“Where are we going?” The man asks as he steps up so that he’s side by side to Yoochun.

Yoochun wraps an arm around him and nuzzles his hair, smiling at the citrus smell of the man’s shampoo. “It’s a secret.”

The man pouts. “I don’t like secrets.”

“Trust me, you’ll like this one.”

“Even so,” the man says doubtfully. “Leaving like this after promising Yunho you’ll help him…”

Yoochun laughs. “There’s no need to worry your pretty head about that, Junsu. He knows here to find me if he needs anything more than what I already gave him.”

“What did you give him?” Junsu presses.

Yoochun looks out into the horizon, where they sky kisses the sea, and for some time the only sound to be heard is the lazy lapping of waves against the sides of the boat. When he finally speaks, it’s in the drawling, charismatic voice of a vampire of the noble class.

“Power.”                                 

-{}-

When Jaejoong wakes up again, it’s dark outside, and Changmin’s lying next to him on the bed, eyes closed, chest rising and falling with each slow breath. The clock on the wall reads three in the morning, and Jaejoong sighs. Three in the morning, when there’s no one to talk to and nothing to do.

Or…maybe there is.

There’s still a faint light coming out from under the door, and if Jaejoong listens very closely, he can just about make out the faint hum of the television. Downstairs? In the next room? He can’t tell. Now that he thinks about it, with Yunho bringing him his meals and a conveniently attached bathroom, he’s never had to leave the room. Beyond his room, Yunho’s house is unexplored territory.

Time to rectify that, then.

Jaejoong doesn’t expand much effort into not making a noise; Changmin loves sleep almost as much as he loves food, and Jaejoong is convinced that if anyone shot off a cannon next to his ear, the most he’d do is roll over and mumble something intelligible. At any rate, that’s the reaction he had when Jaejoong tried with party poppers and Infinite’s “Man in Love” at maximum volume.

So when he feels a hand grab his arm as he gets out of bed, his mouth opens and the scream that emerges from his mouth would definitely have sounded like a girl’s had it not been soundless.

For a split second, Jaejoong thinks he sees two bright red orbs where Changmin’s eyes are.

He blinks, and the lights switch on and the red orbs are gone.

Changmin winces at the onslaught of light, never loosening his grip on Jaejoong’s wrist. “What are you doing up at such an ungodly hour?” He groans.

In response, Jaejoong motions at the door.

“He’s probably fallen asleep in front of the television.”

Jaejoong shakes his head impatiently and points at the door again.

Changmin’s eyes narrow. “I don’t think Y—professor will like that, hyung,” he says, and the tone of his voice indicates that he’s not too happy about it either.

Cue the puppy eyes.

As always, it only takes a couple of seconds for Changmin to give in. “I’d recommend you stay away from the study. It’s the one with the door that has the purple iris carving on the door. And don’t take too long.”

It’s not like there’ll be much to see anyway, Jaejoong mouths, too lazy to write it on the notepad. By the way Changmin cracks a smile, he understands what Jaejoong’s saying…just barely.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,’ he says, finally loosening his grip on Jaejoong’s wrist. “I’d come with you, but this mattress goes for a couple thousand and I’m not going to taste this for a long time.” He lightly pushes Jaejoong towards the door. “Go on, Dora the Explorer.”

Jaejoong playfully slaps his hands away. As Changmin rolls over, he, feeling evil, switches off the lights, and Jaejoong is left to his way to the door in the dark.

-{}-

Though he doesn’t avoid it like the plague per se, Jaejoong follows Changmin’s suggestion and leaves the door with the purple iris carving on it alone. It’s a very good carving, Jaejoong notes, the wood of the petals so thin it’s hard to believe that they haven’t snapped off yet, and the single flower skilfully painted in royal purple, far too beautiful to have been made by an amateur.

It’s strange, Jaejoong thinks, that a guy like Yunho would like something so delicate and fragile.

Maybe he’s not as masculine as he seems. Yunho doesn’t seem like a pushover, but then again, Jaejoong has only seen him in teacher-mode and father-mode, both of which don’t really allow room for any feminine actions. But as he passed by the living room—he didn’t go in because Yunho, as Changmin predicted, has fallen asleep in front of the television—he catches a glimpse of Yunho’s sleeping face, and while it doesn’t disapprove the idea that Yunho is at least a little more manly than the pretty-faced boys that the girls in Jaejoong’s school go nuts over (he’s one of them), it’s a lot less…fierce than Jaejoong would’ve thought.

He doesn’t look much different from when he’s awake—when you already look perfect, there’s only so much more perfect you can look, even when asleep—but there’s a certain innocent air about him that Jaejoong didn’t detect when Yunho was awake. Asleep, with eyelashes brushing his cheeks and his mouth softened into an almost-smile, Yunho looks more like an adorable, overgrown child than a teacher, let alone the man that killed Jaejoong’s father.

Apparently, a mental brick to the face was not enough to remind Jaejoong he should not be having that kind of thoughts about Yunho. So Jaejoong figures that instead of hurling an imaginary truck at himself next, the best thing to do would be to move on to the next room, because the sooner Yunho is out of his sight, the better.

He all but runs down the corridor to the next room.

Even with the lights off, the moonlight streaming in through the window is enough to let Jaejoong see that it’s a library, smaller than the kind in movies that you could fit a tiny village in, but what it lacks in size it makes up in sheer volume. Apart from a single rectangular block on the wall opposite the door given to an elongated window, the walls are covered with bookshelves that extend from floor to ceiling, every space filled with books of every kind, from slim volumes that would’ve passed for children’s storybooks to leather-bound volumes so thick and ancient-looking Jaejoong wouldn’t have been surprised if he was told they were some royal family’s history dating all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire. As it is, they’re about something just as boring…the titles that he can see are all something along the lines of A History of Navigation and other equally yawn-inducing sentences. Jaejoong can’t help chuckling, not bothering to repress it since no sound’s going to come out anyway. What would the girls in school think, if they knew that their beloved professor Yunho has books that are probably older than their grandparents?

The room is every bookworm’s wet dream, but unfortunately, Jaejoong is not a bookworm. Yes, he’s good at literature (second in class after Changmin), but being good doesn’t necessarily mean he likes it. Truth to be told, though he doesn’t hate literature, he’d actually much rather just sit and stare into space than read Wilde or Keats. So it’s only natural that instead of the books, his eyes immediately centre in on the red velvet armchair in the middle of the room, the sole piece of none book-containing furniture in the room apart from the side table next to it.

Even if Jaejoong refuses to acknowledge it, he still has one secret wish left over from his childhood. Thanks to Changmin’s mum, Jaejoong has sat through many a movie that involves a large mansion with an old, cold and mostly evil master. While he agrees with the general consensus that those people are generally not likable, he’s always secretly wanted to be like one of them, sitting in the middle of a colossal room filled with useless fancy stuff that only really rich bastards can afford and survey his non-living kingdom. That’s why even though the room in his eyes is as boring as hell, he stills goes in nonetheless, just to sit on the armchair and survey ‘his’ kingdom.

The armchair is as comfortable as it looks; Jaejoong sinks into the soft swan’s down of the cloud-like seat, hardly believing that such luxury does exist and questioning why something so comfortable would be used on armchairs and not beds (perhaps it’s better this way…if Changmin’s bed was made of this stuff he’d never leave it).

A sense of satisfaction like no other fills him. Though nothing in the room is his, it still gives him a sense of possession that he’s never experienced before. His parents are far from poor, but even so, he’s never really felt that their wealth was his as well. It’s as if somehow, Yunho’s things belong to him as much as they belong to Yunho.

He stretches, and then pauses halfway in horror as he hits something off the side table, and it clatters onto the floor, the sound of metal on wood as loud as a gunshot in the silence.

He tenses up, hands going to the armrests to grip them tightly, fingernails digging into the soft surface. But nothing happens, and after a few tension-filled moments Jaejoong’s sure enough that he hasn’t woken anyone up to relax.

Curious, he kneels down on the floor, and his fingers almost immediately brush against cool, gnarled metal. Grasping it, he holds it up to the window to see whether there’s more to the rectangle of twisted metal than he felt.

All at once fear trickles into his blood and his hands start trembling, and had he not set the photo frame down he’d most certainly have dropped it.

It’s not the metal photo frame, unusual as it is, that he has a problem with—actually, the thick strands of metal carefully crafted to resemble vines is the least of his problems. The real issue is the photograph the metal encases.

It’s not a picture of corpses or abused puppies or anything gruesome like that, just a black-and-white photograph that’s obviously been taken long ago despite having been very well preserved. There are two people in it, two men in private’s uniform, arms slung around each other and grinning happily at the camera. To anyone else, there is nothing wrong with it.

Jaejoong would have said the same thing, had one of the men’s faces not eerily resembled his.