Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A voice approaches from behind the airlock door, attached to the thud of heavy footsteps. Namjoon stands abruptly and almost collapses when he feels the undeniable sensation of tearing in his side from beneath his bandages. His vision blurs. A wave of dizziness has him swaying when the door slides open. The light that reaches him is swirled with his own delirium. It makes his head spin, and when he goes to speak, to… defend himself? Plead out a broken apology like usual? Finally fight back? Nothing leaves his mouth.

His next step is more of a stumble. Hopefully, his knees won’t give out. His head hurts. His body’s getting heavy. It’s not supposed to do that. Everything sounds like thunder. The heavy drum of his heartbeat threatens to split his skull. The room weaves between shocks of white and gunmetal grey.

“Whothewhatin- hyunghyung!” The words run through him like water. Somehow so far away and alarmingly close. He recognizes the language in a way he shouldn’t. It’s some mix of common and something else that reminds him of home.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles deliriously. He's too foggy to reach for his gun, but that wouldn't matter. They never give him enough charges for days like this anyways. What was he doing today? What's he doing right now?

What's going on? His head hurts.

“Whatsgoing– whosthat!" There’s someone else now. Pain pulses through him, and the world wavers in rhythm like heat waves.

“Idontknow!” His head hurts. His foot catches on something, and a rush of vertigo hits him, clogging the air in his throat. His heartbeat is loud. There’s iron on his tongue. He can smell lavender. Someone's singing. His head hurts. 

There’s a shout, muffled like he’s drowning. A pair of black boots blur into his vision. Oh, he frowns, not again. The ground is growing closer. Then, oh. Hands. Warm hands. That’s nice.

He’s being leaned into something. He’s being held tight. His next step is more of a buckle. There are more muffled voices crowded out by the gunfire in his skull. More hands. Everything’s blurry. Everything’s spinning.

His head hurts.

There's a poison in his veins that wants to eat him from the inside out, and he has never been strong enough to stop it.

Everything loud becomes quiet, then all he can hear is his breathing. A smile splits his cheeks when the silence hits him. He's missed the quiet. This is nice.

His head hurts, he manages to think through the suffocating silence. It's odd because Joon swears it's the one thing he didn't hit. And then everything goes black.

─── ⭑⋅⭑ ✧ ⭑⋅⭑ ───

Somewhere above, a nebula swirls. Churning colors spill in and out, streaks of crimson and violet threading through each other like the notes of a symphony. Somewhere below, a spaceport breathes. 

Primary stabilizers pulse underfoot, their distant, synced beats rise through shielding and supports to carry out the echoing bids of a colossus engine. Underground chambers turn over, shaking the floor as they move to replenish the synthetic atmosphere. Loose pebbles clustered around ground vents vibrate alongside each breath the spaceport takes. The next breath Namjoon takes is in time with its bellows. The next breath he takes grates at torn skin.

Teeth scrape against tongue. Hot breathing fans over raw, exposed flesh. His forearm burns under murmured whispers. Pain clouds his thoughts, even as Namjoon assesses the likelihood that the photon blast burned off most of the affected nerves.

Carefully, he rotates his wrists, gritting his teeth when the shift pulls at the seared muscles. Sparks born from barely working tendons dance up his arm, punching him in the chest when the blaze he'd just managed to quiet begins anew. His thoughts run white. His vision blurs, and the world spins beneath him.

For a moment, the air smells of lavender, and all he can hear is soft humming. His breath hitches, his lungs ache. He begs the ground to stop swaying. Namjoon swallows more iron, and the memory slides back down his throat. The radiator on the other side of the alley rattles on its metallic tune. He can't wait to get off this godforsaken planet.

The once pilot, now deckhand, pulls out another roll of synthetic skin. His hands tremble as he aligns it to his burned arm. One edge of the wrap is gently clenched between his teeth. The aching pulse of lingering antiseptic washes up his forearm.

The synthetic skin crinkles under his touch. Bitter citrus builds on his tongue, the wrap's balm hydrating on cracked lips. He can feel the fabric start to activate, numbing toxins making his corners of his mouth buzz. He needs to move faster. The next steps come in quick succession. Namjoon steadies his breathing, shuts out the bustle of the spaceport's commerce sect, and wills his body to freeze. He brings the wrap down fast, steady fingers coiling the synthetic fibers around his injury. He grits his teeth as the faux-skin slides against seared flesh, fine mesh layers bite at the raw muscle as careful grooves latch onto the wound and grip it tight. He pulls the wrap taut and swallows the broken noise that threatens to spill from his throat.

The back of his head roars with thunder, his heartbeat hammers in his ears. Namjoon chokes down more bile, sudden nausea hitting him from behind in the moments between the sticky balm blooming to life and his own reinforced agony. His fingers tremble as he smooths the edges of the fraying fabric down, careful not to push too hard as the balm spliced between the layers adheres to itself.

Slowly, the numbing comes to life. It spreads in an odd, fizzy sensation, making him shudder as flickering signals from threadbare nerves are shushed. Slowly, steadily, thankfully, a cooling sensation binds to the worst parts of the wound. The agony sinking into him releases its teeth.

Namjoon heaves a sigh of relief, head tipping back until it finds the durasteel wall at his back. Carefully, he drags the hand of his unscathed arm over the loose fibers of temporary skin. The synthetic's edges curl, fractured texture lines splinter across its surface like tree bark, the cheap material revealing its age even as it works. Namjoon's jagged nails catch on the fabric, and he carefully pulls the caught thread free.

The skin won't heal him, that's for certain. It's there to keep him stable, to let him think without blinding, all-consuming pain. To avoid bacteria getting in and starve any possible infections of growth. It keeps him functional and alive. It doesn't need to be healing to do that. It just needs to keep his ailments under control. Everything damaged will learn to heal on its own.

He tugs slightly, testing the wrap's security, and winces at the bite that finds him through the thick cotton-like layering. Yet, his prodding doesn't cause it to unravel, and the layers don't shift, so he lets his jaw unclench and his shoulders sag. He sits unmoving, just breathing in the sudden absence of pain, then raises his gaze heavenward.

Here on the spaceport, there is no sky. Thick hyper-plexus glass refracts golden light from the star system's over-bright sun. The dome overhead tints the light of shredding stars and absorbs the harmful rays the sun produces in place of an atmosphere. Darkness stretches as far as the eye can see, only broken up when the spaceport's rotation brings curious observers face-to-face with the satellite's host planet, Mnenae.

The planet watches Namjoon now, its swirling surface serving as a mocking contrast to the unflinching black the planet is draped upon. Its bulking shape is cloudy and blue. White capped mountains are divided by stretches of endless ocean. He spots an eruption spiral into the sky in the upper hemisphere. Thick, choking, charcoal smoke colors the planet’s atmosphere. Then it seems to hit an invisible wall, daring to reach the height where the atmosphere grows so thin its fumes cannot survive; before it succumbs to its nature, billowing out in a wide cloud, soot spreading to form a choking gloom. There's an echo in the planet's endless ocean from the blast, a sudden shift in the tides that ripples for leagues. 

Pain echoes through Namjoon’s ribs, its epicenter has crimson staining his shirt. 

He watches the array with blank eyes. It's framed by the vacuum which makes up so much of his life; he's only now separated from it by a few meters of glass. The light of a distant nebula reflects oddly off the dome's paneling, and he is abruptly aware that it is the only thing keeping Namjoon from simultaneously flash-freezing and boiling in the void. The thought comes to him with a shudder. "Voluntarily trapped in a fucking fishbowl," a voice hisses in his ear. It sounds like the whispers from his mission briefing.

His arm aches when he thinks about it.

He breathes in. The ground vent beside him rumbles, underground chambers shaking the floor as they rotate, tubes switching to replenish some crucial percentage of nitrogen in the air. Namjoon can almost imagine an air devoid of the metallic tinge of purification. Another tube turns, the spaceport shivers under the weight of its own greatness. Engines cough and systems stutter with every extra vessel, species, and freight load that dares pass through its walls. It's a technologically beautiful thing. It reminds Namjoon of home.

He breathes out.

He refuses to die here.

A red light blinks at his hip. It triggers an accompanying whine, his earpiece's poor attempt to alert him while working with scorched parts. He thumbs a few buttons on the radio, smearing soot onto his fingers as he forces the receiver into an upright position before connecting to the transmission.

The call he gets is shrouded in static. The crackling obscures whatever likely bitter words are being spouted to him from his drop ship. Namjoon unhooks the commn from his belt and switches it to his uninjured side. His other hand pulls at the soot scars and crimson-stained holes marring his shirt. He gently pushes around the damaged cloth until he finds a tender spot around his ribs where another patch of synthetic skin sits, and tests the stability of those wraps too. He cradles his commn, bending and twisting antenna and wires until the whining feedback hissing in his ear manages to suffocate itself.

“Echo-five?” Namjoon asks, toggling the microphone.

"…RM?” A voice hisses through the feed. “Come in, RM-” The voice goes out before he can get a lock on the signal. Namjoon pulls the wire wrapped around his ring finger tighter. “RM? Dahlo, can you get a read on his-”

“I’m here,” Namjoon interrupts, “I’m fine.” The iron on his tongue feels thick when he speaks, and the voice on the other end of the commn line freezes. “I’m here,” he repeats. He’s here, breathing through an ache settled deep in his bones, a burning pulse to his thoughts that swells with the static on the other side of the commn line. Alive against all odds, a stutter to his step, and the bag he practically traded his life for resting on a bruised hip. But he's here.

“I’m fine.” If he tries, he can make himself believe it. 

Namjoon brings an unsteady hand to the bag slung across his body, toying with the strap pressed to his sternum. Stained fingers trail over the insignia carved into the bag's buckle. It’s been stamped onto every page of every document he’d been handed for this mission. He tries his commn again.

“Echo-five?” His tongue is heavy in his mouth. His breath has begun to feel tacky. Probably some combination of the photon blast and whatever mystery weaponry he was shot with, having an adverse reaction to his biochemistry. Just needs to keep his ailments under control. Everything ruined will learn to heal on its own.

A tinny garbled noise buzzes in his ear, more static than speech. “Repeat transmission,” Namjoon says. Fog buds at the back of his mind. He brings himself to sit up straighter and fights a wince. There's a long moment where the void rings loud in the passing seconds, the pulse of solar flares and magnetic storms resonating through whining interference, crackling through his feed. Then his receiver breaks through the static.

"RM, your tags are back online, but we're receiving a lot of interference from the sensors." Namjoon looks to his bandaged arm, to where the small raised bump of an implant would usually be. "Dahlo needs a rough field estimate to recalibrate to your location. Have you made it to the primary dock yet?" Namjoon leans more of his weight into the wall behind him, keeping his posture strained just enough that he doesn't risk any contact of the durasteel against his injured side.

"Not yet. I've reached the sixth deck, but patrols have been pretty tight. There hasn't been a wide enough window for me to reach the port." Lingering silence crowds the commn waves. Faintly, he can make out his captain's sigh.

"Where are you now?" she says bitingly, her voice grates in his ear. She likes to keep the sensitivity of her microphone high, despite the way it makes his head ache. Each audible breath set to ring at a pinching frequency that bites at his already frayed nerves. Yet he doesn't scrape his teeth, doesn't give into the urge to grimace, or wheeze out a strained plea to fix it. She can't hear it. Why should it matter to her that it bothers him?

"Still outside of the commerce sector," he says instead. He flexes a fist when the ringing dies with the click of her transmission. "There was more conflict than expected at the pick up. I was able to retreat successfully and with the package, but not unscathed." The silence is so loud. Even amongst the ever-present hum of a living satellite, the emptiness that surrounds him is a burdening quiet he dreams of at night.

"Will this inhibit your extraction?"

"No. I'll make it." He's supposed to be fine, isn't he?

"Good." He said he was. Why would he lie when he is already so close to the end?

There's an audible clicking of keys from the Echo-five's commn line. The frequency burns underneath his skin. Namjoon keeps his mouth shut. He can do this a little while longer.

"We have a lock on your location. We're sending you the route to Echo-five in a moment. Hurry."

Hurry. Get up. Heavens above, RM, won't you move! A boot to his side. There's a rubber sole on his chest. The cloying scent of fresh polish. You're dirtying my shoe. If you moved faster, this wouldn't happen to you. Someone's laughing, someone's always laughing. Someone's always watching. Well then, maybe, RM, you should hurry. Shaky letters on a scrap of paper begging, Joonie, please hurry.

Hurry.

"I'll do my best," he says, and his throat feels dry when he speaks. He swallows down more iron.

A new blinking red light at his waist, a signal for a new transmission. Namjoon relays the message to his watch and swipes through the fuzzy hologram. His location, a rough approximation of the real thing, is a blinking orange dot squished near the entrance to the maintenance tunnels on the spaceport's sixth level. A dull schematic maps the way Namjoon came, a series of stairs, hallways, and back routes all either abandoned or under construction, where the odd fired circuit to a locked passageway wouldn't be noticed. The line spirals down all the way to the third level, the epicenter of his day.

A marker tabs the cathedral. It fails to capture the nightmare that went down there. A dotted line shows Namjoon's new route to Echo-five. It makes his stomach turn. The route passes through the main body of the spaceport's commerce sector. A clean shot from his hideout to the primary dock. No back route, no obscure squeezes through defunct maintenance shafts. Just a straight line, through undoubtedly packed clusters of bodies, where enforcers guard the perimeter, and cameras survey every angle.

His heartbeat thrums loud in his ears, and dots flicker in his vision. His medical sensors onboard the ship must be spiking. Echo-five makes no move to call out to him.

Absently, his hand finds the microphone. His breathing echoes through the static.

"RM?" his captain radios in. She's going to tell him to stop clogging their lines. That if they're on too long, the signal could be picked up, and then they're really screwed. He speaks before she can.

"Are you sure?"

"As in?"

"This route has me moving straight through the hub of this level. Are you sure it's the right move?"

"Are you questioning my choices?" He is abruptly aware of himself, alone and bleeding in a strange place, labeled as a threat to strange people, and she is his only exit.

"No, Captain. I'm just concerned about the emergency level previous movements may have caused."

"I am well aware that dome security is tight, but it will continue getting tighter. You of all people should understand the consequences of squandering this window. Your top priority right now should be speed, not rounding errors. I have my orders from Central Command, and you have your path. Unless you would like to have a longer conversation about Command's assessment abilities, I would suggest you hurry if you intend to maintain your plans for dormancy."

Blood sticks to his shirt. He's managed to hide the worst of it with a stolen jacket, but even with the wound newly compressed, he's still concerned about bleeding out a trail.

What he was shot with wasn't normal. Yes, there was standard-issue weaponry that burned through his nerve endings and almost took off his arm, and then there had been something else. A new wieldy ammunition loaded into a metal-lined magazine, lacking the crystalline focus of photon flanks and its bell-like charging sound. They switched the safety off when he kept moving, when he managed to smile through gritted, bloody teeth. That shot had been tastefully punishing, and its discharge had lodged itself inside him and had yet to make its way out. It's just lingered, leaking poison, filling his vision with spots, and reacting badly with his blood.

He's confronted with the reality that he doesn't think he could make a longer route even if he wanted to, even if it was the smarter decision. He refuses to die here.

"Understood," says into the radio line. He doesn't like doing this again.

The ground shakes with an earthquake that reminds him of engine failure. Likely just the startup of incinerators roaring five levels deep. He misses solid ground, real gravity. Static rings loudly between him and Echo-five. The song of the universe, filtered through the radio waves, so he can feel his captain's eyes on him, no matter how hard he tries to escape.

"Get to the primary dock," snaps his commn.

“Yes, Captain,” he grits out. There is no sign-off from the Echo-five. Just a buzzing that burrows into his brain, intent to hollow out his heart through his head; infecting everything it touches with a rot he’s been scraping at for years. Then silence. Namjoon breathes out. The steady hum of pushed nitrogen falls quiet.

Slowly, he pushes to his feet, weight braced against the wall as he moves. Each movement to uncurl himself pulls the synthetic skin grafted on his ribs, and the material threatens to tear when he straightens his back. He keeps one hand planted on the wall, trying to find his balance despite his swimming vision and the welling taste of blood in his mouth. He can feel it in his teeth, a stained smile that’s only been a grimace these days.

Namjoon squeezes his eyes shut, allowing himself one more moment of agony. Embracing and acknowledging every aching limb and screaming wound, the nausea mixed with a spreading numbness heralded by tremors and pins and needles. The pounding in his skull drumming loud enough to threaten sudden collapse. He takes it all in, breaths hitching and eyes watering as the metal at his back presses coolly against his skin. He sucks in a breath and grits his teeth before pushing upright. Stars twinkle in his vision, and his heartbeat rings loud in his ears. He exhales. 

Namjoon takes a step forward. The spaceport pulses underfoot. He hates this godforsaken planet. He takes another.

And another. 

And another.

He refuses to die here.

─── ⋅ ✧ ⋅ ───

Bright, wide eyes are bathed in tinted light. They stare at him, unyielding gaze seeming to shiver under the side street's flickering fluorescents. The safety lights embedded in the floor maintain a steady dim orange glow. Namjoon's gaze shifts to the enforcers standing guard beside a currency convertor machine a few paces away. They're uncomfortably close to the breezeway that feeds into the third level's main commerce sect. His gaze shifts back to the unwavering glare of his younger self. A permanent scowl is fixed to the hologram's face. Ugh. He needs a new mugshot. Horizontal blue lines skitter across the hologram-Namjoon's face as the ground beneath him gives a sudden lurch, almost throwing real-Namjoon off his feet.

He throws out his hands, tamping down the yelp that dares to burst from his chest when the sudden action sends sparks through his arm and abdomen. He can feel the synthetic skin stretch, gripping hard to his wounds to keep them in place. He blinks through the white crowding, his vision with ragged breaths. There's an old, long-buried instinctual whine that burns in his throat. It sticks cloyingly to his desperation, mixes with the anguish found in every step, and pools with the suffocating need to escape. He can taste it like his own blood-tinged saliva, but it dies well before it reaches his lips, all those ancient instincts well aware that no matter how hard he cried, there would be no one to hear them.

The ground gives another lurch, the spaceport shifting and sliding through an unending series of subroutines and diagnostic adjustments. The residents of the port are unbothered by the constant movements, seeming to adjust their posture and footing to accommodate their mechanical home without thinking. His own fluidity, which usually echoes their unconscious stabilization, has likely dripped out of him several floors ago, left behind in a blood trail. The wound in his side has him reeling, and the scowling picture of a much younger him, buzzing in rows on the metal walls, seems to almost mock him with its glower.

Namjoon steadies himself on the wall, one hand itches where it passes through the hologram. Slowly, a banner rolls across the bottom of the projection. Any Information Regarding Whereabouts Will Be Compensated. Wanted Alive. R-M. He frowns as the message skips, blocky text restarting as if an update has been made. Reward: it now reads 30,000 credits.

Fuck.

A mechanical whine pours through his earpiece, accompanied by a blinking light on his commn, picking up the lingering signal of Echo-five. His captain hasn't returned to speak to him directly, afraid that any radio waves passing through the dome are being monitored as the spaceport's security level is increasing with every passing minute. Instead, she's been sending him a helpful nudge of ear-splitting static every few minutes, that's ambiguous enough to be filtered out as noise to any enforcer scanners, but serves as a fun reminder to Namjoon that she's still breathing down his neck.

He grits his teeth and turns down the volume of his commn a little more, though it doesn't feel like it's making much of a difference.

The commn spits out a chain of random buzzes and pops, someone a little higher up would know how to decipher. The strings get longer every time he dares to stop for a breather, the speed of each message increasing with their lengths. Fortunately, it's not hard to guess what she's saying.

Echo-five spits out a particularly sharp burst of sound, which stirs the thunder looming in his skull. He drops a hand off the wall in order to send a brief hiss of white noise back. More jumbled static is parroted back at him. Sometimes this noise finds its way into his dreams, whispers in the dark in the space between awake and asleep. He's never been taught what their code means, but he heard the message a thousand times before. Hurry. You're running out of time. He knows the unspoken sticking to the static, and his eyes fall back to the bounty poster.

The faded blue hair, he'd convinced himself, was the reason for their plan failing, his sunken cheeks, and deep shadows under his eyes. The hologram shows the uncanny pallor that had stuck to him for months afterwards in nauseating detail. A bruise on his jaw sits just above a small line of Eprosseii code scrawled on his neck. Idly, his good hand finds the space where the tattoo had been, reduced to just raised skin. He's not important enough for them to risk staying behind. Mission or not, there is no greater crime than being caught. And they will not go down with him.

He drops his hand like the memory burns. He shifts his posture, watching new approaching enforcers head towards the ones guarding the breezeway, about to start their rotation.

He shifts the strap of his bag, tucking the insignia that got him here under the panel of his jacket. His eyes flicker to the hologram once more. Blue steaks cross the hologram again, giving the sour expression of a younger him the impression of blinking. The streaks are clear, and the wanted text runs across the text again. Wanted Alive. R-M. For Crimes Against the Embassy. Reward: 35,000 credits. He drags his tongue against his teeth, face slipping into an eerily familiar scowl.

Shit.

His body aches, and his head swims, and he starts walking.

The enforcers at the breezeway barely look at him as he slips by, head held high and hair carefully hiding the scrapes and bruises blooming on his face as he passes them. They speak loudly of the criminal who put their home on lockdown, barking about the possibilities of what he stole between recapping the steady stream of customers and sellers moving through the sect. No one's been making credit conversions since the first alarm went out. Namjoon feels his chest burn, the strenuous drag of his lungs under his ribs as he keeps his leisurely, confident pace. The enforcers at the convertor trail after him, moving with their exchange-ees into the sect.

He doesn't slow down. He can't. He doesn't stumble. He won't. He hears them mutter about checking carts for stowaways and changes his path from the line of hovering trolleys selling off-world-wares and spaceport-specific aids, diverting to the crowd clustered around the bolted-down canteen.

His pace stays even despite the booming of his heartbeat in his ears, making his legs shake as he presses into the crowd, leaving the enforcers behind.

The bustle of the canteen isn't too busy; a healthy crowd encircles each stall. Hands shoot out from order windows, exchanging credits for food before disappearing back into the border wall, which houses their kitchens and splits this part of the level from another. Smoke and steam billow out of vents, sending rich smells into the air. He can't imagine the food's very good since nothing naturally grows on this giant hunk of metal.

As the smells hit him, a swell of nausea churns in his stomach. The sensation makes him stumble, suppressed symptoms suddenly rising up, and he has to pause in order to keep down the acrid spitting up into his throat. He clamps a hand over his mouth and holds his breath. Tears bud in his eyes.

He blames whatever is lodged inside of him. The Eprosseii have always been good with weaponry; he'd almost blacked out from the pain when whatever they'd shot him with had burrowed into his chest, rather than cauterized. His vision blurs in random pieces when he starts to move again. He can’t see anything on his left, all reduced to smudges and smooth lines that leave him shaky.

He drops his hand slowly and breathes in through his mouth. Fuck he's tired. He breathes out, and starts his next steps forward in time for his commn to light up again. This time it's a transmission instead of static code.

"RM, come in?" he hears when he picks up the signal.

"Receiving," he replies. He can't imagine there's a good reason there's for her to be broadcasting a transmission, but then again, she's his captain.

"Have you reached the gateway to the primary dock yet?"

"No, I'm still in the canteen," he says. She makes a discontent noise while Namjoon tries not to make it look like he's using a commn. He can see the pointed helmets of nearby enforcers passing through the crowd. The sheen of their blasters scatters the light of neon stall signs. Namjoon ducks his head and squeezes between a couple, murmuring an apology as he passes. "It's pretty tight over here, and there's only so fast I can move without raising attention." There's only so fast he can move in general.

"Do you understand how vital this retrieval is?" she snaps.

"Of course I do," he sputters.

"Then I expect someone of your caliber to act like it."

"I-"

"We are already receiving enough interference to disrupt our signal to your tags, and every time we reroute them, we risk interception. Enforcers have begun spreading out into the docks despite our best efforts-" The droning of his captain disappears when Namjoon collides with a body.

He doesn't realize he's gone down until his back hits the floor, head cracking against the metal. A new wave of fresh, ringing bone-deep that drowns out every thought.

He can't think outside of the pain. The thing inside him is jostled and tears further at his insides, already buried too far for cheap, surface-level synthetics to treat. He can hear a twisted whimper pulse in and out of his ears, the broken sound muffled by a pain threatening to suffocate him. Something brushes his leg. The touch presses against the shallow scrapes hidden under his trousers. Another broken whimper punches out of him, and Namjoon registers the torn whining as his.

He gasps, barely holding back more broken sounds. He blinks blankly up at the sky. His vision clears in spots, buzzing static flicker as streaks of white and black muddy his view. The world around him is still drowned by the aching sensations claiming his senses. He tamps down on more nausea, carefully pushing himself upright with the help of a hand gently placed on his back. It rubs slowly down his spine and guides Namjoon carefully, never fully letting him go. With the help, Namjoon moves off the ground and onto a small ledge.

Still, the nauseating noise in his ears refuses to stop, and the words he speaks are felt rather than heard. Shit, he says. He can feel his voice warble in the air as his breath leaves his lips.

"Are you okay?" someone asks. It sounds like they're underwater. He hazards the slightest of nods. His mouth forms some kind of yes. "I'm so sorry." More words in blurry, accented common. Namjoon lifts his head from where it's been dipped and meets large, wide eyes. He notes their circular pupils, the dark hair swishes across delicate features, displaying an alarmed face.

The ringing in his ears fades slowly.

"I didn't even see you. I'm so sorry, I was just freaked out about the lockdown thing and trying to find my partner, he always telling me that I need to look where I'm going, and I…" the stranger trails off as Namjoon waves at him to stop, the headache that's following him all day is not playing well the the stranger's apologies.

He takes in the newfound quiet. The crowd around them has kept moving, thankfully. It seems like the stranger managed to get Namjoon to a slightly less occupied spot between stalls. An enforcer passes by, and Namjoon drops his head back down, listening to their heavy armoured footfalls grow further and further away. He realizes the sudden quiet for what it is, a reward he hasn't been granted yet. He fumbles for speech before managing to fit a phrase in his mouth.

"Have you seen my…" he waves to his ear and hip, wincing as pain splinters up his arm with the action. His body refuses to ignore every bit of torture he's put it through today.

"Oh, yes!" the stranger says brightly. He pulls Namjoon's radio from his pocket, and Namjoon frowns further when he takes in the mangled antenna sticking out of the wrong spot. "I think you hit it when you fell. I tried not to mess with it, but I can buy you a new one if it's not working."

"No, no," Namjoon murmurs. He's so tired. He wants to go home.

He bends at the antenna a few times and squeezes a battery back into its socket, flinching when a circuit inside visibly sparks in response. He locks the casing back in place and puts his earpiece in. "It'll be fine, I've put this thing through worse."

"RM!" the earpiece barks. He looks up at his nervous observer. He seems young, but Namjoon knows the revelation doesn't really mean anything in the grand span of the cosmos. Sleeves of tattoos disappear under a shirt that looks like it's some sort of heat-retaining thermal nature. Not an uncommon sight in climate-controlled facilities like spaceports. Namjoon's never had a problem with temperatures like that; he tends to run too warm, actually.

"Yeah, it's okay," he says to the stranger. He hits the reply button for the transmission. "Here," he radios. He gives his observer a short smile.

"Your progress has stalled again," his captain says immediately.

"I know," he replies. In front of him, the stranger's brow furrows, lips creasing at the edge of Namjoon's tone.

"Do you care to inform me why it should be acceptable that your progress has stalled again?" she states. Namjoon toys with his lip for a moment, his teeth snag on a scrape from a few days ago that was still healing. He thumbs at the new welling blood and stares at it with little shock. His gaze flickers to the figure who's still standing above him, body positioned in just the right way that he's blocking Namjoon from any passing enforcer's line of sight. Namjoon's breath is hot against the new scratch. His lungs hurt with every exhale.

"I… I bumped into someone and went down harder than I expected."

"You bumped into someone."

"Yes."

"And you went down hard."

"Yes, Captain."

"That's what acceptable sounds like to you?" Namjoon sighs and brings a fist to his forehead, kneading at the ache that grows with the radio's feedback.

"No, Captain."

"RM, you are smart, you are accomplished. You have proven yourself to be better than this time and time again. I do not understand what is so difficult about today that you have gone out of your way to risk the lives of your crew, the viability of your contract, and your own record. Our trust in your capabilities is why you were requested to be here. I will be reporting your inability to perform today back to Command." Panic spikes in his chest.

"Captain I-"

"And your record will be adjusted accordingly. If you did not want this outcome, then you should have acted in accordance with company policy and your own interests. I expect an honest report of your failures when you return to the ship. Do I make myself clear?"

Namjoon stares out, seeing through the stranger, through the crowd, through the guards blocking his exit, past the double-plated walls, and the impenetrable dome. His shoulders are shaking. He is looking into the void, and it is looking back. Dark and unyielding, forever expanding. It is all he will ever know.

"RM!" Namjoon startles. The stranger in front of him flinches.

"I understand," he says hollowly.

"Get up and get back to the ship. Now. And, RM, if you would like to reduce the severity of this incident, then I suggest you finally listen to me, and hurry."

The wanted sign flashes through his mind. Memories of heavy boots and too many hands. It twists into waves of haunting laughter, poking at his neck, prodding at the scars decorating his spine. A boot to his side, connecting hard with a healing rib. This is why you should have hurried.

"I'm on my way." There's no other option for him but that. He ends the transmission with little care for her reply. He blinks back the tears in his eyes. Namjoon moves to push to his feet, and hands land on his shoulders again. The stranger looks at him with pleading eyes. The longer he stays down, the more tired he'll be. He pushes against them harder.

"Are you sure you should be moving? You look pretty pale. I can have my partner check on you. He's a doctor. He's heading over to me now, anyways. I promise it's-"

"Look, I appreciate the help, really. But I've got to get moving. Obviously," he waves to his radio, proud at how his tone doesn't shake even when it feels like his chest is caving in, "I am unfortunately in the middle of something. Thank you, though." He reluctantly pulls himself upward, lightly guided by the stranger's hands. His vision swims as his blood rushes when he stands, and he feels his body loll with no way to stop it. The stranger makes another fretting noise, shooting out his hands, and Namjoon pulls himself together. He doesn't know why he was expecting better this time.

"Have a good day," he says, and pushes into the flow of the crowd. He glances over his shoulder every few steps, watching the stranger standing still, stuck looking at the space where Namjoon had been. Then another man shows up beside Namjoon's saviour. His partner, Namjoon assumes. He's clearly a different xeno-origin than his partner, but as the traffic around him shifts, Namjoon can't tell what kind.

His gaze falls back to his path ahead of him, pressing through the crowd with more haste than before despite the way his pace makes his stomach turn and his head spin. He follows the path on his watch. The crowd starts to thin as the walls of the spaceport close further in around him. The canteen around him devolves into a series of hallways. Safety lights blink with his laboured steps.

The orange line leading him to Echo-five draws shorter and shorter, eventually leading Namjoon to the last corner before the docks. His thoughts are nothing but fuzzy blurs, winding colors, an unending mantra of hurry, hurry, hurry. The light reflecting off the dome has faded into smears, and the walls of the spaceport blend together into a sea of steel.

Namjoon rounds a corner, his body pulling to stop without thinking as he joins the line building outside the third level's primary dock. He blinks and takes his focus off the bodies lined up before him. His eyes follow the mix of people carrying bags and dressed in the heavy clothes of star-farers. The line ends in the metallic helmets and double-barreled photon-blasters.

Enforcers, he thinks, once he realizes. Dread spreads down his spine as the thought sets in. They're guarding the dock. The two standing closest to the line call the next traveller up. One goes through the traveller's bags while the other beckons for the traveller to fish something out of their pockets for the enforcer to scan, likely some form of identification if Namjoon knows the Eprosseii well enough.

He works through the cloud fogging his thoughts, carefully letting his hand fall to his radio and sending out a transmission. "Echo-five," he calls out. Dahlo will probably laugh at him for needing a reroute. More enforcers exit the dock to form a line to block the gates. There's no way to get past. He says that much into his mic, but Echo-five does not respond, only sitting static replies to his plea for help.

Feedback rings in his ear when he tries to transmit again. His thoughts whirl, his stomach heaves. One enforcer guarding the dock's gateway peels off to start checking the line. They stop randomly to ask for identification, and when they don't like the answer the obviously ruffled traveller has given them, they clamp a hand over the back of their neck and haul them out of the line, pulling the yelping, panicking farer through a door that locks behind them. "Echo-five," Namjoon calls again.

Another guard moves to take their place, heavy metal-soled boots clanking loudly against the floor. The two guarding the front of the line pay no heed to the incident or the rattled onlookers. Instead, they call the next person up.

Namjoon can't let himself panic. He makes one more transmission.

"Echo-five, please." The newly walking guard stops beside a purple-skinned woman. "Just… please." And he gets a meaningless, garbled frequency in return. Nothing, they're giving him nothing. Again.

"Okay," he mutters to himself. "Okay." He can do this. He can figure this out. He just needs to reroute himself, without the help of the ship's scanner, or people keeping eyes on enforcer patrols, and with the ongoing changes in security levels. Beneath him, the ground lurches, letting him know another click has passed.

The next lurch will be in time with another increase in his bounty and the next level of the spaceport's lockdown protocols. He just needs to get to the ship before that. Easy.

The enforcers at the gate wave the next set of passengers forward. Carefully. Namjoon backs out, quietly apologizing to the couple newly behind him, then bolts as casually as possible.

Hurry, hurry, hurry, echoes through his brain.

He checks his shoddy hologram-map of the spaceport, running through his options with as much efficiency as fatigue-and-delirium-branded cocktail inside him will allow. The orange line between him and his goal grows. He decides on using the maintenance that looks a few minutes away; the route is winding and not nearly as easy going through the canteen was, but it should lead to a backdoor to the primary docks. He'll fry the locks the same way he did on his way up to the third level, and then—he hopes, he prays, he desperately believes—he'll be home free.

With that vague idea in mind, he picks up his shaky pace, listening for the clang of armoured steps the whole way.

His actions are a blur. A pounding headache crowds the space between his thoughts. His world has devolved into grey, into timed movements, and twisted, boiling aches that have burned so long they've become a dull pulsing pain. He thinks only of the vacuum. He thinks in thin flashes of his next moves. A pen knife cuts wires to a circuit, a pocket conductor overloads a lock, a red light signals a security error he hopes will be drowned out by all the other chaos on the spaceport.

The maintenance tunnel is dark. His steps are illuminated by the dim light of his watch's hologram. He watches the space between him and the shipyard grow in through the increasing orange maze of his route. His commn hums at his hip, he's waiting for something, anything from the ship. He has no idea if they know what he's doing, but he knows what his path looks like.

The living machine he crosses through buzzes all around him. He feels like he is deep in the veins of a beast, stepping over dense piping and ground wires. Floor vents release clouds of gas toxic to any other biology, and the cooling fans that accompany them blow the bitter steam directly into his face.

He walks through the dark. He thinks of nothing but his future, nothing but the void. Midway through his path, a red light comes to life at his hip. Wound between feedback and static lies twisted words, ones hard to make out, yet still managing to make his stomach sink. He steps quicken in response. The orange line starts to form a loop, circling around his final destination. He fries another lock, bypasses another door, moving faster and faster, pushing his body to a brink he swears it will never recover from. All the while, the song of the voids plays louder and louder in his ears.

Finally, Namjoon forces open another door, and the light of the dock is blinding. He doesn't know how to stop his tears.

"Echo-five?" he breathes. There's not even static. "Echo-five," he calls again, his voice cracks in his throat. His commn light blinks a profound purple. That long-buried warble rises to the tip of his tongue again, petering out as Namjoon hyperventilates.

His recipient is out of range.

The ship is gone. An empty space stands proudly in the hangar. Absence replaces his last chance at freedom. He is alone.

His captain's voice finds him in the all-consuming panic.

You were supposed to be better, RM. He stands alone in the empty docking hangar. I expected better from you. It didn't matter. His pain didn't matter. We have an agreement with our employer, which you voided by refusing to stick to the plan. His promises didn't matter. His retrieval didn't matter. I was hoping you wouldn't be so predictable. It didn't matter that he succeeded. They'd left him anyway. I was hoping you'd finally have the strength to prove your commitment. They left him. The ship cannot wait. You'll have to make it back to Central on your own. They left him. Best of luck, RM. I have a feeling you'll be needing it. Once again, he is utterly alone.

His back hits the wall.

His knees must buckle because Namjoon finds himself on the ground.

He's breathing too fast, his lungs are burning with every exhale. He can't stop it. He can't change his fate.

The corners of his world blur, streaks rip through his vision. He is dizzy, unbearably faint, but that's nothing new.

Tears wet dry lips, another shaky breath wracks through him, spilling out of him in a broken whimper that makes his head hurt.

He's alone. They left him. He's been abandoned again. Except this time, he could've made it. Except this time, they've left him bleeding out with no chance for help.

He's going to die here. The thought is startling, and all Namjoon manages to do is shiver.

They left him, and now he is going to die here.

He misses home. He can barely remember what this was all for.

He never should have left.

"Hyung, is that the last of it?" someone distantly asks. The air tastes of ozone. Iron mixes with copper on his tongue. "Hyung!" the person shouts again. Namjoon knows that word. The rumbling sounds of warming an engine stops short. The shouting falls back to a murmur as the engine stills.

There are tears on his cheeks, yet a voice, crisp and dressed in the familiar sound of a language he has not heard in years, burns through the fog in his mind like a beacon in the dark. The murmurs taste of an accent that stings like the balm taped to his chest. It's a shitty antidote, but he is so utterly alone. Delirium calls for him to move, oxygen-choked panic drives him to his feet.

Blindly, desperately, shaking and afraid, with nothing left to lose and little more to give, Namjoon takes a step forward. Maybe, if he's lucky, he can slip through the folds in the universe and escape from everything. Maybe that's what the voice means, he thinks. Over-fatigue clings to every twitch and thought. Maybe he can be free.

His feet drag towards the familiarity with no protest from the rest of him. He drifts out of the abandoned hangar, squeezing through the narrow side walkways between vessels, keeping himself behind the ships crowded around the dock. Subconsciously, he thinks of his bounty and the aching truth that familiarity promises no safety for him. Rarely has it ever.

Slowly, the voices creep louder.

"Trouble at the gate? How? What kind?" a voice Namjoon hasn't heard before, all low and dry, replies. They sound almost as tired as Namjoon feels.

"I don't know. Hyung just said you might need to stall for a minute." It's the original speaker again. Their fast speech draws him closer.

"How long is a minute?" the second voice sighs. Namjoon pokes his head out from behind a small cargo-style moonship. Across the way, two people stand outside an old sunship. The hauler is bruised and battered, but clearly well cared for. It's a design Namjoon hasn't seen since his pilot days. It'd been the ship his crew had been saving up until plans… changed. The popularity of the vessel had been short-lived when discoveries of its hard-to-maintain engine and minimal weaponry came to light right after its builders were bought out by a larger tradeship company. He never thought he'd see one again in his lifetime.

The haul door opens, and a figure, taller but with the same purple hair and slight iridescence as the second speaker, sticks his head out the door.

"Did you tell hyung the news?" he says. And something clicks in Namjoon. For the first time since he embarked for Eprosseii Spaceport, he feels like he can breathe. The second speaker clicks his tongue.

"Yes, he did, and I don't need two messengers to tell me to wait. I can't even get the warp fully started without Hobi here. Do you even know what the issue is?" The first speaker shrugs.

"Something with the whole security freakout," he says. "There's chatter about a heist at one of the cathedrals or whatever they're calling their cult buildings these days." As he speaks, the floor underneath them lurches, causing some of the less sturdy ships to sway on their landing gear. The sunship is unmoving. The older xenos pinches his at the spot between his brow. Namjoon's easy breathing takes a halt. Another click has passed.

"Alright, well, the longer we wait, the worse getting out of here will be. Jiminie, radio everyone and tell them to hurry. Tae, get the engines warmed up. I'd rather come out of here at the crawl than not at all. I'll see what we can do about the warp core. We might have to reroute the power."

Hurry, hurry, hurry, something in Namjoon hisses, mocking. The smile of a superior digs into his spine even with the distance between them. And then he registers the xenos' comment. They're leaving. They're leaving, and they're leaving now.

Namjoon needs to get on that ship.

He tucks further behind the moonship, gaze pinned on the three space-farers. He watches the eldest of the trio press closer to his two companions. Their discussion is drowned out by the roar of a distant heavy-engined ship coming to life on the dock. The cloying smell of ozone begins anew in the air.

Namjoon waits for the three to disperse, hoping they'll provide him a window for entry. Blood loss makes his limbs heavy. The brunt of his weight is braced against the moonship's landing gear. Between long blinks, the sunship's crew seems to phase away, twisting into smears of colors as they go about their actions, all eventually leading to swirling afterimages of flight preparation taking them inside their ship. The haul door closes behind them.

A thundering boom rocks the dock as the far-off ship takes off, and after only a few of Namjoon's equally thunderous heartbeats later, the sunship's engines flare up. The air warps around him. External brakes flex as lighting builds in Namjoon's veins.

He pushes off the ship he's been braced against, bloody hand prints he has no time to remove gleam like taunting graffiti-tag. RM was here, battered and bruised and alone.

He slinks out from under the wheels, watching the world pulse and spin around him. Miraculously, his steps are straight as he drags his body through the shipyard. The ship grows more alive with every step he takes.

Slowly awakening boosters send rippling waves of heat through Namjoon, who abruptly stops shivering, and is in turn abruptly aware of the fact that he's constantly been shivering. The uncanny sensation of his body growing cold had been made an afterthought to the much more prevalent radiating pain contorting any remaining space in his brain.

The ship's rear thrusters slowly shift color, and Namjoon gathers the last of his strength. He needs to get on that ship. He needs to get off this godforsaken planet. He's not going to die here.

He forces himself to approach the ship, keeping too close to its tail, thankful for the odd way the dock is designed. Non-military vessels here are relegated to being pressed together tail-to-tail, side-to-side, cramped like a can of traveller's rations. Private hangars, like the one for his mission, come at a hefty price, so most resign to having their neighbors a handful of steps away.

Namjoon steers clear of the windows of the main haul door, creeping around the side of the ship until he reaches the emergency airlock. An odd panel splits the smooth exterior of the ship, creating odd, fractured lines only noticeable when up close. Namjoon digs his pen knife out of his pocket. His hand shakes as he raises it to the seam of the airlock's external access panel. He digs the device into the panel's seam, pressing into the crack until he hits the panel's designed fail point, and the metal plate pops off.

Careful fingers prod at a patchwork of wires in movements repeated a dozen times over that day. He isn't worried about whether or not it would work. It would. He's worried about what would come after succeeding. A spike of pain shoots up his ribs when the abandoned deckhand moves too fast with his pocket conductor.

He anchors the convertor underneath the clearly marked power switch panel, and a new rumbling shakes the sunship. His escape is preparing to leave him. He doubts he'll be this lucky a second time. A steady metallic rhythm echoes across the dock, barely audible over the engine and the faint sounds of chatter. People, he thinks. Potentially enforcers.

The struggling criminal, the dying outlaw, the forgotten fugitive flips a switch to surge the door's circuit and overrides the lock with his convertor. The blood on his hands leaves tacky evidence of his work, yet a hiss comes from his left. The airlock door slides open.

Namjoon fits the cover back into place.

The pilot steps inside the airlock. And when the door hisses shut behind him, the prisoner's knees buckle with relief.

─── ⋅ ✧ ⋅ ───

His world dissolves into blurs once again. Body-heaving sobs wrack Namjoon as he floats in and out of awareness, all the while the ship continues to warm. Time stretches out in long twisted shapes. His senses dull down the airlock door and his scattered breathing. Everything he has become up to this moment leaves him aching. His bones pulse, and his head burns. Spidering pain climbs up his limbs. He can feel a bruise slowly starting to bloom on his cheek from where an enforcer had struck him outside the cathedral. All of him is trembling, and all of him is vulnerable.

At one point, Namjoon thinks he hears new voices, but he can't be sure. Thinking hurts. It's easier to succumb to his own agony and straddle the thin line between wakefulness and the gentle call of dreaming. The ship vibrates and jolts, and then, like rock shattering the still of a pond, he can feel the strain of artificial gravity pulling until it snaps. And once again, Namjoon can breathe.

New tears leak from his eyes. He doesn't gather the strength to wipe them. He lets his thoughts go dark until, inevitably, his peace is disturbed when a voice approaches from behind the airlock door, attached to the thud of heavy footsteps.

Namjoon stands abruptly and almost collapses when he feels the undeniable sensation of tearing in his side from beneath his bandages. His vision blurs. Everything damaged will learn to heal on its own. It's never been able to learn quite fast enough for Namjoon's taste.

A wave of dizziness has him swaying when the door slides open. The light that reaches him is swirled with his own delirium. It makes his head spin, and when he goes to speak, to… defend himself? Plead out a broken apology like usual? Finally fight back? Nothing leaves his mouth.

His next step is more of a stumble. Hopefully, his knees won’t give out. His head hurts. His body’s getting heavy. It’s not supposed to do that. Everything sounds like thunder. The heavy drum of his heartbeat threatens to split his skull. The room weaves between shocks of white and gunmetal grey.

“Whothewhatin- hyunghyung!” The words run through him like water. Somehow so far away and alarmingly close. He recognizes the language in a way he shouldn’t. It’s some mix of common and something else that reminds him of home.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles deliriously. He's too foggy to reach for his gun, but that wouldn't matter. They never give him enough charges for days like this anyways. What was he doing today? What's he doing right now?

What's going on? His head hurts.

“Whatsgoing– whosthat!" There’s someone else now. Pain pulses through him, and the world wavers in rhythm like heat waves.

“Idontknow!” His head hurts. His foot catches on something, and a rush of vertigo hits him, clogging the air in his throat. His heartbeat is loud. There’s iron on his tongue. He can smell lavender. Someone's singing. His head hurts. 

There’s a shout, muffled like he’s drowning. A pair of black boots blur into his vision. Oh, he frowns, not again. The ground is growing closer. Then, oh. Hands. Warm hands. That’s nice.

He’s being leaned into something. He’s being held tight. His next step is more of a buckle. There are more muffled voices crowded out by the gunfire in his skull. More hands. Everything’s blurry. Everything’s spinning.

His head hurts.

There's a poison in his veins that wants to eat him from the inside out, and he has never been strong enough to stop it.

Everything loud becomes quiet, then all he can hear is his breathing. A smile splits his cheeks when the silence hits him. He's missed the quiet. This is nice.

His head hurts, he manages to think through the suffocating silence. It's odd because Joon swears it's the one thing he didn't hit. And then everything goes black.

Chapter Text

There's beeping.

A steady beat pulsing in the back of his ears.

It shakes the world around him, changes the shapes of the clouds, and tints the light cast upon his mother's hands. She runs gentle fingers through his void-black hair. He keeps his head down, soaking in the feeling of her gentle caresses. She's humming a song he can't quite make out. It bounces along in an odd rhythm, weaving between the steady beep, nipping at his foggy thoughts.

His lap is a multi-colored swirl. Her hand drifts down, warm—foreignly warm, a warmth he hasn't known in orbits—touch cupping his cheek. Her pealing laughter feels like wind chimes echoing from across some far-off way.

He can feel her smile. She is made of pink blossoms and lavender blooms. She smells like wet rocks and fresh ferns. Joon is still a boy, a stumpy, stubborn child, and she is his whole world. He has yet to tower over her nor learn to leave her behind.

The beeping hasn't stopped. He basks in her presence, in her warmth. The rightness of her whole being, until he blinks and she is beckoning Joon with words he cannot understand. She cocks a pastel-painted face, all hues and impressions instead of a person. Jingling laughter runs through him like water when she stands. Mom? he mouths, but the word never leaves his lips. Maybe because it's not his own? Eomma? he tries this time, but the word is still stuck behind his teeth. He frowns. He's still a boy. He's not supposed to be without her.

Beeping. It's an intrusive noise. Joon rises to his feet, legs shaking as they bear his weight, and he follows her with a desperation only children have, blindingly charging into the tunnel she has cut into the sunset-colored cloudscape encompassing them.

Eomma? It still doesn't work. Eomma? More beeping. Beeping loud enough to interrupt his thoughts and her lilting voice. More, and more, and more beeping. Enough with the beeping, he thinks, and his voice is lower. His strides grow longer with every step, frame stretching, and figure contorting as he gets older. The cloudscape starts to shift around him, beginning to press in with hardening walls as the world starts to dim at his heels. Joon walks faster, but the bright path his mother has created only gets further away. She is like a memory of a smudged painting.

It's getting darker. The beeping won't stop. A thousand, thousand whispers drown out the last remnants of her laughter.

The tunnel grows tighter. The dark at his feet claws up its walls, splintering his route into a maze full of dark alleys and twisted corridors that hiss instead of hum. Without her, he is swamped in a darkness he knows he shouldn't touch. He chooses his route blindly, armed with a desperation that only comes with age. The dark herds him into a dead end. Hardened cloud-made walls press in at all sides, and the last flickers of a guiding light fade out at the foot of the impassable wall before him. The last touch of color leeches from his world, casting his surroundings into a darkening grey.

He can't let the dark reach him; he'll never see her again if he does. Joon's breathing is erratic. Night closes in on the alley. It shifts its bulk until there is no longer a chance of escape. He can feel the dark smiling. A rabbiting pulse decorated with beeps and whines is all he can hear.

Newborn night hefts itself forward, and there is a new weight on Joon's hip. The dark jolts closer, sluggish, crawling nature gaining speed. Its limbs climb the tunnel's walls, spidery tendrils bulging as it swallows the space where Joon had once stood. He can hear his breath shake his lungs, but faces the dark with a hardening resolve. He will not succumb to it. Not again. The yawning void stretches wide, closing in on him. Beeping. Beeping. Beeping. Echoing from all around. Namjoon raises his hand, wearing gritted teeth. The abyss lunges.

Gunfire illuminates the dark.

─── ⋆⋅⭑ ✧ ⭑⋅⋆ ───

He jolts upright and wakes to a world of blinding white.

Shifting shapes quake in his vision as his head spins. His throat burns like he's been swallowing acid, and a burning ache pulses through every bone in his body. The run-over and wrung-out-to-dry sensation clinging to all of him makes even the act of opening his eyes painful.

A sore, hurting wheeze claws its way out of his throat when Namjoon goes to breathe. He blinks through the fog clouding his vision to take in the swaying room.

Heavy overhead lights are stamped into the ceiling in rows, all glowing bright enough to burn his corneas. Glass apparatuses are scattered throughout the room, stacked on shelves mounted to the steel-plated walls. There's a medicinal tinge to the sanitized smell in the air. A mechanical buzz hums from all around. Directly across from Namjoon, a humanoid man stares him down from a small bench. He carries a gun and wears eyes made of iron. The barrel of his gun is leveled at Namjoon's head.

Like a death knell, the beeping that had haunted him throughout his dreams grows louder, faster. Piercing resonance rings in time with the hammering pulse of Namjoon's heartbeat. Namjoon doesn't recognize him, and he's not dressed in the rank-specific garb Namjoon is used to seeing when he wakes.

Who is he? Namjoon thinks. What's happening? Panic climbs up his throat, choking his next breaths even as he tries to keep them steady. He's shaking all over, a hazy combination of adrenaline and something foreign, mixed with his blood, muddies his thoughts. The fog is slow to clear, but by the burning glare on the stranger's face, Namjoon can tell that whatever he'd done has gone poorly. Incredibly poorly.

This is bad.

This is so bad.

Handcuffs rattle as Namjoon reaches for the frame of the hospital bed, and the ex-pilot realizes he's strapped to the bed he's in, tubes of unknown substances pipe out of the wall behind him and into his body, all shifting with him as he trembles. His breathing gets faster because, what is happening to him? What did he do? What are they going to do to him?

He doesn't know where he is; he can barely split his dreams from reality. He has no idea what's going on. The dead-eyed, scowling xenos observes Namjoon with a slow blink. His dark gaze traps Namjoon to the bed, and Namjoon racks his brain for what could have landed him here. What did he do? What did he manage to screw up?

Something's gone terribly wrong. Command won't be happy about it. What if this is it? he thinks. Are they finally going to dust him? Namjoon takes in his aching body and the pulsing pain clinging to every move. He hazards a glance at the bruising on his arms, shaking as he tears his gaze away from his onlooker. The bruising's not as bad as he expected; he's definitely been in worse shape, but the sluggish speed to his thoughts is something he's only felt because of pain medication. He's in a medical bay, on pain meds, receiving actual treatment. He's so fucked.

The stranger cocks his head, inhaling sharply before he shifts. The xenos drags himself out of a hunched over position, sitting upright, and his gaze narrows further. The over-bright lights meet the dark, distinctly alien color of his irises, and the glittering color expands, slitted pupils contracting thinner as his lips curl. Dark purple hair is stark against his pale, faintly iridescent skin. The beeping in Namjoon's ears grows louder.

He doesn't know this man. He doesn't know where he is. He can't even recognize the model of the ship from this angle. An odd frosted glass bisects this room from another space, clearly an add-on since Namjoon can see where the glass oddly splits a chain of outlets from its other half beyond the glass. Namjoon can't think of any of Gujihanna's models that would be permitted to do that. Did they put him on a carrier? Are they shipping him out? What did he screw up that was that bad? What are they punishing him for? A flickering notion floats through his thoughts, and for a moment Namjoon recalls that he's supposed to be… done? The idea quickly vanishes.

Namjoon scrambles for the memory to come back. He racks his brain, flinching in the cot when the stranger suddenly calls out. His gravel-drunk tone switches a light on in the confused deckhand's brain.

"Seok-ah!" the xenos barks. His voice is low and husky. "Your patient's awake!" His curved-accented common prickles at the back of Namjoon's mind.

He knows that voice.

He recognizes it from the docks.

The spaceport. Eprosseii Spaceport. After his mission. Oh.

Oh no.

Oh no.

The stowaway's—shit stowaway—memory comes back in vengeful flood. The dread dripping down his spine turns from a dribble to a rapid.

Faded memories of a strange ship serving as a beacon in the dark to a desperate mind. Blurred thoughts of bloody hand prints and a strange, poisonous kind of weaponry embedded into him, clogging all grasps for logic. The crew he'd scrambled to hide from. His wound getting worse. He'd been abandoned (they'd abandoned him) and been left to follow the instincts of a dream.

His observer fixes him with a long, snarling look. He shifts his hold on his gun. Namjoon is so fucked.

At least he's not on that stupid fucking planet.

On the other side of the frosted glass, between the mounted shelves stacked full of unfamiliar medical supplies, a shape jolts. A blurry figure slides across the glass until a door Namjoon hadn't noticed opens.

The stowaway's heartbeat manages to pick up again, pounding faster and faster. His head spins, a new swell of dizzying nausea overtaking him. The beeping, pealing, plaguing, brain-numbingly irritating sound from his dreams gets louder and louder. Staccatoed breaths hitch faster, cracking into wheezes and broken gasps that rock his chest. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

A head pops out the door. Dark hair hangs politely above two-toned eyes and a calm smile. The newcomer closes the door behind them and locks eyes with Namjoon. Their unblinking stare sinks into the stowaway's skin.

Namjoon licks his lips. There's acrid on his tongue. When he swallows, it's dry. What did they put in him? What are they going to do?

"You're up!" the newcomer says, smiling. His gaze doesn't leave Namjoon's. The warm energy he radiates is disconcerting. Namjoon shrinks back into the cot. Where am I? he wants to ask. He has no place asking. He's an intruder, a stowaway. Many vessels would gut him for far lesser crimes. Instead, Namjoon just stares. He can feel his gaze wanting to bounce between the glaring, armed watchman and this new smiling person, whose unrelenting grin is making the hairs on Namjoon's skin rise, but it doesn't. He just keeps his eyes on the newcomer as the new xenos navigates the room with ease, drawing Namjoon's focus like a moth to a flame.

"I wasn't expecting you to be up for a few more hours, but Jin-hyung's pretty hardy, so I don't know why I wasn't expecting you to be," he says. "Of course, Jin-hyung's not usually dosed with mercury." There's confusion on Namjoon's face, an emotion he normally wouldn't be so blatant about, but the choking nausea in his stomach has suddenly ground to a halt in response to the new stranger, who continues to move around in some sort of practiced routine, unfazed.

He crosses to a small sink and washes his hands. Namjoon's stuttering breaths slow into a steady rhythm. "I'm Hoseok," the man says. He scrubs hard enough at his wrist around that the skin reddens. Something warm blooms on the back of Namjoon's tongue. "And that," he nods toward the armed figure on the bench who's pressing a hand to his face, "is Yoongi."

Namjoon breaks eye contact to look at Yoongi, who meets Namjoon with a sharp sneer. Namjoon jolts back reflexively. The handcuffs rattle as he moves, their metallic jingling mimicking distant, dream-made laughter. Hoseok clears his throat, shaking out his hands to dry in the medical bay's temperate air. Droplets scatter in Namjoon's direction. The newly increased beeping coming from the medical nonsense surrounding Namjoon slows back down again. Hoseok takes a second to turn to their observer, fixing him with a pointed look. The new xenos' demeanor doesn't falter, but something about him seems to pause for a moment before Yoongi shrinks back, leaning further into his hand.

What is happening right now?

"You'll have to ignore him. He's usually better than this," Hoseok smiles. He approaches the bed, grinning widely. His gold eyes seem to gleam. Namjoon stiffens, but doesn't flinch. Hoseok looms over the cot. Concern, discomfort, and fear mix in the stowaway's gut, but the combination is thin. As Hoseok navigates a careful hand through the mess of tubing behind Namjoon to flick a switch, the stowaway watches him placidly.

"We usually don't have rats," Yoongi snarks. As he speaks, the beeping, beeping, beeping ringing in Namjoon's ears stops. And all that's left is the rhythm of his heartbeat, steadily, calmly pulsing under his skin in time with the last echoes of the cardiac monitor. Hoseok grimaces when Yoongi's words sit heavy in the new silence. He leans back to shoot the purple-haired man another look, his hands still poised over Namjoon placatingly.

Namjoon runs his tongue over his lips again. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't want them to change their mind about helping him, or at least not immediately killing him, but it's been so long since he hasn't woken up completely afraid. The fear that had been clogging his throat seems to have finally broken down. For once, being in a medical bay doesn't make him feel like he's going to shake out of his skin. He's calm, and he doesn't know how to respond to that, to the person causing that. To the person who could make everything worse and but chooses to smile instead.

Hoseok's grin is warm and waiting. He tilts his head and shaggy wine-red curls shift around black horns their gold-capped tips catching the light. The last trepidation in Namjoon's chest dissolves and the stowaway opens his mouth without realizing it. His voice tumbles from his lips without the usual, carefully curated intention he usually puts in his words.

"I'm sorry," he mutters, unused voice cracking as he speaks. A distant part of him wants to cry, but it's quickly shushed silent by a lulling presence. Hoseok perks up at Namjoon's voice. "I didn't mean to cause trouble, I just needed…" he trails off as the xenos' gaze washes over Namjoon, and the weird, off-kilter calm he seems to exude hits Namjoon again, dulling generations of flight impulses into something more breathable. Namjoon can see the slight quiver in the way Hoseok's pupils dilate, boring into him, and belatedly he realizes he's felt this before. He's just used the sensation, trying to drown him into submission rather than gently sweep him off his feet.

His apology dries out on his lips. "You're Kiviuq?" Namjoon asks, and he wants to be angry, but he can't. Abruptly, Hoseok pauses, startled, and the forced tranquility, the Kiviuq's thrall—a pheromone-induced serenity that makes Namjoon's insides feel like their melting when he spends too long under it—warping the air between them, stops.

Suddenly, Namjoon can feel his body allowed to panic again.

"Huh," the Kiviuq says brightly. Yoongi's stormy expression grows darker.

"I'm calling him," he says. It's some callback to a previous conversation Namjoon wasn't present for. Or maybe he was. His brain is still full of cotton, and Hoseok hasn't been helping. He hasn't been around a Kiviuq in a long time. He put it on his mission docket minimums. Who else–what else is on this ship? What are they going to do to him?

Hoseok waves Yoongi off, but the gun-wielding xenos reaches for something at his waist anyway, slitted eyes never leaving Namjoon's. Namjoon looks back at Hoseok. His pulse is loud again, heart begging to break out in his chest, punch through the bed frame, and burrow through the floor. It'd probably leave him for the void if Namjoon couldn't help it.

"Most people don't pick up on that," Hoseok states, in lieu of the obvious unasked question. Namjoon's nails are biting into the palm of his hands. If he keeps going, he's sure he'll draw blood.

"I've been thralled before," Namjoon responds. "Not many species have that kind of ability. Fewer do it well."

Kiviuq are often sought out for their skill and almost universal subjugation, despite how dangerous it makes them. Namjoon hates how susceptible he is to it. Hoseok takes a moment to stare blankly at Namjoon. His pupils don't stretch, but the predator's look still burrows into its prey, evaluating. Then he cracks a lopsided grin that feels less formulated than his previous smiles. The thin taste of pheromones Namjoon hadn't noticed building in the back of his throat is suddenly tacky, forcing the stowaway to grimace as he swallows down some saliva to clear the feeling.

"I'll keep that in mind," he replies, easily. Namjoon feels watched.

Yoongi's watch rings, a hologram popping up in response to whatever message the man had sent. Hoseok tears his gaze away from the stowaway. He looks to Yoongi expectantly, who replies to him with a nod, and then Hoseok pivots back to Namjoon. Their obvious familiarity makes Namjoon's skin itch.

"Our captain's on his way," Hoseok says. "He stopped by earlier, but you were still asleep. We would have paged him sooner, but I didn't expect you to be up so early. Luckily, Yoongi is overcautious, huh? Or we probably would have found you wandering around bleeding all over the ship." He laughs, but his attention doesn't stray from the stowaway. The sudden focus on Namjoon's current circumstances has the ex-pilot tensing in their cot.

His nails bite further into his hands. The skin starts to give. A monitor ticks up, and a metallic smell cuts through the sanitized air. Hoseok shoots a hand out to grab Namjoon's wrist without looking away from his face. The stowaway freezes. His pulse roars louder, suddenly aware of all the instincts he's been scrapping against since the xenos walked in, but all the Kiviuq does is fold one hand over Namjoon's own and gingerly pry his fingers apart.

"Please don't," he says. The handcuffs rattle as he pulls back. "You'll undo all my hard work if you hurt yourself."

"Sorry," Namjoon murmurs absently. Adrenaline has been dribbling into his blood ever since he woke. It's been a slow stream, responsible for his thunderous heartbeat, and hurried breathing, but when Hoseok pulls back, his unexpected hosts' canines catch the light. They shine under the fluorescents, undoubtedly sharp and long as the man cracks a smile. And suddenly that feeble stream turns into a flood.

Namjoon tries to keep his breathing steady, but he can't stop the panic from rising in his chest. It's a thick, sickly feeling, swamped in the knowledge that he's trapped here, somewhere, with no one looking for him. Alone and abandoned, again.

Hoseok pulls free one of the many bags attached to the tubes feeding into Namjoon, and the stowaway jumps. His vision swims. His body jerks, startling a noise out of the Kiviuq. His head pulses, brain starved of oxygen from his broken breaths. A new tinny beeping plays in the background, accompanied by a flurry of activity. Hands move in a flurry at the corners of his vision. Namjoon tries to focus on his surroundings over the mounting fear. He can't panic right now. He needs to keep tabs on the gunman, on the doctor, meet their captain. He has to ask about his stuff; he needs to contact Command. He has to keep his head above water. He can't panic.

He cannot panic.

But he can't stop the little voice in the back of his head from whispering louder and louder at every empty grab he makes for control. It sounds like the worst whispers of his missions, the hissed comments in the mess line, and the laughter that echoes. Every. Single. Time. He wakes in the medbay. Always bloodied, always bruised, and always alone. You're so helpless. They keep you broken on purpose, for your own safety. You know they won't forgive you for fucking up again, right? You know your kind aren't supposed to be this far out? You know you're lucky, right? You're lucky they want you. You're lucky you haven't been replaced. You keep acting like your time isn't running out, and it's making me tired, RM. You deserve this, RM. Keep talking, I dare you, RM, but know that one day you're going to land yourself in trouble and we won't be there to pull your sorry ass out of it. Maybe then you'll realize how kind this place has been to you. No one else wants someone like you. No one else would keep you.

And there's some part of him that swears he knows better, but he's been drowning in these waters for so long he can't remember what surface even looks like. He's just been trapped in their dark, waiting for his clock to run out, and now he's landed in place they'd promised he'd be. Where they told him he should never go. There are no more guardrails in place. He's going to die here.

His chest is heaving, his lungs burn, and he's overexerting his body, scrambling to sit up, but he can't lie here and wait for death. He needs to try something. Maybe his captain will forgive him if he begs hard enough. Maybe she'll turn around. He can take a few more years on his contract if she saves him. He can do it again.

He's begging out loud for someone who isn't there. His voice is hoarse, and his throat is burning. His ribs ache as too fast breaths strain his lungs, but he can't just let this happen. He's suffered so long for this to be how he dies. And he-

Warm hands. A calming presence brings everything in his brain to a screeching halt. A gentle touch presses against his chest, arms wrap carefully around his middle and pull him down, down, down into a plush warmth. A smiling face dances in his vision, carefully taking his palms and examining the familiar scars that broke open again, before they could even scab up.

Cotton fills his head and static downs out every torrent emotion, leaving him with only ease; floating idly, pliantly, relaxing artificially against his will. He knows what this is. He's been bracing for it since he first understood the doctor's gaze, but that doesn't mean Namjoon has the power to stop it. The spiral he's been in collapses. The circled drain, plugged by thick pheromones and static. Someone is speaking to him. All he can do is blink. His eyes fix on the ceiling, gaze blankly intercepting everything that passes between him and the hospital-white lights. Hands touch monitors and wires. Vials of fluid pour into tubes. He hears laughter and can't stop his tears.

He hopes they'll forgive him when he wakes. He never wanted this. Memories of a purple commn light blinking on his hip, flicker through his fuzzy thoughts, mocking, and when his hands start to shake, someone does him the kindness of shushing them back into silence.

Control of his body comes in waves, and pain, in turn, exists in flickers. Everything is muted by cloying, cloudy, calm. Sometimes he can feel his hands, flex his fingers, and curl his grip away from Hoseok's touch, but the awareness sparks an ache in his chest that steals his breath away, and once one broken wheeze is stolen from his lungs, the haze returns. Namjoon falls back to floating, hearing and seeing without the ability to process any of it. Sometimes there's clarity without pain, but those moments are fleeting and far between. Each time he finds them, he finds more tears soaking his cheeks.

Time passes slowly under the control of being much more suited to the universe than he.

"I wonder what calendar system he uses. He looks about our age. What do you think? Norillium? Vak'oras? Arayic Imperial?" Hoseok asks. He receives low chiding noise in response.

"Not important, Seok-ah. Can you just hurry so we get this over with?" Hurry. Hurry. Hurry. Like a mantra. Namjoon did that, now what? He's helpless to escape this haze.

"You thralled him?" Someone new.

"He keeps panicking. It wasn't safe for his vitals while I'm still trying to cleanse the mercury from his system." A sigh. The noise is obscured by the unwavering fog in Namjoon's mind.

"Alright, well, if you can get him stable enough where it's safe for him to come up, call me again. We need to figure out what he's doing here, Hobi."

"I know, hyung." Namjoon had a hyung. He wonders where he went.

Something touches Namjoon, and then something else smashes. "Seok-ah!"

"I'm fine. I'm fine. I just wasn't expecting him to still be responsive this far down." A snarl.

"I just want to be done with him. Hyung should have let me shoot him when we first found him."

"Yoongi," he says, like he's scolding a small child. Namjoon misses being small. He misses his eomma. He's glad she can't see what he's become.

"Where do you think he's from? Aren't his kind forbidden from being this far off-world?"

"Running probably. I mean, they shot him, so I doubt whatever got him here is normal on his planet."

"Maybe," he trails off. "I'll have to ask Jin-hyung when he gets back. Do you know the course status yet?"

"Hyung's said they're looking for a debris field, so if he's got any trackers, there shouldn't be anyone to pick the signal. And why would hyung know about him?" His tone crawls with disgust.

"Well, hyung's a runner too, so…"

Eventually, Hoseok brings Namjoon up enough where the stowaway can taste the bile on his tongue and feel pheromones in his blood, but the thrall doesn't stop, just keeps him on the edge of reality. The effect leaves him slightly more placid than when Hoseok had first set his gaze on him, and even if the man had truly pulled back the thrall has never been an easy thing for Namjoon to purge from his system.

But Hoseok pulls back enough where Namjoon can think. He knows hours have passed, he can feel the lost time sticking to his skin, but he can't feel himself panic. He's just… uncharacteristically calm. And he wants to be angry about it, but Hoseok's still smiling. His gaze is far beyond something a human could make, so Namjoon can't. He breathes in even breaths, his heartbeat slow in his ears.

His hands are laced together in his lap, now wrapped in gauze. His fingers twitch mildly from bone-deep weakness. He looks up from a horizontal position in the cot, hazarding a glance at the xenos, armed and staring Namjoon down with only malice in his gaze, and the stowaway feels nothing.

Hoseok shuffles some papers on the corner of the cot where he sits. The room is quiet apart from the buzz and beeps of machines. Idly, Namjoon's fingers drop to the blanket draped over the bed, and he rubs the threads between his fingers. Namjoon glances at Yoongi to see the xenos bristle at the action, but he makes no moves. He still has a hand over his mouth. Then Hoseok sighs.

"My pack gave me this before I first ventured off-world. It was supposed to be a good luck charm while I was at school. I never technically finished, so who knows if it actually works, but I like to keep it with me. It's usually here in the medbay, as long as someone hasn't stolen it for their nest." He shoots a look at Yoongi, who fails to respond, his unwavering attention solely focusing its ire on Namjoon. Hoseok clasps his hands together and turns his body away from the wall to face Namjoon directly. His vibrating pupils begin to slow. "I say all that to say, we don't mean you any harm here." Yoongi scoffs, and Hoseok ignores him. "I know this situation is uncomfortable, and I know you're afraid, but we aren't trying to hurt you." The vibrating stops, yet there's still a film on Namjoon's tongue that won't leave even after he swallows.

"Our captain is coming to figure out whatever comes next, and he's asked that I break my thrall on you to do so, and I will, but I need you not to panic." Something flickers in Namjoon's chest. "You're too weak to stand, so please don't try to run. The ship is well out of the range of the spaceport, and everyone aboard can remotely disable flight commands if necessary." He cocks his head, glittering gold meet the flat brown of Namjoon's dilated gaze."We aren't going to hurt you, we just want to figure this out."

He waits for a response from Namjoon, some symbol of awareness, long enough that it makes Namjoon want to squirm under. Until the stowaway takes a breath as deep as he comfortably can, and gives Hoseok the smallest of nods, never once managing to break away from the man's watch. Hoseok grins again; there are no teeth to his smile. He looks to Yoongi and then nods, and the purple-haired xenos taps something on his watch, and then all heads turn to the medbay door, and watch as it slides open.

─── ⋆⋅⭑ ✧ ⭑⋅⋆ ───

He's human, Seokjin thinks. He'd known it from the moment he first saw the man draped over Taehyung's shoulders, a delirious, begging form. He'd been reminded of it when Hoseok worried about him running a fever in the medbay bed, and Jin had murmured that his kind, their kind, red-blooded xenos, run hot, yet Hoseok had still administered something to bring his temperature down. He'd faced it again this morning, when he watched over the stranger's body while their resident medic and mechanic left to help Tae handle their ongoing engine problems, but it truly hits now.

Now.

He's human, Jin thinks, and it should be exciting, but that only makes this so much worse. He's propped up on the medbay cot, shaking. Wires and IVs stretch out of him like the tendrils of a solar flare. Monitors and machines hum quietly, their low noises only broken up by their intruder's laboured breathing. Jin thought Hoseok might have been wrong that night, almost four day-cycles ago, when Jimin's scream had first rang out across the ship and the crew of Bangtan was handed a dilemma they'd thought no one would ever be sacrificial enough to try.

For a moment, he might not have been; just a trembling figure covered in blood, murmuring frantic sorries and broken pleads for his eomma, but he'd been too humanoid to be anything else. Still, there'd been a whine between the wheezing. A hiss breathed in the seconds before the bloodied stranger in their airlock dove face-first towards the ground. When Taehyung scrambled to catch him and pulled the stranger upright, a noise had torn from his throat. A forgotten siren song buried itself in Jin's bones, and in that moment, maybe, for an unlikely minute, the two had more in common than the ability to bleed red.

But his crew needed more than conjecture and Jin's lonely, long-suppressed instincts, so he left it to Hoseok to call the man human, and the Bangtan's captain did his duty and charted their ship a path through the stars.

Now, Jin stands just outside the medbay, watching the quaking stranger raise his head to face what lies beyond its doors.

His skin is marred purple with bruising, reddened scrapes are scattered across his face, and his eyes are a deep, rich brown, like fresh turned soil, the kind dark enough to promise new growth. Seokjin looks at him, and he's sure. He's human, he thinks, and he crosses the doorway.

The stowaway flinches as Jin enters the room. The medbay air tastes like disinfectant and the heady, honey-sweet remnants of Hoseok's thrall. It's thinner than it had been a few hours ago when Hoseok had first put their intruder under. Jin hadn't been shocked to find the stranger staring blankly at the ceiling, unresponsive, pliable, and smelling of syrup after Yoongi cancelled Jin's plans for questioning over their private line. Something about the human's circulatory system meant his panicking could pull whatever he was poisoned with to his heart, and Hoseok has never been inclined towards sedatives. It wasn't a surprising outcome, but inconvenient for its time.

"Captain," Yoongi drawls sharply, as the door whooshes shut behind Jin. His gaze is weary and dark when Jin meets it.

A part of Jin wants to remind his eldest bondmate that he was not required to stand guard around the clock at their intruder's wake. Especially since, as Hoseok had informed them from the jump, it would be a miracle if the man managed to sit up on his own, let alone climb out of bed and go on a rampage through the ship. But Jin keeps his mouth shut, simply nodding as he walks past.

He doesn't need another round of their ongoing argument where he has to remind his lover, once again, he's still angling for a third, less actively hostile option, that's not trapping their stowaway in the airlock to be interrogated, or shooting him where he sits and sparing them the supply costs of a seventh body. The weapons specialist has yet to find the light in Jin's reasoning.

Jin ignores the irritated growl bristled by Yoongi and slides into the chair empty at Hoseok's desk.

Yoongi shifts his gun towards the stowaway's head, and the human clenches his hands into tight fists. Jin notes the bandages wrapped around his palms. They're a new addition to his dressings. Jin frowns. Hobi's mouth forms a line, and Jin recalls Hoseok's overly-fatigued complaint that Yoongi keeps making their intruder's panic episodes worse. He watches the weapons specialist switch the setting on his blaster from stun to shock, and resists the urge to sigh. It's too obvious if he sighs, but the captain does assuage himself with the knowledge that he was going to do this anyway. Yoongi snarls at the human. Jin might as well do it now.

"Yoongi, love?" Eyes that shine like the darkest of glaciers find Jin with a glare. "Would you mind checking on Jiminie for me? You know how he gets about these things, I think he could use the company." His lover stiffens.

"Captain," Yoongi says disbelievingly.

"I would appreciate it." Jin's wearing a genial smile, the one he knows Yoongi hates. The one that makes Yoongi feel like his mate is corralling him, because that is exactly what Jin's doing, he's corralling him. Seokjin is about to have a very uncomfortable conversation, and he wants to have it now with as few interruptions and unnecessary pains as possible, so he needs to eliminate any threats from the room. Unfortunately for the man who wants to shoot Jin's unwilling participant, he counts as a threat, so he's being corralled.

"You need me here," Yoongi protests carefully. He won't risk a fight in mixed company. They both know better than that. Which means Yoongi knows he can't win.

"I need you with Jimin. I can handle here."

"Hyung."

"Yoongi-yah." A silent conversation rings hot in the air.

"Seok-ah isn't armed."

"I am," Jin replies. He's not above pulling rank. As much as Jin is Yoongi's mate and longest confidant, at this moment, he's his captain, something they agreed to long ago. "Please," he purrs, and it's a tense moment as they both think about what comes next. Something medical beeps. Then there's a swear, and Yoongi hisses underneath his breath before he storms out without another word.

The door whooshes shut, taking some of the lingering notes of thrall with it. Papers stir in the gust started by hydraulics, but it does little to clear the sticky feeling gathering on Jin's skin.

Hobi sends him a grateful look before he pops off the medbay cot and takes Yoongi's place on the bench. He marks something down on his tablet, tracking the slight change in the readings displayed all around the room as the medbay door audibly locks. Then the medic gives his captain a nod, and Jin clears his throat, directing the stranger's attention to him.

"So, RM, I hope you're feeling better," Bangtan's captain starts. "I know this is probably not where you were expecting to wake, but hopefully you don't mind that Hoseokie took the liberty of patching you up." Somehow, the stowaway has managed to get paler.

"You know my name."

"You're on my ship," Jin returns, pointedly. He's not a threat to the intruder, not yet, but the stowaway doesn't need to know that. "But I will return the courtesy. I'm Kim Seokjin, captain of the Bangtan." RM doesn't move. He hardly even breathes. Hoseok shoots Jin a look, and Jin pivots his approach. "I don't know if Seok-ah told you, but I'm the one who gave you the blood transfusion after we found you." A process Jin hopes he never has to repeat anytime soon.

"Blood transfusion?" RM dares to reply.

"You were bleeding a lot when we found you," Hoseok pipes up. "Your synthetics weren't holding very well. They were providing pressure, but not enough to effectively staunch the wound. You passed out right after we found you, though I doubt you remember all that. Anyways, luckily for you, Jin-hyung is another ferro-hemo type; I was able to convert his blood into something you'd be able to process. It's not perfect, but it definitely turned out to be a better match than expected." Hoseok doesn't smile like Jin expects him to when recounting all the hard work he's done over the past few days, but Jin still sees the proud set of his shoulders.

RM's head lolls against the pillow, turning back to face Jin. His eyes are still cloudy from thrall, but he manages a few sputtered sounds before words fit in the stowaway's mouth.

"You're iron-blooded?" RM asks. He seems exceptionally scared but is still surprisingly polite. It almost feels like a reflex rather than an active choice the human is making.

"I'm Lehari," Jin explains, and RM's eyes go wide.

"What are you doing out here?"

"I could ask you the same thing, human. I thought your kind weren't supposed to leave your colonies."

He twitches slightly. A direct movement rather than the constant trembling, Hoseok said to ignore. A spark flares in RM's eyes, but all the human does is swallow, his almost stalking gaze suddenly annulled to watching his hands flex in his lap. Jin frowns slightly, yet Hoseok doesn't look surprised. He needs to ask the medic what he's noticed once they're behind closed doors. For now, Jin will let it go.

RM knits his fingers together in his lap, wincing slightly as he does.

"Does it have anything to do with the bounty on your head?" Jin asks. RM's head whips up.

"Bounty?" he repeats, slowly. A new kind of horror flickers in the stranger's eyes, and something buzzes loudly from the mess of machines RM is hooked up to. Jin waits for Hoseok's sign to slow down, but his mate makes no such move, instead tapping something on his holo-pad and then displaying a hologram into the medbay air.

Gridded blue lines distort the image, but the message is clear. A man, clearly RM, though a notably younger version of him, scowls at the empty air he hangs in. He's beat up and bruised, much like his counterpart watching from the cot. The hologram's lip is split in the same spot it's healing on RM now. Static text sits in bold, framing the top and bottom of the mugshot. Wanted Alive. R-M. Notorious Criminal and Suspected Pirate. Wanted for Grand Crimes and Treason Against The Eprosseii Embassy. Reward: 50,000 credits.

It's excessive; the description they've given him, and the price attached to his name, puts him on the upper end of currently active Eprosseiian bounties. They must really want him. Jin leans back in his chair.

"I do try to keep tabs on who's aboard my ship in the odd chance we've taken on a passenger. Luckily, this showed up on my radar not long after you did, funny huh?"

RM swallows. He barely tears away from the hologram to face Jin with a somber stare.

"What now?" he says. There's a rumble to his voice, unexpected for a trapped, dying man. Jin thinks the last of Hoseok's thrall may be finally wearing off.

"I don't know," the captain grins. "You're still here, so obviously I don't plan to throw you to the Embassy just yet."

"Yet." Jin wonders how far down this repetition thing runs.

"Yet," he replies in kind. "It depends. The price on your head is pretty big, wanna tell me about it?" Jin's smiling. He can't help the fact that he's smiling. Thank the heavens above that Yoongi's not here. He couldn't bear another hissed comment asking, what could possibly be so amusing about this situation? But Seokjin can't help it. He's having fun.

Hoseok only rolls his eyes at Jin's expression. He makes no moves to shut the hologram down.

RM seems to mull over his answer for a moment before settling on, "Heresy." Jin smiles wider.

"They don't put 50,000 credit prices on heretics," he rebuts.

"I'm their favourite one." That buried spark flickers briefly under the fluorescent lights.

"And just what heresy did you commit that makes you so expensive?" Hoseok adds from the bench. RM's head rolls back to face him. His fingers trace the weave pattern of the blanket draped over him.

"It's the Eprosseii," he answers. "Pick anything." Fair enough.

Seokjin uses the moment of stolen attention to try and determine whether the human is being coy with them, but it doesn't look like it. Obviously, he's lying. Jin's not an idiot, but the man's not trying to play games. RM shivers when Hoseok flashes his teeth. He's still scared.

Silence lingers in a long moment. Jin cocks his head. A timer goes off on Hobi's watch, and the medic stands to adjust something within the tubing running to RM. The human tenses as Hoseok draws closer, breathing visibly, picking up, but he makes no moves to fight, just watching anxiously, like this scares him more than the questioning. Huh. Curious. Seokjin breaks the quiet.

"And all that heresy led you to my ship for no particular reason?" This makes RM flinch, jerking back abruptly enough that Hoseok makes a chiding noise, grabbing onto the only IV in use that isn't part of the room but instead free-standing. Hobi keeps it from toppling, a pulse of honey spiking in the air automatically trying to calm his patient and prevent further damage, before he reels the instinct in.

"Be careful," Hobi bids. Then he moves the stand closer, increasing the slack on the IV line. RM nods. His hands curl into tight fists. Ah, Jin thinks. He's so glad Yoongi's not here.

"I didn't- it was an accident- I never. You weren't supposed…" he falls silent, chest heaving despite how quiet the stuttered words were. "It was never supposed to be you. I wasn't thinking. I can barely remember how I got here."

"You had your own ship," Hobi asks, but it's not really a question. RM nods anyway. "And then you didn't." RM nods again. "Did the Embassy find it?"

"No, it just…" he trails off, gaze fixed in the middle distance. Then he clears his throat with a brief shake of his head. "Either way, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to get anyone pulled into my situation. I was just looking for an exit. Please don't give me to the Embassy. Please. I promise I'm not trying to cause you trouble, Captain. I’m only looking for a way off-world. I’ll pay whatever the price." The confession feels like a prayer.

"You know if I turned you in, I could probably get ten times anything you could offer?" RM's throat bobs. Jin raises his brows genially.

"I'm aware."

"And you're still asking."

"You're my only option, and you haven't killed me yet."

"Yet."

"Yet," RM agrees.

For a moment, Jin sees his mates in this man. Scared, lonely, and desperate. Willing to do whatever to get out of the clutches of one horror, even if it means handing himself over to another. Jungkook was like that. Jungkook would probably love RM. If things had gone better the first time around Jin suspects he probably would have ended up a pirate too.

Seokjin closes the shared commn link displaying the wanted poster. He sighs.

"If I tried to turn you into the Embassy now, I imagine they'd take the ship in for habouring alongside you. The habouring clause would likely lead to us being charged as accomplices, and my mate would murder me for getting us restricted from this end of the galactic quadrant, and ruining his reputation."

"And for being caught," Hobi interrupts.

"That too." He drags manicured nails over the smooth surface of Hoseok's desk. The wood is from Kiviut. It was a hard thing to find so far from his mate's home world, but Jin did it anyway. It's got a warmth to it the flora on Lehari's never knew. Hoseok would hate to loose it, and Jin would despise losing him.

"RM," he addresses. The stowaway manages to sit up a little straighter against the pillows. "You are incredibly lucky that this ship is not in the business of selling people. At this moment, the risk of you being here has yet to outweigh the risk of turning you in. But the fact that you have not been sent out the airlock we found you in is a kindness. One, I am more than willing to revoke.

"If you start trouble here, know whatever the Eprosseii Embassy wants from you will be the last of your issues. My priority on this ship will always be my crew. Now, I am not a naive man, and so I don't expect us to get along perfectly, but as long as you are here, you will follow my orders and the orders of my crew, and you will learn to like it, because we are doing you a favour by letting you keep your life." The ship's captain speaks slow and calm, unflinching through every syllable, his dark gaze staked on the human as he makes sure their intruder absorbs every word. "Do we have an understanding?"

"Yes, Captain," the words are fluent from practice. "I'd expect nothing less."

"Good." Jin wipes the shadow off his face and replaces it with his usual charming smile. "So where are we taking you?"

RM stares are Jin for a moment, watching his warder in a silence Jin can't quite put a name to. RM glances at Hoseok who's busy unplugging one machine and turning on another. Something with bellows breathes to life. The doctor is unfazed, the patient evaluates his next move, before he finally allows his face to pinch, soil-brown eyes fall back on Jin, looking almost ashamed.

"Ymir."

"Ymir?" Hoseok gasps before Jin can. Jin can't quite keep the grimace off his face. The tips of RM's ears redden. Jin notes the fact that his do the same when he's particularly flustered. Strange. He thought that was a Lehari thing. Then again, he hasn't met many—any—humans.

Ymir's not a bad planet for them, technically speaking. It's far out from their current destination—a stray asteroid belt a little too close to the Embassy for his liking, but Hoseok and Tae are still patching up their engine problems, so it's fine enough for now. The Bangtan's current trade route does, however, take them through Ymir's system, though he won't stress the ship by actually trying to get onto the planet. He imagines the stowaway will be fine with the Bangtan just getting him close. Someone's always ferrying the lost to Ymir.

"I can do Lanayru," Jin offers instead. The planet is much closer to the ice planet's sun; much more Jin's speed. The stowaway brightens.

"Done," RM says without hesitation. "How… how much?"

Seokjin puts his teeth away. Part of him wants to be cruel, the core part of him that will defend his lovers with tooth and tail if it is the last thing he ever does. But, Jin reasons, he's having fun. Against all odds, the man Jin is willing to kill at moment's notice, without a single lick of regret, has been fun. Hoseokie's made no reservations about getting into RM's personal space to care for him, so he's clearly alright with their little intruder. Plus, he can always change his mind later. Or push RM out the airlock himself.

"15,000 credits." The human blanches.

"Okay."

─── ⋆⋅⭑ ✧ ⭑⋅⋆ ───

Namjoon doesn't know what he was expecting when he was informed of the captain's arrival, but it wasn't… him. Captain Seokjin left not long after the end of their negotiations, striding out of the medbay, off to tell the crew of Namjoon's new plans. There'd been fewer knives and threats with intangibly thin, veils than Namjoon is used to, which was nice. But the man, the Lehari, also never stopped looking at Namjoon.

The captain, though smiley and so at ease it was off-putting, had spent the better part of their talk staring unblinking at Namjoon. His piercing gaze had taken what little mobility Namjoon had and swiftly pinned it to the bedspread. His attention never wandered, solely and completely focused on his newfound passenger like he was on a quest to get under Namjoon's skin. A wild grin had spread wider and wider across the captain's face with every word Namjoon forced through his teeth, only stopping when the captain promised the end of Namjoon's life if he screwed them over.

Namjoon shivers as he thinks about it. Hoseok lifts his head from where he's been slowly pairing down the number of machines Namjoon's hooked to.

"How are you feeling?" he asks.

"Fine," Namjoon lies. His stomach is full of lead. At least they don't want to kill him for now. Or at least, Hoseok and the captain don't have plans. He expects Yoongi will slaughter him in his sleep, once Namjoon's credit transfer goes through.

"Let me know if that changes," Hoseok says.

"I will," Namjoon returns. He will not.

There's more padding around from the medic, casual ministrations resuming as Hoseok is caught up in the process of Namjoon. Namjoon is Awake, awake now, though too scared to get in the medic's way.

They're taking him to Lanayru, he thinks. Once he gets to Lanayru, he should be able to get a ride to Ymir and track down Gujihanna's emergency base. He'll send a distress call, pray it will get an answer, and dread what they'll do to his contract. Maybe they'll just leave him out to die in the snow. He wouldn't be surprised. A voice that tastes suspiciously like Namjoon's captain reminds him how low on chances he's already running. Maybe he deserves to die there, but that might mean he made it off the spaceport for a reason, rather than his own poorly planned dumb luck.

Right as his head starts to hurt from thinking too hard, there's a knock on the medbay door.

"I brought dinner!" a voice cheerfully shouts. Namjoon recognizes it. Hoseok makes a fond noise and steps away from his duties to unlock the door.

"Tae-yah, I asked you to wait until I called," Hoseok says as the door whooshes open.

"I know, hyung, but Yoongi was getting all wound up about you being in here alone, so I thought I'd do you a favour before he tries to convince Jin-hyung to let him come back," someone says. They push through the door despite Hoseok's squawk of protest and set a covered tray down at the end of Namjoon's cot.

"Hi!" he says, "I'm Taehyung!"

And Namjoon swears he remembers the hands that caught him when he first fell here.