o32

Patch and Rip

Baekhyun didn’t sleep for very long before he had jolted awake from another nightmare. Hei heard him breathing heavily, like he was trying to calm himself without waking her, but she shifted to face him anyway. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

His breathing was erratic. “It’s—” The words seemed to catch in his throat, voice rough from sleep, and through the faint glow of the lamps, she could seen a sheen of sweat covering his forehead. “It’s fine. Just give me—give me a moment.”

She sat up as Baekhyun took deep breaths, focusing on steadying himself, before he pushed the blankets off him and slid his legs over the side of the bed. “I can’t sleep after this,” he said in a quiet voice, though he seemed to have calmed down. “I need to… I need to do something. To take my mind off of the nightmares.” He winced. “Sorry, Hei. I just need more time to adjust.”

One talk hadn’t fixed everything, she knew. A step at a time, Hei told herself, and managed to smile at him. It was a substantial amount better than before. “Go,” she replied. “At least you won’t be hogging the bed.”

He nodded, a hint of a smile touching his lips, before he dressed swiftly and slipped out of the cabin. Hei sat still on the bed for a little while, then tried to return to sleep.

She drifted off for a while, but she hadn’t been too tired in the first place, not after the spell had worn off, and she woke from light sleep to knocking on the cabin door. It took a minute for her to register that she wasn’t dreaming, and pulling on a coat hastily, she hurried to open the cabin door.

Kim Jongdae stood outside, arms folded.

Hei raised an eyebrow at him. “You can knock?” she demanded.

“It’s a good habit in case I interrupt something I would rather not witness. I was saying this the other day. If Baekhyun can’t keep his hands to himself in public, then I’d rather not know walk into what’s happening in the bedroom—”

Hei scowled at him. “Baekhyun’s not even here. Why are you here?”

His face fell, and he took a step inside. Jongdae couldn’t lie, but she’d seen him maintain a façade to lessen severities of situations. Today even his teasing just felt halfhearted, yet another indicator that something was wrong with him. In the lamplight, his features were even sharper than usual, and Hei wondered if it were a trick of the light or the fact that he looked like he hadn’t been sleeping or eating properly.

“Taeyong?” she guessed. She knew that he and Luhan and Jinqiong had been looking for ways to figure out how the gem worked.

“Our friend on the island is all safe and cozy, as far as I know,” Jongdae replied tiredly, then elaborated. “Jinqiong.”

Hei opened , couldn’t find a thing to say, then snapped it shut. “Ah,” she ended up mouthing.

Jongdae picked up two of Baekhyun’s coats and one shirt from the back of a chair and tossed it onto another, where she kept her own clothes neatly folded. Hei hadn’t even managed to protest when he winked at her. “You clean up after him anyways.”

“I get him to fold his own clothing,” she replied. “Which he will definitely be doing when I see him come back here.”

“You make it sound like he’s two,” Jongdae snorted.

“You’re avoiding the topic.”

He gave her a long look. Then, “Yeah.”

“You came here to talk about Jinqiong. What did she do?”

Jongdae’s lips lifted into a dry smile. “The usual,” he replied. “Lied to my face uncountable times and continued lying after I told her that I could tell that she was lying, snapped at me a couple of times, then gave me that look where I can’t tell if she wants to claw my eyes out or cut my tongue off.”

Hei frowned, then crossed her legs beneath her and leaned forward. “So the usual?”

“More or less,” Jongdae replied. “So I told her she was lying, tried to tell her… something, then made a really big mistake.”

She raised an eyebrow. Jongdae shifted, for once uncomfortable under her gaze, then threw his hands up and groaned. “Fine, I kissed her and she did not take that very well, and I’ve been trying to get onto her good side for forever and now I think I’ve ruined everything forever.”

Hei couldn’t think of anything to say. For all that she had said about Jinqiong and Jongdae, Jinqiong had always made it abundantly clear that she was going to have nothing to do with the crew after they left Hell’s Gate, and Hei had always thought that was it. Because she didn’t want to be attached to them, and because her goals, whatever they were, didn’t exactly align. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen the longing looks from Jongdae in her direction, but for some reason… 

“I thought Jinqiong wanted to leave after this,” she said dumbly.

Jongdae ran his fingers through his hair, tugging on too-long strands with frustration before he seemed to remember something and dropped his hands. “Song Jinqiong,” he replied, “says all the things she doesn’t mean and does all the things she doesn’t want to do.”

Hei supposed Jongdae had come for some sort of advice or for someone to hear him out, but she wasn’t really confident when it came to her half-sister. And Jongdae. And the fact that he had kissed her and was now telling her had her mind reeling.

“So she wants to stay.”

“She gets mad at me every time I suggest something like that,” he replied, “but I can tell, what she wants and doesn’t want, what she means and just…” He shook his head. “She still doesn’t trust me.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

For the first time since Hei had known Jongdae, a hint of raw helplessness crept into his voice. “She doesn’t trust me,” he repeated. “What do I even do? She walked out and locked me out and hasn’t opened the door since then, and she’s just going to take it even worse if I keep on trying. I can’t make things right.”

“That’s just her way of dealing with things, isn’t it? Give her space, and maybe—”

“Space is all she has,” Jongdae interrupted. “She’s been alone all these years that it’s all she knows now. And her personality’s also made it that way. You accepted Byun Baekhyun because you’re… well, you’re you, and you let him in because you could trust him and no one’s ever quite betrayed you before. But she’s always had to be alone.”

“I could talk to her,” Hei offered tentatively. Jongdae was right, though. No one had ever betrayed her. Hua had been an endless maze of working, learning, of not good enough, and no one had ever truly cared. Baekhyun doing so hadn’t scared her as much as she craved for it, and it hadn’t been hard to trust him when he did things no one else had done for her before. Jinqiong, with her personality and what she had gone through, was a completely different story.

“The only reason Jinqiong’s so adamant in pushing you away is because she cares about you too,” Hei said.

Jongdae looked up. “I know,” he said miserably. “And sometimes I think that it’s better if I couldn’t see through it, because to know and still have her shove me away every time and yell at me that it just feels hopeless. It would’ve been so much easier if I just thought she hated me. At least I would know when to stop trying. No matter what I do, I can’t get her to realize.

“Realize what?”

“That she doesn’t have to be alone all the time.” Hei thought that she had never heard Jongdae sound so…helpless. Like he had been finally faced with a problem that he had no hope of solving. “And realize that what your family did to her in the past was terrible, but we’re not the same, and we do care about her, and she doesn’t have to shove us away for that. And that no matter what she says, I’m willing to go wherever she wants after this, even if she wants to go back to goddamn Ezentia and live there forever. But I can’t if she doesn’t want me to. Or if she won’t let me.”

Hei nodded, mouth still dry. “I’ll talk to Jinqiong.”

Jongdae stared at his hands. “Jinqiong said that when she was seventeen, she crippled one of her half brothers because he tried to beat her so she wouldn’t be competition. Then, when she was eighteen and the Song family started sending her on more missions, she killed her partner on one of them because it was either kill him or have him kill her. I told me and said that she didn’t have a sob story and she was perfectly content with having no one care, because everything had worked like that before. But it was a lie. Maybe not the first part, not that she realized, but she thinks that just because she didn’t go through the same things as you did—because she was forced to fend for herself and managed that she’s fine.”

She blinked. “Jinqiong had to do that?”

“Who knows what else she had to do?”

Song Jinqiong had always seemed so adept in fending for herself since Hei had met her. She’d seen her fight, and her sister was ruthless, skilled, quick, and a survivor. Even then, Hei had never really thought about what she had to go through under her family’s hands. Perhaps Jinqiong had said those things to Jongdae in hopes of proving that she didn’t need his or their help, that she was perfectly alright on her own, but she echoed his thoughts on it. It was cruel, and it had scarred her deeper than she knew. Or perhaps, deeper than she would willfully acknowledge. Her chest hurt to think about just what Jinqiong had to go through. What she was still going through, if the wounds ran so deep that she was still so terrified of letting other people in.

“Have you tried to talk to her?” she asked Jongdae.

He shook his head. “She locks me out often, but this is…”

“I’ll talk to her,” Hei repeated. “Is there anything else…?”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” Jongdae said. “I just feel like I ruined everything. She was just—she was just starting to trust me, you know? Or as close as you can get to that when it’s Song Jinqiong.” A rueful laugh. “Maybe we were better off before.”

Before was when all she could recall between Jinqiong and Jongdae were harsh words exchanged and tension between the two of them. Hei shook her head. “I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she reassured, and if Jongdae could tell the uncertainty in her words, he didn’t make a comment about it. “And even if it doesn’t ultimately do anything, we’ll just have to do all we can, right?”

Jongdae winced, but he didn’t look too hopeful. Had it really been that bad? “Alright,” he said halfheartedly.

***

Jinqiong found the alcohol, which wasn’t really that great, because she hadn’t touched it for a while. Still, it was bitter when the liquid slid down , and she had drunk enough to make herself feel tired and collapsed into her bed unceremoniously, a good hour or so after she had left Jongdae’s cabin. It was enough for her to give into the exhaustion and to push the thoughts of Kim Jongdae far, far back into where she couldn’t think about it. Even if the alcohol weakened her resolve, and she very, very tempted to slip into his cabin again and kiss him until they were both breathless.

The alcohol had not done her any favors when she woke up either, with a clearer mind but a pounding head. Jinqiong was almost tempted to reach for another drink, but her bottle was empty and someone was bound to have discovered the mess she made in the cellar when she had searched for the alcohol.

For the longest time, she glared at the ceiling of her cabin. It would be her shift soon, unless she had slept past it, but Jinqiong didn’t exactly feel very well rested. Besides, no one except Kim Jongdae had pounded on her door, and then she wished she hadn’t thought about him, because it gave her another impossible headache.

He had kissed her, of all things. She knew that whatever they’d been doing before—some stupid game of push and pull where she was free to pretend all she liked that it didn’t mean anything. Jongdae asking her to stay was just a challenge to see if she’d agree, to see if she cared enough. But that, and the fact that she’d kissed him back because she wanted to and still wanted to…

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupider still that the thought of facing Jongdae filled her with so much terror, and stupider still that she wanted some stupid fairytale ending in which everything had changed, just like it had seemed with Hei and Baekhyun. Or perhaps everything had changed but for the worst, like her touch had added bad luck blooming to everything. And perhaps—no, nor even perhaps—Jongdae was a fool for kissing her, for liking her, and she was no better for returning that.

Jinqiong still couldn’t decide who she hated more when knocking sounded on the door again.

It wasn’t Jongdae, and she knew. He had pounded the door so hard that she wondered if he’d break it down the first five minutes, then remained there for a while until finally realizing that it was useless. This was more timid, polite, and undeniably Hei.

“It’s me,” Hei called, sure enough, and Jinqiong sat up with a groan.

“Is it my shift?” she called, hoping her voice wasn’t as hoarse as she felt it should be. burned.

“I don’t… think so,” Hei replied. “Can you open the door?”

She had no idea what Song Hei was doing there, and Jinqiong wasn’t sure if she were ready to face anybody. But it wasn’t Jongdae, and if she continued that way, everybody would know something was wrong. And the last thing she wanted was for anyone to know what had happened.

So she pulled herself out of bed, head screaming, heart hurting, and yanked open the door.

Hei’s eyes widened slightly when she saw Jinqiong. Then, calmly, “You drank.”

“Yup,” Jinqiong drawled. “Do you want some?”

The look she got in response was enough of an answer. Hei stepped inside, shut the door behind her, then scanned the room quickly.

“How’s Baekhyun?” Jinqiong asked, hoping she sounded casual enough.

If Hei suspected something, she remained silent about it. “He’s better,” she replied. “We talked. I heard you two fought. He’s uh, as regretful as Baekhyun can be about things.”

“As regretful as he can be about things that aren’t you,” Jinqiong corrected.

“Well…”

She shook her head. “I’m kidding,” she said, though she wasn’t really. She doubted Baekhyun was that regretful about the fight. Perhaps as regretful as she was, which wasn’t very. All her regret was keyed to her sister, and she was pretty sure that all the regret Baekhyun felt was also due to Hei. “Why are you here? Surely it can’t be to apologize to Baekhyun on his behalf? We’re well past that.”

Hei winced again, eyes flickering across her room, lingering on the bottle of alcohol. Jinqiong half expected her to question her about the drinking again. Jongdae’s unwelcome voice followed her. You have a drinking problem, he told her.

I do not, she snapped back to no one in particular.

Finally, Hei raised her eyes. “Jongdae talked to me this morning,” she said.

Jinqiong had been trained for many things, but that one sentence still made her stiffen so hard that there was no way it wasn’t visible. “Jongdae what?” she echoed sharply.

“He told me,” Hei said. Jinqiong could tell that her sister wasn’t very comfortable talking, but she plowed on either way. “He told me about what happened.”

Her voice was so harsh that Hei flinched that time. “And?”

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