[Mildly mature content towards the very end of the chapter. Nothing explicit.]

Junior was busy with a new project he had yet to officially unveil. Naturally, Ren was with him all the time, but today Minhyun had also been asked to help.

Therefore it fell to Baekho to keep the American entertained. By now, the foreign boy didn’t really need the wheelchair anymore but he was – according to Minhyun – terribly afraid of a spasm making him fall flat on his face, so he still used it.

The white tiger thought that was a little paranoid, but admittedly it was a really cute face and he’d hate to see it bruised.

Carrying two cups of not-too-hot chai tea, Baekho made his way into a part of the facility he had rarely been to.

He knocked on the door to the improvised sanatorium – a roomy storage chamber that had been repurposed for Aron’s rehabilitation. Baekho knew that the recovering boy spend a lot of time throwing balls, walking along a railing and treading water in a sizeable indoor pool. A nice environment and perhaps even more comfortable than his own room. Which was why he didn’t hesitate to barge in, expecting none of what he saw.

Baekho almost dropped the chai when he stepped into a universe.

Walls and ceiling were a night sky, stars circling before dimly glistening nebulae. Tiny clusters and hand sized galaxies wobbled between red, blue and purple constellations.

In the middle on a hill of treasure – gold bars, coins and gem stones – perched Aron, gazing up at the ‘stars’.

Taking a few steps, Baekho cleared his throat. At last, the American noticed him.

“Tiger boy! Oh, you bring me something to drink. All the better. Can you climb up with your hands full?”

“Sure,” Baekho said and began to ascend the small hill. It was all candy. The gold coins were tin foil wrapped chocolate; the gems were jelly beans; the bars were gingerbread; most complicated stuff was made of marzipan.

One such item was a crown sitting on Aron’s head.

As Baekho dropped down next to the boy he sighed and handed over one cup. He wasn’t planning on staying. There was no way he could resist the call of sugar long enough to keep his hips slim.

“Shouldn’t you be exercising?” he said, with a gesture towards the unused equipment in the dark parts of the room.

“Nah, I can walk just fine,” Aron said and took a sip. “By now it’s a matter of working on the fine motor skills. My fingers are still a bit stiff.”

For a while Baekho watched as the other boy played with his candy, crafting small art pieces.

“You know,” he began again, “Junior said maybe we should all get chipped with a gps tracker. But there’s a good chance the Shadow would find a way to jam the signal so we’d have to do it in secret and…really I don’t know how I feel about the whole idea of getting a chip into my neck.”

Aron hummed noncommittally.

Well, so much for conversation. The American boy had been imprisoned by their arch nemesis, revealed a secret technique, survived multiple death traps and brought down a skyscraper. There was much to talk about, but there was simply nothing to say. ‘So, Aron, what’s is like to be paralyzed? Oh, it ? Figures.’

Baekho emptied his cup and vaguely motioned towards the faux night sky. “What’s this all about?”

“I tried some new things,” Aron said. “If I hadn’t known about the vacuum transfiguration thing I might not have been able to think of a way out of the cage. So now I experiment with my powers. I’m plucking photons out of the upper atmosphere and recreating them in here. Spent a while outside but now I can do it indoors. This is what you would see if you were in a space station.” He called upon one of the small galaxies circling above the hill. In his hand it rotated slowly. “Then I warped the images of individual objects I found interesting. This one is called the pinwheel galaxy. I can’t make them much bigger without making them blurry. Guess I would actually have to be up there.”

Baekho gave in and treated himself to a jelly bean. “How are things with Minhyun?”

“Fantastic,” Aron said, with an eye roll. “He’s making me eat fruit, because he wants me to get used to real food again. Oh, the things I do for love. How are things with that weird arrangement between Junior, Ren and yourself?”

“You know about that?”

“You’re loud. All of you.”

Baekho felt the heat rising in his cheeks. “You sleep in a different part of the building. We can’t be that loud.”

“Ever thought that someone might want to speak to the leader some evenings? I can’t count how often I turned around because I knew what was going on when I was only standing outside the door.”

“Uh…is that…do we have to stay on topic here?”

Aron shrugged. “I’ve been feeling pretty bored lately. Days with nothing to do but paddle in the kiddy pool. Don’t think I’m completely out of the loop. I know it’s weird to sit on a mountain of candy and look at stars that aren’t there. But what to do? We know exactly as much about the Shadow as we did before.” He scratched his hair under the marzipan crown. “I was kind of mad at myself for destroying the device completely and utterly. But in the moment there was no telling how much damage would have been enough to incapacitate it. Now we’re back to square one.”

“At least you gave him a good beating. He’ll run out of resources eventually. The…uh…the blood splatter count indicated that the building contained a huge amount of agents of the void. Maybe the majority, Junior says. Maybe all of them. Good job.”

The tiger awkwardly reached over and patted Aron’s shoulder for a moment. When that didn’t earn him a comment he let his hand rest on Aron’s back.

“Are you…uh,” Aron said, “coming onto me?”

“What?” Baekho retracted his hand at lightning speed.

“Kay. Never mind.”

Baekho tried to rise up to tower over the other boy, slipped on some squished chocolate money and dropped back into a sitting position. “I…I wasn’t. No way.”

“Not a problem if you were.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Alright. Forget it.”

The ensuing silence wasn’t comfortable of course but anything he could have said would make it even worse. A few times Baekho glanced to the side and each time Aron caught him looking. Well, maybe it was time to leave then. How had the American even come to this conclusion? Unless…

“Would you…” Baekho said quietly, “would you have liked me to?”

There was only the tiniest bit of hesitation. “I’d sure like to know what all the fuzz is about.”

Baekho turned to Aron and looked right at his smiling face. It really was a cute face. But…

“I can’t make you cheat on Minhyun.”

“What I have with Minhyun is completely different,” the American said. “I promise he won’t mind. Actually, he’ll pluck all the details out of my head later.”

“I bet you and Minhyun have done a few odd things, too, with those powers of yours.”

Aron chuckled. “Not really, to be honest. But I did think of an application or two, which seem worth testing.”

“Not on top of all this food, though,” Baekho said. “That’s a bit icky.”

With a booming swoosh the whole pile collapsed, becoming the biggest memory foam mattress in existence. The boys landed on the huge, silk draped rectangle.

How useful. Aron could make his bed where ever he pleased. Baekho wasn’t sure if he preferred this situation or Junior’s ability to warn him well before he hurt the boy. How wild would Aron allow him to go?

Both boy’s clothes exploded off their bodies and fell as a thousand shreds around the bed. The American rolled on top of the surprised Baekho. Skin on skin.

Aron’s face wore a radiant smile. “And no shifting into Twi, tiger boy. You’re mine now.”

Somehow Baekho had assumed he would be in charge. Apparently not. Well, that was yet to be decided.

He shifted under Aron, doubtlessly making the boy drop the distance to the mattress. In Twi the starry night illusion wasn’t there – just boring, gray ceiling. Baekho flew up and popped back out, slamming into Aron’s backside from an arm’s length above. The pinned boy huffed in surprise and turned his head as far as the white tiger’s weight on his back allowed. “So we’re having a role related disagreement, huh? Don’t make me turn this bed into a wrestling pit.”

Baekho chuckled. “We’ll just have to figure it out as we go along. Let’s get started on those ideas you mentioned. And for the record, I’d beat you in any fair fight, pretty boy.”

“Bring it, kitty cat.”

It wouldn’t take too long for Aron to find out what made Junior so loud on those occasions, Baekho was sure of that. They’d have a lot of fun for the rest of the day. If neither would relent, they’d just have to try every possible permutation.

They got started.

Galaxies spun overhead.