Warning(s): cursing
Length: 6.6k words

Black car, black rims, black coat, black eyes. These are all the things that Ange notices about Baekhyun when she walks out to the parking structure across the street from her brother’s apartment. In typical, broody boy fashion, Baekhyun is sitting on the hood of his black Jaguar, arms crossed, brows furrowed, and jaw clenched so hard that Ange thinks that he’ll pop a blood vessel in his neck.

“Are you okay?” Ange asks when she gets closer to him. Baekhyun raises his eyes off the floor, and his frown lessens its intensity, but he shakes his head.

“I just have a lot on my mind, sorry,” he murmurs. He stands to his full height, and Ange curiously peers up at him. She’s worried that he’s too angry to drive clearheadedly, but he’s Baekhyun. On cue, he slaps a small smile onto his face, and suddenly he doesn’t seem so angry anymore. “You good to go, Angel?”

“Of course,” Ange beams, glad to have the nice Baekhyun back. “Where are we going first?”

Baekhyun grins knowingly but doesn’t say anything to directly answer her question. Instead, he walks over to the passenger side of his car and opens the door for her. “You’ll find out,” he says cryptically, “when I drive you there.”

The B in Baekhyun stands for Blasé. French for cool and jaded. On him, it means handsome. Getting into someone’s car has never been so exciting. So easy.

- - - - -

“Do you ever get scared of driving at night?”

The moment the question leaves Ange’s mouth, she knows that it’s stupid, and even Baekhyun casts her a sideways glance of disbelief, but he answers it regardless. With his left hand draped over the steering wheel while the other rests on the gearstick, he shakes his head and clicks his tongue.

“I live in the night,” Baekhyun replies in a husky tone, “and there’s nothing out here that scares me.”

“What if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere?”

“Then I’ll fix it.”

Riiiiight, Ange thinks to herself. Sometimes she forgets who Baekhyun is.

“This place creeps me out,” Ange quips when the silence has become unbearable to her. Baekhyun is driving through one of those seemingly uninhabited neighborhoods that’s falling apart at the seams, and the only source of light are his car’s headlights and a sparse number of flickering streetlamps. Besides the soft whir of the car’s tires on pavement and its heating system, there isn’t much to hear either. “Why are we here?” Ange whines. “It’s so…dark.”

“I told you I was going to show you why you shouldn’t be going out at night,” Baekhyun replies coolly. “If you want me to drive back, I will.”

Ange rolls her eyes but leans closer to Baekhyun. She wants to place as much distance between her and the car window—just in case some psycho decides to punch their fist through it. In fact, Baekhyun is her only source of comfort. The houses with shattered windows or boarded up doors scream of hidden danger, and the more the streetlamps flicker, the more the whole setting feels like a horror movie. There is absolutely no one walking around on the street, and parts of the road are so cracked and torn that a hurricane-ravaged city would look more appealing.

In the corners of her eyes, Ange feels like she’s seeing things—like people walking around or random objects moving on their own—but when she turns, all she observes is the reflecting of light on shards of broken window glass. It’s eerie and definitely frightening to the point that Ange wants to beg Baekhyun to go back to the inner city, and she almost does it, but the thing about her is that she’ll run with other things before she pleads for anything.

“What happened to this neighborhood?” she asks. “What happened to everyone?”

“These houses have been here since before the famine,” Baekhyun murmurs in response. “People die, but their houses don’t go anywhere.” He points a finger towards a particular house with red spray paint on its door, forming a D-symbol. “You see that? The one with the red paint? They sell drugs in those houses.”

“How do you know?”

“I broke my jaw in one of them.”

Ange pauses and turns towards Baekhyun with a newfound concern. On impulse, she looks at his clenched jaw for any signs of his apparently past injury, but she finds none—at least nothing from her angle.

“This guy,” Baekhyun continues, “was supposed to pay me, and I believed him when he said he’d be in one of these houses. Of course, I was young and stupid, and there was no one here except a dealer who wasn’t too happy that some random was invading his property.” Baekhyun lifts his hand from the gearstick to touch the edge of his jaw. His eyes have a faraway look in them, like he’s peering into the past and remembering how it all felt. “He punched me so hard that I couldn’t chew normal food for a month.”

A cold shiver runs up Ange’s back as she tries to imagine that pain, but she has never been in a situation where someone ends up punching her in the jaw.

“Good thing it was just a fracture, though,” Baekhyun adds. “It could have been worse. I could have had all my teeth replaced.”

“That still sounds awful.” Ange makes a face and shudders at thought of having her handed to her in one of these shacks. “So why’d you take me here?” she wonders. “I’m not dumb enough to wander in here by myself—or go in any of the houses.”

“The point is that you could get killed here.” Baekhyun steps on the gas, and the car accelerates forward and deeper into the neighborhood. His eyes glance up to the rearview mirror for less than a second, and he makes a left turn into a street bordered by more houses and a small park with an intact swing set. “Statistically you could get killed anywhere, but neighborhoods like these almost guarantee it if you’re not careful. I’ve known people to disappear after just one night of squatting. You see that house with the pink paint on the door?” Ange nods slowly. “Trafficking,” Baekhyun states. “The one with the green paint? Gambling.”

“That one doesn’t sound so bad.”

“What—gambling? No,” Baekhyun vehemently denies. “It’s as bad as murder. People don’t just gamble with money. They gamble with their lives, their families, when they decide they want to do it with the lowlifes that do their business here.”

“Are you speaking from experience?”

“I’m speaking as the guy who broke his jaw here.”

Ange keeps her smart mouth shut for entirety of Baekhyun’s small tour of the neighborhood. Although she thought that she knew about the imaginable horrors—the “normal” crimes such as drive-by shootings or robberies—Baekhyun gives her some insight on the fact that humans are probably the worst of all animals to exist. Fortunately, he doesn’t dig too deep into it; he merely tells her of atrocities that he has seen—from witnessing someone have their fingers broken with a hammer to hearing a woman’s helpless pleas as a group of men violated her.

“So you saw or heard these things,” Ange asks while Baekhyun finally starts driving out of the complex, “but you didn’t do anything to help them?”

“I know my limits, Angel,” Baekhyun murmurs in answer, and Ange wonders if he feels guilty for not having done enough. “If I had tried to help everyone I saw struggling, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d probably be dead—or halfway around the world in some prison.” He takes his eyes off the road for a moment to look at her in the eye. “I helped myself first and foremost, and sometimes doing things for yourself is enough.”

Ange takes those words and writes it down in her mind. The more Baekhyun talks about his experiences, the more that she wants to know about him, about everything. At some point, she wonders how it’s possible for someone to become more mysterious the more he reveals things about himself.

“Where are we going now?” Ange queries when Baekhyun reenters the “good” part of the city.

“Depends. Which story do you wanna hear about? How I entered my first street race or how I almost got stabbed?”

“Can I hear both?”

“No, you can only pick one.”

“But why?” Ange whines. “It’s not like it’ll take you hours to tell one story. We have time—”

“Well time’s up,” Baekhyun interjects, shaking his head. “You don’t get to choose anymore.” Very abruptly, he makes a U-turn that leaves Ange breathless. With one seemingly simple flick of his wrist, he turns the steering wheel, changes the gears, and accelerates forward with a VROOM. The back of Ange’s head hits the headrest of her seat, and she quickly glances over at Baekhyun. “Indecision,” he states like a lecturer, “is sometimes worse than the worst of two options.”

“How’s that possible?”

“You’ll figure it out when you get there, Angel. It’s different for everyone.” Baekhyun makes another turn, and they pass by several office buildings and into large parking structure standing near a hotel and casino. “Guess which story I’m telling you.”

The concrete structure half-filled with cars is set like a horror movie about a serial killer kidnapping people; the dim lights, the low-lying ceiling, the skid marks on the ground—it’s all very eerie. While there are people standing in small groups here and there, it’s important to note that they all look at Baekhyun’s car as he drives past them. Some look like common people laughing and meeting with their friends, but the majority don serious expressions. Of that majority, most look reverent, but a very few scowls.

“When you almost got stabbed,” Ange absentmindedly murmurs. “Baekhyun, why is everyone looking at you?”

“Because they know me.” Baekhyun drives onto the top level of the parking building—on the roof level. It’s there where he parks his car and unbuckles his seatbelt. He twists his body to face Ange, and she curiously returns his gaze. “This is where a lot started,” he says solemnly. “This is where I decided that I was going to enter my first street race.”

Ange’s jaw falls. This is it—the origin story, or some part of it, that she has always wanted to hear. “Really?” she asks in a hushed tone.

Baekhyun nods. “Yeah. Come on, I’ll tell you about it.”

He gets out of the car, and Ange follows him despite the freezing conditions of tonight. Although it isn’t snowing, the wind has picked up, and it seems as if the full moon is enhancing the cold’s prickly fingers and their grip on flesh. Ange has to hug herself to conserve heat while Baekhyun shoves his hands into his pockets and squares his shoulders.

“Do you see that road down there?” Baekhyun asks, and since there’s only one road that the parking structure is closest to, Ange mumbles a yeah in response. “They usually close that down for street races, and one night, I was up here with a bunch of guys while they were betting on who the winner would be.” Baekhyun walks to the ledge of the barrier that keeps cars from falling off the roof and sits on it. Ange tries to do the same, but she’s not nearly as tall as him, so she stands by his side and peers at the street below. “It seemed like they were making a lot of money,” Baekhyun continues, “and I wanted it on that.”

“Why?”

“I was young and broke, and I never went to college. Making money is like doing magic for guys like me.” Baekhyun’s jaw twitches, and Ange recognizes the movement as him clenching it amid the cold. “So I talked to some more people,” Baekhyun went on, “and before the night ended, I talked my way into the next street race.”

“It was that simple?”

“Well, I wasn’t a threat back then.” Baekhyun nudges a shoulder towards his car. “I didn’t have a good set of wheels yet, and I was just a scrawny kid. They figured I was easy money, so they let me in. Probably one of the dumbest decisions ever, huh?”

“Them letting you in or you deciding to enter?”

“Both.”

“You like driving, though, don’t you?” Ange inquires. She smiles as she recalls Baekhyun teaching her how to drive and him showing her what drifting was. “It can’t be too dumb if you enjoy it.” Baekhyun doesn’t say anything to that, so Ange decides to do a little introspection of her own.

She doesn’t know Baekhyun as much as she’d like to, but she knows enough to make the deduction that a part of him wants to go back. To where, she doesn’t know, but doesn’t everyone want to turn back time, even just a little bit? If Ange had the choice, she definitely wouldn’t be living in this year; she’d go back to before her parents passed away, to an era where she felt like she had a place in the world, to a time where it was good to be experience life. Now, everything is so…sad. These days, the moments move through her rather than having her move through them.

“Do you feel like that your life changed forever when you decided to enter a street race?” Ange mumbles after a while. “Do you think that was the start of something?”

“I know it was the start of something,” Baekhyun replies. “My life’s never been the same since.”

“How old were you?”

Baekhyun exhales, and the air in front of him turns white.

“20.”

You were my age? Ange remains silent at the revelation, but that doesn’t stop her from gaping at Baekhyun with awe. Things are falling into place and knowing that he was only 20 when he walked into a world of crime makes his decisions make sense. No wonder he was—and still is—so adamant about not letting her near anything remotely dangerous. Upon that realization, a sense of admiration fills Ange, and it’s at this point that she can respect Baekhyun a lot more.

“We should go,” Baekhyun murmurs when the wind picks up, ruffling his hair. “There’s more places I wanna show you.”

“Wait.” Ange’s words cause Baekhyun to halt. “What’s so bad about this place? It’s peaceful up here.”

“Oh, right.” Baekhyun points to the area below the parking structure. Ange tries to peek over the ledge as best as she can, and she catches a glimpse of a few trees at the bottom. “They find dead people down there sometimes,” Baekhyun states casually. “The police say they probably fell off drunk, but I know for a fact that it’s not true.”

“Huh?”

Baekhyun, for some strange reason, finds Ange’s reaction funny, and his eyes curl into little crescent shapes. His cheeks grow puffy in his smile, but he shakes his head and waves her shock off. “Come on,” he says, “we’re wasting time doing nothing up here.”

They get back into his car and start driving back down the parking structure, and everything seems to be normal (at least to Ange), but Baekhyun frowns when he glances up at the rearview mirror. Ange dismisses it as him being careful, but he doesn’t continue moving. His frown grows deeper, and he clenches his jaw as a scowl slowly forms on his face. At that point, Ange twists her body to look out of the rear windshield and see what’s happening, but Baekhyun forcibly pulls her down.

“What are you doing?” Ange a