Chapter Text
Khun is sleeping, he’s being doing a lot of that, these days. Bam lets him because truth is easier to bear when it’s not right before you, casting shadows over your entire being, taking control of your mind.
His pocket rings. Bam waits until the third ring before answering. “…Hwaryun?” he says, polite, stepping outside the room in muted footsteps. “Did you find anything?”
“Ha Jinsung said he will handle the rest for now. How is he?”
“He’s getting better.”
“Just keep decreasing the dosage. He’ll be out of it soon.”
“Okay.”
The call ends. A few years ago, Bam got into a mission that prompted him to leave the team temporarily, refusing to take anyone else with him. It had caught him by surprise when Khun, usually the first in line to protest, had let him leave without a word of complaint. It should have been the first sign.
Then came the addiction.
He’s heard everything from Hatz. How Khun, after the first few weeks of his absence, started growing increasingly absent from the team, usually taking tests by himself, locked up in his ice-cold room. How he discovered substances that completely changed Khun’s behavior. How everything had tied to FUG.
How they got Khun addicted just so they could control him, control Bam, all over again.
The door creaks open, spilling a confused-looking Khun. He’s gotten thinner. Bam wants to cry and scream and slam something. He settles to calling softly, “Khun?”
Khun’s eyes, restless and flying at everywhere, freeze up and focus on him. “B-Bam, I’m—” He pauses, embarrassment taking over his expression. “I’m hungry.”
Bam lights up. “Yes, yes. Of course, it’s noon. I’ll bring a meal over.”
Khun stares at him apologetically. “Thank you.”
It takes a month for Khun to start eating on his own, and another couple of months for him to independently start leaving his room. It’s the addiction and depression, Hwaryun has said, and Bam should have known everything, if only someone has fucking told him something.
Anything.
The water looks hypnotizing as Bam lets it run through Khun’s blue strands. He’s bathing him, Khun hugging his knees in the bathtub, sulking. “I told you I can do this myself now,” he says for the fifth time.
Bam shakes his head. “I wanna take care of you, Khun.”
Khun blows a strand out of his face. “You’ve done enough of that for the past weeks.”
“Not enough,” Bam insists.
Khun, stubborn as he is, frowns. “I haven’t taken anything for this week, have I? That’s the first time since I started. I-I’m getting better, I think. There’s no more withdrawals. We can start taking tests again next week.”
Bam catches a fallen blue hair on the side of the bathtub, pinches it between his fingertips.
“And I can stand on my own now.”
He rolls the strand around the tip of his finger, until it snaps into two. It falls slowly, drifting down, down, down.
Was this what Rachel felt? When she made Bam the center of her world, and Bam did, he had prayed to gods that he’d give up everything to follow. Did she feed on that obsession to make herself feel better? Did she feel this pleasant thing in her stomach, dark and greedy, when Bam depended only for her and waited with abated breath like time only resumed when she was around?
Did Rachel feel what Bam feels now, high on knowledge that right this moment, Khun needs him more than anything in this god forsaken tower?
“No,” Bam finds himself saying, low and a little angered. If he’s going to be anyone’s god, he should be Khun’s. He won’t even ask for a shrine or thousands of prayers, just this .
Khun looks startled. “Bam? What did you say?”
Bam shakes his head, his conscience and everything human taking back the control of his mind. “Nothing. Sorry, Khun. You’re right. I can’t keep taking care of you like this. But just this once, let me.”
Please .
Khun exhales, then leans his back toward Bam. “Okay.”
I’m sorry.
Hatz supposes he should stop meeting Khun like this. The latter, with a stupid large hat on, stupider sunglasses and a hideous bomber jacket, sitting opposite of him in this sketchy restaurant in the middle tower. “Earrings,” he hisses in disgust. “When you said to meet up, I was under impression this will be a normal conversation. Are you high again?”
Earrings snorts. “Just sit down, Hatz.”
He grudgingly sits down. “How are things? Are you still…”
“I’m two months sober, harakiri. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Whatever. Why did you want to talk?” He won’t ever admit that he misses arguing like this, the witty exchange of insults, and suddenly he’s eighteen again, trying to make a point about how earrings make a man less of a man like it’s not a bunch of nonsense. Khun has returned to his old self, no more of those ugly pills taken as if those were his meals, no more of those dark eye bags and the stink of addiction etched to his soul.
Maybe they will be climbing the tower again,
Hatz is glad. He really is. Even though a part of him misses the way Khun used to cling to him, the way he wanted to hide in shame and thought only Hatz was allowed to see that side of his.
Khun plucks the hat off his head, thank god. But he keeps the shades on. “How’s Rak?”
“Good, I guess,” he shrugs. “He asks us a lot about you and Bam. He’s still busy with the ancient power shit, but knowing that gator, he’d drop everything if you ask.” If only Khun is the type of person to ask, but he isn’t, and Hatz hates that about him.
He’s growing to love that too.
Something in Khun’s features softens. “That dumb gator. What about your team? They’re climbing again?”
“Why don’t you ask Isu? You two used to communicate over that stuff.”
“I can’t. It’s embarrassing to talk to him now.”
“You were never the type to care about your reputation.”
Khun cringes back. “I don’t. I just…”
After a considerable long lapse of silence, Hatz sighs and rises to his feet. “I’m going to order drinks. What do you want?”
Khun looks up to him, collecting his jumbled thoughts for a second. “Sparkling water.”
“Sparkling water,” Hatz deadpans.
Khun raises a brow. “Something wrong with that?”
He scoffs and shakes his head. “Alright, then.”
After a few minutes, he comes back to Khun tapping the table impatiently, the sunglasses tucked in the neck of his shirt. With that out of the way, Hatz finally sees the bloodshot eyes, dazed toward something he can’t see.
“Earrings.”
Khun lifts his head, his big blue eyes giving his undivided attention, and really, Hatz shouldn’t get used to this. “Yeah what? Just sit down, Hatz. It’s not the first time you've seen my eyes.”
“They’re red.”
“I’m sober.”
“I know it’s not because of drugs.”
As Hatz sits back down, Khun bites his bottom lip and with clear devastation in his eyes, says, “I came to a decision last night.”
Hatz watches him, and Khun avoids eye contact as if it burns him. He stares at his sparkling water, not once taking a sip, looking like he’s a second away from bursting to tears. There’s a hard look in his face, like they’re trying to recognize reality. It’s unsettling. It’s how he used to look in those months Bam was gone. Except there are no more drugs to blame for that faraway quality anymore. Thus, Hatz gives up and asks, “What is it?”
Taking a deep breath, his gaze moves slowly until they lock eyes. “I want to climb separately from Bam.”
Hatz swallows, unsure how to interpret that decision. “Have you talked to Bam about it?”
“No. You’re the first one I’ve told about it.”
“But… why? You two did not fight, did you?”
Khun shifts his head to the side, shutting his eyes for a moment. When he opens them back, something has changed about the air around him, turning colder and colder. “FUG got me into those drugs. It was in my food first, then my bloodstream. When I noticed, it was too late.”
The memories of those years feel surreal, he’s felt drained and wronged all over. The world divided in a lot of ways, so he sought an alternative to happiness. He felt alive while drowning, and he paid with his sanity.
The only good thing was that Bam never got to see the worst of it.
“What’s your plan now, then?” Hatz says, searching his face for the truth. “You can’t just tell Bam, ‘hey I’m leaving’, and leave it at that.”
“Why not?”
Hatz shoots him a dumbfounded expression. “You know how Bam gets.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m planning to make it gradual.”
“And Rak?”
Khun shrugs. “He’s already doing things on his own, isn’t he? And Bam’s letting him.”
Hatz wants to say, it’s different with you. Bam needs you too much. But that will be unfair, won’t it? Khun has already been tied down for one too many times. By this bullshit from FUG, that it makes him want to slash their necks open. By Bam, who’s doing everything he can to make things right, but at the end of the day, he’s part of them. A god of FUG, or puppet, depending on whose lives he’s saving.
“If you think this is the right decision, I won’t stop you,” Hatz says. “But won’t it be dangerous? FUG already wanted you to be under their control. Making themselves your supplier was one thing, but what if they go to extreme lengths to keep you next?”
“I know.” Khun smiles vaguely. “It feels too much like putting Bam back on their radar but he already has power to rival a high ranker now, they can’t move recklessly anymore. The drugs were their last resort, and I doubt the entirety of FUG agreed to it. If my guess is right, Rachel probably has something to do with it.”
Rachel. A name that should have been abandoned long ago. Hatz doesn’t hate her as much as Khun does, but he does ponder over the source of the obsessive hate years ago, when Khun chose to take her to the top of the tower alone the moment Bam died, like it had been his life’s mission all along. Now, he barely even cared.
With a serious face, Hatz asks naturally, “Should I kill her?”
Khun breaks into small laugh. “Should you? I won’t stop you.” Then he stares at Hatz and the smile remains. “I’m planning to start gathering for new teammates.”
The scoff he lets out is instinctive. “You keep making those.”
“Haha. This time it won’t be to haunt for her. It will be just for me and my peace.”
Hatz crosses his arms. “You need help?”
“No. I already found a teammate.”
“Is that so?”
Khun’s smiles grows wider and brighter. Hatz winces, suspicious at the face of it. “Yep. In fact, he’s in front of me right now.”
“You better convince him properly then.”
“I should,” he drawls out, a glow in his eyes that hadn’t been present for many months since the addiction and the everything after. “But by the look in his face, I already did.”
Hatz pokes the inside of his cheek with his tongue, observing, reflecting, settling. “Why me? You got a crush on me?”
He meant it as a joke, but as Khun leans closer with a chin on his palm, all seriousness in the world, perhaps he may not have worded it like a joke, after all. “If you agree, I might just be.”
His heart should not skip a beat at that, but it does. “You’re the one talking to Shibisu about that,” he says instead, maneuvering himself out of the awkward atmosphere he got himself into.
Khun’s eyes flicker with hesitation. “…Fine.”
This is a start of something, Hatz thinks. Only he’s not quite sure what of yet, but something is beginning.
This feels like a first time too, when Hatz smiles back and Khun looks taken aback, mouth parting open, eyes blown wide, and then the moment lingers and attaches to his memory like it’s meant to be preserved.
Khun’s cheeks hurt from grinning.
The thing about staying sober is that your body searches for it even when you don’t exactly remember needing it. He feels he’s ten again, fingers wrapped around the family’s emblem, searching the crowd for the proud eyes of his mother, past all the dead bodies, past all the watchful gazes that gleamed like predators. He feels twelve, eyes trained at everything beyond the window, horizon blocked by the main castle of his father, far and imposing and deadly. He feels fifteen, a wreckage of many things that his mother warned him against, sitting next to a girl who, for a moment, took away his hunger for answers. He feels sixteen, letting go of her, trying to unlearn devotion, trying to learn love , because desperation is a bad ingredient in beginning something new.
He feels seventeen, back when he had everything, and still seventeen when he lost it all.
How old is he now? His gaze is melting the ceiling. Khun tries to remember. He’s sprawled like a starfish on his bed. Bam should be here any moment. There’s a pattern in the ceiling that he has never seen before. A crab. A laugh escapes him.
It does indeed look like a crab.
Why a crab, though? Did Bam put it in there? He doesn’t remember. He misses Bam. He’s hungry. He only eats the meals Bam made for him, because it’s the only right thing to do, not after this tragedy.
He loves crabs, maybe that’s why Bam has put a pattern like that in the ceiling, in the sky, in everything Khun looks at today.
The doorway cracks open and the rest of the light falls into the room.
“Khun?” a soft voice calls out, and Khun obligingly pours all his attention to the source of it.
“Bam, welcome back.”
“Hey.” Bam strides in, holding a tray, and it smells good. Khun decides he will always love Bam, even when he doesn’t feel like himself. “I brought you food.”
“Thank you.” He rises to a sitting position, reaching for his breakfast.
But Bam, for some stupid reason, pauses halfway through the room. “Where were you yesterday?”
Where was he? Khun frankly doesn’t remember. He’s hungry. Why can’t Bam let him eat before asking useless questions? “I think Hatz met up with me. Or I met up with Hatz. Can I eat now?”
Bam doesn’t look pleased at the answer, but Khun isn’t lying so he’s not sure what to do from there. He watches Bam who watches him back, unfazed from where he sits.
“Bam?”
“Please tell me next time if you’re going to leave the room.”
Khun nods. “Alright.”
The fond look returns in Bam’s expression, and he finally starts walking toward Khun again. There are two bowls in the tray, and as Khun reaches for one of them, Bam lightly slaps his hand away. “The right one is yours,” he clarifies, although Khun is pretty sure both are the same meals. He no longer has the energy to inquire, so he ignores the weirdness and starts eating.
“Is it good?” Bam asks.
Khun nods, the incessant ringing in his head retreats to some dark corner upon his first bite of the meal, regaining his clarity. “Yeah,” he replies, even though it isn’t crab, but a seafood soup that tastes a little bland. There’s something heavenly about it though that he can’t pinpoint.
Bam, from his peripheral, flashes the softest of smiles. “I’m glad it is.”
There are too many rooms in their home, and empty, most of them. Khun doesn’t ask what the extra ones are for, but Khun understands that it stands for something, maybe Bam is waiting for its other residents. For now, it’s just Khun and Bam.
It will be too lonely once it starts being only Bam. So he delays the announcement of his leaving until he finds Hatz’s message one day, setting aglow in his lighthouse that Bam kept in one of the empty rooms.
Hey earrings, you little shit, did you block my contact in your pocket?
What?
Drowned in confusion, Khun sets his pocket back to life. He doesn’t remember doing such a thing, but then again, he doesn’t remember a lot of things, like what his breakfast was. He scrolls for Hatz’ contact, and finds none, to his astonishment.
He promptly replies. I must have deleted it by mistake. Sorry. Connect again.
His pocket rings with a message. Did you tell Bam?
It’s the one thing he can’t forget. He dreams of it a lot, leaving that is, but every time he does so, he’ll wake up out of breath, chest heaving, tears all over his face, and with Bam snapped awake at all the fussing.
Not yet , he messages back. At that moment, the front door of the house clicks open, and Khun turns his head, reaching a decision. I’ll tell him now.
His pocket vibrates with another message but Khun doesn’t get the time to read because Bam is yelling for his name downstairs.
Bam has his arms full with groceries, face buried in paper bags. Khun immediately rushes down to help. “You bought a lot!”
Bam chuckles. “It reduces a lot of trips.”
“You should have taken me with you.”
“You were asleep.”
“You could have woken me up.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
As Bam skips to the kitchen, Khun following close behind, the latter promptly clears his throat, searching for the balance within him. “Uhm, Bam? Can we talk for a bit?”
Bam glances over his shoulder. “Now? Sure. Hang on, let me put this stuff.”
Khun nervously fiddles with his fingers to the side as he waits for Bam to finish arranging the groceries. As the fridge slams shut, he claps his hands together once. “There!” He cheerfully turns back to Khun. “What do you want to talk about?”
Khun swallows heavily, like the air is poisoned around him. Bam tilts his head, curious and eyes big, and Khun convinces himself that there’s no way Bam will hate him for this. Not even many deaths had brought out the worst in him, so what can go wrong, right? So with a sharp inhale, he goes, “I was thinking of climbing the tower again.”
Bam’s lips press together. “Oh.”
Khun waits in anticipation, waits for a no and prepares his heart just in case, waits for a yes because he’s learned that hope isn’t always a bad thing. Then:
“Okay.”
Khun lights up. “And I want to go separately.”
Bam licks his lips, looking unaffected beneath the pretense of concern. “If that’s what you want, Khun. I can’t stop you.”
He blinks. That’s it? “Yeah, that’s what I want. And what I— what I need.”
There’s a fleeting flare of anger in Bam’s face, features twisting in a sudden, ugly resentment, but it’s gone by the next moment when Khun blinks in surprise. Because by then, Bam looks as understanding as ever, nodding softly, fondly, never without warmth, so he knows he must have imagined it.
“Alright. Do you need anything else?”
Khun shoots him a genuine smile. “Can I help you prepare dinner?”
“It’s fine. I prefer cooking by myself.” He must have caught the disappointment in Khun’s face because he quickly amends, “Consider this as my parting gift.”
Khun laughs softly. “ Parting gift ? I’m not completely leaving Bam. It’s not like we’ve never been separated before. Just a couple of floors and we’ll be a team again.”
Bam laughs along with him, but there’s something guarded to it. “I know. Just wait for me to finish this, alright?”
“Alright.” He leaves the kitchen with lighter footsteps.
“You never asked.”
Bam lifts his head, caught off guard. “Hm?”
“You never asked what happened,” Khun continues, between the clinking of spoons against bowls and the shared, oppressive quiet.
“It’s not my place.”
“You’re my best friend . If you feel like you have every right to know, you should.”
“It was my fault,” Bam says after a beat of dreaded expression. “You— you got into it because of me.”
“That’s not true.”
“FUG went after you because of me. They did not kill you.” His bottom lip wobbles like every word out of it tastes wretched. “But they did the closest thing. I almost lost you.”
You can’t create madness just for the sake of it, there’s always a place for it. Khun is sure he’ll never blame Bam for being weak against an obvious attempt to dominate him, but blaming himself extends to the people connected to him, and he’s done pretending like those two years of insanity never happened.
“It was a mistake,” Khun says. “It will never happen again. I will never let it happen again.”
A sad smile falls on Bam’s expression, and he looks weak like that, he looks like the boy Khun is only beginning to love. “So will I, Khun. So will I.”
The dinner ends with a long, thoughtful silence.
Hatz is certainly not waiting for someone, definitely not for the blue jerk who’s been radio silence for a week.
“Your face doesn’t seem that way,” a voice pipes up in front of him. It’s Isu, the ever observant, albeit a bit too energetic, fellow scout of their team.
“Shut up.” Did he seriously just read my mind ?
“You’ve been murmuring ‘ this damn Earrings’ five times for the past hour. Don’t be surprised.” His grin is too wide for his liking. “How is he? I heard he was sick. I didn’t know someone like him could be sick.”
“He’s gotten better.” Sober , as Earrings worded it, but he didn’t sound like one the last time he called; each syllable slurred when he spoke, sounding lightheaded and not quite there, asking the dumbest questions, How old am I again, Hatz?
“Then why do you look so worried?”
Because there’s been no progress. Because Bam promised he would hunt for the people responsible, but there has been nothing. Because Khun sounded high on those shitty pills again. “What do you think about me leaving the team?” he asks instead of answering Isu’s question, because he’s as good at dodging as he is at blocking.
“Excuse me?” Isu splutters. “You’re what?! Who’s gonna carry Laure around once you’re gone?!”
“Is that seriously all my worth to this team?”
Isu breaks into a nervous laugh. “Of course not. But you’re not serious, right? You’re not leaving, right?”
Hatz stares at him, straight-faced and complete with seriousness.
“Y—You’re actually serious.” Unceremoniously, Isu sniffs and then bursts into tears, or well he looks like he has, because he abruptly wails too loudly that Hatz nearly falls out of the chair. “Nooo! Hatz, my son, what did I do? Did I fail as a leader?! Noooo! I can’t do this without you!” He jumps from his seat to lunge at Hatz, who promptly sidesteps to avoid, and Isu just cries harder. “You can’t leave!”
“Khun wants me to go with him.”
Isu pauses, blinks a few times, then straightens back up. “Oh well, why didn’t you say so immediately? Alright, permission granted.”
“What the fuck? Just like that?” Hatz gapes in disbelief.
“Well yeah.” Then, Isu smiles, like he’s trading a secret. “I’m not stupid, Hatz. I more or less got what’s going on.”
Oh . “Then—”
“Why are you all so goddamn loud?!” Endorsi shrieks, slamming the door open that leads to the rooftop they’re on. “It’s ruining my beauty sleep!”
“Princess, it’s three pm!” Isu cries.
“Did I stutter ?!”
Hatz escapes downstairs before he gets caught up in the argument. The least face he’s expecting to greet him in the living room of their flat is that guide, perched on the sofa like a bored cat, her expression caught between interest and impatience, like she’s been waiting for him for ages.
“Hwaryun,” Hatz says, wary. “What are you doing here?”
She gestures for him to sit down, and so Hatz remains standing out of pettiness. “Suit yourself.” She shrugs. “You’re curious about which FUG member was responsible for what happened to Khun, aren’t you?”
Hatz falls silent. For a split second, his gaze snaps around, looking for stray ears trying to listen, but his scout abilities detect none. His shoulders sag. “Despite our differences, I’m still his friend.”
“His friend,” Hwaryun repeats, like the word amuses her. “You better stop at this, then.”
“What?”
“You won’t like what you will find out if you keep this up. Just forget what happened and focus on your team. As long as Khun Aguero Agnes is with my god, you won’t have to worry about anything.”
He scoffs. “That’s for me to decide.”
“In fact, not really,” she says.
“You…” Hatz refrains from gritting his teeth. “You know who’s behind of this, don’t you?”
She smiles, tipping her head like he’s the slow one here. “Give up, Hatz. This isn’t the path my god wants you to take.”
“For the last time, Bam is not a god,” he grits out. He inhales sharply, composing himself. “I have every right to know what happened to my friend. I will destroy those very paths you speak of if you keep getting in our way.” He marches forward, and with a swift movement, brandishes his sword and points it at her neck, cutting through the air. “Khun has been through so much by these assholes in FUG. If you are one of them, I don’t care if you’re Bam’s friend or not. I won’t hesitate to slice your neck right here and then.”
“Have you ever wondered how he was fooled into taking it?” Hwaryun says, unfazed at the blade threatening her very life. “He’s a genius acknowledged by many family leaders. He took part in taking down many of Bam’s powerful enemies. Did you know Ha Jinsung himself sent him truckloads of items as a birthday gift in appreciation for having a large involvement in freeing him from the nest?” At Hatz's no-answer, Hwaryun continues. “But until now, Khun Aguero Agnes has made no use of those items. A gift from a high ranker, yet he doesn’t touch any of them for some reason. Why? Because that’s the level of cautiousness he has. Despite being Bam’s master and everything, he doesn’t accept anything easily .” A skin of her neck dangerous gets too close to the blade. Hatz subconsciously takes a step back.
“Where are you going with this?”
“He didn’t tell you, did he? How he got forced into taking those drugs in the first place. How he had no choice but to be heavily dependent to the point it ruined him.”
“It was in his food, he said. Then in—”
“He doesn’t take in anything unless the food itself is provided by the floor’s test administrators.”
“FUG must have—”
“Even most of the most powerful members of FUG can’t manipulate the distribution of meals in every floor. Poisons are heavily prohibited from being given to regulars by rankers. The administrators themselves will sense our involvement and we don’t want that kind of attention, do we?”
Hatz swallows thickly. “Then how…?”
“Unless,” Hwaryun says, stepping forward again. Hatz steps back in response, a sweat trickling on the back of his neck, like he is the one on the other side of the sword. “There’s someone very close to him. Someone from FUG. Someone Khun Aguero Agnes trusts more than his own life, that he will take whatever that person gives. Do you know anyone who can satisfy that criteria, Hatz?”
A face appears in his head, someone with a kind smile and kinder eyes. And it’s all he needs for the world beneath him to tilt.
It’s like time itself freezes. Blood disappears from his face, and Hatz’ thoughts begin to race abnormally fast, because everything suddenly makes sense, and he denies it with everything in him. “No,” he gasps out, his throat dry, his eyes blown wide. “No, no, no. Bam wouldn’t— Bam wouldn’t .”
Bam, the boy who will die for his friends, who will sacrifice each limb of his body to take them to the higher place. Bam, who has lost too much for any of them to give half of it back. Bam, the boy, who’s now changing in the center of Hatz’s mind. And he wants to scream. He wants to break something. He wants to tear this tower in half, because it can’t be.
It can’t be.
Hatz falls to his knees, sword clattering to the floor as he clutches his head, trying to escape from those cursed images flickering in and out of his mind. “No. No…”
“I told you,” Hwaryun mutters, low enough that he can still hear it. He can almost hear the smile in her voice, cruel and unaffected. “You won’t like what you will find out.”
Inside him, something breaks, because there's no way of returning from this.