that was good enough for him). It was because, in a span of three short months, TaeMin erupted from a runt that barely reached JongHyun's nose to a giant that JongHyun could only talk to if he tilted his head upwards.
JongHyun once considered that he may have made the wrong decision about whom to befriend among his fellow opera house trainees, but by then they were too comfortable with each other that breaking up the friendship just didn't seem worth it. Besides, there were such things as heel-lifts.
Deep inside, the romantic in him remarked that, had it not been for them being both guys, it would have been a dramatic match made in heaven. It was a friendship bound with music and art, of the manifestation of human beauty, of wit and sarcasm and knowing when to say sorry and when to say nothing at all, and - the weightiest of all - of farting contests (which JongHyun always won, be it by loudness or sheer olfactory malevolence) and spit bombs (JongHyun swore that his left hear had never been the same ever since they discovered TaeMin's impeccable aim). Fortunately, nobody ruined everything by falling in love with the other party and causing the oniony depths of their relationship to develop into something flowery that caused birds to suddenly appear every time he was near.
Not that JongHyun had anything against that kind of romance. He'd long accepted that some guys simply rolled that way, but he was also confident that he's not one of them. He really didn't need anything to make his self-concept more complicated when he was at the stage of his life where everything in skirts just seemed to turn him on. So it would help if a certain feminine someone would stop bringing up that he was pretty enough to be a girl if he just grew his hair longer, because JongHyun's dreams were confused enough as it is, thanks. (He once dreamed of being chased by a killer cabbage with the teeth of a tiger. He considered seeing a psychiatrist about why that turned him on so much until he realized he'd have to recollect the dream, and that was that.)
Sometimes, onions were just better than flowers and lovebirds.
"Hyung!" TaeMin called excitedly as soon as the elevator door opened.
JongHyun stood up from the lobby's sofa and tossed the fashion magazine he was browsing through onto the rack. "Took you long enough," he said, punching TaeMin on the arm when he got close. He led the way out of the apartment complex and into the bright sunlight.
"Where are we going? Are you taking me out on a date?" TaeMin asked, bewildered. "If you are, I'm letting you know here and now that you're my hyung and I don't judge you for being like that and I only look like a girl but- ow!"
"Don't flatter yourself," JongHyun said as he rubbed his knuckles. It momentarily skipped his mind that TaeMin was so bony. "Grow tits and then worry about me taking you on a date."
TaeMin furrowed his forehead thoughtfully. "Doable," he decided.
"What?!"
"Kidding! So where are we going?" TaeMin asked hastily when JongHyun seemed unwilling to let go of his disbelief.
JongHyun shook his head. He really had to be on guard at all times against TaeMin's wit. "Nowhere," he answered. "I just wanted to go out. School's driving me nuts!"
TaeMin puffed his cheeks. It wasn't the sympathetic reaction JongHyun expected, but he was feeling better already. It was harder to feel bothered about the possibility of having a surprise tenant in his head when TaeMin was around. Verbal spars between them took concentration.
"But supplementary classes are good for you!" TaeMin told him. "At least this way you won't have so much trouble in school."
"Not likely," JongHyun admitted. "Even my superior intellect can't remember everything I'm being taught when half my mind is preoccupied with just seizing the day and making the most of the season."
"And by 'making the most of the season', I assume you mean going to the beach and ogling at all the girls in bikinis?" TaeMin asked nonchalantly.
"Got that right."
"I dunno, hyung..." TaeMin said, pouting thoughtfully. "How would you hide your heel lifts at the beach?"
JongHyun frowned. "Why would I wear heel lifts to the beach?"
"You expect the girls to ogle you back when they can't even see you down there? Ow!"
"I'm adorably petit!"
"So's Mickey Mouse, and no one's swooning over him. Ow!"
"You know, you're a good friend, TaeMinnie," JongHyun said honestly. "It's like having my own personal punching bag that follows me around."
~*~
Their circuitous route around town led them to two different arcades, an ice cream store, a clothes shop where JongHyun pined for a jacket that was deliciously flattering for his figure but was too expensive even though it was already on sale, a music store where JongHyun bought a new A tuning fork because his old one was going slightly flat, another arcade where TaeMin absolutely creamed his hyung at a dancing game, a food stall where they binged on barbecued pork intestines and chicken gizzard, another arcade where TaeMin miraculously beat JongHyun at the karaoke machine by singing loudly instead of artfully, and by the time they reached the soda parlor the sky was burning with the colors of sunset and their feet were screaming bloody murder at them.
By then, TaeMin had figured out that JongHyun was bothered about something, but it didn't cross his mind to wait for any revelation. They never shared serious problems with each other until after it was resolved. He didn't know how it worked out that way, but it was good enough for him.
TaeMin was sipping his strawberry-vanilla float and trying to figure JongHyun out without looking like it when snatches of conversation from some people at the counter drifted over to where they were seated. JongHyun caught his eye and silently agreed to eavesdrop.
"... but the opera ... only been three..." a tall, lanky boy said in the soothing voice mothers used on excited children.
His companion, a shorter, round-faced boy sounded exasperated. "... long enough! Why don't ... we're useless or anything!"
"They have ... of time."
"Whatever." The two made their way to a table on the other side of the parlor and their conversation became too muted to hear.
JongHyun raised an eyebrow at TaeMin. "They were talking about the opera house, right? Our opera house?"
TaeMin took another sip and unknowingly earned a cream mustache. "Closed for three weeks? I'd say so."
JongHyun glanced at them and saw the smaller boy looking dejected. "Think they know something about why it was abruptly closed down?"
"Hard to say. Why don't we go over and find out?"
As one, they looked at their quarry again and sized them up. "The shorter guy looks like a wimp," JongHyun assessed.
"I think I recognize him," TaeMin said. "Lives about two blocks from my house. I pass by his place on my way to school."
"Doesn't look strong at all. I can take him if things turn ugly."
"Not that I don't admire this overt display of masculinity, but why don't we think of another approach first?"
JongHyun thought about this. "A fun approach or a subtle approach?"
"A sane approach?" TaeMin hinted strongly.
"Also known as the boring approach," JongHyun retorted.
TaeMin gave a theatrical sigh. "Fine. What's the fun approach?"
JongHyun's grin was equal parts adventurous and manic. "Wanna visit home sweet home?"
TaeMin's first thought was to say 'No, absolutely not. We were told the place was dangerously unsafe for mysterious reasons, we'd be breaking and entering, and we don't know if other people are in there doing unspeakable stuff like... whatever unspeakable stuff people do in action dramas.' But the truth was, he missed the opera house. Whenever there was a production, he and JongHyun practically lived there with all the other performers. The chorus, the dancers, the orchestra... the only thing that bound their family together was art. Without opera, everyone drifted apart to their own worlds. He was lucky enough to still have JongHyun around, and there were rare moments when he and KiKwang were able to relive some old dances together just for the heck of it, but that didn't deny the overwhelming moments at three in the morning when he'd wake up filled to the brim with the sadness of missing his secondary family of artists.
So even when the rational part of his head was screaming against the idea, three weeks' worth of pent up emotions made him say yes.
It was just as well that they didn't consider asking the people they eavesdropped on about the topic, because the tall one was armed with a memory modification device and he wasn't afraid to use it.
~*~
They stood before the dark building under the creeping twilight sky.
TaeMin shifted uneasily. "Tell me, hyung, has home ever looked so..."
"Welcoming?" JongHyun hazarded uncertainly.
"I was thinking more like 'foreboding', but sure, let's go with that."
The opera house loomed before them. It was the most basic of all architectural designs: a dark gray cube with balconies and pillars and gargoyles and spires added as mere afterthoughts, as if the architect realized the tasteless irony of people absorbing the artistic drama of opera in a building so drab. The over-all effect was that of a decades-old cake decorated by an over-enthusiastic five year-old, but none of the patrons minded as long as the place looked discouragingly elite.
But JongHyun and TaeMin had to admit this much: without spotlights, torches, candles, or any light source to liven the place up, the building looked as close to vampiric as possible in center of the city. And it preyed on their imagination.
"It's still the same building, right?" TaeMin asked, trying not to betray the apprehension in his voice.
JongHyun gulped, and spoke more to convince himself than his friend. "Come on, it's still home. We've been here at much later times, right? Midnight, even."
TaeMin nodded a bit too enthusiastically. "Yeah, yeah. Good times, those."
"Yeah."
Winter...
JongHyun twitched.
Some people, when confronted by the thought of something terrible after a bad day, could rationally decide that enough was enough and just indulge in some hot cocoa in front of the TV while the rest of the world confronted its own nightmares. And if JongHyun was one of them, this would have been a much shorter story.
"Let's go. Fighting!" he said a bit too shrilly, but that was enough. He pulled out his phone and used it as a flashlight. TaeMin followed quickly behind him, and soon they were shrouded in the darkness of the alley beside the building.
The main entrances were obviously barred. But JongHyun and TaeMin lived in the opera house for months that felt like years, and they knew entrances and passages that wouldn't have been noticed if they weren't specifically being sought. There were, for example, slightly convenient vacancies in the brickwork that could, with some effort, be used to climb up the wall to a second-story balcony with a door whose lock always opened to a strong enough thump. The two adventurers employed this now, and JongHyun noted with some slight resentment that TaeMin didn't have to reach up for the handholds as much as he still did.
But soon, resentment or not, and slightly drunk with the adrenaline of breaking into a place that somehow still felt like home even with all the shadows, both boys treaded the familiar hallways with no idea where to head first.
"The dorms?" TaeMin suggested.
"All the way up to the seventh floor?" JongHyun continued.
"Not the dorms, then."
JongHyun nodded. "How about the rehearsal studios?"
"Which ones?"
JongHyun tried to control his shiver, but he wasn't sure if he succeeded. "Not that I'm scared or anything-"
"Of course not, hyung."
"-but I don't think I can deal with your studio right now. There are mirrors everywhere."
TaeMin squeaked at the imagery. He gulped. "Good idea. So... the chorus studio?"
JongHyun shrugged, trying to tease the nonchalance back into his stature. "As good as any, I guess."
The past three weeks had not been kind to the building: there was a fine coating of dust everywhere. And if TaeMin had chosen to pay attention to the faint nagging at the back of his mind, he'd have realized that dust was not supposed to glitter at the lights their cellphones made. But he was too busy not thinking of the many things that could be hiding behind the shadows.
That was the thing about the dark: one could know a place like the back of his hand under the reassurance of light, but at the moment of darkness, one can never be sure if it's still the same place. Or if there are people lying in wait for him to act on that confidence.
They made their way to maze of rooms and corridors behind the stage and found the familiar yet darkly alien studio where JongHyun had spent countless hours honing his voice with people of similar talents and inclinations. He entered and made his way to the harpsichord. There was a piece on the stand.
"Hyung," TaeMin said, alarmed. "Don't wander off."
"I'm not wandering off, I'm just here," he said loudly, his courage boosted by the distraction the room offered. "Celeste Aida. The last thing we were studying before we were ushered out so abruptly."
TaeMin softly pressed a key on the harpsichord. The instrument breathed a reedy semblance of its former life.
Winter is...
JongHyun jerked around and stared at the door. The voice sounded... different. But before he could dissect how different, he was knocked back against the wall by a flurry of lanky and bony limbs. JongHyun's ears rang with a loud scream of terror as TaeMin wrapped himself around him, teeth chattering and breath going shallow.
"TaeMin, what the hell-"
"Someone's crying out there!" TaeMin chittered between breaths and clicks of teeth.
JongHyun froze. "What? Crying? When?"
"Just now! Didn't you hear it was faint and scary and hyung we have to get out of here it's scary and there it goes again!"
"Then shut up and let me listen" JongHyun yelled.
And there it was. If he turned his ears to the right direction, he heard the faint wailing at the very edge of his hearing. A cry full of sorrow. A cry in an empty auditorium.
But JongHyun's ears were sharpened by years of exposure to the musicality of sound, and the first thing that popped into his head (apart from the sudden spike of fear and adrenaline that is) was that it wasn't a human cry.
"That's a violin," he whispered as he fought to slow his heartbeat. "Someone's playing a violin out there."
"Hyung..."
JongHyun strained his ears. Fa sharp above middle C. He hummed it in falsetto.
TaeMin clung to his tighter. "Hyung! Stop it, it's creepy!"
JongHyun steeled his resolve. "Come on, it's probably one of the violinists from the orchestra."
"What would they be doing here?" TaeMin asked, at the edge of tears.
"Same reason as ours? Maybe? Stop being such a big baby," JongHyun scolded. "Come on, I want to see who it is."
"Hyung..."
JongHyun forced TaeMin's arms open and wriggled free. "Then stay here if you want. I'm checking who it is." And he walked steadily towards the door with TaeMin wiping at his eyes and following not centimeters behind.
~*~
Zhou Mi squinted through the desktop magnifying glass as he gently, carefully, delicately nudged an almost microscopic shard of lee stone using a strand of his own hair. The stone was brittle enough at its natural crystal sizes; manipulating a sliver that's thinner than a human hair onto a paper-thin silver disc was proving to be one of his toughest challenges yet.
Behind him, JinKi was focusing all his concentration on trying not to be a distraction. Easier said than done, considering he still hasn't gained full control over the subconscious surges and tides of his spirit pressure.
A loud chord of shamisen music blared over the speakers.
"Damn it!" Zhou Mi hissed.
"It wasn't me!" JinKi yelled preemptively. "I was just sitting here minding my own business and I didn't do anything I swear-"
"Shut up," Mi told him distractedly as he ran to the walk-in closet that hid the communication transponder that established lines between worlds. He pressed a short sequence of buttons that caused the screen to brighten and show a concerned shinigami on the other end of the line.
JinKi was expecting a correspondent from Soul Society. Maybe even Lieutenant JunSu since he and Zhou Mi seemed to be have found some semblance of productive and professional balance. But he recognized the face on the screen: it belonged to the shinigami who was stationed to protecting this part of the city. JinKi would have sniggered at the odd camera angle as if they were watching SeungHyun's face from below (he could practically see up the shinigami's nose!), but he'd craved for anything exciting to happen ever since his powers awakened, and if he behaved properly he might just be able to get his wish.
"SeungHyun," Mi said tensely to the somewhat distorted face on the screen. "There's been a breach at the opera house."
They saw SeungHyun nod. "I'm on it." The video shifted to quick blurs as SeungHyun began moving too quickly for the spirit technology to render. Flash Steps.
Zhou Mi ran to his supply closet and pulled out the bag containing his crossbow, and a small cylinder of something silvery that JinKi had never seen before.
"You're just leaving me here?" JinKi almost complained. But he'd successfully removed the whine from his voice, just in case there was still a chance things could work his way.
"I can't drag you along," Mi said tersely. He reached into a drawer, plugged something into his ear, and tossed another piece to JinKi. "Put it in," he instructed and ran out of the shop.
JinKi did. He could hear faint buzzes through the ear piece. He heard a tinny version of Zhou Mi's voice crackle to life. "You're too valuable to bring to battle," Mi's voice explained as he panted. "I've already sent a message to JunSu that something's up, and I'm guessing SeungHyun's sent an alert to his division."
"What, you want me to just stand here and record everything I hear?" JinKi asked blankly.
"Not the time to be an idiot," Mi's voice said irritably. "Scout the opera house with your powers. Conserve your energy. Don't waste it on fine details."
JinKi nodded. He didn't know that adrenaline highs could also be experienced vicariously through someone else, but somehow he also caught the excitement despite being stuck in Zhou Mi's shop. And now that he came to think about it, that was the entire point of his abilities: he could experience things from afar. (There was also a small nugget of truth about him being totally useless in battle because he didn't even know the first thing about combat, but that piece of information was ignored for the sake of his ego.)
He threw his mind to the mental direction of his target. "Two people. Human people," he clarified. "Wait. There's a small hint of spiritual awareness in one of them. But not awakened."
Zhou Mi's panting was falling into a rhythm as his body got used to the effort. "Are you sure? That wouldn't have set off my alarms."
JinKi frowned. "I'm telling you what I can sense. But really, that's all."
"Then there's something else that you can't sense," SeungHyun's deep rumble said right in JinKi's ear, which spiked JinKi's heart rate through sheer surprise. "Remember, your powers are limited to the world you're currently in."
JinKi scolded himself for not realizing that Zhou Mi would have thought that three-way communication was needed. "But the opera house is in our world," he said.
"Maybe," was SeungHyun's frustratingly short answer.
Mi's voice spoke on. "Just keep monitoring the opera house. And wait for any response from JunSu on the transponder. If anything goes wrong tonight, you are to go with him to the spirit world."
JinKi decided he mustn't have heard that right. "Wha-"
"Was I not clear enough?" Mi's voice cut in sharply.
"I'll die there! I won't even be able to breathe!" There was a definite whining component in JinKi's voice this time.
"We've found a way around that," Mi assured him. "JunSu knows what to do."
JinKi froze. Something was... "But Zhou Mi-"
"Listen-"
"No! They're gone! The opera house is empty!"
The sudden radio silence unsettled JinKi. Long enough for tendrils of doubt to seep in and wonder if their communication was suddenly cut off. "Damn this," JinKi muttered.
"What do you mean, 'empty'?" SeungHyun asked quietly, and JinKi breathed a long sigh of relief. "I've been on the rooftop for the past half minute. No one left."
"I don't know!" JinKi wailed. "They're just gone! They were there and suddenly they weren't!"
"Tell us where they were last," Zhou Mi said, his breathing more audible that earlier. Softly, in the background, JinKi heard a deep twang - Mi was testing his crossbow.
JinKi closed his eyes and opened the gates of energy that he knew were regulating the flow of his spirit. He urged the rivers of power that welled up his pressure to flow faster, harder... and suddenly the world around him that rose and fell with the ebbs and tides of previously unseen particles grew so much sharper than before. JinKi cast his mind to the opera house once more and read the echoes of shapes and edges that flowed back to him. Standing by the staff entrance in an alley behind the building was Zhou Mi, whose spiritual presence was unbelievably gigantic compared to JinKi's own. Then there was SeungHyun's weaker but more polished field of influence at the rooftop.
And inside the building... Traces. Like streaks of white left by fingers dipped in chalk dust and wiped on a blackboard. Faint, growing fainter, but still distinct enough to be followed...
Into a vacuum of energy, the likes of which JinKi had never been told of before. A section where JinKi's senses felt distorted and confused. A hole in spirit space.
No, not a hole, JinKi thought with conviction. A mouth. Hungry. Still chewing on something. A chill ran through his whole body.
"They were on the stage," he whispered shakily. "There's something there. Something bad. Zhou Mi, it's bad. Get out of there!"
Silence again, but his senses told him that the ones he was talking to were deep in thought. There came a short but numbingly sharp flare of SeungHyun's power, which vanished too quickly to be read but JinKi still tasted the thoughts that molded that flash. It was a message. And there was only one reason for SeungHyun to leave a message.
He wanted to tell them that there were times for bravery, and there were times for heroism, but this was just a time to get out while they still can... and if he was calmer, perhaps he could have thought of the words to say so.
"We're going in," SeungHyun's deep rumbling voice said in JinKi's earphones.
"But-"
"We'll be careful," Zhou Mi assured him.
"But!"
"You stay there," Zhou mi interrupted again. "Whatever happens you are to stay there until JunSu fetches you. Understood?"
JinKi gulped. He'd quite forgotten that Zhou Mi wasn't there to see, but he nodded all the same. He watched the scene in his mind unfold. And minutes later, when both Zhou Mi's and SeungHyun's presence also vanished into the void, JinKi wondered if he was a coward.
~*~
TaeMin woke to the feeling of sand in his mouth and pressed against the sides of his face. Was he at the beach?
It didn't even taste like sand, he thought. Nothing like the times when he fell asleep while sunbathing at the beach and he unknowingly rolled over and breathed in sand through his mouth.
And the air smelled wrong. It wasn't salty like at the beach, where even the air was filled with the scents of life and death happening every second at every scale. The air here was... flat. It wasn't even stale. Like there had never been anything to smell or go stale for... ever.
And now that his mind was gathering momentum, TaeMin realized that he couldn't hear anyone laughing. People were always laughing at the beach. JongHyun-hyung's stupid laughter could-
JongHyun.
TaeMin blearily opened his eyes and pushed himself off the white sand.
At the back of his mind, he noted that this wasn't the whiteness of sand made from corroded rocks. No, this was sand - he shivered visibly at the thought - with whiteness like sun-bleached bone. With every grain rounded to perfect smoothness by wind.
But no wind was blowing. TaeMin looked up to check the clouds, but there were none in the sky. Neither were there stars or the moon. In fact, the sky was not the rich, deep purple of the night that he had gazed up to every time. No, what loomed above him was the true blackness of the dark when there was no light by which to see.
And yet, he could see. He had no trouble seeing.
Not that there was anything to see. All around him, there was nothing but the unbroken uniformity of sand that was bleached by a sun that wasn't there, rounded by winds that didn't blow. He could make out the faint outlines of what could possibly be mountains far into the distance, but they were too faint for him to be sure.
Not that he was in any state to be sure of anything.
When he turned, he saw lying behind him the prone body of his hyung.
TaeMin pulled his body to attention and crawled over. "Yah," he said dryly. "Hyung, wake up. JongHyun-hyung?"
There was no answer, but TaeMin could see JongHyun's chest rise and fall to the beat of deep slumber. TaeMin prodded him repeatedly to no avail.
He wiped at his dry mouth and ignored the way the sand grated against his lips. How did they get here?
Somewhere, from so far away that TaeMin knew no sound that soft could have possibly traveled that far, was a faint crying. It was-
The same sound from the opera house. The same note, at least. He couldn't tell about the texture, but JongHyun-hyung said it was a violin. He could probably check again... if he was awake.
He poked JongHyun hard at the waist. "Yah," he added for good measure, but it was a half-hearted effort. If hyung was going to wake, he would at his own time. If at all.
TaeMin chased the last thought away from his mind and stood up uncertainly. No searing pain anywhere, no broken bones, no pulled muscles... his body didn't seem in any way injured, just weak and fragile. His throat felt dry but not parched. His muscles felt numb but they were always like that whenever he'd just woken up. It could be because of the sleep. How long had he been asleep, anyway?
His watch had stopped ticking. He patted his pockets for his phone. No luck. JongHyun-hyung's phone wasn't anywhere, either.
TaeMin reviewed his situation, such as it was: he was effectively by himself in a strange desert under blackness so profound that the night would have been afraid of it. But he could see. And there was music from far away. Such as it was. He remembered being afraid back at the opera house, up until... what happened anyway? He'd heard something crying and JongHyun-hyung said he was going to check it out, so they walked quietly to the wings... and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in a desert.
He wondered what happened to his fear. Did he suddenly just go brave out of the blue?
He could just wait here. He could just lie back down and wait for JongHyun-hyung to awaken. He'd know what to do. If he wakes up.
TaeMin shook his head. No. That didn't seem like a good idea. He dragged to mind the motto that he lived his life by lately. WWJD. He wore an armband bearing those letters so he could see it every day. What Would JongHyun Do?
Feeling somewhat foolish that this wasn't how things were normally supposed to be, and then feeling even more deeply foolish for wondering about normalcy at a time like this, TaeMin wrapped JongHyun's arms around his neck and lifted his hyung on his back. Not that he'd ever say it out loud, but this was another reason to be thankful for JongHyun's height - he was heavy enough with his muscles and all. Being taller would have just made things worse.
He walked toward the violin music. Or at least toward the direction he believed the music was coming from. It was hard to tell. He reasoned that it was as good a direction as any, and there was something comfortable about walking and huffing and puffing because of the weight on his back: it distracted him, for now, about what could be waiting for him once he reached the music's source.
But he knew it was the better option. He felt with absolute conviction that if he chose to stay, he'd have waited forever.
It was a good thing that he didn't continue thinking about what happened to his fear. The human mind is a very delicate thing. It filters out what it deems too bothersome or too harmful for its own sake. Some things were just too small to bother with, like the fine details of how ink spiked on paper fibers. And like how swimming in an ocean felt exactly the same as swimming in the sea, some things were just too big to notice at all.
~*~
JunSu kicked his office door open.
He wasn't angry. It just so happened that his arms were full of more discarded reports that he'd scrounged from all over his Division. They would fit in nicely in the small hedge maze he'd been constructing in his office. That ought to earn him a few more points in the anti-neatfreak race.
"Love what you've done with the place, JunSu," SeungGi said as he trailed along. He, too, carried an armful of unclassified 12th Division paperwork. He was willing to help the other lieutenants in their little contest, provided that they weren't actually threats to his own progress. "Very... modern. Definitely worth the effort, I'd say."
JunSu grinned proudly as he navigated their path through the twists and turns of his personal labyrinth. "It's just a matter of not throwing anything away. It helps to have a nearly obsessive-compulsive captain."
He heard the shrill, insistent beeping from the console on his desk as he turned the last corner. SeungGi noticed it, too.
"Is that the communication device the human mechanist invented?" SeungGi asked with pronounced interest. "I've always wanted to see one. The 6th Division won't even let me go near theirs."
"That's because they know you'll take it apart as soon as you look at it," JunSu said. He walked over to the console and, arms still laden with his latest acquisitions, pressed the reception button with his toe. Being flexible really had a lot of benefits. He dragged an empty chair away from its corner with his feet and tried to balance his pile of paper on it while the connection was being established.
A double beep told him it was time to talk. "Hey, Zhou Mi, sorry for getting back to you kinda late. Everyone's kind of busy with-"
The shout from the console nearly caused him to tip his pile of paper over. "Zhou Mi's in trouble!"
JunSu ran to his desk and stared intently at the screen, with SeungGi peering over his shoulder. "JinKi?" JunSu asked, surprised. "Where's Zhou Mi? What happened?"
"There was- there- I was going-"
"Shhh. Deep breaths, as much as you need," JunSu consoled.
On the screen, JinKi nodded tersely and gulped in huge mouthfuls of air until he was calm enough to speak. "He was working on something when one of his alarms went off. The ones at the opera house. He and SeungHyun went over to check on it, and they're gone!"
"Gone?" JunSu repeated for clarification.
"They're gone!"
JunSu fought down the irritation. "Where do your powers say they went?"
"I don't know! They just disappeared! The mouth just swallowed them!"
"Mouth?" JunSu asked, getting more confused. Zhou Mi really didn't have his work cut out for him with this kid.
SeungGi coughed politely behind him, the universal signal for wanting to say something without knowing how to segue flawlessly. "What tripped off the alarms?" he asked the screen. JinKi's eyes darted to him and then clouded over with remembering.
"There were two kids in the opera house," JinKi said. "But they were gone even before Zhou Mi got there. The mouth must have got them, too! One of them had spirit awareness!"
JunSu blinked, and just like that he entered his Serious Business mode. "Okay, listen: stay at the workshop, and whatever you do, do not go after them. We'll take care of it. Clear?"
JinKi nodded manically on screen. JunSu flicked the device off and turned to consult SeungGi. "Two human civilians missing, along with a 6th Division officer and a human with the spirit level of a Lieutenant in a site with a notably dangerous spiritual history."
SeungGi's eyes narrowed. He knew the shinigami protocol by heart, including the ones that most officers thought didn't leave their Division headquarters. "Normally, just a routine dispatch with a Lieutenant escort would suffice. According to normal operations."
JunSu's eyes travelled to the blank screen. "I have confidential reason to believe that the opera house is the site of the first known human-hollow spiritual symbiosis. As a Lieutenant of the Special Ops Division, do I have the weight to override that level of protocol?"
SeungGi chose his words carefully. It wasn't enough to do the good thing; in Soul Society, you also had to do them right. "You would if I back you up. Human-hollow symbiosis is unheard of. That sounds like hollowistic evolution, and the R&D is interested in that."
"Then let's go," JunSu said. "Two lieutenants ought to be enough."
"Better to be over-prepared than under, don't you think?" SeungGi asked. And with a chant softly muttered beneath his breath, he spoke straight into JunSu's mind - as well as every other Lieutenant's - with the Tenteikura.
Link to part 2
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