Choi Seunghyun. Jiyong wondered if that was even his real name. Well, he supposed it didn’t matter really, as long as Seunghyun followed orders and didn’t try anything funny. He had tutted mockingly when Jiyong persisted questioning him about his registry file. He was unbelievably snarky once the small semblance of fear wore off, even worse than Seungri, who had been surprisingly recalcitrant towards Seunghyun. He whined that he was stealing his name (stupid really, none of them ever called Seungri by his legal name), and that Seunghyun was stealing Jiyong’s attention away from him (probably true; Jiyong found himself enjoying Seunghyun’s company a lot more than Seungri’s, though that wasn’t a particularly high standard of comparison). Seungri’s whining persisted for a week, he suddenly woke up one morning to find his desktop set permanently to a gif of Jiyong blowing a kiss, heavily layered with hot pink, glittery filters. If pressed, Jiyong would have insisted that the image was completely photoshopped, obviously, while trying to keep a straight face at the memory of Seunghyun cornering him with a cheeky grin and a camera.

The photo stopped Seungri’s grumblings towards Seunghyun, and turned it into something of a hero worship, if you constantly pressed your hero for more photos of your other hero. Jiyong thought about deterring this behavior, but Seunghyun seemed to delight in the attention and Youngbae and Daesung found the entire exchange hilarious. The two were suspicious and slightly in awe of their former source of technological cheating, and seemed to take a erse pleasure ripping into Seunghyun during training, unswayed by Seunghyun’s puppy eyes and threats of trashing their credit scores.

As for Jiyong, he trusted Seunghyun about as far as he could throw him. He seemed to have slipped into their group too easily, seemed a little too cavalier about abandoning his freedom and relative comforts of civilian life to become a soldier. (Remembering Seunghyun’s eyes from his dingy apartment, perhaps he had always been a soldier, only now he carried the official title).

“Are you even trying?” Jiyong spat after one particularly grueling hand-to-hand sparring session. Seunghyun lay on the ground in a fetal position, dry-heaving and coughing.

“ you,” he snarled at Jiyong. “You’re the one who dragged me into this mess. I’m just tech support, why are you making me go through the secret assassin training schtick? I’m just going to end up sitting behind a computer for the rest of my life anyways.”

Jiyong snorted condescendingly.

“What if we need you out in the field to disable a bomb, or manually hack a computer? We can’t have your dead weight slowing us down.”

Seunghyun muttered something derogatory under his breath about “manually hacking a computer, Jesus Christ, do we live in the Middle Ages?” before going still.

“You don’t trust me,” he stated, peering up at Jiyong.

“You’ve given me no reason to trust you,” Jiyong replied.

Seunghyun stared at him for a while, his eyes utterly blank. Then, he smiled poisonously.

“And you’ve given me such great reasons to trust you Mr. Dragon? You rip me from my home, threaten me with a lifetime in the labor camps, ostensibly for my highly specialized skill set, which apparently isn’t good enough for the great Dragon himself-”

Jiyong narrowly dodged a well-aimed kick towards his groin, only to wince as he felt Seungyun’s fingernails digging into his cheeks, millimeters away from his eyes. Yes, Jiyong thought, this is who you really are. He knew Seunghyun had been holding back, balking against the regimented training of operatives. The others had assumed it was because he was a lazy, overweight, computer geek who never had a need to fight in his life. But Jiyong looked into his eyes and saw the wreckage of war. He’d also finally found Seunghyun’s citizen registry file, which he had found in Seunghyun’s computer after manually hacking it ( it, Seunghyun).

Seunghyun fought dirty and efficiently. Jiyong half expected him to pull a switchblade out of his sleeve and gut him. Perhaps in his prime, Seunghyun could have held his own against Jiyong, but alas he had grown into a lazy, overweight computer geek, and Jiyong almost felt bad at how easy it was to pummel him.

“Is this pathetic flailing how they teach you to fight in the gangs?” Jiyong taunted, feeling Seunghyun still under his chokehold. “Or were you originally just this useless? No wonder your mother sold you to the Foxes before you turned ten.”

Seunghyun froze. “You little ,” he ground out. “Manual hacking, eh?”

“You’ll find that I’m always right,” Jiyong said primly, keeping his arm coiled firmly around Seunghyun’s neck. “You need to understand, Seunghyun, that we’re not like the gangs. Sure some of the higher-ups are just as heartless when it comes to their personal careers, but we as a team are dedicated to each other. We have each other’s back no matter what-stop squirming while I’m trying to give you a ing pep talk-and you, whether you like it or not are part of this family now.”

Jiyong released him. Seunghyun leveled Jiyong with an icy glare, then walked out of the training room and proceeded not to speak to Jiyong for the following month. Jiyong had always been awful at motivational speaking.

Seunghyun trained hard and worked well, integrating smoothly with Big Bang. If only he’d talk to Jiyong, their team would be perfect, Jiyong thought ruefully. Perhaps he’d gone too far that day in the training room, poked too hard at the open wounds under Seunghyun’s armor. Another part of him, one that he’d never admit out loud, actually missed Seunghyun’s presence incredibly. Though Jiyong hadn’t been a huge fan of Seunghyun’s guarded snark, it was a vast improvement from radio silence.

“What the hell did you do to him?” Yongbae asked Jiyong, cornering him after dinner.

Jiyong shrugged in response.

“Well, fix it,” Yongbae snapped, uncharacteristically irritated. “We’re going to have to start missions soon, and at the rate we’re going someone’s going to get seriously hurt if our leader can’t communicate with a member.”

“He’s the one ignoring me,” Jiyong pointed out petulantly.

“I’m sure you deserved it,” Yongbae snorted. “You just never met people who won’t put up with your . Fix. It.”

Jiyong sighed. “This isn’t something I can fix. Seunghyun needs to come to me to work out his problems.”

“Jesus Christ, why are you like this? Did you even apologize?”

“Please Bae, how long have you known me? I don’t do apologies.”

Youngbae threw his hands in the air despairingly and walked away muttering under his breath.

The next night, Jiyong’s door opened just as he was about to fall asleep. He reflexively grabbed the knife tucked into the side of his bed post, then relaxed upon recognizing his intruder. Seunghyun stood in the doorway, looking at Jiyong intensely. Something swooped uncomfortably in Jiyong’s stomach under Seunghyun’s sudden scrutiny.

“I have to come to you, eh?” Seunghyun said.

“And here you are,” Jiyong replied.

Seunghyun sighed. “I suppose I am, aren’t I?”

He stepped into the room, and set a small black disk on Jiyong’s desk.

“When’s the last time you backed up your computer?” he asked Jiyong, fiddling with the device.

“A few hours ago, why?”

Seunghyun ignored him. “Any other important electrical devices with unsaved data?”

“No? Wait hold up, is that-”

Seunghyun tapped the disk twice and Jiyong’s ears were suddenly filled with a high pitched ringing. Jiyong screeched and flailed to cover his ears.

“Electromagnetic pulse,” Seunghyun said after the ringing cleared. “I don’t want this conversation to be overheard.”

“Yeah, thanks for the warning,” Jiyong sniped.

Seunghyun shot him a dirty look and stood awkwardly in the middle of Jiyong’s room. After staring down Jiyong so intently earlier, he now seemed reluctant to meet his eyes. Jiyong sighed, then kicked out his desk chair.

“Sit down, you’re making me uncomfortable just looking at you.”

“Has anyone ever informed you that you’re a grade A ? Because you are,” Seunghyun said.

“Well, I aim to be the best at everything I do,” Jiyong replied with a cheeky grin. Seunghyun looked up and stared at Jiyong, unimpressed. He then kept on staring. At the five minute mark, Jiyong started getting uncomfortable.

“I know I’m suave and handsome, but I assume you came here to talk to me, and not just admire my everlasting beauty,” he quipped. Seunghyun snorted, finally breaking eye contact.

“Sometimes I wonder what made you this way,” he said in a rush. “I certainly know what made me this way, and I supposed you do too now that you violated my privacy and snooped through my life.

“I didn’t really understand anything that was happening when I was a kid. They just started testing out the rationing system with some of the working class districts after I turned seven, and my mother couldn’t feed me and my sister with what the government was giving us, so she tried to get money through other ways. My sister was old enough to get a legitimate job at a factory, but I was too young to legally work. The Foxes started recruiting pretty heavily as people started struggling, and told my mother they would pay her a pretty hefty sum if she was willing to contract me to their group. They made hundreds of similar contracts with families all over the slums, but didn’t have the funds to back them up. The smart ones let their kids get taken away. My mom put up a fight when she realized what they were doing, so they shot her through the head.”

Seunghyun paused to draw a breath. Jiyong felt sick, remembering the way Seunghyun’s body had gone rigid at your mother sold you to the gangs.

“I learned how to code when I was at the Foxes so they wouldn’t send me out patrolling on the streets too often. When I was thirteen, the gang leader was assassinated by a government agent, probably from this very institution, and the group pretty much dissolved since then. I started doing freelance hacking and computer work, and five years later you broke into my apartment and kidnapped me.

“Frankly, I don’t trust you. You forced me into your little spy camp, and I’m making the best of my situation. When I think about it carefully, you probably ended up doing me a favor, dragging me out of the slums and into government dough, but you’re still a and I don’t like you. But, I adapt. It’s what I’ve done my entire life. So I’ll do your work, you’ll compensate me for my services, and if you ever refer to my past again I’ll cut off your balls and give them to Seungri. Got it?”

Jiyong nodded, unable to help the slight sting at Seunghyun’s blatant rejection. Seunghyun smiled tightly. “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He was halfway out the door when Jiyong called out.

“Wait Seunghyun.”

Seunghyun paused, but didn’t turn around.

“I don’t apologize,” Jiyong began. Seunghyun snorted. “But, if I did, I would.”

“You are such an , oh my God. And for the record, you are neither suave nor handsome.”