Tao sneaked into the dorms through the front door quietly, or at least as quiet as he thought he was. It was around 4 a.m, just the time when the sky turned from dark navy to light blue as the hour passes. He hadn’t had the chance to change his attire, and simply just put on the leather jacket so that he wouldn’t attract attention driving a motorcycle in the dead of night dressed all formal.

He was taking his shoes off when he saw the bathroom door opening. Crap. The lights to the hallway of the front door were still on. He heard footsteps coming his way, and Tao just froze in place. What’s his excuse?

“Tao?” A very familiar deep voice asked for his presence. Tao looked up and gave a sheepish smile. “What are you doing?”

Tao was about to think of an excuse when Yifan noticed the direction he was facing and added, “Did you just come back?”

“I uh,” the younger’s eyes flicked towards his duffel bag, “Was just about to go for a morning run.” Yeah. That’ll work.

Yifan eyed him up and down, and raised an eyebrow while smirking, “In a button down, tie and slacks?”

Surprised, Tao looked down and saw he hadn’t changed to sweats yet. Great, now what? “I was trying to make a fashion statement.”

The youngest Chinese trainee in the dorm was unique, Yifan always knew that, but damn, “At four in the morning?” Of course, the elder knew that Tao was probably trying to hide something, but the man simply couldn’t resist teasing him about it.

“Y-yes?” Tao’s voice squeaked an octave higher at the end of the syllable, to which Yifan gave a light chuckle. Giving up, he decided to let Tao off the hook, “Okay, but change first. Your fashion statement can wait.”

Tao hastily nodded and rushed to his room. Baekhyun was a light sleeper, so was everyone in his family, so when he heard the door open in a not so discreet manner, he awoken instantly. “Tao?” He murmured, “What’s wrong? You look out of breath.”

“Hyung,” The younger sighed in relief, “Get up. I need you to run something for me.” He threw his duffel bag onto the ground and dove straight for his laptop, setting it up on his table and gesturing his brother to sit. Baekhyun did as instructed and was about to question his brother’s antics before a cold black-metal object was pressed to his open palms.

“Tao,” He drawled off, his voice taking a tone that warranted explanation in the best ‘what did you do?’ context. The taller simply shrugged it off saying that he’ll explain later. And to that, he stripped off his formal attire and began jumping into his sweats in a hurry, before stumbling through the door and out of the room.

Baekhyun shook his head and plugged the USB into the laptop in front of him. He tried to access the data in the device only to find that it’s heavily encrypted and guarded by multiple firewalls. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and stretched out his fingers. When he opened them, he whispered, “Okay boys, come show yourself.”

~~~

Yifan was pulling out two bottles of water from the fridge, aimlessly placing it on the counter, and grabbed two energy bars for him and Tao when he saw the younger run into the living room to greet him. Yifan stopped and stared.

“Sorry, Baekhyun was asleep and I had to move slowly to not wake him up,” Tao explained, going straight up in front of the taller. Yifan froze in his spot, his eyes locked on the unbearably adorable member. He was dressed in an oversized hoodie with a white T-shirt underneath it and loose jogging pants.

“Hyung?” Tao tipped his head to the side, and bent down, staring at the frozen Yifan through his long eyelashes. Yifan snapped out of his trance and stared right back into the dark orbs of Tao’s eyes and had an unexplainable urge to hug him into oblivion. Without his permission, his hands slowly cruised to the younger’s head and landed in his soft tuft of hair.

Tao blinked at the elder’s actions, staring to the wrist above his head that disappeared to his hair, an unfamiliar but welcomed warmth. The hand that was nestled in between his hair, raked through the soft strands, falling ever so slowly to the side of his head, brushing his ear. Yifan’s hands were big enough that it could cup Tao’s head and fit snugly in place. When the taller’s fingertips touch the first span of skin on Tao’s neck, the latter shivered. The warmth that was previously on his head had now spread to the rest of his face, and it bloomed in his heart.

Silence had never felt this loud, or this pleasantly nerve-wracking. Tao couldn’t take his eyes off Yifan’s, as did his, and neither one of them wanted to break the gaze. Yifan’s stare was clouded and hazy, as if he was not aware of what he was doing. And to a certain point, that proved to be true. Because Yifan was just doing as his heart wanted to, skipping his brain’s approval and going straight to action.

Without thinking, Yifan’s hands rested on the side of Tao’s head, cupping his face, and his thumb brushed over the latter’s cheeks. Tao’s heart skipped a beat. And in that instant when a gasp left Tao’s mouth and his eyes widened, Yifan snapped out of his second consecutive trance. He realized what he was doing and his hand retreated at the speed of light. Coughing, trying to stifle the awkwardness that grew between the two. It seems like awkward situations were their thing.

“Run?” Was the only thing Yifan could bring about to say, his heart beating too loud and his brain too busy swimming in morphine and dopamine to conjure an actual grammatically accepted- no, language acceptable sentence.

Apparently, Yifan wasn’t the only one out of it, as Tao was also caught in between the states. He had never felt this – rush, that feeling at the pit of his stomach – outside of the adrenaline of his missions that he actually found enjoyable. His heart has never skipped a beat before, and certainly never felt warmth like that outside of his family members. Yifan was a whole lot of new and unfamiliar to Tao, and he was always a curious one.

Tao smiled, replying with a soft and simple, “Run.”

~~~

Baekhyun grumbled, wiping his eyes furiously to stay awake after being woken up in an ungodly hour when he was supposed to be sleeping his way to oblivion. The sun was barely even out yet, and here he was, cracking what seemed like a million dollar or more firewall that’s heavier than Santa on Christmas, post cookie and milk.

“Making me work in the crack of dawn,” Baekhyun mumbled to himself, his fingers furiously flying over the keyboard, keeping up with the constantly changing codes to the firewall and blocking the reboot system with his every move, “This better be damn worth it, Tao.”

The USB was insanely heavy-guarded, multiple firewalls upon firewalls. At first glance, it even looked like it was impenetrable. However, being the ‘Byun’ Baekhyun that he was, he was not giving up. But, whoever designed the firewalls was smart, he, or she, programmed the firewall to change every minute, to switch up the codes and outlay, so that no matter if you could figure out the code to crack the firewall, because if you don’t get it in under a minute, the code’s useless and there’s a new code that you need to figure out. A minute is nearly impossible to try and decode the firewall, and not to mention it was constantly shifting like a rubix cube, Baekhyun wanted to scream.

“Oh. My. Flipping. Eyeliners. You are pms-ing worse than my sister on a mission in her period,” He whispered harshly to his laptop, still careful to his surroundings, when another minute is up and his decoding has just gone to waste, again, “Alright that’s it.”

Baekhyun is not happy. And when Baekhyun is not happy, Baekhyun gets what Baekhyun wants. He might or might not have said that out loud, but if anyone asked him he would’ve denied saying it. Instead of cracking the code, he followed the encrypted algorithm in the firewall that allowed the layout and code to change. An algorithm was hard to crack even with a given key, and without that key, it was just as nearly impossible to crack a never-ending changing code, but not as nearly. He wrote in the system, after finding an overlap in the algorithm and counter-coded it so that the firewall would turn on itself and destroy the algorithm by changing the codes faster than the system could keep up. With that, he cracked the firewall and was almost ready to jump up and celebrate before he saw a notice pop up.

“Warning. First firewall breached. 14 firewalls left functional,” He read in a hushed voice, before banging his head on to the table, “Damn it, Tao.”

~~~

They got back from their run when the sun has risen completely. Around 2 hours has passed since they left the dorm, and when they got back more people have awoken from the night. Yifan simply patted Tao on the head once and left to his room, which is no surprise, as for the whole run they did not say a word to each other, still caught up in the events that happened prior to the run and the awkwardness that followed.

Tao strutted over to the kitchen, where he found Minseok and Kyungsoo busying themselves over making breakfast. “Morning Tao,” Minseok offered cheerfully, “Want some breakfast?”

Minseok was one of the Korean trainees that took to him quickly. He adored Tao, for some reason, and looked after him more often than not. Baekhyun for adopting another brother, but Tao shook him off, and hugged his brother saying he needed only one. But that doesn’t mean Tao didn’t preen at the attention. Minseok hyung was so kind and gentle that Tao felt an instant liking to him, and accepted his show of affection, which he normally wouldn’t with stranger.

“I’ll help,” Tao stood closer to Minseok, after he greeted a Kyungsoo smiling behind him. Minseok smiled and pinched Tao’s cheeks before shaking his head, “Why don’t you change first? Wouldn’t want the others to eat sweaty eggs.”

Puffing his cheeks out and rubbing them, Tao pouted at the teasing that Minseok was giving him but relented with his suggestion and went back to his room to change out of his sweaty sweats.

What he came to was Baekhyun, bent over his desk, working on the USB as it seems. The younger approached his brother, laying a hand on his shoulder that caused the elder to snap the laptop close and turned violently. Tao was shocked, to say the least, but even more when he saw Baekhyun’s eyes wide and worried, his lines grim and scared.

“Hyung?” Tao called out , “What’s wrong?”

Baekhyun said nothing, looking back to his laptop once and then to his awaiting brother. He started off, his voice strict, worryingly so, “Tao. Where did you get this?” In his clutched hands was the steel black USB.

“In Jung Joo’s apartment,” Tao explained slowly, unsure, “It was left in the safe where the ledger was in.”

Baekhyun snapped up to look at his brother dead in the eyes, “The ledger?”

“Yeah, the file that the company wanted-”

“How did you know it was a ledger?” The elder asked, eyebrows furrowing, “Tell me you didn’t look at it.”

Tao kept quiet, his eyes darting across their shared room before blurting out the truth, “Technically, I asked him about it and he told me.”

“Tao!” Baekhyun quickly reprimanded, “You know you’re not supposed to ask any questions on the mission, not to mention to the target!”

Tao understood, but he would’ve thought Baekhyun understood. He felt the need to explain to him, to justify himself, “But Baek-hyung, aren’t you curious? This mission is weird to begin with. Why follow him the entire night when all we want is the file?”

That got Baekhyun to seal his lips and think, so Tao continued, “They could’ve asked me to raid the apartment first, and ambush Hyung Jung Joo there, use his prints and the code, then kill him.” Baekhyun looked at him and Tao urged on, “But instead they wanted us to follow him, for no reason, which means-”

“Which means the file is not what they want,” Baekhyun pieced the information together, the gears in his mind working, “They want something else, but they don’t know what it is.”

Tao nodded, “My guess is, last night, something was supposed to happen, that ousted the true target of the mission. But something went wrong. So they only got the folder.”

Reaching out to grab the device out of Baekhyun’s hand, Tao smirked, “And I’m willing to bet that this was what they were looking for.”

Baekhyun sat down, closing his eyes. Tao took this as a bad sign so he went on, trying to convince him, “Hyung, aren’t you tired of being in the dark? You know something’s changed ever since our handler was killed and the file was moved up in the ranks.” Tao frowned, “It’s about time we got our own answers.”

“Why wouldn’t they tell us?” Baekhyun whispered.

“To hide it probably, I don’t know why,” Tao shrugged.

“No, Tao.” Baekhyun got up, his eyes flooding with worry and his pupils wavering, “If what you’re saying is true, then this has nothing to do with SM.”

Tao frowned, about to ask, when Baekhyun cut him off again, “Look, the ledger I could understand, since Hyung Jung Joo was related in a business deal with SM, under a corporate office law, through a middle man so it can’t be traced.” Baekhyun placed a hand on his laptop. “But this, since they didn’t tell us, then they wanted the USB for themselves.”

“Why’s that so bad?” Tao questioned, his nerves tingling, as if he could feel that it bothered him more than it should, “They’re not only focused on taking down SM, the Company has multiple big targets and other operatives-”

“Because.” Baekhyun harshly snapped, stepping closer to Tao, almost pressing against his chest, tilting his head. His brown eyes wavered, so much that Tao had to hold his hands, steadying him. Baekhyun whispered, in a soft and shaky voice, his hands grasping Tao’s hand which held the USB. “Tao, this contains NSA’s most sensitive redacted documents on arms and military operation.”

Tao’s eyes flew wide, shock registering on his face, his mouth parting, unable to say anything. But Baekhyun voiced out the rhetorical question that they both were thinking of.

“Tell me, what the hell are they doing keeping track of foreign military resources?” 

MERRY CHRISTMAS Y'ALL ~ May the seasons be kind to you, and the new year be merciful and bright. So, this upcoming year, things will undoubtedly escalate, and so will this story. So I thought, why not upload another chapter~~~~ I promise I'd upload much more and please comment and tell me your feedback~ Things are about to get ugly real fast if u don't. just kidding.

Love y'all and hope you enjoy this to all you taoris stans~~