“Shoot!” she exclaimed as she tripped over a crack in the sidewalk that made her land on her hands and knees. “How embarrassing,” she muttered to herself.

“Are you okay?” Yixing asked, immediately running to the girl’s aid. “Wait... Korean?” he asked her, recognizing the foreign language that she had used. She nodded yes, though her attention was still on her hands on the ground. He offered her his hand, helping her to her feet once she accepted. She brushed herself off and winced slightly when she accidentally brushed against a couple scratches on her knees, which were left bare by the skirt she was wearing.

“You... you’re bleeding?” he asked in the best Korean that he could muster up, worried for the strange girl. He kneeled down to hold a hand over her scratches and looked around at their surroundings, trying to remember where the closest mini-mart was so he could treat her injuries.

“I am?” she replied, giving her broken Mandarin a try. “I’m sure I’ll be okay... I feel fine.”

“You do?” He looked up at her, and that was the first time they made eye contact. He felt an odd sensation about her; it was as though a shock of familiarity shot through his body in an intense wave of deja vu. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t notice her eyes before because they should have been the first thing to catch his attention. They were a beautiful shade of grey, and they reminded him of glass: fragile but firm. She giggled at his serious expression and nodded, trying to reassure him that she was okay.

“I feel fine,” she said again. “Look.”

He removed his hands from her scratched knees to find that the scratches had disappeared. He looked back up at her and then back to her knees, completely bewildered. “But... I saw the scratches there...” he said, returning to his native tongue. He was sure she had been a bit scratched up. He was positive. He had even seen some blood! He had seen it with his own eyes... hadn’t he?

“I should go now,” the girl said, breaking his concentration; his eyes had been determined to scour her legs for any remnants of her fall.

“Wait--what’s your name?” He quickly got back up to his feet, eager to meet her grey eyes once more before she left.

“Xie xie, Lay,” she said with a smile. She left him, still frozen in place with befuddlement, with a mystery that he decided to keep all to himself.

Yixing’s eyes shot open at the sudden memory.

Who was this girl exactly? Why, in that moment, had she appeared in his life? And why, in this moment, had she come up in his job, of all places?

“And now you’re in my dreams, too,” he whispered before rolling over and forcing himself back to sleep.

---

“Duizhang! Duizhang! I got one! I got one!” Tao announced excitedly as he dragged his prisoner into EXO M’s main office.

“Good job, Tao. You will be rewarded later,” Kris congratulated the youngest agent of their division.

“Great!” Tao exclaimed. “What’s my reward? Shopping? Lunch?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Kris replied, brushing away the topic. “Which one did you capture?”

Tao’s face dropped immediately. “Actually, I’m not sure.” Kris raised an eyebrow, waiting for Tao to explain. “There was actually two of them. One got away and I was only able to capture this guy, but I’m not sure who he is or what he does.”

Kris sighed, accepting Tao’s excuse. “Alright, that’s fine. As long as you caught this one. Did you get his name?”

“No,” Tao replied quietly in hopes of avoiding the leader’s chastisement.

Kris groaned at Tao’s lack of information. He poked Tao’s captive on the shoulder. “Hey, what’s your name?”

However, the captive simply looked confused.

“Uh, duizhang... I don’t think he understands. I found him in Korea.”

“And you brought him back here so quickly?” Kris asked, once again in awe at the young agent. Tao beamed. “Hao,” Kris started before directing his best Korean at the captive. “What is your name?”

The captive shook his head in refusal.

“Hmm...” Kris hummed. He figured that the boy would not give out his information so easily, but Tao still had to fill out the proper paperwork. In order to do that, they needed some sort of identification. “Tao, where is your information packet?”

“I, uh, left it in my car,” he answered sheepishly.

“Yixing! Luhan!” Kris called for the other EXO M agents, who were seated at their desks.

“Yes, duizhang?” they replied.

“Bring your Harmony folders up here. We--Tao needs a name to go with this face.”

“Yes, sir,” the two older agents responded as they began to sift through their folders. Yixing quickly flipped past the first two files since they featured females, but he could not help but pause for a bit as he skimmed over the all-too familiar grey eyes. Regaining his senses, he flipped to the next file, which pictured a male. He looked up to compare the image with the captive before him to find that he had already been staring at him, scrutinizing him.

“Wait, I recognize this one,” Luhan interjected with a laugh. He leafed through his folder until he found the file he was thinking of. “He’s the Blue Freeze!”

“How did you know so quickly?” Tao asked, amazed.

“I remembered his picture because when I first saw it, I thought he looked like a baozi!” Luhan explained as he began to laugh again.

“Er, great work, agents,” Kris nodded as he dismissed the two agents back to their workstations. Luhan was still laughing at his baozi comparison as he gathered the papers on his desk. Yixing, on the other hand, was feeling uneasy. He could feel the Blue Freeze’s gaze follow him as he walked back to his seat.

“I’ll just stick him next to the Girl of Allure, and then I’ll fill out the papers!” Tao informed Kris.

“Sounds good,” Kris responded. “Luhan, can you help him? You still have the keys, right?”

“No, I gave them to Yixing.”

“You have the keys?” Yixing looked up with a start and nodded. “Can you help Tao, then?”

“Y-yeah,” Yixing replied half-heartedly as he got up to help Tao bring the captive into the holding chambers. Yixing purposefully avoided looking at the Blue Freeze, afraid to once again catch his scrutinizing stare.

“Remember, don’t look into the girl’s eyes!” Kris called out after them before getting back to work. He heard an echo of “hao’s” in response.

“In you go!” Tao sang as he shoved his prisoner into the empty cell. “You could lock it up for me, right Yixing-gege?”

Yixing agreed, allowing the younger agent to leave first. He quickly locked the blue freeze’s cell, risking a quick glance before following after Tao.

Xingle waited until the agents were gone before daring to speak to her new companion. “Minseok!” she whispered in Korean through the bars of her cell once the coast was clear.

“Xingle!” he smiled, crawling to the side of his cell closest to hers. “I’d say I’m glad to see you here, but this kind of .” He gestured to their surroundings, making Xingle laugh.

“Agreed,” she replied. “But I really am glad to see you, too.”

Minseok glanced at the direction the agents left in before looking back at Xingle. “Was that...?”

“Yeah, it was,” she replied, knowingly.

“Did he recognize you?”

“Nope... It seems like he definitely doesn’t remember anything from the old life.”

“I see.” Minseok looked down to mull over that thought before returning his attention to Xingle. “So how’d you get here?”

Xingle shrugged. “An agent came to my house, I wasn’t wearing my contacts, I got screwed. You?”

“Jongin texted us about you getting caught, Jongdae and I left work together and headed to their house, then I got caught.”

“So where’s Jongdae?”

“We split up.” Minseok nodded toward the main office door. “He chased after me. Jongdae got away.”

“Those Kim siblings; the lucky bastards who got away,” Xingle laughed sarcastically.

“Yup, leaving us here to rot in jail.”

“‘Holding chamber,’” Xingle corrected him using air quotes. She rolled her eyes. “As though that makes it sound any better.”

Minseok laughed. “On the bright side, we’re here together.”

“Yeah,” Xingle agreed with a soft smile. “I thought I’d be stuck in here by myself. At least I have you here with me, too.”

---

“Hahaha, baozi,” Luhan snickered again, remembering his earlier connection with the Blue Freeze and one of his favorite snacks. He looked around to see if anyone else was laughing along with him. Since he and Yixing were the only two in the room at the moment, it was easy to see that he was laughing by himself. In fact, it seemed as though his partner was lost in his own thoughts. “Hey, what’s up?”

Yixing lifted his head, looking dazed. “Sorry, what?”

“Something wrong?”

“Nah, I was just thinking,” Yixing responded, shaking his head.

“You sure? You’ve been quiet all day.”

“Actually...” Yixing began. Luhan looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue.

“Earlier, when you brought in the Girl of Allure--”

“Xingle?” Luhan interrupted.

“What?”

“Her name; Xingle.”

“Oh, right... yeah. When you brought in Xingle, she gave me this weird look.”

Luhan laughed. “Yeah, she was pretty pissed that I caught her. She wouldn’t stop glaring.”

“I guess so,” Yixing said, pausing to think. “But then Tao brought in the Blue Freeze, and he gave me a weird look, too. Did you notice that?”

“Not really... But go on.”

“I felt this weird vibe from each of them when they came in.”

“Well, they’re kind of exoplanetary...”

“But the way they looked at me... it was as though they knew me. Like, knew who I was.”

Luhan got up and clapped a comforting hand on Yixing’s shoulder. “You’re thinking about it too much. They’re prisoners, they’re angry, they give us dirty looks -- no hard feelings about that, though, since we’re the ones that caught them in the first place. You shouldn’t feel bad about them giving you mean looks.”

“Yeah, I guess so...” However, Yixing remained unconvinced. He was positive that there was something different in the way that the two prisoners had looked at him earlier. But Luhan was right in that he was thinking about it too much.

“Great,” Luhan smiled, happy to have helped out his friend. He returned to his seat and picked up a small stack of papers. “By the way, would you happen to have an extra paper clip lying around? I ran out, but I have to bring this over to the mailroom right now...”

“Yeah, let me grab one,” Yixing replied, opening a couple drawers. “Hmm, I don’t think I have any either... Ah! But you can take this; I need to shred some of these anyway.”

“Thanks!” Luhan replied. Yixing brought out his own stack of papers, skimming the contents before deciding which ones he no longer needed.

“Ouch!” Yixing exclaimed suddenly as he instinctively brought his finger to his mouth.

“What happened? Papercut? Want me to grab you a bandaid?”

Yixing nodded with a little “Yes, please” and Luhan quickly got up to grab the first-aid kit. Yixing brought his finger out for inspection and saw that there was indeed a cut; though he had extrapolated as much when he tasted blood. He replaced the finger in his mouth as he waited for Luhan to return.

“Here you go,” Luhan said, handing Yixing a bandaid and a small tube of Neosporin.

“Thanks,” Yixing replied, removing his finger from his mouth.

“Hey, you’re not even bleeding!” Luhan complained. “I got up for nothing!”

“What?”

“I’ll go put this back,” Luhan offered glumly as he retrieved the bandaid and Neosporin from his friend.

“But I saw blood...” Yixing held his finger up for another inspection, but this time, just as Luhan observed, there was no cut to be seen.

A/N: Annyeong~ I was kind of staying away from AFF for a while during that whole... server fiasco. But I decided to come back for an update~ I rewarded myself by posting up a chapter because I was actually productive today and finished writing (and sent!) my cover letter for a job offer ^^ Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter~ Thank you for reading, for the comments, and for the subscriptions my dears~