“Sweetheart," Hyukjae shouts into the kitchen, resting his head against the bottom of the overturned couch as he removes the empty magazine clip from the uzi, "you’re not dead are you?"

He hears back a loud snort and shuffling from the other side of their house, and then, “No,” says Donghae with a slight indignant in his tone.

Hyukjae readjusts the uzi on his lap as he grabs the extra magazine laying on the floor with his other hand, and quickly reloads a new magazine into the uzi with the ease and familiarity of someone who had done this a hundred times before—which he had.

"So how’s that left arm of yours?" Donghae casually asks, that he might as well be talking about the weather right now.

His obnoxiously cheery voice drifts into the great room, baring no reflection on the tense and precarious situation between them, and Hyukjae can’t contain the annoyed sigh that leave his mouth, because of course Donghae is the type of person to smile as he knock you down.

Donghae has always been soft and sweet on him and since the time Hyukjae had known him, he had never seen it any other way. Donghae looks at Hyukjae like Hyukjae had hung the moon and stars and like his world dangles on the slightest word from Hyukjae. That kind of unreserved and unfiltered affection can make even the most humble of man arrogant, and that’s why Hyukjae can’t help but finding it hard to console his Donghae to the one before him now and how jarring it is to be greeted with a bland and infinitely cold smile from Donghae instead.

So this is what it feels like to no longer be the center of Donghae’s world.

"Not bad," Hyukjae says after a moment. He slowly rolling his left shoulder, wincing at the biting jab of pain originating from the bullet wound that Donghae had landed with his M4 cabine, and holding back a string of curses.

Luckily for him it was only a flesh wound to his upper arm—he had to quickly stabilized the bleeding with a ripped piece of his own shirt, one of his favorites too, just so he won’t bleed to death—but getting hit by a cabine hurt like .

It was such an amateur mistake too. He suppose to be a professional, yet he stupidly entered the house without any prior planning or having done any surveillance on it as though he wasn’t walking into an enemy’s territory. The moment he found out Donghae’s true identity, this house and Donghae should have ceased to mean anything to him but his mission.

And Donghae should never been able to land a shot like that on him, not when he has nearly a decade of experience on him dealing with people trying to kill him as he try to kill them and he hasn’t feel this incompetent since he was twenty-two and on his first mission to Bangladesh, ordered to take out a drug-lord, and nearly got his head cleft off for his trouble plus three broken ribs and a black eye.

Donghae is a different kind of enemy he is fighting though, one whom he is keenly familiar with and with three years of love and adoration between them, and that makes him hesitant, weak, and raw in a way he never knew before but now isn’t the time for that kind of sentiment though.

He won’t make the same mistake again.

Hyukjae pushes up himself into a crouch and cautiously pokes his head above his covering, seeing that Donghae is still ducked behind the half-wall that divided the space between the great room and the open plan kitchen.  

He regretfully unloads the uzi into their beautiful newly remodeled kitchen that they just had it done two months ago, shattering the china plates on the display cabinets, tearing holes into the kitchen appliances, and ripping apart the very cabinets that Donghae is so proud of.

“Our kitchen!” Donghae shrieks from his hiding spot, sounding horrified and appalled. “And my beautiful cabinetries.” His voice drops low and into mournful tone and Hyukjae almost feel guilty about it.

Almost as he glances back down at his injured arm. Hyukjae always been a little vindictive, he’ll admit.

"Good riddance,” says Hyukjae, holding his fire.

Broken pieces of porcelain lay haphazardly on the floor, the cutleries has fallen in disarray, and gunshot holes marked each corner and niche of the kitchen, even their prize refrigerator has a string of bullets inscribed into its front door as another causality of their war.

He doesn’t missed those ugly yellow cabinets one bit though. He is just glad that he’ll never lay eyes on anything as awful as those cabinets again and it’s not even the kind of yellowish beige that Hyukjae could bare to live with but no, it’s a lemon yellow and it is so disgustingly cheery and perky that Hyukjae died a little on the inside every time he has to look at it.

 “They were awful anyway,” he adds. Yellow cabinets, seriously what was Donghae even thinking?

"What," Donghae demands hotly, poking his head above half-wall with a betrayed and affronted expression on his face. "You told me you like them when we bought them!"

Holding the pistol grip steady in his hand and fingers still on the trigger, Hyukjae says, "I lied," and shrugs his injure-less shoulder, because marriage is about compromise and sometimes that mean indulging your husband’s awful taste in interior designing.

The corner of Donghae’s lips pinch as he fixed Hyukjae with a heated glare, brows drawn together in a tight line and as soon as Hyukjae spots the flash of the barrel of Donghae’s M4 carbine, raised from behind the half-wall, he drops back down behind the couch.

Donghae ruthlessly unleashes a hail of bullets into the great room. “You already lied to me about what you really do and now this, so what else have you lied to me about?” he spats. “Is Lee Hyukjae even your real name?”

That probably wasn’t the best thing to say to Donghae in their current situation, but Hyukjae can’t help quietly grumbling under his breath, “I could say the same thing about you.”

Hyukjae hastily cover his ears against discord of the gunfire as the bullets pour into the room, leaving wreckage and carnage throughout. He watches with heavy heart as their large flat screen TV splinters on impact, the decorative vases break with a single shot, and several furniture left open in the room is caught in the firing line and is now punctured with bullet wounds.

Another room falls apart because of the lies and secrets kept between Hyukjae and Donghae.

Hyukjae eyes goes wide when he sees a stray bullet grazes the massive fish tank hazardly placed to into the side of great room where there’s a shootout taking place right at this instance but then again they never expected there will be any kind of a gunfight when they put the tank there.  

"Hey, hey, watch it!" Hyukjae yells in alarm through the cacophony of the violent storm of gunfire, feeling the frantic pace of his heart and the chest thumping horror, "you almost shot the kids.”

A stilted pause and the gunfire quickly dies out after that.

"Sorry, sorry,” Donghae says frantically, and Hyukjae could hear the obvious concern lace with each word that comes out of his mouth. “Are—are they alright?” It’s the first time he heard any real emotion in Donghae’s voice since he lit up his carbine on Hyukjae as soon as Hyukjae walked through the front door.

Betrayed never did sit well with Donghae. Or Hyukjae either, and hiding the fact they both work in the same profession, killer for hirers at that, is the biggest secret of all.

The only thing on his mind, since he had found out Donghae’s true identity, was: if Donghae had been keeping his secret life from Hyukjae, what else could he be hiding from Hyukjae? Their entire marriage could be sham for all Hyukjae know and all the love that Donghae had whispered to him in their bed feels too much like lie now.

Maybe all this time, the obvious affection that Donghae had shown to him was only a façade put up by Donghae to seduce some ordinary guy and marry them as some sort cover for his real job and to maintain a veneer of a regular life.

That set heavy in his chest, a bitterness he can’t seem to shake.  He tries not to think about it now not when he has a more important matter at hand.

Hyukjae takes advantage of the momentarily ceasefire to crawl where they had chose to place the massive aquarium. “Yea,” he says, carefully checking over the acrylic casing for any slight damage and making sure all the fishes were okay.

He’s really glad that he had the aquarium tank manufacture reinforced the acrylic casing just in case anything like this may happen and cause harm to their fishes. Donghae had easily accepted his paranoia and supported getting a nearly bullet proof tank and that should have been a clue in itself.

The fishes are swimming normally though and didn’t even seem perturbed by the disruptive noise of gunfire or the fact that the room they been living in for a year is now all blown up.

Hyukjae’s eyes drift over the array of fishes inhabiting their tank, [1] the school of Tinfoil Garbs and Fei Fangs swims innocently between the java ferns, their red Asian Arowana (that is Hyukjae’s favorite and cost Hyukjae over a thousand yen to acquire him from an arowana breeder but so worth it) seemingly ignoring Hyukjae’s face pressing up against the acrylic, a spotted gar hovering in the upper portion of the tank, a giant gourami who looks mean and tough but is more like a gentle giant following after their Siamese Tiger, and finally their Tigrinus catfish happily settling at the bottom of tank, all of whom shares a spacious 1,200 gallons half-circular aquarium protruding out of one of the walls in the great room and almost touching the ceiling.

It is the centerpiece of the house and their life, because somehow these innocuous fishes had become something like their children within a year.

The fishes were Donghae’s idea at first since they both do a lot of traveling for their job. Donghae was supposed to be a salesman of a pharmaceutical company and Hyukjae—well he explained to Donghae that he was a pilot for a small private aviation company and that was load of bull on both of their part. He should have known something was wrong when Donghae never talk about his work or even mention his coworkers and that he’d never been interest in prying in Hyukjae’s job but Hyukjae took it as a gift, that is it one more lie he didn’t have to tell.

Hyukjae wasn’t sure about getting an aquarium at first, he always been more of a dog person but getting a dog or even a cat wouldn’t be viable when they are out too much as it is so he grudgingly agreed to getting an aquarium.

It was the best and worst mistake of his life, because it took them three painstaking months to personally pick out each of the fish species that they wanted and finding breeders that aren’t skivvy. Each new fish arrival was like homecoming for both of them and they became more and more invested in these fish than they ever really wanted.

There are more work that goes in taking care of the fishes then Hyukjae had previously thought, Donghae had an entire shelf dedicated to care and feeding habits of each individual species and Hyukjae had learned about the tank humility, pH level, lighting, and even water hardness just keep all the fishes happy and content with their living situation.

Most of the time they personally do all the feeding and cleaning of the tank, switching off every week but when they are both gone they get an aquarium caretaker that come in daily to watch and care for their fishes and when they are finally home, cuddling up in the loveseat of their great room as they look at their aquarium, feeling a wave of calm and serenity overtake them form their rather violent and stressful job—not that either of them knew that.

“What about the tank? It the leaking water through?” Donghae asks, voice tauts with worry.

"The bullet only brushed against the acrylic,” he tells Donghae, touching the acrylic casing and feeling the dry and cool surface against his skin.

Hyukjae hears an audible sigh of relief from Donghae. “Oh thank god,” he says.  

“Just try to aim better and not hit the kids,” Hyukjae bites out. The tank didn’t break but that was too ing close.  

"Move out of the room then," Donghae snaps.

"So you can try to shoot at me again," Hyukjae says with a snort. "No thanks."

And then because he realizes that they aren’t getting anywhere in their stalemate—they are far too good and well trained to cut this fight short. “Did you clean the tank this week? Because Sumi seems a little ill and you know how sensitive she is to water purity level.”

Silent and then, “You never said anything about it.”

“I left a note for you near the nightstand to take over for me this week since I would be leaving early and coming home late and too tired to do any about it, did you forget that?” Which is a lie, since Hyukjae had cleaned the tank two days ago when he finished his mission ahead of schedule just so he can make time to clean the fish tank.

“I didn’t see anything like that,” he says, skeptism color his every words. “And why didn’t you mention it to me instead?”

“Does it really matter now because Sumi’s coloring is off and she’s swimming weirdly,” he says, keep his voice even and strong to not betrayed the lie.   

Sumi is a giant gourami and Donghae’s favorite, he regards her as if she was his favored child and anything about Sumi get him up in arms and just like Hyukjae expected, he hears a scuffling in the kitchen and then Donghae bursts into the great room looking panic and in full blown hysteria.

His carbine hangs at his side as he quickly makes his way to Hyukjae and the aquarium.

“Move,” Donghae says sharply, pushing Hyukjae aside to make room for him. His eyes scane every inch of the tank for Sumi, who is found happily flitting through the anacharis plants at the bottom of the tank.“ What are you saying she looks completely fine, you—“

Hyukjae hastily pulls out a short and thin knife concealed between his thighs, dropping his uzi on the floor beside him, and knocks Donghae’s weapon out of his hand as his knife hand push up against Donghae’s throat, startling Donghae completely and knocking him off balance until he’s on the floor with Hyukjae’s knees bracketing his waist and holding him still.  

He holds Donghae at knife’s edge, the cold steel does nothing to calm Donghae’s furious eyes, fixing Hyukjae with a heated glare and Hyukjae feels a twinge of desire kindling within him—because of course when Donghae looks just about ready to rip his throat given the chance, is a total turn on for him.

Just his life.

Silent passes between them, only the labored breathing of Donghae filled the air and Hyukjae looks down on Donghae—cheeks flushed with a feverish heat, body strained against Hyukjae, and eyes still fierce and uncompromising as the sun and Hyukjae could almost feel the beginning of his downfall.

“Do it,” Donghae says with a heavy resignation, eyes fluttering shut and his body give away.

Hyukjae blinks. It’s like the spark of fire within Donghae had just died and that isn’t like his Donghae at all.

And he still can’t stop think of this Donghae as his Donghae, to separate the two identity when he knows that the Donghae that he had fallen in love with was just a façade that Donghae had made up to fool him but it was only two days ago when he had woken up with Donghae furrowing into his side, mumbling inane things into creak of his neck and he was safe and warm and everything Hyukjae could ever wanted when his life is only blood and death and empty.

He shouldn’t—this is a trick, there never been his Donghae, he never existed in the first place so he might as well ended it here because if his Donghae didn’t exist than he didn’t want this stranger wearing Donghae’s face to walk this earth.

His knife digs into Donghae’s flesh until he sees blood peeking through and all it takes is quick movment of the wrist to end it here but instead he says, “You drives me absolutely crazy but—but I don’t know how to breath without you.”

He throws the knife aside and as it clatters against the flooring, Donghae’s eyes flash open. With Hyukjae’s free hand he grabs a handful of Donghae’s hair, leans down and crushed their lips together in bruising and biting kiss.

Forcibly prying Donghae’s lips open and he just takes and takes, not giving Donghae even a moment to breathe and unforgivingly demands all of Donghae even the one he never knew about. Every part of Donghae is his and he won’t let anything goes unshackles and free.

He burns and Hyukjae can’t fight it.

Donghae suddenly surges forward and returns Hyukjae’s biting kiss, ensnarling and drawing Hyukjae until Hyukjae too is caught in the fire.

But then, Donghae bites into his lower lip, drawing blood and Hyukjae jerks back; he could taste his blood on his tongue and he stares down at Donghae who smirks.

“Like you don’t do the same for me,” says Donghae and coyly Hyukjae’s blood off his lips, pink tongue peeking slipping pass his lips and chasing after the blood as if it was a drug. “I always knew you were going to ruin me.”

Hyukjae let out a choked off laugh that had lodged in his throat since the revelation of Donghae’s true identity, because even if Donghae is not the Donghae that Hyukjae thought he was only Donghae can make Hyukjae want to kiss him senseless and kill him at the same time.

They are quite the mess.  

[1] actually had to looked up these fishes to make sure a) they were compatible with each other (freshwater vs saltwater and uh the potential of they might eat each other) b) fit what I think hyukjae and donghae in this ‘verse would have chosen for themselves (the tinfoil garb and fei fang were specifically chosen b/c THEY WERE SILVER see what I did there??? :DD) and c) how plausible would it be to acquire them through legal means b/c hyukjae and donghae are okay with killing ppl for money but feeding into the black market for illegal aquarium fish trades?? Yea no. Now I know more about these particular fishes than I ever wanted to know, I just might take up to being a hobby aquarist now~

[2] I think that b/c they both deal in secrets and deaths that trust means a lot to them and betrayal is very common in their line of work so to find out the person they known and been with for three years IS NOT WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE?? It’s like instinct kick in and it’s all anger and resentment and heartbreak and they try think of each other as enemy instead of husband but it’s so hard to separate that so yea :/.