Jongin was packing.  Kyungsoo had been watching him for a while, too tired to sleep, as the man filled some cardboard boxes he’d filched with a plethora of things that he’d stolen from the HQ they were in.  Jongin worked quickly and quietly and – it had to be admitted – extremely efficiently.

“What’s the plan?” Kyungsoo asked in a drowsy murmur.

If Jongin was surprised that the IT technician was still awake at four in the morning, he didn’t show it in the slightest.

“We’re going to start shipping these out,” Jongin told him as he closed the ninth box up with a few deft movements.  “We’ve got a lot of evidence, and if we try to take them with us when we leave, we’re only going to get caught.”

“How do we do that?” Kyungsoo asked.

Jongin just grinned at him.

“So,” he said, patting the first box.  “We have illegal gold trading, counterfeit money, money laundering, illegal money made through rigged gambling, money made from bribery and extortion—”

Feeling a little more awake, Kyungsoo sat up.  “Can you prove all that or tell them apart?”

“And recordings of examples of those transactions,” Jongin added, having tapped the second and third boxes and now moving on to the fourth.  “I don’t just get food when I’m out, you know.  I stole a whole bunch of multi-purpose walkie-talkies and I visit a different floor every time I go out.  This building’s massive – they’re not going to notice if the food goes missing from a different place every time.  We also have evidence of murder for hire and for hire, both of which are illegal, and I’ve found out where the bodies were disposed of for two of the more recently assassinated enemies of the gang.  I also snapped a photo last time I was out.”  He tugged the fifth box towards him and pulled a slip of paper out from the top.  Kyungsoo saw that it was the only box that had been marked “fragile”.

Jongin flipped the photo around between his fingers so that Kyungsoo could see it.  With a massive yawn, Kyungsoo squinted.  There were three men in the photo, and from the angle it was shot at—

“Did you take that from the floor?” Kyungsoo asked in distraction.

“Yeah, I was more or less hiding under somebody’s skirt to get out of that room,” Jongin admitted.  “She was okay with it, though,” he added with a slight blush.  “She’s our contact for getting these out.”

Kyungsoo flashed him a quizzical look.

“I grew up watching a lot of Bond films,” Jongin mumbled.

“I won’t ask,” Kyungsoo said drily.

“Well, anyway, we have our lovely gang leader in that photo getting cosy with a senior government official  and another very shady character who’s been to jail several times for things like tax evasion and money laundering – surprising he’s not dead, really – and they were both names that your scrutiny on the IT stuff of this locality has thrown up, so you might want to look into them further if you have the time and if you can’t get any further into the system here,” said Jongin.  “But while I’m on the subject, my lovely belle of the night gave me a gun.”  He was abruptly chipper again.  “Plus a spare one for you.”

Kyungsoo eyed the weapon as Jongin slid it over to him.  He’d shot before, but he didn’t consider himself all that competent with firearms.  Nevertheless, he tucked it away.

“And the other boxes?”

“How Mighty Mouth make the rest of their money, basically.”

Kyungsoo frowned.

“You look in that, and we’ve got shrooms, speed, whizz, spice, liquid gold, grass, bounce – we’re talking probably the largest cartel in East Asia.  All the samples in those boxes are different.”

Kyungsoo stared at him.  “Just what kind of training do they give you in the FBI to be able to recognise all the world’s listed drugs?”

Jongin laughed.  “Well, a lot of FBI time is spent on that kind of thing because a lot of the cartels operate across state borders.”

“But still—”

“Are you going to go to sleep?”

“Not now,” Kyungsoo argued.  “Not when I know that if I poke one of those boxes the wrong way and breathe too deeply I’m going to end up high—”

Jongin laughed again.  “Relax.  They’re all in sealed containers.”

Kyungsoo eyed both Jongin and the boxes.  He’d never quite managed to figure Jongin out the previous time they’d been working together, but he genuinely felt that the more he got to know the man, the less he knew him or anything about him.

“I still don’t understand how you can remember and identify all that off the top of your head,” he mumbled.

Jongin shoved the boxes away and sat, leaning back on his hands.  The smile had largely gone from his face, replaced by a thoughtful look.

“I was actually able to identify all of them before I joined the FBI,” he admitted, much to Kyungsoo’s alarm.

Kyungsoo pointed at the boxes.  “Should this worry me?” he asked, only half joking.

“Relax.  I’m not a junkie.”  Jongin flashed him a grin.  “The FBI would never have taken me on if I was.  I was involved with a cartel for a few years and I quit when I was fifteen.”

Kyungsoo’s eyes teared up a little as he tried to simultaneously narrow them a stifle a yawn.  “Is this another one of your ‘am I telling the truth’ things?”

“Nope.”  Jongin popped the “p”.  “We had a mole in the cartel and I was clever enough to figure out that it was better to throw in my lot with the law.  Nearly got killed for my troubles, but life remains exciting.  Unconventional reality can be a fantastic educator sometimes.”

A buzz started to grow in Kyungsoo’s head, and he wasn’t sure whether it was because he was tired or because he felt like he was going to faint from shock.

There was a very long silence and Jongin started picking at his nails.

“I always wondered what it would be like to tell a friend that,” he mumbled.  “Maybe now wasn’t quite the right time.”

“I just... shock,” Kyungsoo told him eloquently.

“In a very roundabout way, it’s how I ended up here.”  Jongin held up one finger to the light and squinted at the nail.  “I got put in witness protection with a newbie agent who was scared out of his mind.  We spent some time cooped up in a log cabin telling each other stories and then they decided to train me to act like a normal teenager and I went away on a summer camp, where I met Oh Sehun.  I actually lived with his family for a school semester, but then I went and blew my cover by drawing too much attention to myself and had to go on the run again.  Anyway, when Semi came over to the US about a decade ago, Sehun got in contact with me and asked if I could help, which was how I ended up on Semi’s case, and that’s how I ended up on this one.  But tell me about yourself.  You’re a fairly law-abiding person – how did Yixing manage to rope you in from the Blue House of all places?”

“I’m... not that interesting,” Kyungsoo said hastily.  “How did you blow your cover as a school child?”

“That’s for when we’re bored tomorrow night—”

“Wait,” Kyungsoo interrupted as something finally processed.  “You left the cartel at fifteen?”

“Dad!  Daaaaad!”

“Mine!”

“Dad, Jaera’s trying to eat nuts!”

Jaehwan must have seen Minseok pulling up in the driveway, because he had the front door open and was frantically trying to keep his little sister from climbing up him like a monkey after the bag of peanuts he was holding as high above his head as he could.

“Jaejae meanie!” Jaera shrieked the second she saw her father.  “Daddy, Jaejae meanie!”

Jaehwan looked like he was on the brink of tears.  Minseok relieved him of the bag of peanuts and herded the two children back indoors and down the passage, ignoring Jaera’s grabby hands as she attempted to get him to pick her up so that she could be closer to her roasted, salted treasure trove.

“What are these doing in the house anyway?” he asked, looking down at the packet.  It had been well over a year since the last time he’d had nuts, when he and Sehun had taken a men-of-the-family weekend over in Daegu and he’d eaten so many he’d nearly been sick.

“I don’t know!”  Jaehwan actually grabbed a fistful of his hair as though he was going to rib it out.  “That’s exactly it!  Mum’s gone insane – she came back from the shops with three of these and everybody except you and Luhan is probably going to die if you let her put these in the dinner – it’s those hormone thingies she was telling me about earlier.  Why did you get her pregnant?”

“Mummy’s nuts,” Jaera agreed, though Minseok didn’t have time to figure out if