그 손을 놓지 말라는 마음이 들려요

I can hear your heart telling me not let go of these hands

진심이 아닌걸 눈치 채걸요

I can feel that this isn't your whole heart

눈물이 말하잖아요

That's what your tears are telling me

When Myungsoo burst into the hospital from the front entrance, he was met with complete and utter chaos. Staff members, patients still in their hospital attire, and visitors alike were being escorted to safety by officers in uniform, and the detective had to weave his way through the crowd to reach the corridor. Spotting a lone nurse stumbling nearby, Myungsoo grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her aside. "Which floor is it?" he grit out, shaking the woman out of her stupor. "Lim Jaeheun's room! Which floor is it on?"

The woman stared up at him, wide-eyed and panicked. "I-I'm sorry," she replied shrilly, shaking her head. "I don't know-"

"Where do you keep patients who've been in a coma for three years?" Myungsoo interjected hastily.

"T-the extended care unit, I think," the nurse stuttered distractedly, eyes darting wildly.

Before he could ask which floor that was on, the blast of a distant gunshot spurred into his ears and sent the woman crumbling to the floor in hysterics. He remained motionless, uncertain of what to make of this sound, but the scattered screams coming from the crowd was enough to snap his head in the direction of the shot. Myungsoo hastily pulled up the distraught nurse and shoved her into the arms of a nearby officer, evading the stampede of frantic evacuees in search of the elevators. Head spinning and knees threatening to give out beneath him, the detective staggered inside the parting doors the moment they cracked open and vigorously punched in random buttons in hopes that one of them would bring him to the right floor. He sank into a corner with a fist clamped over his chest, heaving large gulps of air and beads of sweat rolling down the length of his forehead. 

A few images crossed his mind as the elevator continued to clank its way up, images that revealed themselves all at once like multiple snapshots, and that only made him hold his head from the overwhelming disturbance. There was the smiling Lee Sungjong from high school buried behind a mountain of textbooks; there was the overjoyed Lee Sungjong embracing him tightly when he received the acceptance letter from Seoul University; there was the Lee Sungjong from a few nights ago staring up at him with tears swimming in his own eyes, asking him to stay; there was the Lee Sungjong laughing by his side as he had always done from what seemed like moments ago. 

"I'm here, hyung. I won't disappear again . . ."

The elevator doors parted, bringing in the sound of another gunshot.

~

"You're sure as hell he's in there, Woohyun?" Howon asked through grit teeth, gun aimed straight at Lim Jaeheun's door. His eyes darted to the rest of his teammates, who seemed to mirroring him as they held up their own revolvers to point at their target. "We can't lose him this time. You know that, don't you?"

"I saw the bastard go inside," Woohyun replied soberly. "I wouldn't call all of you here if I wasn't sure-"

The team leader stepped in between the two, kicking the door with the heel of his shoe. "Min Kisuk!" he bellowed at the perpetrator inside. "You're surrounded by an armed police squad, and this room's on the sixth floor so jumping out the window isn't an option for you. It's over."

No response.

Sunggyu exchanged a sidelong glance with Dongwoo, signaling him with a brief nod, and the younger detective threw himself at the door. It burst open, barely clinging onto its hinges, and revealed a figure with a cap pulled over his eyes charging straight at the crime unit with a handgun held out at arm's length. Before the team could have a chance to fire, the man squeezed his finger over his own trigger and shot at them, the bullet blasting into the wall behind them. "," Woohyun heard Sungyeol mutter as they all ducked simultaneously. 

"Yah, Min Kisuk-" Woohyun began to shout before he was flung to the ground with such force that his gun slipped from his grasp and skittered across the hall. 

"He's getting away!" Sunggyu exclaimed, breaking off into a sprint after the rapidly retreating figure down the corridor. "Spread out!"

"," Woohyun groaned as he rose on all fours and watched his team members disperse. 

~

Myungsoo found himself running blindly into unfamiliar corridors, skidding past every corner only to be met with another labyrinth made of white walls and rows and rows of doors that led nowhere. Ignoring the pain in his stomach, the heaviness of his legs, the detective continued to run. Run and run and run. And somewhere, in the midst of his pursuit, he realized that running was all he was capable of. Running away from his problems, running away from Sungjong. Running away from himself.

He stopped to catch his breath, and he punched the wall beside him with the side of his fist, disregarding the pain that soon followed.

And this time, another gunshot sounded from the stairwell.

~

Sungyeol sprinted down a flight of stairs and aimed the handgun slightly away from his target. He decided that he shouldn't shoot, not directly anyways; if anything, Min Kisuk needed to be alive when they brought him in. Shooting the bastard would only complicate this case even further.

The detective ducked behind the railing as a bullet whizzed past his cheek. He found himself breathing out a quiet "" as the sound of fleeing footsteps grew more and more distant from him, out of reach. Sungyeol stood up only to be held back roughly by the shoulder. "Stay back." He darted his eyes to find the voice attached to a familiar, twisted grimace. But Kim Myungsoo had already grabbed the handgun from his grasp and pushed past him to hop over the railing, landing on the flight of stairs below.

"Wait, Myungsoo!" Sungyeol cried out in a frantic attempt to stop him. He took off into a run. "Myungsoo, don't shoot!"

But Myungsoo, unlocking the safety and curving his finger over the trigger, had already fired at their running target. Clutching at the railing, Sungyeol jarred to a complete stop as he watched Min Kisuk jerk forward violently before tumbling down another flight of stairs. The perpetrator, rising shakily on all fours, aimed his own weapon at Myungsoo's approaching figure, and in a state of panic, began to blast out a barrage of bullets with a trembling hand. Eyes widened and mouth agape, the older detective parted his lips to let out a shout of warning -- something, anything that might prevent his teammate from getting hit -- but he found that the bullets only zipped past and berated the walls behind them. Reaching his fallen form, Kim Myungsoo pressed the barrel of his gun against the perpetrator's forehead. "Learn to shoot straight, bastard," the detective murmured, eyes flaring.

The target's gun dropped to the floor.

~

Woohyun grabbed fistfuls of Myungsoo's shirt, jerking him forward with a menacing glare boring into his younger teammate's eyes. "What the hell did you just do back there?!" he snarled, shoving off the hands of the rest of his group members. "If you had shot the bastard even an inch to the left, you would've ing killed him! Do you realize that? A ing inch-"

"But I didn't!" Myungsoo shouted back, not realizing how loud his voice was until he found that it had ricocheted off the lobby walls back to him. "I stopped him, didn't I? I cuffed him, didn't I? While all of you just let him run away, I did something about it." He pried himself free from Woohyun's grip. "You're lucky I didn't ing kill him, that I found it in myself to miss that shot by a damn inch. Because if I had the chance, I would've made sure he were dead."

They remained like this for what seemed like a long stretch of time -- glaring at each other because they couldn't possibly find it in their stubborn selves to admit that the other was right. But then Woohyun tore his gaze away at the slight tap of his shoulder, and the group peered down to meet the timid gaze of a lone nurse standing before them. Breaking the silence, Howon spoke first with, "Sorry, miss, but you're not supposed to be-"

"You're the nurse from the receptionist's desk, aren't you?" Woohyun suddenly interjected, waving a dismissing hand in Howon's direction.

The nurse nodded tentatively. "The officers out front said I shouldn't be in here, but they agreed to let me in after I told them that I had to talk to you regarding Min Kisuk. I was going to tell you on the phone earlier, but you hung up before I had the chance." She bit her lower lip in contemplation. "I thought it was strange at first, but the man who signed himself in today and went upstairs is not the Min Kisuk who normally visits Lim Jaeheun."

Myungsoo pushed Woohyun out of the way, stepping in front of the nurse. "So what you're saying is-"

"The person you arrested is not Min Kisuk. I'm sure about that because I know what the real Min Kisuk looks like since he's been visiting frequently for the past three years, and that man who was being put into the patrol car wasn't him. I called Detective Nam earlier because I was instructed to do so if someone signed himself in under that name. I just . . . didn't know it would end up like this."

Jang Dongwoo exchanged a somber glance with his team leader. "So," he began.

"An imposter," Sunggyu finished.

~

Sungjong found himself staring longer than he should at Myungsoo's graduation picture. Since the detective had left, he found that there was a strange aching in his chest at the thought of being alone, and the pain only subsided when he took to looking through his best friend's photos. So he had dedicated the past hour to revisiting the past through Myungsoo's eyes -- or in this case, Myungsoo's lens. Sungjong's always found it ironic how someone with undoubtedly handsome features, someone as flawless as Kim Myungsoo, preferred to be the one behind the camera. And somehow, his favorite subject came to be none other than Lee Sungjong himself. So when the boy was flipping through some of the detective's old photo albums, he couldn't help but flinch in embarrassment that most of the pictures were (unfortunate) candid shots of him.

When had he ever been caught off guard like this?

He stopped on one picture, the only one that had a caption written beneath it: "Favorite." And it was the only one that Sungjong seemed to recognize from three years ago.

"Hey, Changil," Myungsoo said, tapping on his classmate's shoulder. The boy he called Changil glanced up from the sandcastle he and his girlfriend were busy constructing, away from the tossing waves of Jeju beach but close enough to gather up mounds of wet sand. "Can you hold onto my camera while Sungjong and I walk by the ocean? I don't want it to get wet or anything."

Changil rose to his feet, brushing off the coat of sand from his hands and gingerly taking the camera from Myungsoo's. "Sure thing, Myung." He grinned. "Hey, have fun on your date with Sungjong!" Myungsoo whipped around so quickly that he almost lost his balance, staggering in place, and he gaped wide-eyed at his classmate in disbelief. But Changil only waved him off. "It was a joke, a joke! Can't a guy make a good joke during a class field trip? Go have fun, man."

Throwing him a brief, questioning look, Myungsoo turned back towards the water and bounded over to Sungjong, who was crouched by the shoreline and tentatively grazing the sea foam with his fingertips. Kicking off his sandals, the older boy knelt beside him, peering down at his hands to see what they were searching for. "Hyung, you know it's been such a long time since I've been to the beach," Sungjong began, still digging, "that I almost forgot how cold the ocean is."

"Yeah?" Myungsoo uttered, pulling up the corner of his lips into a mischievous half-smirk. He swiped his hand against the shore, and Sungjong cried out in shock as he was spritzed with sea water. "Well, now you know."

"Yah, Kim Myungsoo!" Sungjong snapped, lips twitching. He held out his fist -- right underneath the older boy's nose -- and sprawled open his fingers to reveal a squirming sandbug situated on his palm. Letting out a shriek and flailing his arms in shock, Myungsoo stumbled backwards and toppled into the sea. "Now you know too!"

Myungsoo, with his wet fringe clinging to his forehead, gathered the younger boy into his arms ("Wait, hyung! No!" he gasped.) and pulled him into the shallow waters. They both fell onto their backs in a fit of laughter, facing each other with grins reflecting all the happiness they felt in this small moment of time and Myungsoo beaming at the boy who held the entirety of his heart.

20 feet away from the two best friends, without either of them knowing, Changil raised Myungsoo's camera to his face and captured that instant with a press of a button.

When Sungjong blinked, he found that he had blotted the photo with his own tears. He slammed the book shut, shoved it underneath one of the cushions, and clutched a hand to his chest with deep, heaving breaths spilling through his lips. But even tossing aside the album couldn't keep him from remembering the moments of their friendship, of Myungsoo's soft fingertips brushing his skin, of their shared smiles and laughter, of the burn on Sungjong's lips when Myungsoo had kissed him. Nothing he did, the boy realized, could erase Kim Myungsoo from his thoughts.

~

"Go home, Myungsoo," Sunggyu said once the crime unit filed into the meeting room, reclining tiredly into his chair. "I'll give you a call if we find out anything else."

"But, team leader, let me talk to him," Myungsoo insisted. "Maybe I can get some information out of him and find out where the real Min Kisuk-"

"And we will," came his superior's immediate response. "But that man isn't in the state to be interrogated. He's going to be released from the infirmary after his wound gets treated, then we'll get the answer out of him. Just call it a night." Sunggyu ran a hand down the length of his face with a small sigh escaping his lips. "I know you want to finish this case, Myungsoo. We all do. But there's nothing we can do right now."

"Sir."

"Go home, Myungsoo."

~

Myungsoo stood outside his own apartment, his eyes fixated on the knob and fingers itching at his side as though he were contemplating on whether or not he should go inside. So he kept to staring at the door he may never open because he wasn't sure what to expect on the other side of it. But the longer he stood here, the more his heart seemed to ache with a barrage of emotions -- of longing, of loneliness, of love -- that almost demanded to be felt. Clamping a hand over his chest and closing his fingers around the door knob with the other, Myungsoo in his breath, and he brought himself to turn his wrist --

But the door had already swung open from the inside. The detective stiffened, wide-eyed.

Standing underneath the doorway with his duffel bag in hand and eyes suddenly darting away from Myungsoo's, Lee Sungjong took a tentative step backwards. Myungsoo, snapping out of his confounded stupor, tore through the space separating them to snatch the bag away from the younger boy by grabbing his wrist, but Sungjong pried himself free with a strange look contorting his eyes to the point that the detective almost couldn't recognize him. "Where do you think you're going?" the older boy murmured.

Sungjong exhaled. "Somewhere that's not here."

"Lee Sungjong-"

"Who are you," Sungjong interjected, unknowingly raising his voice, "to do this to me? Who are you to leave me alone for three years and come back only to mess with my thoughts? It hurts, Myungsoo. Thinking about you in that way, having feelings for you, I can't do it." Tears were beginning to build up in his eyes, and his voice diminished into nothing but a whisper racked with sobs. "I can't stay with you."

Myungsoo took a shaky step towards him, reaching out with a trembling hand before pulling Sungjong into his arms. It was an automatic response, driven by everything that seemed to fill up in his heart. "Don't," he breathed as the younger boy tried squirming out of his embrace. Myungsoo held him closer, and Sungjong found himself growing still. "Don't leave." His request came out so quietly, with such tenderness that Sungjong wasn't sure if maybe he had heard anything to begin with. But he something in him was telling him that he had.

And that's when the strings holding him together seemed to snap.

Sungjong shoved the detective away from him, sobbing. "W-why didn't you tell me?" he cried out as he hit Myungsoo on the chest again and again until the rage slowly subsided into sadness. "All this time . . . all this time, you felt that way about me, y-yet you never said anything. Why?"

Myungsoo gently held the younger boy by the wrist, tears swimming in his own eyes as he met Sungjong's. "Because you might have left, just like you're trying to do now," the older boy whispered. "Because everything beautiful is meant to be loved in silence."

Sungjong didn't pull away this time, but instead, he managed to utter these two words: "I'm afraid."

And Myungsoo said the three: "I love you."

Sungjong let the duffel bag fall at his feet, and he wound his arms around the older boy's neck, pulling him in and losing himself in the storm of Myungsoo's lips. He was no longer afraid of his heart being moved, of drowning in the deep pools of his best friend's eyes, or of maybe just falling. All he could think about was kissing the boy that offered nothing but comfort and about giving him nothing but love in return.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A/N: I'm finally finished with this, goddamn. I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to update sooner. Truthfully, I started this chapter as soon as I finished the last one, but that was right around the time I started school so I haven't had many opportunities to just sit down and write :/ I'm not completely satisfied with this (especially the action scenes smh), but I guess...it's okay. I'll try (TRY) to update soon (again, TRY). But thank you, guys, for reading and subscribing^^