Ehehehe~ 

“Jongin?”

Taemin is knocking on the door impatiently, unable to stand the silence behind the wooden door of Kai’s and D.O’s shared bedroom. The silence that has been beating him up for the past five minutes. Meanwhile, D.O and Minho watch him from a close distance, the others having left the three of them alone with Kai on the other side of the door.

His mind replays the scene that has happened minutes ago inside and outside the Cordius.

The Angel’s shipwright shot Taemin a look that was a mixture of hurt and confusion, not sure what to think of anymore. Taemin dared a glance upwards to meet with Kai’s gaze…

Almost immediately, the shipwright gave a faint shake of his head and was backing away with a few steps, until he turned around and fled from the room, the doors automatically opening for him. D.O, being the one closest to him, did nothing to stop him; he could only watch Kai’s retreating back, just like the others were doing.

“Jongin, wait!”

The words escaped from Taemin’s lips a little too late, and Taemin ran after him, the others clearing away a path for him to run through.

“WAIT! JONGIN!”

Taemin was back in the room with flights of stairs and ladders, trying to find Kai. He was quick to catch Kai climbing up a ladder on his right just before Kai’s feet vanished from view. He ran to the ladder in haste.

“JONGIN, PLEASE WAIT!” Taemin yelled as he tried to get the hang of climbing up the ladder with speed, but Kai was already too fast for him. He heard the feet pattering against the perforated metal floorings a floor above him just as his head reached past the first floor.

The young man heard a slam of a door before he landed on the floor where Kai had gotten off. When Taemin reached the corridor, he stopped in his tracks to see that there was a double-loaded corridor of ten doors.

What was even worse, all the doors are closed and identical down to the doorknob. Taemin groaned.

“Jongin?” Taemin walked into the corridor, determined not to give up on reaching out to Kai.

He heard footsteps behind him, and looked around to see D.O and Minho approaching him. The others were gathered at the far opposite side of where the three of them are.

“Taemin?” D.O’s voice catches the young man’s attention. There was sympathy written across his face. “Erm, Jongin and I, we share a room over there.” The short man led Lucifer’s two members to the third door on the left side.

“Jongin, it’s Kyungsoo…” D.O tested the door to see if it was locked, placing his fingers in the grooved handle and giving it a light pull.  It was indeed locked.  He then raised a hand to knock on the door gently, with a series of rhythmic taps. He glanced briefly at Taemin and Minho before speaking up.

“…I have Taemin and Minho with me…” D.O said softly.

There was only silence from behind the door. Kyungsoo let out a sigh, knowing that Kai would tend to bottle things up once more again.

Taemin grew impatient as the seconds and the minutes went by, frustrated at his friend’s silence. He made his way over to the door, with D.O quick to step away and let him handle the situation. The taller man knocked hurriedly without rhythm.

“Jongin?” His voice was a little more forceful, and he didn’t care that he sounded demanding. “Jongin, open the door. We need to talk.”

The door still did not open.

So they waited…and waited.

“Come on, Jongin, open the door…” Taemin growls, trying hard not to feel so pissed about his friend’s attitude. “I get why you reacted the way you did earlier, but you should know that it’s a lot different from my perspective on how I dealt with things back then.” He rests his forehead against the cool metal surface of the door, letting out an exasperated sigh.

Taemin softens his tone. “Honestly, I can’t blame you for being like this; you thought that I’d forgotten about you after all these years. The truth is, I haven’t. It’s the honest-to-goodness truth, Jongin. When we were on our way here, even though I was hoping on a whim that our reunion would be a happy one, I had expected that you would be upset with me… And I know the years behind us are too many that it’s not easy to forgive and forget, so I’m sorry for that.”

On the other side of the door, Kai has been sitting on his bed with his back against the wall, listening to his friend’s monologue. He has his arms crossed, legs drawn up to his chest, and has been glaring at the door, imagining where Taemin’s face is behind it.

“I’m sorry that you were led to believe that I was gone but, Jongin, I had no way of reaching you the moment Fate sent me to the Lucifer. I had no way to go back to you because I had no idea where we were, and I didn’t even know if we were in the same dimension. We were on missions with our captain once I got on board, and I…I was only a young man back then with a book, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and adve-…“ Kai’s ears perk up at the sudden interruption but he scowls even further when he realizes that Taemin was about to say ‘adventure’. “…I just want you to know that you’ve never left my mind after all these years.”

Kai rolls his eyes. Yeah right, he thinks to himself. He stares outside the window, the clouds billowing gently in the bright sky.

“You told me about that day when you found out our ship was docking in our hometown...” Kai looks back sharply at the door.  “…And how you waited at the tree where we used to meet all the time. And that you waited a long time for me.” There is a pause of silence as Taemin sighs softly on the other side of the door.

“…I saw you.”

Kai’s eyes widen at the revelation.

“I saw you sitting there at the base of the tree, picking at the grass, watching our ship at the dock.”

That makes Kai straighten up.

“Sometimes you climbed up the tree and would look around, waiting, mumbling to yourself. And all I could do was just hide behind one of the hedges.”

What? Kai makes a face. Why would he hide?

“Right now, you’re wondering why I hid myself from you…” Kai glowers at the door, “and it was because of the shock and the shame. I was shocked, because I wasn’t sure if you were some kind of dream…”

Kai softens at the statement, realizing that at that time, he had looked exactly the same as he always had been before their fight, before he met Taemin for the first time. Even now, he looks unchanged. He never should have kept his age so secretly from him; they had been best friends after all. It is not long before Kai hears Taemin speak up again, with this time, the tone sounding much more gentle and pensive.

“You were exactly the same Jongin I had seen many years before than, so I didn’t know how to react. But then I heard you talking to yourself, and the more that I listened, the more that I realized that you were actually alive and living in that time...” There is another brief silence on the other side of the door. “I couldn’t return to you just like that, knowing that after what happened that night and how long it had been, you might have freaked out and thought that I was a ghost. Look where our predicaments got us.”

Kai moves closer to the door, his hand reaching for the built-in grooved handle and resting there.

“When I realized earlier that you guys were much older than what I took you to be, you especially, it all started to make sense. And I don’t know why you never told me about it back when we were friends; I thought we trusted each other. I had lost my parents but I still had you… Jongin, I’m sorry that I lashed out at you; I don’t know why I did that, I really don’t.  I felt so ashamed that I had yelled at you and left you there. You didn’t fail me for anything, Jongin.”

The sudden click and opening of the door makes Taemin, D.O, and Minho almost jump out of their skins, startled as Kai appears instantly into view, his scowl etched on his face.

“So what made you join Lucifer that night?” Taemin maintains Kai’s intense stare as he listens to his friend practically seething. “What made you accept Fate’s offer that night compared to those three previous months when you had said no? Was it because of our fight?”

Taemin slowly shakes his head. “No, it was never because of our fight. We said things that we shouldn’t have meant, because we knew we were better than that. Jongin, I didn’t have a choice as to when I was going to board that ship. Fate offered me that night following our fight, and I just wanted to be done with my grief over my parents’ deaths, to be done with the failed attempts of learning what killed my parents. You told me to move on