Eric's alarm goes off at 5am sharp, the unforgiving ringing tears him from his sleep and rips him out of his bedsheets. With curses at every step, he drags himself to the bathroom before hearing a faint thud and a groan of pain.

Right, he thinks, blearily squinting down the hall from the bathroom door, there's a killer in my house.

ㅇㅇ

After a brief morning shower, Eric decides to check on the arrestee. He pauses outside the spare bedroom door, debating whether or not to enter unannounced or to knock politely. After what happened last night, he felt... bad, almost, for Minwoo. He still hates the other man's guts, but he can't help the shame and sympathy clawing at  the back of his mind.

Eric takes a deep breath before rapping his knuckles lightly against the door. After a moment of silence, he knocks again, a little louder.

"Hey," he calls out, slightly panicked, "are you alive? Hey!"

Eric nearly pounds on the door--he fears the other might've somehow escaped without detection. He wouldn't hear the end of it from his uppers, and he really couldn't take more rejection from Hyesung.  He tries the doorknob, but it refuses to turn. "Don't tell me you ran away, bastard! Open the door! I'm telling you right now--"

The door suddenly swings inwards, and Eric stumbles inside, hand still gripping the doorknob.

"Good morning," Minwoo greets, much of his previous energy drained and gone. Eric stares long and hard at this shell of a man, trying to get his own composure back. Minwoo's eyes are red around the rims and dry streaks ran down his cheeks. The plain white sheets were wounded around his legs and around his body and dragged down from the bed, crumpled and messy. The shorter man notices the stare and quickly rubs at his eyes and flattens his hair, willing for both the puffiness and bed head to disappear. Pathetic, Eric thinks.

"So you didn't run away." He crosses his arms, hoping to exude dominance. "Good. Wouldn't do to have some little on the loose now, would it?"

"...I have a name, you know."

Eric narrows his eyes at the other.

"Excuse me? Did you say something?"

"I have a name." Minwoo glowers at the officer, looking up petulantly despite the size difference. "It's Lee Minw--"

Something red and hot snaps within Eric. Whatever pity and embarrassment he felt before all but disintegrate rapidly, and left a seething irritation boiling in the pit of his stomach.

"Criminals," he grinds out between clenched teeth, "don't have names. They are referred to with whatever we wish."

Minwoo shuts up, a look of disbelief evident on his face. He seemed to decay a little bit, wilting around the edges.  With downcast eyes, he mumbles, "Did you want something?"

The total defeat in the other's voice leaves a bitter, dry taste in Eric's mouth. He clears his throat once, a little feebly, to get rid of the dirty taste.

"... Nothing," he mutters, and leaves the shorter man alone to lock himself away in his own room.

ㅇㅇ

Eric wakes up hours after, when the rays of the sun that filter through between his blinds have turned orange. He sits silently on his bed, resting his forehead against his knees as he tries to justify his earlier violence.

The other man is truly annoying, he argues. I was tired. He deserved it--he probably did kill somebody and he turned a gun on Hyesung.

Whatever conclusions he reached, whatever excuses he made didn't sit well with Eric. He was only human, and despite all the injustice he believes he went through, his morals didn't allow him to mistreat the other man.

"Ah... ." He pulls himself himself off his bed, prepared to go apologize--sincerely--and hope that they can live out the remainder of the house arrest in relative peace.

Just as Eric unlocks and pulls his bedroom door open, he is met with an earful of the piercing smoke detector.

"Ah, ."

ㅇㅇ

He smells the smoke right as he hits the landing of the stairs, and sees black and dark gray creep along the ceiling near his kitchen. Eric dives to throw open all the windows before resetting the smoke detector. After making sure the alarm wouldn't be upsetting his neighbors, and a few mediating breaths, he heads into the kitchen.

", , ..." Minwoo was frantically shaking the frying pan, before dropping it into the sink and dousing the entire blackened mass with cold water. In his distress, he fails to notice Eric standing near the entrance.

"So."

With a startle, Minwoo whips around and the colour drains from his face. He looks at Eric with sheer terror, so drastically different from the energetic, bratty person he was a little over 24 hours ago. Eric realizes this with a pang.

"S-sorry, I'll clean it up. I just wanted to help--I thought you might be hungry--" Minwoo stutters as his hands flew nervously over the chopping board, the metal cutlery, the vegetables from the fridge. He busies himself with returning the kitchen to its original state, all the while avoiding Eric's cold gaze. "I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to--"

"You don't mean a lot of things."

Minwoo slows his distraught tidying to a stop. He stares down blankly at his hands.

"...I do, don't I?" he whispers, and Eric deflates a little.

He digs deep into his guts, looking for the anger that drove him many times before, and found nothing but regret. Eric couldn't find it in himself to hate the man before him. He hated his seniors, he hated the circumstances, he hated his outbursts--

More than anything, he hated how this criminal, this supposed *murderer* made him feel so... uncertain.

So weak.

"Look, I'll ask you about this later, but let me clean this up." Eric enters the kitchen and approaches Minwoo, laying a hand on his shoulder to pull the other away after a moment's deliberation. "Go wait in the living room--holy , did you cut yourself?!"

Blood pooled on the marble countertop from a wound on Minwoo's palm. It was a sizeable gash, running across the width of his hand. Although the wound was gruesome, his right hand is what caught Eric's attention.

Red, black, and swollen so much, the officer wondered how he never took notice of it. The skin on the back of his hand was torn and festering, and three of the nails were all kinds of purple.

It must have been when he had the gun. The memory sinks deep into his mind--the gun, the threat, Hyesung, the adrenaline, the feeling of bones crushing under the heel of his shoe--it was a really hard stomp--

"Why didn't you say something?!" Eric asks in disbelief. He pulls Minwoo over to the sink and quickly runs the cut under the tap water before fastening a kitchen towel around the wound to staunch the bleeding. He sits the other down at the dining table, ignoring the bloodstains on his floor and on the surface of the wood, and reaches for the phone. Minwoo follows his actions around with glassy eyes, unfocused and fatigued.

"Sir, the suspect requires immediate medical attention--the hospital--" Eric frantically speaks into the phone, expression darkening. "I'll go with him--it'll be fine, I'll watch him, please, sir--it is very serious! Sir--"

Silence. 

With a growl, Eric flicks the phone off before rushing upstairs to the bathroom. He returns with a first aid kit, muttering under his breath.

"That -faced sorry excuse of a police officer, he forbade me to drive you to the hospital, or seek any sort of medical help. What is his ing deal?!" he spits venomously while disinfecting the cut. Bandages it carefully.  "If we don't get that hand examined, it might heal incorrectly--" Eric pauses, and looks at Minwoo. Really look at him, without contempt or assumptions.

Minwoo had tears in his eyes--again, Eric thought--perhaps from the pain of the wounds, or the stinging of the smoke. Shadows and bags hung under his small eyes heavily, as if he hasn't rested all night. There were scrapes on his cheek from when he was tackled to the ground, and his lips were chapped.

He looks like hell.

"Why didn't you tell me...?" Eric asks again. Less demanding, more concern. It feels so foreign, he realizes, to care for anyone other than himself.

Minwoo stares back at the officer dully. His bark and bite were long, long gone.

"I'm just a criminal," he says simply. "I don't mean a lot of things."

wowwee 

i apologize for my absence

I felt really bad for those few fans who really like this story, apparently 

you are wonderful 

also a certain someone asked me to join this group effort thing to write fics for minwoo's birthday which i never did, i apologize

 

also my writing went downhill really fast i didnt know i was such a bad writer until today lmao how do you read my stuff

my writing quality went downhill really fast, as fast as this took a turn for the cheesy oops

its almost 7am i stayed up all night writing this, in one go so the author comments are really wtf

 

thanks for putting up with this;; it gives me strength!!

as always, comments and criticism are greatly appreciated!