Kai wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten there. He’d been driving home after a particularly taxing job when he found himself at Perdition. He was familiar with the various establishments owned under the nightclub conglomerate Devil’s Playground—in his line of work, he’d had to be—but it was his first time in this particular club. He liked it well enough; as clubs go it wasn’t entirely awful, and the mass of people dancing seemed to be enjoying themselves at least. Kai noticed the dancers because he was usually one of them. (It was unbelievably easy to behave badly when everyone around you was either drunk or trying really hard to get there.)

            Today, though, he wasn’t in the mood to be crushed under a not entirely unpleasant combination of sweat, lust, and temptation. Today he was tired, and since he was there anyway, he wanted a drink. Today was different because he’d had to kill someone—that was nothing new—and the person he’d been sent after had literally begged him to let them live. Usually the ones who found themselves in the presence of Kai either tried to run away or to pay him off. In those cases at least they feared him enough to respect the rules of his trade. Runners he could catch and it helped that the rich bastards who offered him their house or woman or double his hiring price were usually pricks to the highest degree. And anyway, Kai found he liked the chase. He was also gay and had already been independently wealthy before beginning his chosen profession. Essentially, the rich and the runners were harmless because they offered him nothing new and he had no problem ending things that were boring.

            But beggars? Kai found those people personally offensive. He too was a laborer; he often worked long hours for little pay, and rarely took the time for a vacation. Yet these people reacted to him with disgust in their eyes and pleas on their lips, and Kai had no patience for their judgment. It wasn’t that he cared what the people he killed thought about him as they took their last breaths—because he didn’t. At the end of the day, though, was it too much to ask for a little commiseration? Just because he took the lives of others didn’t mean he didn’t often think about doing the same to his own.

            Today, though, he wasn’t going to think about his work. About the beggar. About the fatigue that was stronger than usual in the car but seemed to dissipate in the steady beat of the bass and the transfixing rhythm of moving bodies. He approached the bar—which was empty—and hailed the bartender, raising his arm and noticing something very strange in the process. Kai felt fine, but looking at his limb he could clearly see a torn shirt and skin dyed red with blood that spilled freely from his veins yet didn’t seem to drop anywhere. A further inspection of his person revealed more tears in his clothing and more blood, but still, there was no pain.

            If he had stopped to think more about the state of his body than the progress of his drink, Kai would have realized that actually, he didn’t feel pain because he couldn’t feel anything. It was like the empty abyss he sometimes fell into—in moments when it had been days since the last job and he felt like simply not being had to be better than this—had expanded to consume his soul.

            But today Kai didn’t care. Especially not when the bartender to whose back he’d given his drink order finally turned around and took Kai’s breath away. That’s what it seemed like at least. Kai still felt nothing, so for all he knew he had never actually been breathing at all. But if his breath was there to have been stolen from him, Perdition’s bartender was definitely to blame. The man in question was annoyed that the customer hadn’t allowed time for the club’s patented greeting—Welcome to Perdition. What can I get you?—but nevertheless readied Kai’s drink without comment, then reached out and pushed it toward him. At this, the hitman put years of training to instant use and grabbed the bartender’s wrist, refusing to release the other man until he shared his name. He’d rolled his eyes—Kai assumed as a man that attractive working at a bar, this was likely not the first time he’d been hit on—but complied for the sake of his hand.

            Kyungsoo.

            The name of Perdition’s owner and a man who sometimes moonlighted as a bartender in his own club. Not that Kai knew any of this, of course. But Kyungsoo, on the other hand, knew all about Kai. The legendary Kim Jongin might not be familiar with Kyungsoo’s work—as a bartender or otherwise—but Kyungsoo was aware of his, and Kai’s resume did not impress.

            Kyungsoo told Kai that he’d shared his name, so now could the assassin please remove his grip because Kyungsoo had other customers to attend to. Kai complied, too caught up in the victory of receiving a name to realize—or care—that the bartender knew what he did for a living. Or to look around the club and see that the music still blared and the masses still danced, but the bar itself was entirely empty. None of that mattered to Kai, though, because today he’d had a horrible time of it—and he still wasn’t quite sure what was going on with his body being apparently injured—but if he felt anything, he could swear it was love.

            The time between Kai’s first visit to Perdition and his second blurred in such a way that Kai couldn’t remember if he’d ever even left the club. He assumed he must have, because his arm was no longer a mangled, bloody mess, his shirt was spotlessly clean—albeit a bit wrinkled, but killing people for a living sometimes took a toll on his wardrobe—and the heady feeling he’d developed last time after his third Boilermaker was completely gone. Kai still felt nothing, but he thought he was at least probably sober, and today he was determined to find out more about the club’s bartender. About Kyungsoo.

            The hitman had tried to ask around about the mysterious man who served drinks while keeping his tips close and his secrets even closer. But when he’d approached the dancing clubbers in the middle of the floor, no one had spared him so much as a single glance, let alone a word or conversation. That’s why Kai found himself at the bar, again ordering to Kyungsoo’s delicate back, and again not knowing quite what it was that had gotten him there.

            This time, when Kyungsoo began to push Kai his drink, the bartender expected Kai’s attack on his wrist and was ready. Kim Jongin was not Kai for nothing, though, and he too was prepared. Instead of grabbing Kyungsoo’s wrist, the assassin leaned forward at the exact moment the bartender moved to slide the drink, and grasped Kyungsoo on both forearms with his hands. (Kyungsoo had the strange and sudden thought that hands which were used to take life had no business being that soft).

            “Tell me something about you,” the hitman demanded as he pulled Kyungsoo close, his grip on the bartender’s arms tightening as if to convey the heightened tension of the situation. Kai couldn’t say the words he wanted to Kyungsoo because he couldn’t feel enough to communicate them, but the warmth of his strong hands as they slid down Kyungsoo’s arms to circle the bartender’s slender wrists said more than enough.

            I want you.

            I know, Jongin, Kyungsoo’s thoughts responded. I’m starting to want you too.

            Sometime around Kai’s third, fourth, or fifth appearance in Perdition—he lost count—he started to feel something again. And as he began to feel, he also began to notice. Kai had always seen Kyungsoo, but now he was also seeing that the dancers who never stopped to rest because they never seemed to tire, also never seemed to go home and change their clothes. (He’s pretty sure at least that that one woman with the pink hair and the slinky back dress which covered nothing and revealed everything had already been at the club when he came the first time and was still there this time too.) Too caught up in the mystery that was Kyungsoo, what Kai didn’t notice was that his clothes were unchanged too; for an assassin with excellent reflexes and hyper-senses, Kai was sometimes unbearably obtuse.

            Kyungsoo noticed, of course, because if Jongin saw Kyungsoo and then the world came into focus, the bartender saw all there was to the world and still could only focus on Jongin. So of course Kyungsoo noticed that Jongin had acted fine, but had been bloody and beaten when he’d first appeared in Kyungsoo’s club. And of course he noticed that woman with the pink hair and the fact that Jongin’s blue shirt might be cleaner and less torn, but was nevertheless the same one every time, even if Jongin himself didn’t realize. But Kyungsoo said nothing because, as a bartender, that was his job. Sure, he’d told Jongin that he worked the night shift as Perdition’s bartender to pay for his daytime cooking classes, but with Jongin’s breath tickling his ear and the other man’s fingers brushing feather-light touches across his wrist’s pulse, Kyungsoo couldn’t remember a reason not to tell him. Besides, that part of Kyungsoo’s life wasn’t even real; not anymore at least.

            This time—the third, the fourth, or the fifth—Kai neglected to order any alcohol at all and simply chose to sit and stare at Kyungsoo work, drinking him in. “I go by Kai,” the hitman said, “but my real name is Jongin. Please call me that.”

            In my heart, I already do.

            If Kai or Kyungsoo tried to do the math—which they didn’t—the hitman’s time spent at Perdition began to rival that of the bartender’s—an actual employee of the place. What started as wrists caught with force by broken limbs turned into sensually intimate caresses at each slide of a drink in Kai’s direction and stolen kisses in the darkness when the rotating strobe lights which lit the club’s dance floor temporarily illuminated elsewhere.

            Kai knew that he should be contemplating his next job and wondering at the retreating emptiness inside him, but Jongin was content with Kyungsoo and probably didn’t even realize that the last job he’d had was today’s tiring beggar from a while ago.

            Kyungsoo experienced moments of self-awareness when he remembered with sudden clarity why it was bad for him to want the wayward assassin so badly. He couldn’t fall in love with Jongin—couldn’t risk it—but whoever said it was possible to talk yourself out of love had obviously never witnessed the appeal of Jongin when he unpinned his cufflinks and rolled up the sleeves of his blue dress shirt with an air of studied nonchalance. Or held the hitman’s hands during rare moments of vulnerability when the steady supply of alcohol wasn’t enough and Jongin needed more from Kyungsoo than the bartender had thought he was willing to offer. It was dangerous, these feelings Kyungsoo had for Jongin, and even when the two were together and Kyungsoo couldn’t remember why, the feeling of an impending threat lingered beneath his skin at a layer that even the deepest of Jongin’s love bites couldn’t reach.

            “I’m afraid,” Kyungsoo told his lover once. “I’m afraid that one day I’m going to come to work and you won’t be here. I’m afraid I’m going to lose you.”

            Jongin laughed, and there Kyungsoo thought he caught a glimpse of the Kai his lover used to be. “I’m not going anywhere, pabo. You give me free drinks.”

            The bartender rolled his eyes at the running joke, and Jongin leaned across the bar to kiss away the frown that wrinkled his lover's nose and furrowed his brow. This action was done with a practiced ease that spoke to many such moments; moments that Jongin was now aware enough to appreciate but cared too much to count.

            “And anyway,” the hitman finished, “I love you more than you love me. That’s been our M.O. since the beginning.”

            There, he’d said it. The L-word. Love. Like most of their relationship, Kyungsoo was way ahead of Jongin in this too. The bartender already knew that Jongin was in love with him; he’d even known back when Jongin had still been Kai and hadn’t really felt anything. Kyungsoo also knew that Jongin was wrong—he loved the other just as much, if not more—but didn’t think clarifying this point to his lover would alter the constant threat any. Because that’s still what that conversation was supposed to be about: Kyungsoo’s fear—not that Jongin would abandon him, but that he’d simply disappear. But he played along with Jongin’s attempt to change the subject, appreciating the effort and replying with a few fervent kisses and an “I love you too, you idiot,” because he did.

            If only they knew what was too soon to come.

            Perdition was Kyungsoo’s domain, but it was Devil’s Playground which had actually chosen the name of the place. The club was meant to be some hedonistic combination of pleasure and pain; somewhere people could—and did—dance themselves to lustful exhaustion, only to repeat the actions again and again and again without really stopping to think about why. Jongin was a dancer, but Perdition had never been his stage, and for that reason he’d seemed to escape the gilded cage of torturous repetition that the normal clubbers seemed unaware of. He’d escaped because today was exhausting and he was too empty even to dance, and by the time he’d felt aware again, he’d already met Kyungsoo and the bartender’s kisses were more addicting than dancing as just one more in a sweaty mass of desire could ever be.

            That’s why Jongin wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten there. He’d been driving home after a particularly taxing job when he found himself at Elysium. He was familiar with the various establishments owned under the nightclub conglomerate Devil’s Playground—in his line of work, he’d had to be—but it was his first time in this particular club. He liked it well enough; as clubs go it wasn’t awful, and there were more people drinking in small groups than dancing anyway. Jongin couldn’t help but feel like something was missing as he noticed a few of the people drinking enter the dance floor to fill the space abandoned by a pair who had just left it. He usually liked dancing—it was unbelievably easy to enjoy yourself uninhibitedly when everyone around you was either already too drunk to care or else trying really hard not to get there—but today he couldn’t bring himself to join in the rhythmic celebrations performed by the gyrating bodies on the Elysium’s dance floor.

            No, today he just wanted a drink. As he approached, for some reason Jongin could not identify, he expected the bartender to be a little short, with a delicate back, and small, slender wrists. When he reached the bar and contemplated his order, the bartender turned toward Jongin with a smile. The man was indeed small-boned, with a build and a delicacy that Jongin had imagined. But when the bartender had paused in his smile to offer a hand and a name—Luhan—Jongin couldn’t help but be disappointed.

            And he never knew why.

            Kyungsoo knew that when he turned around to face the customer who’d just ordered at his back the way Kai used to, it would not be his lover that he would see sitting forlornly at Perdition’s bar. He knew that it would only hurt to hope that it would be Jongin’s face which would greet him when he turned around, but Kyungsoo couldn’t help it—just like he couldn’t help loving Jongin in the first place. But Kyungsoo also knew that while an assassin named Kai with no remorse for his killings belonged in a place called Perdition, the beautiful Jongin that Kai had returned to—someone who had relearned what it was to love and be loved in return—someone like that had no place in the darkness of Kyungsoo’s nightclub. No, someone like that should be in Elysium because that is the place where lovers get their happy endings.

            Perdition’s bartender got no happy ending because he had been right; the man before him was also bloodied and broken, but he wasn’t Kai—and he certainly wasn’t Kyungsoo’s Jongin.

            Welcome to Perdition. What can I get you?

Perdition: A state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unrepentant person passes after death.

Elysium: A conception of the eternal hereafter in which the chosen live a blessed and happy afterlife.

A/N: It's late, and this is unedited, and I apologize in advance if you think it's awful. I'm not quite sure what I was going for here, but I hope you like it. And if I make this a Devil's Playground series, would anyone read it? Love and goodnight, Author-unnie

Update (05/09): I woke up this morning, reread this, and added a little something. Also, shoutout to fluffy-mallow for the encouragement even before I'd written anything except the foreward. I don't even know you, but you're the best!