Lighter, more romantic chapter to counterbalance the bullshit of Felix from last time
As soon as they returned to Jisung’s house, a horror beyond anything he could imagine waited for him.
Oh fuck
On his coffee table,
Fuckkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!
The stack of ungraded assignments was waiting for him to return home.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
He had ushered Minho away to take a shower. The other seemed to need it, badly, what with a sweet scent still lingering on his tricolored baseball jacket that caused them both to feel light-headed on the drive back, then the light bruise that was forming on his cheek from when the chair he was bound to fell over onto the ground, and to top it all off, the odd absences the bounty hunter got as his mind was occupied with processing and sorting through the encounter with Felix, what would come afterー Minho needed that shower far more than Jisung needed it at the moment. He figured the other needed time to himself. Some quiet. Some peace with his own thoughts. Warm water to wash away whatever he was feeling. And a long time to come to terms with whatever laid out for them on the road ahead to find Seo Changbin. Felix was just a taste of it. The snowflake at the top of the iceberg. Especially if his words were to be taken seriously.
Felix was a lot of things. A lot of mentally unstable things. Completely with rainbows, sparkles, and sunshine; He worked for Athanasia Laboratories, for their clinical trials, for fuck’s sake, didn’t that take a certain level of twisted to participate in now that the public knew about their methods because of Seo? Still, of everything, Jisung wouldn’t call him much of a liar. He was honest. Sometimes painfully and brutally so, in the fact it was as if he didn’t have a filter to block his thoughts from his words. As much as Seungmin despised him too, he would attest to that much. 96% of the time, what Felix told, was the truth. Or, at the least, Felix’s version of the truth.
Still, he’s getting distracted. While Minho was taking his shoulder, Jisung hadn’t even bothered to change out of his clothes. He didn’t bother to unpack his laptop, or put away his rifle. He didn’t bother to take his jacket off, or kick his shoes off. He dropped everything on his back off, guitar case, laptop, the works, right there at the edge of the sofa. Grabbed a blue pen from his backpack. Uncapped it. Wedged himself between the sofa and the coffee table. Then diligently got to work. A damn handwritten assignment. Another synthesis and analyze homework assignmentー WHY DID HE GIVE HIS STUDENTS SO MUCH* HOMEWORK? The stack was as thick as his rifle rounds! About thirty times as heavy too! What was he going to do, there’s no way he can finish grading and reviewing all hundred something papers in time… fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck….
*He did not give his students an obscene amount of homework. This was just bad timing.
He couldn’t have been grading the assignments with that fluid blue pen of his for more than twenty minutes; Scribbling down corrections alongside his student’s messy writing, occasionally leaving notes to help them, marking up their papers with advice, he had rolled his sleeve back to take down notes on his forearm too. Without his notebook to write down corrections to his lesson plan, he subjected his skin to scribbling harshly on it as he filled up his wrist with shorthand. But it hadn’t been that long, not too long at all before Minho was trudging his way out of the bathroom. Dwarfed in his pajamas, the shuffling of the hem of his pants underneath his step alerted Jisung to his presence long before he entered the living room, “Minho, you can sleep in my bedroom. I’ll be up for a while.”
“Why?” The bounty hunter blinked at him from where he stood vacantly at the mouth of the house’s dimmed hallway, nearly bewildered by the hitman’s statement. Though he wasn’t much of a hitman at the moment. Teacher. Bewildered by the teacher. Even if his puzzlement was anything but helpful to Jisung. Again, if anything, he seemed sort of, soft. In the baggy sweatpants and the loose shirt Jisung had offered him up to sleep in instead of his uncomfortable jeans and baseball jacket, his hair erratically splayed as if he had freshly washed his hair and scrubbed it out with a towel instead of drying it gently, he was still a bit wet too, and Jisung would be lying if he said his shirt wasn’t clinging to him.
Still, the teacher possessed strength and willpower. With a nibble biting down at the back of his lip, Jisung returned right back to where he was in the homework assignment, hand busied with scribbling away, “I didn’t finish grading my student’s assignments.”
“It’s… 3:08 am,” Minho announced to him, as if he didn’t know he was staying up until some unholy hour to finish the assignments he had neglected to do. As if Jisung couldn’t already tell how late in the night it was by the wooziness settling in after the previous hour’s excitement, or by the mild headache dulling in the center of his forehead or beginning their throbbing at the back of his eye’s blood vessels as he strained to read the pages. As if he didn’t know how exhausted he was, wanting nothing more than to lay his head back against the sofa behind him and pass out like he was, or how his writing was getting more sloppy with his lack of focus.
“Right. It’s Thursday now, I have classes to teach in the morning,” Strength and willpower. As long as he held onto his ideals, his strength to stay up for long hours at a time, and his willpower to finish grading these assignments, damn it he was so hungry too, he hadn’t eaten anything since before they left for the club. Hungry, tired, but he had his will. His unbreakable will. Because if he didn’t finish these assignments now, he would have a backlog of grading to do, and that means he would have to do double the time on his weekend. Not to mention, the first midterms were approaching, and he would not be late to submit grades before the midterm report if he could help it, “If I focus and hurry I can get these done by 4:00 a.m., then I can sleep for two hours, wake up by 6:00 a.m., eat breakfast, shower, and be ready to go teach by time school starts.”
With a sigh barely audible over Jisung’s tunnel vision focusing him on stacking another finished paper and moving onto the next, the bounty hunter shuffled over to him. He plopped himself down on the sofa behind Jisung. Leaning over the teacher’s shoulder to see the assignments he was currently busied with finishing up, “Isn’t that too much? What about you? Two hours isn’t nearly enough after what happened tonight. Just give them all full marks and call it a night.”
“I do. Their homework is for a completion grade, I don’t dock points for wrong answers on homework assignments. As long as they tried, I don’t care,” If he could feel the warmth from the other’s freshly washed skin radiating off of him and into Jisung’s thoughts. If he could feel the wet strands of hair brushing against the shell of his ear as Minho cheeked the papers too, or see the droplets land on his clothed arm. If he could smell the slight scent of his own drug-store cheap raspberry fragrance shampoo and body wash he adored about as much as his blue pens, but the undeniable mix of mint that naturally lingered on Minho that rinsed his mind. Jisung tried not to pay any of it any mind. He pushed the sensations to the back of his mind and returned to his assignments.
First fiddling with the pen as he stared at the words. A jumbled mess in his eyes, they all looked like estranged symbols and nothing more in his tired eyes. Not fully remembering where he had left off before the other’s presence distracted him. But he combed through the writing again. Deciphering that the symbols were truly words, and picking up where he left off to keep grading.
The bounty hunter seemed to be watching him as he wrote on the papers. Still hovering over his shoulder. Still a mind-numbing distraction. He smelled so sweetly of a sugary mint, peppermint? This natural scent that clung to him even if it had nearly been masked by his own body wash. Only a distraction. If he could, Jisung would’ve tilted his head back into the other, would’ve fallen back against the sofa and his leg to catch him, would’ve fallen asleep underneath the calming scent and the warm presence. But the vibrations from the other’s quiet voice was enough to knock some rationality back into him, “Why are you still correcting their homework, then?”
He was only tired anyway. These thoughts would mean nothing once he was of a rational, clear, and functional mind. So, Jisung forced himself to keep working, “They won’t learn anything if they don’t know what to improve.”
“Your students don’t read them anyway.”
“I know. I know, they don’t, and they don’t really care and it’s not worth me staying up so late to finish these. But if even one of them does, if they read it or they see the corrections I’m making, or if they see the smiley face or the flowers and it makes their day better, if it helps them, in any way, then…”
Jisung drew a little smiley face and a flower next to the question, scribbling a fast, ‘Great evidence! Keep it up!’ underneath. He flipped the page back over, adding another tiny drawing of a flower in the upper corner to mark completion, before setting the page off to the side. He’ll submit the grades into the electronic gradebook during his lunch. Making a mental reminder to pack up both his work laptop, remove his personal laptop from his bag, and then put the assignments in the folder. Set an alarm. He reminded himself to set an alarm. He wrote down a note on his forearm to set an alarm, underlining and circling it so future Jisung wouldn’t forget.
Another circle with his blue pen around the note. He flipped the page over, put it off to the side, and got started with the next in the stack, “You know, then… Then I’ll keep doing it for those one or two…”
The bounty hunter kept watching him from over his shoulder. The burning of his stare nearly searing Jisung’s hand from his wrist, as if his glare alone would be enough to stop him from doing any further assignments and he could instead go to sleep before he began to hate himself too badly. No. No! Strength and willpower! Strength! Willpower! Stay awake! It didn’t matter how comforting Minho was behind him, it didn’t matter if his shoulder tapped into the other’s chest when he leaned closer, and it didn’t matter if he wanted to fall asleep right there. He probably smelled bad too, the sticky sweat from his running dried down on his skin. He felt gross. Probably smelled bad. Tired. Hungry. So hungry. So so, hungry!! He swears he could hear his stomach growling.
Mid-sentence, the pen was snatched out of his hand.
Before he could snap a glare onto Minho and threaten for him to hand his pen back, the bounty hunter also grabbed a stack of unfinished assignments. Even if he appeared exhausted in his own right, mentally, emotionally, and physically taxed; Even if he seemed as if he’d rather lay his head back and fall asleep against the couch too; Minho grabbed a pillow to set on his lap. Using the plush surface as his table to write on the first assignment, “Let me help you finish then.”
Help him…?
Like hell he was about to refuse that.
“I need to get something to eat then. But you, check them. Thoroughly! I mean it!” Jisung quickly stood up from the coffeetable, his directions carefully listened to as Minho paused all movements to take his orders. As if he was a military sergeant dishing out commands on a battlefield, a battlefield of education, “Really critique what they write in their answers but tell them where they’re doing a good job too. Don’t be too harsh and don’t be too soft with them.”
When Minho gave him a breathy, ‘Alright’ to and glued his eyes back to the paper, Jisung dashed to his kitchen. Quickly! He grabbed up whatever the first snack he saw was inside of his fridge, which ended up being the leftover grapes from yesterday’s lunch. Somehow, a gut feeling within him taking over to grab more than just a bundle of grapes; Some blocks of cheese, a handful of salted crackers, the washed grapes, some slices of pepperoni, a snack! Not a meal, but enough! With the platter of food readily available, he sprinted back to the living room. Clearing a space on the coffeetable, he set the plate down where both he and Minho could reach for the munchies. With a mouthful of a cracker and a settled stomach that wasn’t trying to throw up from hunger, Jisung snatched another pen from inside of his bag, and got to work on the pages.
As each page slowly disappeared from the unfinished list and began to stack up on the completed side, their nibbles began to disappear too. From Minho picking out the pieces of cheese and pepperoni to slowly chew on while he wrote neatly in the margins, to Jisung shoving three grapes into his cheeks at once to crunch on while he scribbled haphazardly above their lines of writing, the intimidatin stack of pages were slowly beginning to fade. Plus, from the one or two pages he grabbed from Minho’s completed stack of assignments, he was pleasantly surprised. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he supposed having a real journalist correcting student’s writing for a literature and composition class was more beneficial than he guessed. Minho was able to pinpoint certain fallacies or offer pointers that he himself couldn’t.
Not to mention, the company was appreciated. Usually these long nights, he would turn a show on or listen to his music until he was finished. Even if neither of them said a word while they worked, Jisung found himself relaxing.
And, on the side he didn’t want, growing tired easier than he typically did in these late hours. Perhaps it was the comforting atmosphere, or it was the events of that day, or the fact he was blatantly tired, but eventually that once dull headache in his forehead began to spread. It grew. Rippling out into an unbeatable monster that pounding on his head to be let out. The longer he kept his head upright. The longer he tried to read the pencil lines and his eyes began to stutter gibberish by blending the letters together. The longer he tried to keep his hand steady as he wrote. The longer he tried to keep his head upright even if he felt the sleepiness grabbing hold of his conciousness. Gradually pulling him down.
Pulling him…
Slowly…
No, he can stay awake. Just a few more words. One more paper.
One more.
Just a few more.
He fought against his eyes to stay open.
Just…
His neck slowly going lax.
Just one…
More…
His head thumped onto the coffeetable.
Minho flinched, the sound ripping his attention off the paper he was combing through, and onto the hitman slumped onto the surface. Out. Like, out out. Not passed out or dead out, but, obviously, and clearly, asleep. The plate of snacks polished off aside from a few crumbs from the salty crackers. The stack of assignments almost done. His hand still where it rested to steady the paper as he wrote, his cheek flopped down on the sheet as sleepy breaths left his parted lips, his fingers still loosely clutched around his trusty blue pen, now scratched a dash into the student’s paper from the middle of the sentence he was attempting to finish. Poorly, Minho might add, his handwriting had gotten sloppier and unsteady the longer the sentence went on, until… Thump. There his head was.
The entire scene was almost… Cute. If he didn’t know what he did about Jisung (Although limited to what the hitman scarcely shared with him), he could’ve been convinced he was any other person. For once, the typical tenseness that straightened his features serious at every given moment, analyzing all he saw at every given moment, rigid and careful everywhere he stepped at every given moment; All of it was gone. It had been replaced with gentle eyes squished closed and parted lips, soft breathing and the steady rise and fall of the teacher’s chest. For the first time since Minho saw him, he’d say Jisung looked completely at peace. Not troubled. Not burdened. But serene as he slept.
The bounty hunter moved silently. Slowly, to not disturb Jisung as he slept. He set his stack of papers and his pen on the table. Before he gently reached to peel Jisung’s pen out of his limp hand.
“Why do you try so hard to heal these kids?” Minho whispered to himself. Whispered to the sleeping hitman, knowing that his words would never reach him, and his question would never be answered. He set the pen atop the finished stack of papers, before he softly patted Jisung’s head. Hardly feathering, before he knew the other wouldn’t be disturbed in his deep slumber, before setting his palm against his hair. Stroking the disturbed strands down while he spoke, “Yet, you are so cold.”
Knowing Jisung wouldn’t wake, Minho slipped off of the couch. Taking care to not harm him, he manipulated the hitman’s sleeping body, moving his arms out of his way, tucking his lulling head into his chest, he snuck an arm underneath his legs and around his back to hoist him up.
As he lifted Jisung off the ground, his back popped.
“OHjesusfuckmeyoureheavyー”
The bounty hunter did lift him up without much struggle after the first hoist, and managed to deliver the sleepy hitman to his bedroom without much issue. He did slip his jacket and his shoes off to not ruin the sheets, tucking him up in the comforter, and letting him be. His home on the sofa being claimed once more despite the promise of otherwise.
On his own phone, he set an alarm to remind Jisung to pack up the papers and his work laptop. Settling once more into his seat, Minho got to work on completing the last of the assignments.
Blood puddled on the floor. Clinging and soaking the bottom of his shoes. His steps drawn out as he gradually approached the man handcuffed against the floor.
“Don’t you love the rules of the undercity?”
The revolver in his hand clicked, his thumb fiddling with the barrel as he spun the next bullet into position. He pointed it his head.
Click.
Empty.
“Whoever is at the top, whoever has the most, calls the shots and makes the rules. When you want something, you take it, even if you have to kill for it.”
He thumbed the next round into place. Pointing the barrel at the man.
Click.
“But you have to be strong to take it, and you have to take it to be on top.”
The next. Aiming at himself.
Click.
“Basically, in the undercity, it means the the strongest one is always right.”
He spun the revolver’s chambers against his palm.
With a gentle smile, he aimed it at the trembling man as the revolving chamber snapped into place.
“That makes me right.”
▄︻デâ•â•â”一 BANGá°.áŸËŽËŠË—
Wonder who this little ray of sunshine is pt.2
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