𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐈 𝐌𝐔-𝐉𝐈𝐍.

The alcohol didn't help, not really, still, Taeju needed to focus on something that wasn't the complete uprooting of the life he had finally made his. He couldn't even resent the situation, because there was a child, a scared child, in need of a home. And she was Mujin's family, his blood, Taeju would never have been able to turn her away. Still, he lets out an affronted scoff at the promise, and turns again to fix a stare on his partner, something between hurt and acceptance in his eyes. He doesn't speak for a heartbeat, two, then takes a deep breath. He was formulating his response, because Taeju really had never been someone to act rashly, even over something as simple as a conversation. He presses his lips together in thought, glances down at the almost empty glass still in his hand, then back at Mujin. "So I'm supposed to let you do it alone?" He asked, evenly, "Do you really think I could do that? Pretend she doesn't exist? Just because I - because we never expected her?"

“Because I didn’t have a choice.” Donghoon hisses, sounding more affronted now than he had dared to before. “I didn’t love you when I took this position, which - by the way, I didn’t ask for. I was put in Narcotics and shipped here a month later. I didn’t know you so I did my job. I met you, I started to fall for you, but I was still more cop than yours. So I did my job.” He took a deep breath, irritation darkening the fear and sorrow that had painted his face. “By the time I loved you it was too late, I couldn’t be pulled out without everyone going to prison. I couldn’t stop reporting without everyone going to prison, I couldn’t tell you without facing your childish fucking rage, and yes - I was scared you would hurt my daughter, I was scared you’d use her, or hurt me in front of her, because I have seen you when you go for traitors, you tear their entire fucking lives down. I wasn’t going to let you do that to her. So I kept reporting, I covered up for you, because I love you. I hid the worst of this fucking place so I wouldn’t lose you, and I did it for ten fucking years.” His voice was shaking again, and he tossed the lighter onto the coffee table, fishing out his own packet of cigarettes and lighting one with his own lighter before he could continue. "You will never understand having to wake up every morning knowing that everything ends in being killed or being ripped away and put somewhere under so-called protection to rot. There was no happy ending, not for me."

The lighter. His blood runs cold as Mujin holds it out to him, his eyes lock on it, and suddenly he understands. The bug, he'd found the bug and then he'd found the typewriter and the gun and figured everything out. He had wanted to arrest him, once. Back when he'd started at Narcotics, and his head had been filled with a hundred stories of how terrible Choi Mujin was. But then he'd met him, he'd spent time with him, he'd fallen in love with him. The murderer, the violent crime lord, who could be so gentle when no one else was around, who loved passionately and completely. How could he harm him? And yet he did. Every single day. "I had to." He murmured, "You don't know the pres-" He cut himself off, fingers closing around the lighter, slowly. He couldn't make an excuse for it , there was no excuse that wasn't 'it's my job,' no words he could find that would make it any better. "You found it... How- No... I... I'm so sorry."

There's a moment's reprieve while Mujin lights the cigarette, but the silence only serves to point out that Donghoon still didn't know what he had done that had given him away, that he still didn't know how he had been discovered, what had led to Mujin tearing through the apartment so ferociously to find the proof. He didn't want to know. Not really. And the silence is filled with more of Mujin egging him on, he seemed desperate to accept the police in his blood, to wipe out everything that he had become over the last ten years. It was probably easier that way, he reasoned; to make him completely different, a true villain, black and white and blue all over. He couldn't give him that closure, he couldn't even give it to himself. "I've already told you why I won't." He says, fighting not to make it sound confrontational. He lights his own cigarette, and notices that his hand is still trembling. "You're not my fucking meal-ticket," He sighs, exhaling the smoke from his lungs with it, "You're - I'm not cop enough anymore to do that, I don't want to, I don't want to see you behind bars, I haven't wanted that for years. I don't know if I ever really did."

He felt his throat thicken, felt his tongue get heavier in his mouth. His name, his real name, the name he had promised to discard for as long as it took to bring Dongcheon down. The name that he had distanced himself from so thoroughly that it sounded foreign to his ears, that it caught on his tongue and left the taste of blood in his throat. He couldn't say it. But it was the one thing he knew Mujin needed him to say. Donghoon took a few, faltering steps towards the couch that Mujin had thrown himself onto, but stopped a good few feet short of it, not trusting himself to get any closer, lest he lose his nerve entirely. What was his name? What was the correct one? The one that identified who he was under the tattoo and the badge? He didn't know any more. "Song Joonsu." He said, eventually, and then swallowed, as if the action could take it back. "My name is Song Joonsu."

" i know. " his thumb brushes gently over the soft skin on the inside of mujin's wrist, then he releases it, leaning against him and letting the weight of him sit solid and comforting against his own. " i'm not going to take anything from you, okay? i just... you don't need to shut me out from this stuff. " taeju sighs, and tries to find something that would be more comfort, that would make any of this feel more winnable. more normal. but he's too caught up in the whirl of emotion and confusion that's wrapping around him and taking everything that he was away, the careful calculation, the unemotional logic. it was all gone. " it's... it's fine. you need to process. " he pushes up from the couch and returns to the bar, taking a long sip of the drink he had abandoned there.

You could have told me, Mujin cries, as if it wasn't impossible, as if Donghoon could have ever found the words. As if he could roll over, lying next to Choi Mujin at night, kiss him on the cheek, and say 'by the way, my love, I'm an undercover cop.' As if the longer it went unsaid the harder the words were to find. He would never understand the battle, the blurring of identities and allegiances until heart, head and soul all belonged to different corners of a fight Donghoon would never be able to win. The alcoholism was swept under the rug, the sleepless nights ignored, the drugs he'd used just to keep his head when he was being torn apart. All of it unnoticed. But he couldn't blame Mujin for any of that. "I know." He says, taking a deep breath, the tears slow, but still trail over rounded cheeks, he rubs at his cracked knuckles, "I know... and I know I can't make this right, there's - there's nothing I can do. But... I've tried to protect you, I have protected you, or you would have been taken away years ago, you have to know that." Surely that had to count for something.

"I don't know, I don't know." Donghoon's head is pounding, he feels like he's going to be sick, he can't stop shaking - and now he has to unravel the years of confusion and lies and secrets, an unravelling that was leaving nothing left underneath. "Fuck." He turns and slams his fist into the wall, leaning against it and ignoring the beads of blood forming on his knuckles. His vision blurs, cheeks and eyes hot with tears as the fall, far more freely than Mujin had allowed. "You have no fucking idea of the shit they put in my head. The propaganda. Every time I tried to... every time I would think about it, I'd hear Cha Giho's voice in my ear. Like a goddman mosquito. You wouldn't even have to kill her, Jagiya, I'd have destroyed her goddamn life. You know the cops are following her? They're outside my apartment right now. If I got arrested for defecting she'd have no one. I had to fight, every single say, between loving you and loving her. It was just eaiser to keep going, feed them enough to keep their eyes off me, not enough to get to you... Kill me if you want to. But make sure they leave her alone. Please."

"Not every action." There's no grit in his voice, nothing to match the ice that was creeping back into Mujin's, wiping away the hot fury and replacing it with a steely, clinical hatred, even as the tears still glistened on his cheeks. But he's right. Because he had been typing up little reports of everything that could put Mujin away, others, too, but they didn't matter even half as much. There's no insult in being called a hypocrite, not anymore - to deny a swift death but enable him to rot behind bars, to be sworn in as an officer of the law and then swear an oath to an organisation of criminals, to be a father, a lover, a liar. Sometimes he forgets his own name. "Ten years, and they've never come for you, not with anything that sticks." He doesn't elaborate, somehow can't bring himself to ask Mujin what that means, because, in all honestly, Donghoon hadn't even noticed he was doing it. Not until it was too late to fall out of love. Donghoon, finally, lowers his hands. The expression on his face is tumultuous, fear and pain and loss twisted together in a mess of knots and lines. He didn't know what to say, if anything he could say had a chance of saving him. He wasn't sure if he wanted it to. "I - I didn't ask for this. But - fuck... I'm glad I met you anyway."

"No." It comes out as a gasp, and he steps forwards stopping himself after the first movement, knowing that he can't take hold of him, can't touch him, can't ever make him feel better again. "I wasn't, I was never - I could never have killed you." His own eyes are hot and stinging, and Donghoon swallows back to try and save some of his breath for explanations instead of tears. "They gave it to me, ten years ago, and I haven't even thought about using it once. I couldn't. Not ever."

The tears that fall capture all of Donghoon's attention, away from the gun, away from the rage, he feels his heart shatter, far more so than anything that Mujin could say to him. The last decade of his life was gone, what had been left of his legitimate career, what had been build under Yoon Donghoon's hands, the love he had held in his heart and battled with daily, it had vanished. "I couldn't - I was... Mujin what would you have done ten years ago? You wouldn't have hesitated, you'd have shot me dead." He still could, he still might, but Donghoon had to hope that there was enough lingering memory of their affection to keep his finger off the trigger. He takes a deep breath and nods, "Every report. Everything, you can have it, I don't want it." I just want you. "I know you can't stand me right now, but -" He can't finish it. He couldn't find the words to explain. "I'm sorry."