Chapter 4

Chasing Xiumin
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It was well past midnight, and Im Chaeyoung had never wanted to kill something more. Ideally, this something would come in the form of a certain stupid intern, but considering Chaeyoung preferred to stay out of jail, she figured she'd settle for playing the whack-a-mole game on her phone instead.

I’m going to get fired, if not tomorrow then the day after, she thought as she plodded down the hallway to the apartment unit she shared with her sister. Friend or not, Joonmyun won’t be able to protect me from HR now that I’ve potentially exposed our entire country to an attack through the Fifth Tunnel. All those hours spent working overtime, all the networking and -kissing I did, all the prejudice I fought against to get where I am today, none of it matters anymore because I had the poor judgment to leave my briefcase with a total idiot of an intern.

How the intern had thought it would be acceptable to leave a briefcase full of top-secret national security details with some random man inside the building escaped her completely. The fool hadn't even bothered to ask for the man’s name, and now the locations of all the units of surveillance equipment set to be installed in the Fifth Tunnel were floating around somewhere in the clutches of an anonymous stranger. By the time Chaeyoung had extracted this story from an increasingly hysterical intern, the security office for the building had already closed for the night, locking all surveillance tapes within it.

I’ll check the surveillance cameras in the lobby tomorrow, she decided, turning the key in the lock and pushing open the apartment door. Hopefully the cameras caught the man’s face, and we can track him and those papers down immediately. But I'm still going to get fired.

Consumed by her thoughts, she didn’t notice that Baekbaek hadn’t ambushed her with slobbery and enthusiastic yips the second she stepped through the door like he always did. She didn’t notice the frayed wires slumped in a heap next to Baekbaek’s water bowl. She didn’t notice the window in the living room left gaping open, and she certainly didn’t notice a shadow detaching itself from the curtains behind her.

The next thing Im Chaeyoung did notice was a sharp pinch on the back of her neck, and then the world was tilting, twisting, tumbling into an endless sea of black.

---

Chaeyoung was floating, floating away in a lazy river. Water thrummed around her, swelling and dipping rhythmically in waves that rocked her body, and a thin layer of sediment was hardening on her tongue, stiff and gritty. Her limbs felt heavy, restrained, like fat horses chained to a mountain. But why was it so dark? She blinked slowly, seeing only blackness.

Come to think of it, the river current lapping at her back felt strangely steady, almost mechanical in its unfaltering up-and-down oscillations. The sediment coating her tongue, too, felt artificial, tasting more and more bitter by the second.

Panic rising in , Chaeyoung forced her left hand into a fist and slammed it into the water below her with all the strength she could muster. Pain shot through her hand, rendering her entire body immobile once more. That’s not water, she decided when her hand unraveled from its agony-induced pretzel. Definitely not water, it’s solid. Feels kind of scratchy, like some sort of mat or lining instead. Where am I?

The thrum under her back lurched to a halt, ending with it the rocking motion. Chaeyoung heard a muffled thump, and then a voice speaking in Chinese.

“Hang on, Luhan, I might have heard something in the trunk. I’ll call you back in a second.”

I’m in a trunk! Chaeyoung thanked her lucky stars for having studied Chinese during her undergraduate years. But why am I in some Chinese man’s trunk?

The car trunk cracked open, the soft glow of the moon stunning Chaeyoung momentarily, and then she was blinking down the barrel of a dart gun.

“Sorry about this.” This time speaking Korean, the young man pointing the gun at her didn’t look apologetic at all. “But you’re not supposed to be awake until we arrive at Luhan’s.”

Before Chaeyoung could protest, she felt another sharp pinch on her neck, and back she tumbled into the lazy river once more.

---

The next time Chaeyoung opened her eyes, she was strapped down on a cot in the center of an apartment bedroom not unlike her own, and the same young gunman was sitting in the corner of the room, polishing a set of silver-handled knives.

“You're up early again,” he said, eyes remaining focused on his knives. “Perhaps you’re heavier than you look.”

What the hell? First he kidnaps me, and then he calls me fat? She grimaced at the bitter taste lingering in and wiggled her fingers, testing the strength of the bonds holding her down. Her stomach clenched when she realized she had no chance of snapping them.

“Who are you? What did you do to me? What do you want? Where am I?” The questions came shooting out of with the blistering speed and intensity of bullets discharged by a machine gun.

This time he looked up, meeting her gaze with eyes so blank she couldn't see her own reflection in them. “A place,” he said, dropping his head back down.

Chaeyoung forced herself to breathe deeply and make sense of the situation. Why was she tied down to a cot with a potentially sociopathic weapons aficionado as her only companion? Was he really a sociopath, or was he simple-minded? Maybe his brain was just as blank as his eyes if this was how he answered questions. Or maybe he was only withholding certain information. She decided to test this last hypothesis.

“What model of knives are those? They're really expensive looking," she said, watching his face carefully.

The gunman kept polishing. “Mmhmm.”

“Are you hungry?”

He made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What does the color purple mean to you?”

“Eh.”

“Do you like penguins?”

“Perhaps.”

“That probably means yes in Tao-speak, but I’m not too sure.” A young man, ostensibly the same age as the gunman, strolled in, hands tucked in his pockets, and leaned against the entrance to the room. He was trying to look casual, innocuous, with those big eyes all wide and sparkly and a faded Donald Duck shirt on display, but Chaeyoung could spot the stiffness in his smile and the tension in his shoulders with a practiced eye, even in her horizontal position.

She’d see

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Chasing Xiumin is one of the many fics on AFF that have been plagiarized on another site (see blog section for more info). Please don't read CX on that other site - my work can only be read here on AFF, so if you see it anywhere else, please report it to me.

Comments

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comrades
#1
Chapter 22: I just realized this story hasnt been touched in two yrs and now im in mourning :(
vampwrrr
#2
Chapter 21: Oh, wow. That killed one of my theories that little boss was Chanyeollie. I think that Big Boss is Xiumin.

...or not.

Something's up with Xiumin, anyway, though. An experienced secret agent crying over torture? Or...hm, there's something to the fact that Luhan hears machinery in the calls. Maybe they're recordings?

Anyway. RIP, poor Fluffers.
vampwrrr
#3
Chapter 20: I really like how Chaeyoung has decided, even though Jongdae is...the most annoying man on the planet, to stick with him because no one deserves to be alone and defenseless and falsely accused of a felony.
vampwrrr
#4
Chapter 19: I don't trust Henry, I don't trust Chanyeol--shoot, at this point, I don't even trust that Xiumin has actually been kidnapped.
vampwrrr
#5
Chapter 18: Awww, Yixing has a crush...
vampwrrr
#6
Chapter 17: Is Jongdae starting to let down his clown guard?
vampwrrr
#7
Chapter 16: Awwww! Taotao packed them snackies?!
vampwrrr
#8
Chapter 15: I caught the showtime reference and my heart cooed.
vampwrrr
#9
Chapter 14: I love being right.