CHAPTER 24: BANTER
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CODENAME: HERO
NAME: KIM JAEJOONG
AGENCY: NIS

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Pitch Black.

My head is throbbing, my ears are ringing, and my throat is parched. What is that constant yelling in the background? Can’t they let me suffer in peace?

“What….him…..Jaejoong….” Well, whatever they are yelling, I assume has to do with me.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that the hazy and confusing pain in my mind would disappear. My body feels heavy, like the ground is clutching on to me and pulling me past the cold cement. I stop resisting, falling back into the clutches of the void.

Aura.

Where are you?

I have to help you.

The forgiving blackness didn’t last forever, as my hazy consciousness returned. My body is aching; the fact that I have been lying in an uncomfortable position on an uncomfortable cement floor did little to relieve it. I took a deep breath before opening my eyes, hoping that the lethargic and sluggish mentality will leave me alone.

It didn’t.

I groaned, rolling over onto my side, shut my eyes, and clutched my stomach in attempts to rid myself of horrible nausea.

“Oh, how nice of you to join me, Jaejoong, or should I say, how considerate?” a sharp, sarcastic voice called, I bolted upright, whipping my eyes open towards the sound. My eyes tried to adjust to the lighting and the terrible vertigo lessened when my eyes became attuned to my surroundings. There was a person in front of me, a feminine figure…wait…I know that voice…I also know that person. I squinted to try to see better, it was a girl, a rather malicious looking girl…

“Sato Ai?” I asked, confusion and daze coating my voice, “What are you doing here? Last thing I remember is…is.” I stumbled off of my sentence, what was the last thing I remember?

“Yes, Jaejoong. What is the last think you remember? I am so awfully curious.” Ai taunted. I ignored, continuing my strange thought process. Come to think of it, where am I? How did I get here? I remember seeing Aura with Park Yoochun –

“Aura!” I suddenly cried, as the most recent memories stumbled in, “She was in danger, and I went to save her, and she was held hostage,” I cried, words continued to tumble out of my mouth, “then…then…Yunho shot this random pedestrian for some strange reason that I really don’t understand. I ran to the poor dude to try to help him, but all of a sudden, there was so much smoke.” I paused…letting the scene replay in my mind.

“Then….well…I guess I ended up here for some reason…” I mumbled.

“Thank you!” Ai cried, as if my answer was the answer to life’s problems, “So if you could be so kind, why don’t you tell that to my leader so I don’t have to spend my precious time with you.”

“Hey – ” I begun, trying to retaliate against suddenly being insulted. Ai ignored me.

“Styx! He’s up!” Ai yelled. Wait, wait! Leader? Styx? What is the meaning of this!? Wasn’t the Styx an alias for the NJC’s leader? I turned to see a figure of a woman through the gaps between bars. Bars? Is this a jail cell!?

The figure called to me, greeting me by name in English: “Hello, Jaejoong,” her cold voice addressed, shivers slithered up my spine as I finally realized the gravity of my situation. “I must say that I was quite surprised to see your face again. When G-dragon dragged your unconscious body to our base, I was just about ready to kill you on the spot.”

I knew this voice, it was just as familiar as Ai’s was to me, I squinted at the figure, trying to recall who she was. Then it hit me: the person who was speaking to me right now was Ai’s cousin, the deceased Kimura Rin.

“Of course,” Rin continued either deciding to ignore the shocked expression on my face or having not seen it, “there was one thing that I had to find out before I let my anger out. Jaejoong, how did you find out the details of Park Yoochun’s escape?”

I could almost hear my mind clicking into overdrive as I processed the situation. I’m talking to someone who should – in theory- be dead! And she’s asking about how I found out about Park Yoochun’s escape? Wait. Rin ‘died’ in Ai’s interview with a media reporter, which contained a message from the NJC to Park Yoochun! That’s right, meaning that both Kimura Rin and Sato Ai are part of the NJC…meaning that I’m in the hands of the NJC.

Didn’t Ai say something about having to spend time with me, in a jail cell? Does that mean that Rin believes that Ai could have betrayed the NJC? Thinking back, even when we first met, Rin seemed very proud and arrogant. It would possible she believed that Ai purposely gave away the message rather than thinking about the possibility of someone decoding it. The vain woman might just kill me if I told her that I did indeed decode it. Anyway, might as well drag a member of the NJC down with me if I’m going to die.

“Find out the details of Park Yoochun’s escape?” I started, “Well, when I heard the news report for the first time I couldn’t help but wonder about all those strange pauses when Ai was speaking. And the way she was acting was so unnatural; I just knew that she was trying to tell the NIS – trying to tell me something.”

“Our relationship was so close; I immediately recognized all the signals she sent me in that message. Soon enough I was able to understand the clues to decode the message.”

I said as innocently as possible: “It’s all thanks to Ai really that I realized there was a message at all” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ai’s expression transform into disbelief, almost drawing a smirk of triumph to breech my façade. Rin, however, was the reason the smirk never showed itself. As she listened to my explanation she had stood silently. But in an instant she practically leaped onto the bars and began shaking them and screaming through a stream of tears.

“Ai! Look what you’ve done! It’s your fault that Junsu was shot! It’s your fault!” she yelled, the last word of her sentence ripping through an octave higher. “I – I –” Rin stammered before dropping to her knees, “What if he dies…” she whispered. The commotion called a couple of boys to the scene. They quickly ushered Rin back to the room where she had approached them.

“Hell…” I muttered to Ai, “I thought the bars were to keep us in. I’m glad it kept her out.”

Ai only glared at me before opening , “Absolutely fantastic. So now, not only did you seal your death wish, you just had to go and try and bring me down too, didn’t you? Yeah. You are definitely considerate after all.”

“Why do you keep saying considerate?” I asked, finally getting a little irritated by her sarcasm. “Like I said I would be once but there’s no need to keep repeating it is there? Honestly.”

“Oh I see. So I guess that’s just another empty promise isn’t it? Well how stupid of me to take you seriously.”

Two can play at this game: “Yeah it was stupid of you to take me seriously. Like it was stupid of me to actually think that you weren’t part of the NJC.”

“So what? At least the NJC was the one place where I had some stability in my life. Thanks for going and ruining that too.”

“No problem. It was the least I could do. After all, I am soooo considerate.”

Ai suddenly lunged at me with her nails in attempt to rip off a chunk of my face in anger.
“Whoa!” I yelped, quickly invading her ferocious attack, “don’t do something like that! Didn’t you mother teach you any manners?”

“Tch. A mother? My mother left me”

“So did mine.”

“That’s great. We can start a club”

“Pfft. Yeah, for sure. I can imagine it already. ‘The Pitiful Losers Without Mothers Club.’ You be president, I’ll be vice.”

“Stop doing that!”

“Doing what?”

“Stop turning all of my anger into a joke!”

I looked at the anger in Ai face and sighed, “I may turn everything ‘into a joke’ but everything I said its true. The truth is easier to hear as a joke though. In any case, you still haven’t told me how in the world the NJC managed to get a hold of a place with a jail cell.”

“We’re both going to die so I guess there’s no harm in telling you. Welcome to the Japanese Embassy.”
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Author’s Note: As we have forgotten to mention before, we added BIGBANG into the story a while ago, though they do not play a major role. We apologize for the super delay but we cannot promise that the chapter updates will be consistent though we can promise that we will finish the story.
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