well this week has been a storm in the US, so I'm pretty much posting this unbeta'd aside from a few bits because I need to make this week better for myself and everyone else.

Donghae chewed on his thumb as they waited for it to be sufficiently dark, worrying about what would happen if they were caught and that his lack of control would be the thing that got them caught. He at least felt more rested since Heenim had ordered he and Hyukjae to take a nap, given that they were up so early and needed to be able to stay awake until night.

 

“Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid, but your worry won’t help you with control,” Heenim lazily commented, their feet propped up on the boat’s steering wheel, fingers laced over their stomach and eyes closed.

 

The boat was rocking gently in the water as the tide went out, pulling the boat with it. Hyukjae looked just as nervous as Donghae felt, maybe even a little more so.

 

Eventually Heenim cracked their eyes open to look upwards. The light pollution from Incheon and Seoul kept all but the brightest stars from appearing in the sky, and the darker it got, the brighter the light on the horizon seemed to be. They sighed and stood up. “Okay Hyukjae, let’s get going.”

 

“Are you sure this is going to work sunbae?” Hyukjae asked as he nervously sat down where Heenim had been.

 

Heenim shrugged. “Reasonably, yes. They’re still looking for a foreign worker on a commercial vessel, not us, and they won’t be expecting anyone to try and go through the demilitarized zone by water. We should have just enough fuel to make it to Ilsan, and if we’re a little short, it won’t hurt to walk to your parents’ apartment if it’s as close as you remember. Donghae, remember how to just feel the water, and stay relaxed to avoid any movement.”

 

Donghae nodded sharply and took a couple of deep breaths as Heenim made themselves comfortable on the bench seat towards the back.

 

Without the sun, the wind started to have a definite chill to it and Donghae had to occasionally blow on his hands to warm them up as Hyukjae steered the boat north. He took the hour and a half it took for them to get to the DMZ to practice just watching the water as they sped through it, but his nerves grew as Hyukjae slowed them as they reached the point where the Han River met the sea.

 

Forcing himself to take a few deep breaths, Donghae felt the water under them, immediately able to identify buildups of silt in large muddy areas that they would have to navigate around. They’d disabled the running lights and left the radio, smashed to pieces, on the island they’d left. Other than those measures, they had to rely on Heenim to notice and distract anyone looking towards them as they tried to move as quickly as they could through the river.

 

Donghae felt as if all of his senses had grown to make up for the limitations of his sight, but every odd noise made him jump a little, half convinced that they were going to get shot at from either side of the border.

 

“Get more towards the center,” he directed Hyukjae. “Lots of mud along the bank.”

 

“I can only go so far before we cross the border,” Hyukjae said, barely heard above the wind, but pulled them more towards the middle of the river.

 

“Oh go away,” Heenim snapped, making Donghae jump. He turned his head just in time to see Heenim wave a hand towards the north, their eyes closed. “And you all be quiet,” they continued, waving their other hand to the south.

 

Placing a hand over his thundering heart, Donghae leaned heavily against the back of Hyukjae’s chair. As he refocused on the water, he frowned at an odd shape – several of them – all in a row towards the bottom of the river. “What are those?” he muttered, confused.

 

“Probably leftover mines from the war,” Heenim quickly explained. “Don’t run over them, and try to not think so hard, there’s a guard change so there’s a lot of people I have to distract.”

 

“Hyukjae, start moving towards our bank, they’re all over in the middle of the river,” Donghae said right into Hyukjae’s ear, trying to focus only on the water so as to not distract Heenim from distracting others or from accidentally setting off the mines. He could tell that they were almost through when he noticed a split in the river, and as Hyukjae steered them south, Donghae started breathing much easier once they were technically out of the DMZ.

 

“That was scary,” he told Hyukjae as they sped along the water.

 

“For all of us,” Hyukjae yelled back, his voice almost lost in the wind.

 

Donghae almost felt as if he’d never be warm again when the boat began spluttering and dropping in speed. He could see lights not too far away on either side of the shore, but he knew they were probably almost half a kilometer away from that shore. Dipping his hand into the water quickly confirmed what he already knew – there would be no way that they could swim for land, the water was just too cold to avoid hypothermia.

 

“I think we’re out of gas,” Hyukjae said as the boat stalled in the water.

 

Heenim grunted and shook their head, as if waking up from a nap. “Okay Donghae get us to shore, we’ll walk the rest of the way.”

 

Donghae looked around, not really understanding what Heenim was wanting. He wondered how exactly they expected him to get them to shore considering he was not going to dive into freezing cold water to try and swim it. “Um… how?”

 

Heenim stood up and stretched. “Use the water to push the boat towards shore. If you can make splash that goes up over three meters, you can surely use the entire river to get us to shore.”

 

Donghae screwed his eyes shut. This was so different from just feeling water which is what the majority of his control lessons had been covering. Opening his eyes, he felt the water surrounding the boat and had to think about what he really wanted to do with it. He needed the water to push at the back of the boat to move them to the shore, so that was what he concentrated on.

 

His concentration was totally broken when the boat lurched forward, the nose starting to dip towards the surface of the water. He was almost tossed from his seat and he probably would have smashed his face against the windscreen if he hadn’t thrown his hands forward.

 

“Too much,” he muttered to himself as the boat rocked violently in the water. He obviously needed to use a lighter touch to keep them out of the water and just move them along it.

 

Heenim placed their hands on Donghae’s shoulders. “Relax,” they soothed. “Try it again.”

 

Donghae tried to imagine watery hands pushing gently at the back of the boat to move them along. The boat lurched forward, this time without the worrying dip that would flip them over, and he kept doing the same thing over and over again to get them to the shore. It was almost a shock when the boat actually ran aground, halting their forward movement.

 

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “We made it.”

 

Heenim patted him lightly on the shoulders. “Good job, Donghae,” they praised, and Donghae felt his shoulders relax. Hyukjae grabbed the bag and scrambled up onto the prow and jumped off to land in the mud of the bank, followed quickly by Donghae and Heenim.

 

“Donghae, one last thing,” Heenim said. “Sink the boat.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“We can’t have the Ministry finding the boat, our fingerprints are on file,” they said, gesturing between themselves and Hyukjae. “Hurry and sink it, we don’t want to be discovered.”

 

“How?” Donghae asked, bewildered.

 

“You almost sent us completely over, I’m sure you can figure something out. Just make sure that it stays on the bottom of the river,” Heenim replied, waving a hand towards the water.

 

“Here,” Hyukjae said, stretching out his bare hand. “I can help with that.”

 

Donghae held up a finger to indicate that he needed a minute to think. He knew that boats floated unless there were holes in the bottom, so to get it to stay underwater, he’d need to somehow make holes in the boat.

 

“Forget little holes, just break the damn thing in half,” Heenim muttered, folding their arms. “Water can be as hard as concrete when it wants to be. You just need to stop overthinking it and do it. Our powers come completely naturally to us, you can do this easily.”

 

Blowing out his breath, Donghae nodded. Heenim had been right so far about his powers, so all he really needed to do was just to do it. Grabbing Hyukjae’s hand, he felt the distraction try to overcome him, but he stopped thinking about anything but the boat and getting it underwater. In his mental vision, he could see hands pulling the boat backwards off the ground and back fully into the water, but in his physical vision, the boat just seemed to move backwards on its own.

 

Getting it to sink was just a bit harder and he struggled with how to actually achieve it before he remembered that Heenim had told him to just break the boat in half. Taking a deep breath, he tightened his hand around Hyukjae’s a little. He didn’t want to have to try a second time. He imagined the water rising into the air, holding in place until there was enough of it to do what Donghae wanted it to do. To break the boat, he needed the water to be sharp, like an axe, and heavy enough to fully crash through the fiberglass hull. Donghae felt a pulse of energy leave his arms, making him feel like he’d just swung a baseball bat.

 

He jumped when the sound of cracking fiberglass reached them a second after it happened, and he watched the boat, now in two halves, slip beneath the waves with an open mouth.

 

“Wow,” he muttered as Hyukjae slipped his hand away, his powers shrinking back to ‘normal.’

 

“Impressive amount of damage, let’s get going before anyone remembers to come and investigate.”

 

Scrambling up the dirt hill, Donghae looked around, following Hyukjae, who was walking confidently the direction of lights. As they drew closer, Donghae noticed how Hyukjae seemed deeply familiar with the twists and turns, able to keep them off the main roads and away from all but a few people.

 

“Did you grow up here?” he asked in a whisper.

 

Quiet, Heenim admonished.

 

Hyukjae looked back and nodded, answering Donghae’s question.

 

He says that he grew up in a small house near the station, but his family had moved to a new place about a year before he and Lami activated that’s not too much farther away, Heenim continued mentally to Donghae. Hyukjae pulled his hood up as they ducked into an alleyway that was near a large apartment building, and Donghae noticed the worried looks at the street traffic.

 

Let’s go, there’s minimal people right now.

 

Following Hyukjae, Donghae waited nervously with Heenim as Hyukjae pressed the buzzer for his parent’s apartment.

 

“Hello?” a voice answered, and even through the distortion of the system, Donghae could hear the suspicion.

 

Hyukjae wasn’t answering, just staring at the metal box, until Heenim prodded him. “Mom?” he shakily asked. “Mom, it’s Hyukjae, could you let us in please?”

 

There was a nerve wracking pause, and Donghae really hoped that Hyukjae’s parents hadn’t moved without telling him.

 

“Who is this?” she snapped.

 

“Mom, it’s really me,” Hyukjae pleaded. “Please let us in?”

 

“Prove it.”

 

“You let Lami decorate the cake for my last birthday here and I thought she had thrown up on it when you brought it out.”

 

The door beside them buzzed and Donghae reached for it, yanking it open almost before the locks had totally disengaged. Rushing inside, they hung back in the darkened lobby area while waiting for an elevator to come down. Donghae felt like he could breathe for a few minutes, the security of being inside a building instead of out in the open calming his thudding heart.

 

“You thought she’d thrown up on your cake?” Donghae finally asked, his eyes adjusting to the dark.

 

“It was yellowish green and very lumpy from globs of frosting,” Hyukjae explained. “She thought it was very pretty.”

 

An elevator dinged as it arrived, and a woman rushed off, her short hair nearly bouncing from looking around.

 

“Mom!” Hyukjae hissed. “Over here.”

 

Donghae saw her face go slack with shock before her eyes welled with tears. She showed no hesitation in pulling Hyukjae immediately into a hug, patting his back, and Hyukjae curved down, wrapping his arms around her smaller frame.