June 13, 20xx, 14:07

"No seriously, hyung. You can't keep running away from this."

Jinki bit back the urge to sigh or alternatively bury his face in his hands. Instead, he forced himself to look straight into eyes that were quickly becoming familiar. "I don't mean to," he said. He had a much better idea of what he was running away from now. Or wasn't. Or what Onew had been running away from. The thought sent a pang of guilt through his chest.

Something seemed to click in Minho's eyes, and he leaned forward, almost expectantly. Jinki swallowed. "Maybe we should actually, uh, talk about it. Or something. Yeah. That's probably the best idea." Inwardly, he cursed himself for his awkwardness, as he scrambled for more words to fill in the silence when Minho's phone rang.

Minho reached for the phone, checking the number, Jinki realised for the first time. "Sorry, I have to—"

"No you don't," Jinki said abruptly. He leaned forward and pulled the phone from Minho's surprised grip, ending the call. "You don't have to," he repeated. The moment over, any boldness that he'd been momentarily bolstered with seemed to drain from his body, as doubt assailed him. Jonghyun, his mind reminded him. Not this Jonghyun, he reminded his mind.

"It's work." Minho frowned, recovering from the surprise and retrieving his phone from Jinki's now slack grasp. Jinki made a vague effort to hang on, but he knew it was futile, even as Minho redialed the number, apologising for the inconvenience.

So plan A. Get the note, hope it was helpful, and find Jonghyun. Plan B. Ask Minho. If he were to be honest with himself, neither seemed particularly good. On the other hand, it was a start, and one that he didn't have when he'd first started with all this. Or when he first remembered starting with all this. Memory, he thought ruefully.

Minho was standing, and Jinki stood with him. "Sorry hyung, I have to go—" Minho started to say, when Jinki suddenly found himself with his hand around Minho's wrist, holding him back. Minho had been smiling at the end, Jinki suddenly remembered, and clenched his jaw. "No, stay. I... have something to tell you." I don't want to see you dead again, he thought, at the same moment he thought, disorder, and knew with a sinking certainty that Minho hadn't lived to see the end of his own eight minutes.

"Something's wrong," Minho said simply.

"Something is," Jinki agreed readily, and wondered briefly what Onew would've replied with. "What would you say if I told you I knew what was going to happen in the next few minutes?"

Minho opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again just as abruptly, musing over the words. "It depends on what you said," he answered quietly, hand toying with the phone. "But this has to wait, hyung. I really have to go."

"No you don't," Jinki insisted. "You'd get there too late, and then it's all too late, but it won't be if you tell me about, um, about your past."

Minho went dead silent, so still that Jinki blinked in compensation under Minho's gaze. "What does my past have to do with anything?" he said slowly. "You've never brought it up before."

"It's... more specifically, were there any um, hide outs where they could hide a person?"

"They?" Minho asked with raised eyebrows.

Jinki nodded, wondering if this might work after all. "A man in a green shirt, right? And he's... someone who you knew at one point. And they're going to kidnap someone," or already have, he thought morosely, "and please, we need to find him. Can you trust me?"

Minho gave him another long, hard look, and Jinki suppressed a shudder. "I'll trust you," he finally said. Jinki grinned in elation, but stopped when Minho held up a hand. "But I don't know if I believe you yet."

"Believe me," Jinki said, and was struck by a burst of inspiration. "Behind the bakery. That's one of their places, isn't it?"

Minho looked taken aback. "You're not supposed to know that," he said.

Jinki nodded. "But I do. It's... hard to explain." Very hard to explain.

"You're not... you," Minho said slowly, with some sort of dawning comprehension that set Jinki on edge.

"It's hard to explain," he repeated, and grabbed him by the hand dragging him off, across the road, somewhere, anyway to show that he should be trusted. Not as Onew, but as him. Or as not him. "Just trust me on this."

Minho pulled away abruptly, and Jinki slowed to a stop, turning on his heel. "Why should I?" Minho asked. "What did you do with him?"

Jinki blanched, swallowing hard. "I... He's..." dead, he thought. And you'll be dead too. Except that wasn't particularly trust inspiring. "It's complicated," he settled on. "We're sort of the same, right now."

Minho's eyes were dark with an undecipherable expression, and Jinki wasn't sure if it was hatred or anger or something else altogether. Something twisted at the place just behind his stomach, and Jinki swallowed nervously. He found himself running his eyes down the other man's jaw bone instead, following it down the line of his body on the way to the ground. If his gaze lingered slightly too long on the toned shape of his arms, Jinki disregarded it.

"You're—" Minho started to say.

There was a screech of tires, and there wasn't enough time to react as Minho leaped forward, his full weight slamming into Jinki even as another force sent the two of them flying. Impulse, Jinki thought blearily, as Minho's arms went slack around him.

Sorry, he tried to say, but found he couldn't say much of anything at all.