#halateez

You see it in the way he leans into you, his sure, steady hands always hovering near. It is apparent in the tilt of his shoulders when he leans in to listen, clinging to your words like they may drift away, lost forever, if he doesn’t. He gravitates to you like he’s stuck in an orbit, and you too are not immune to his pull. Most of all, the love is plain in his eyes. They are soulful things, warm brown and expressive, a window indeed.

It is no secret to either of you. During the coup, there was a rain drenched night when he told you, fearing neither of you might survive to the morning. The memory is hazy, fragmented by screams and the whistle of bombs and the roar of gunfire, tears and blood wet on your face, but you remember the urgency of his eyes and his grip, insistent on you, how you clung to his words like they alone would save you.

You don’t understand why he dances away now, two years later, skirting around it like it might bite him when it has already sunk its claws so deep inside the both of you there is no extracting it.

Since you were young, you’ve been able to read him; you knew when he was angry before he did, you knew when to leave him and when he wanted to talk it out. You saw the pain that riddled him during the coup, the weight of anger heavy on his shoulders. The new government can ban free expression, but they will never be able to cram him into the box they made for him, for all of you. There is no part of him that is containable, not the sharp angles of his elbows and jaw or the burn of his eyes - only he can curb himself.

And he does. Yunho pulls the shutters down, and though you’ve seen parts of him that no one else has, parts shadowed and dark and wretched, he will not let you see this. A place exists, a corner of him you haven’t set foot in, yet you have been near it, felt the heat of the inferno that he conceals behind a smoke screen.

He’s been pushing you away, coming over to yours less often than normal in some futile attempt to extract himself from your life. There’s been an exhaustion about him recently, enough that you can’t just write it off as an influx of demand in the factory he works at, especially after Halateez’s more recent attacks. You’re tired yourself, frustrated with days and days spent bent over the assembly lines for products that are strictly confidential, but not as much as he is. No, there is something he’s hiding.

At present, he sits across your dining table from you, a half eaten ration pack and whatever chasm he hops over to get to that faraway place in his mind spanning the distance between you. Your tongue itches with half fledged accusations and interrogations, your fingers twisting together in your lap. It stings, really, that he would go there while he’s here with you.

All the time you have known him, you have shared everything: scraped knees, shitty grades, countless long gone snacks crumbled into halves, pain and terror and defiance. The divide started slowly, and you noticed it but let it be, trusting that in time it would come out, that every facet of him would be known to you, just like before.

Yet that unknown space in him grew, and he made no move to stop it. You find it stupid, that you hold such a dislike for a thing, a theory, maybe, that is so critical he must keep it from you. For a while, you entertained the idea that it might be a someone, another, but it isn’t. He looks at you the same, in that way that makes you ache for him, but some sheer wall he has erected keeps him from ever reaching for you.

You have had your fair share of selfish thoughts, gritted your teeth through grudges and bouts of frustration against this spectre, and in the end, you’ve emerged with nothing but the ragged remains of yourself and a bone deep tiredness. What is it that makes him hold himself back from you, and why must he hide it?

You both suffer to be apart from the other.

It’s not arrogance that brings you to that conclusion. He wants for you the same way you want for him, thirsty and desperate to drink from the well, and sometimes he slips, lets himself hold you too long and too tight for it to be proper. His friends ask you to put him out of his misery, and you tell them you wish you could. It makes you want to rip whatever might hurt him into shreds.

You know he doesn’t mean to cause you harm, because deep down to his core, Yunho is kind, good; there will be a reason, something perfectly understandable that is what holds him back. As if to demonstrate his decency, he breaks out of his thoughts and examines your hand, where it traces the imaginary wood grain on your faceless, government assigned table.

“You okay, tiny?” He enquires. “You seem a bit down tonight.”

A million excuses come to mind as to why you’re unhappy, but none make it to your lips. The nickname is what gets you. It fills you to the brim with nostalgia, with memories of Yunho knocking at your door after school and grinning when your mother made him cookies, muffledly saying thank you, ajumma through an overlarge mouthful, back when the distance between you wasn’t so wide, and tears well in your eyes. He’s around the table and kneeling in front of you in a flash, taking your hands in his.

“Tell me,” is all he says.

“Is everything okay, Yunho?” You ask, blinking back the blurriness flooding your vision, hating how your voice wobbles like some terrified wife left at home. “You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“No,” he replies, more guarded now.

“But you’re afraid,” you answer softly. “There’s something you won’t say.”

“I… I’m not,” he protests, lying through his teeth.

You sigh. “Don’t lie to me. You don’t have to tell me whatever it is, just don’t lie to me.”

He opens his mouth, like if he does, the words might come out, but nothing does, and he just stares at you, crouched there between your knees, a wretched battle playing out behind his eyes, one you’ve watched before countless times. The side you root for always loses. Hopeless, you watch as it does for the millionth time. The distance between you yawns wider.

“I miss you,” you blurt.

His eyes, those eyes, raise to yours, gentle as they regard you with bemusement. “Why? I’m right here.”

Suddenly, you hate the careful way he handles you, like you’re made of glass. You like when he babies you a little - you know you’re safe with him, goddamnit - but you’re not a child. Frustration flashes through you, white hot. Hell, you’re strong enough, you can take the news of whatever it is that he’s been up to that’s against the law, if that’s what it is, and you deserve an explanation from him.

“Yeah. Right here, keeping your distance,” you reply curtly. “Stop pretending everything’s alright. Are you scared of me? Is that why you won’t come close these days?”

“I - I…” he tries, then gives up, sentences forsaking him. He looks almost like he might get up, like he might go, and it sharpens you.

“You what?” You snap.

His face goes white, his jaw tensing. A strange sensation envelopes you, like you’re watching this conversation happen from afar, like the person who just spoke is just a projection of you. You hadn’t expected your voice to come out so harsh, loaded with hurt that you’d tried to gather up in your arms and bury, but had wormed its way out anyway. You’d never been good at hiding things from him - and no, the irony of that isn’t lost on you. You almost laugh, but instead, you jump to your feet, turning from him because you cannot bear for him to see the pain in your eyes. You’ve always hated arguing with him.

“I don’t care what it is,” you choke out, fucking crying again. “I don’t care if it’s because you don’t want me, but if it is, stop acting like you do. Just - just put me out of my fucking misery, will you?”

Silence follows, smothering in nature, not quite broken by your sniffles as you angrily wipe tears from your cheeks. You don’t want him to pity you. You want him to trust you, like you always thought he did. Never one to stay still for too long, he jumps to the feet, paces the room, scrubbing a hand over his face before raking it through his hair, and you see the way he turns from you and wonder if he’ll do it, if he has the gall to tell you he feels nothing.

Eventually, Yunho comes to a stop and faces you again. You wait expectantly, hating the way you brace yourself for the impact, hating that you have so little faith in the two of you working this out. Losing him would be like losing half of yourself. You can’t let it happen. You’re afraid it’s happening right before your eyes.

“I’m scared,” he breathes out at last.

There is fear in his eyes, roiling below the surface like a mighty beast of the sea, but more prevalent is the anger - not at you, that you can tell, but at himself - like tossing waves, churning the rest of him into a disarray you can’t make any sense of. You search his gaze for answers, but he yields none, and at last, you reach for him, in search of the comfort you’ve derived thousands of times from his closeness.

Gripping the lapels of his standard white coat, one everyone is supposed to wear but one he seems to carry differently, you give him a shake. “You don’t have to be scared.”

His jaw works, and he fights back some of the anger, taming it. “I’m not worried for me.”

Something swells in your throat, something close to a sob. This is the confrontation you’ve thought through so many times, the moment where you finally speak blatantly about the way you blaze for him, but you are so angry, so tired. You drop your hands to your sides, and as you stare at him, at how composed he would look if it were not for the burn of his eyes, you take a deep, shuddering breath in. He holds your eyes, waiting, and somehow, it makes it so much worse that he would still listen as he tears himself from the weave of your life.

“I love you, Yunho!” You burst out, shoving at him. “Did it mean nothing when you told me that, when you thought we were about to die? Have you forgotten I said it back? I don’t give a fucking shit if you’re scared for me! I can protect myself, you know that?”

Breaking the calm mask he wears, slipping his tight leash, anger floods across his face, vehement enough to be self loathing, and it darkens his gaze before he wrenches away, shaking you off him like you’re nothing but a nuisance. You resist the urge to hit him, to pummel the back he turns on you until he realises how insufferable he’s being, instead balling your fists by your sides and biting your tongue.

“I can’t do this,” he growls, striding for the door like that’s explanation enough.

A sudden desperation fills you, a fear that if you let him go it will be the last time you see him, and you lunge for him, grabbing his sleeve. “Please don’t leave angry.”

Yunho whirls around, looming over you as he shoves his face close to yours like he’s about to yell at you, but something stills him, just like it stills you. The fury rolls off him in waves. You can feel the heat of him, his breath against your skin, and the air between you crackles like a charged sky before a lightning storm, pulled taut with the strain; he is magnetic with it, even as he grinds out a low curse word.

You draw another breath, a hitched one, and then you collide.

As your lips connect, your fingers curl in the collar of his coat and hold tight. You’re afraid he might slip from your grasp, but you have nothing to be scared of, because he cups your face in one hand and presses you infinitely closer with the other at the small of your back, his kiss bruising, desperate. His tongue runs over the seam of your lips, and you part them, allowing him access with a gasp - you’d trust him with anything, let him do anything to you.

Blindly, your hands run over him, skimming over the leanness of the muscles in his back and up to his broad shoulders, and there you wrestle his coat down his shoulders and arms as far as you can, making your intentions clear as day. It’s like the last vestiges of his restraint evaporate with the heat of your professed want, and he groans into your mouth.

Gripping your hips, he backs you up until you’re right against the dining table. He fumbles with his shirt, then yours, and something deep in your core builds with every inch of his skin revealed. Yunho is better than a marble carving, better because a rosy flush dusts up his neck and his cheekbones and spans over his chest as he leans over you, life so vibrant within him that it almost burns to touch him, so tall but bending to your height as he kisses his way scathingly down your throat.

You spare a moment to trail your fingers down the planes of his chest and abdomen, and you think it strange that he is so plainly strong - he’d told you his job at the factory was fine assembly, tinkering with nuts and bolts, not anything that included manual labour. There are scars on him too, of shapes you cannot attribute causes too. A perfectly circular one, the size of a penny, sits just above his hip bone, and you wonder if maybe it’s a birth mark though you can’t ever remember seeing it before.

“I can’t get you out my fucking head,” he says, branding it like a curse against your skin.

“Good,” you hold him tighter. “Good.”

As he unclasps your bra with lithe fingers, your brain spares you a moment of lucidity, soberness from his touch to remember that you will regret being so angry, having him when there are so many things unresolved. He’s out of control, hands fumbling all over you, and you are the same, fearing nothing but the yawning cavern in your chest only he can fill.

“You drive me crazy,” he snarls against your neck, like he might tear your throat out with his teeth. “Always testing me, trying me.”

“Because you hide,” you reply, tugging at his hair.

Yunho looks up at you, wretched, loathful. “It’s agony.”

“You don’t have to,” you whisper, and your nails dig into his back, the anger simmering in him warming you to the core.

He’s weak. You can tell that he knows he’s doomed, and you see the moment he lets it possess him. His eyes turn hooded and ravenous, his fingers tightening around your waist; he grips your chin and wrenches your face close to his, so close you’re giddy with the way he fills your vision, his chest heaving, and you wonder if he can feel the flutter of your thrumming pulse under your skin.

“Turn around,” he says, and his voice, low and deceptively calm, sends chills down your spine.

You spin, and you’re barely there before he’s bending you over the dining table, his hands yanking at the waistband of your trousers, sweeping his palms over your curves and squeezing in ways that elicit the most treacherous of noises from you. Bracing your forearms on the tabletop, you squirm and push against him as fabric pools around your ankles, and even that is part of your argument, brawling with him even as his fingers ghost over the damp spot on your underwear.

When the echo of his touch reaches your clit, a gasp escapes you and your back arches. He pins you down flat with a palm between your shoulder blades, like a butterfly on a cork board, and then abruptly, the whole of his front presses against your back and you feel him, rock hard against your ass. All he does is reach over you, grabbing the half finished ration pack and chucking it onto the counter, careless enough in his care that you almost laugh, but his weight on top of you turns you boneless, pliant.

Your underwear goes next, torn off you in one clipped flick of his wrist: your pussy clenches when the cold air hits it, again when you hear the jingle of his belt, then at the harsh noise of the few brisk strokes he gives his cock. A vision of it, flushed and aching, flashes in front of your eyes, and then his fingers slide debilitatingly through your folds, collecting your slick before his hand returns to his length.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “Soaked for me, huh? Do you get turned on when you’re arguing with me, sweetheart?”

“Please,” you gasp, reeling from the nickname. “Put it in, please, I’m wet enough - ”

The rest of your words trail off into a breathy whimper, because his cock head bumps your clit and your hands grip the table for dear life. It’s not entirely true that you’re wet enough - you’re close to it, but you want to feel the pain of him, you want the stretch to overwhelm you so that he’s the only thing left on your mind.

Minutely, the hand on your back pushes you down further, pressing your cheek into the cold table, and you brace yourself, biting your lip in anticipation of the fire that will come, the feeling of him that you’ve tried to conjure alone in bed, countless nights before, but it doesn’t arrive. You can almost taste his hesitance, his second thoughts, but they are too late, and you writhe against his hold, almost sobbing in your need.

“Please,” you cry. “Please, Yunho, please, I need  - ”

He sweeps your hair out of the way and presses a kiss to your neck, and then his fingers tighten and he tugs at your locks until you’re arched almost painfully. “Who am I to deny you?”

Yunho breaches you then, and behind your closed eyelids, you think you catch a glimpse of heaven. You keen, scrabbling at the table for purchase as he sinks into you, inch by inch, and it is more rapturous than you could ever imagine, your cunt clenching down on every velvety ridge of him, your eyes rolling back. The pit of your stomach aches in want for more, more. You need him to be deeper, so you can feel him in your throat, so you don’t know where he begins and you end.

“I won’t - I can’t be gentle,” he intones, words coloured with urgency, his grip on your hips bruising. “Tell me if I have to - fuck - if I have to stop.”

Your only response is to chant his name like a prayer, pleading him with the vice of your cunt: he eases in until you’re wrapped around him to the hilt, and there he pauses, holding still, so deep you think you can feel him in your navel. He must think himself merciful, letting you adjust here, but every second he remains there fills you with something that claws at the cage of your flesh, howling to be let out, and you push back on him, struggling against the weight of him that keeps you immobile, lips moving silently.

“Move,” you croak, finally finding enough air to voice yourself. “Fucking move! I might die if you don’t!”

Yunho chuckles at that. “I’ve got you, baby. Don’t worry.”

Just a centimetre, he pulls out, ever considerate as he measures your body’s response. It gives you enough space to crane your neck round, and so you see the moment he stops squeezing his eyes shut in pain from reining himself in and their soft brown sheens over with something primal.

Your pussy clings to every inch of him as he draws back, and then you’re shunted forward into the table with how hard he fucks back into you. Four earth-shattering thrusts is all it takes for him to find the angle that makes you sing, and sing you do, words tumbling from your lips that you have no control of, his name interspersed throughout. The table rocks with every snap of his hips, and you know sense will find him before he can, but you want him to anoint every featureless government issued surface of this place with you, just like this.

“Taking me so well,” he grunts, trailing kisses over your back. “That’s it, sweetheart, y - yeah, you like that?”

“Yes,” you reply. “Yes, Yunho, ah!”

Words abandon you. The underside of his cock grinds against a spot inside you that leaves you agape. His pace is ruthless, insatiable, and you squeeze your eyes shut, tears threatening at your lash line with how he wrings the pleasure from you. You’d float away on its waves, but his hands are made of the sun, and their immense gravity tethers you to him, the drag of his cock sending flares of solar heat through you.

Just like that, you’re on the brink, teetering on the edge of the event horizon, and you spiral towards that boundary between earth and paradise, closer and closer with each devastating cant of his hips. It spills from your lips as a warning, though he must feel it too in the tensing of your abdomen and the twitch of your thighs.

“Almost,” you pant. “I’m going to - ”

Yunho pulls out, and you clench too late to halt him. A broken sound escapes you, and he’s quick to soothe you and kiss you sweetly as he lifts you up and flips you, smoothing a hand over your unruly hair and skimming it across your waist. He noses at your neck, licking a long stripe down until his head dips down to your chest and his lips close around the peak of your breast, teeth grazing your nipple. The corners of his mouth curve up when he feels you shiver against him.

His face swims back into your vision, eclipsing everything else. “Sorry, sweetheart.”

“Why’d you stop?” You demand, tugging at his hair a little too hard to spite him.

He gathers your wrists in one hand and pins them above your head. “I want to see your face when you come for me.”

He says it casually, like he’s discussing a simple matter with you, but there’s nothing casual about the way he ploughs into you, this time granting you no adjustment period before he begins pounding into you, so hard that the dining table shakes. Your back curves right off the table and you throw your head back; he groans at the expanse of your throat, bared to him and purpled with his marks.

You cross your ankles at the small of his back, drawing him deeper. Yunho hammers into you, relentless like he intends to mould your walls to fit the shape of him, and yet, it isn’t anywhere near close enough for you. You want to feel him moving under your palms, every bunch and coil of his muscles, until you’re certain you won’t forget it.

Like he hears what you want, he releases your hands, and of their own accord they fly to his shoulders, raking lines down his strong back with every stroke. They sweep up, dallying for a moment in the grooves of his shoulder blades, and then you bury them in his hair, bringing his face proximate to yours so you can share his breath and watch his pupils dilate wide enough that you think they might swallow you.

“I can’t get you out my head,” he repeats, broken.

It’s an echo of his words before, except this time it’s not accusation but worship. His chest heaves, his grip on your thigh tightening, and his fingers find your clit and circle it. Ecstasy frissons through you, and you scream his name, sinking your nails into his skin, brought suddenly to the edge by his deft hands. You quake with it, rocking there for a moment before you come, and this time, the sound that leaves you is raw and ragged as the orgasm that tears through you, ripping you to shreds.

Yunho’s thrusts turn sloppy, a moan unravelling from deep in his chest, and he surges into you one last time before you take his face between your hands and kiss him, as heady and syrupy as the high that still percolates through you. He empties himself into you with a guttural noise, cock pulsing with every spasm of your pussy around him.

A pause follows, filled only by the sound of you both catching your breaths, and then you break it, grasping his shoulders. “Yunho, I…”

It’s then that your eyes brim, and you crumble, hiding your face in his chest though you know he feels your tears slip down his skin. He holds you, of course he does, tucking you to him and rubbing comforting circles over your back, and you cling to him, not quite sure why you’re crying other than that it’s to do with the terrible hole that’s opened up in your centre. Dread has settled in your stomach, and though you tell it that it has no home here, it stays.

“Tiny,” Yunho murmurs, tipping your face up so he can search your face. “Did I hurt you?”

“No!” You shake your head vehemently, wiping your eyes. ”No, I - I don’t know what overcame me.”

He smiles, soft enough that your heart hurts. “Then let me help you clean up, sweetheart.”

Slowly, he pulls out, careful not to jostle you. A small oh leaves you as his come slips down your thighs, warm and sticky, and you see his gaze dart down, something flitting over his face that makes your stomach pull hot and tight, but he smooths the expression away just as fast.

Scooping you up, he carries you to your poky bathroom, somehow managing to cram both you and himself into the shower - he fiddles with the knobs, then shields you from the flow as the water warms up, keeping an arm around your waist the whole time like he’s aware how weak your knees are. You lean into his warmth, eyes drooping, and fight back the creeping wrongness of this all.

It’s evident in his demeanour. Yunho cares about you, so naturally he’s going to look after you and make sure you’re alright, but you can sense the change in him, the certainty. He’ll do what he can to ease you, to ensure you’re not in pain, but he’s going to leave with just as many secrets as he came with, and you’ll be left bleeding no matter what he does.

A bone tiredness envelopes you, and you sag against him, willing those thoughts away for now so that all you’re left with is a pleasant numbness and the pitter patter of the shower. Gentle now, his hands rove over your skin, soapy and beginning to border on pruned, and you close your eyes and let him take your weight. The water sheets over you, just the right temperature, because of course he would know you like it on the hotter side, but it doesn’t wash away the despair seeded in your heart.

After a while, he reaches for the shower knob, and you simply react. You don’t want him to switch off the water and step out of this little chamber of steam and skin on skin, for it will take him a step closer to leaving. Too fast for you to play it off as casual, you grab his hand, feeling the scrape of his callouses against yours, and you bring his knuckles to your lips.

“Sweetheart?” He asks, closing his fingers over yours. “Everything okay?”

You force yourself to drop his hand, grimace a smile. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t believe you, but he leaves it, instead switching off the water and exiting the shower: you watch his silhouette through the fogged glass, and then he reappears and engulfs you in a towel that you could have sworn wasn’t as fluffy yesterday. Wobbly, you stumble out of the bathroom. Yunho doesn’t give your legs a chance to give out, plucking you off the floor and into the cradle of his arms.

You let him set you down on the bed and towel off the ends of your hair. You’re too tired to object when he nudges your arms up and slips his shirt over your head, the one he’d been wearing when he arrived, and before you can protest, he beelines to the cupboard where you keep spares for him when he stays over.

The familiarity aches. From under the covers, you watch silently as he shrugs a fresh shirt on, and you think it awful that you’re surrounded by his scent now while he prepares to go, a kind of finality displayed on his face that makes you realise he might not come back. You know, above all, that he’s a responsible man. There’s a good reason, and you shouldn’t ask him to shirk that, but you’re weak.

“Please stay,” you implore, voice small.

Anguish contorts his face, strange when normally he presents as so collected, and he deliberates, standing by your doorway, before he walks over and sits on the edge of your bed. If he twisted around, he’d be able to look at you, but he keeps his back to you, head bowed under a weight that’s invisible but entirely clear to see. After a while, he covers his face with his hands, and your stomach sinks.

You’d thought at first that maybe he’d committed some minor offence, but why would he shy away from telling you such a thing? It must be something bigger, more serious, if he thinks you’d be a target if he saddled you with his information, for it cannot be something he’s simply ashamed to tell you - he must know you’d love him all the same. You go rigid at a thought. Maybe he’s gone and offered his help to Halateez, dangerous as they are. No, surely not.

Something prickles over the back of your neck, and you glance up and blanch when you find him looking at you; you’ve never seen Yunho so stricken, never with such growing terror apparent on his face, like there’s a nightmare playing on loop behind his glassy eyes. You sit up, grabbing his arm just above the elbow and shaking it, as if to snap him out of whatever prison his mind has built for him.

“What’s wrong?” You ask, though you know exactly what’s wrong.

He lurches to his feet, shakes his head. “Nothing. Don’t worry about me.”

Your grip on his sleeve tightens. Like hell you’re going to let him leave in this state. You level him with a fearsome look, one that you used when the older kids next door played too rough with him, or when he’d forgotten to bring over the specific stuffed toy you’d asked him to, and though you’re out of practice, it works, and he stops in his tracks.

Cracks form in his exterior, and beneath the pain is fear. “I’m sorry,” he utters, unable to look you in the eye. “This was a mistake. I - fuck, what have I done? What have I done to you?”

Yunho stares down at his hands like your blood is already on them, and you don’t miss the way they shake. You wish you were back in the shower with him, just the sound of the water, the simplicity of the absence of words and only each other for company, but that’s gone now, slipped through your fingers like you feel him doing so now. Bit by bit, he’s escaping you, and by the end of the night he’ll have fled. You can’t let him go with all the blame.

“Hey,” you insert yourself in front of him and lace your fingers with his. “I wanted this, too. I wanted you - I still do. I had as much a hand in tonight as you did, Yunho. Whatever fault you’re taking isn’t just yours.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t know what I did. What I do.”

“Tell me, then.”

“I can’t,” he replies heavily. “It’s not safe for you to know.”

“It’s hurting you, Yunho.”

“It would hurt me worse if something happened to you because of me.”

His mind is made up. You can see it in the set of his jaw, and you sigh; he’s prolonged this as long as he can, given you as much of him as he’s able, and you guess in a way you’re glad that he spared you this piece of him, riddled with bullet holes and knife wounds but majestic all the same. Sorrow marrs his usually joyful face, dreadfully out of place, and he lingers in the doorway, not quite able to tear himself away yet.

“I love you, tiny,” Yunho says. “I love you, but I cannot stay.”

The lump in your throat is too big to talk around, but you hug him fiercely, pressing yourself to him and thinking of the scars on him that shouldn’t have been there. You will him to come back to you, burying your face in his chest, and then you let him pull away, sand through your fingers. He cups your chin, looking at you like he wants you memorised, and then he kisses your forehead and turns away.

It’s only as he goes that you see the tears in his eyes well over.

You’re distracted during work, your mind filled with memories of Yunho’s scars. Unease and an uncertain sort of grief worry at you so doggedly that your supervisor yells at you for being a clumsy oaf, though it’s not entirely unusual: she’s as embittered by the government’s ban as the next person.

In the end, though your feet ache from being on them all day, you decide to walk the extra distance and detour to Yunho’s place on the way home, despite the knowledge that your mother is surely heading to your place by now. She visits every Thursday, and you long to confide in her about Yunho. A smile pulls at your lips at the thought of her reaction. She’ll shake her head and call him a rash youngster, but the affection will shine in her eyes - she knows him almost as well as you do, and she dotes on him terribly.

Hurrying, you walk as fast as you dare, slowing only at the street corners where government officials are posted. You avoid their eyes, keeping your head down, drawing the least attention to yourself as possible. The last thing you need is them to stop you for suspicious activity. You just want to see that Yunho is okay with your own eyes and ascertain that he hasn’t blamed last night on himself, hopefully also ridding yourself of the odd sinking in your chest in the meantime.

Panic grips you tighter with each step you take, until you can barely breathe where you stand outside his door, pounding on the knocker and jabbing at the doorbell, and then it occurs to you that you have his spare key. You fumble with it, dropping it on the floor twice before you manage to jam it into the lock with unsteady hands.

The door swings open with a bang. You know it within seconds.

He’s not here.

Your mind supplies you with all kinds of excuses. He’s out, stocking up on more ration packs. He’s taking out the trash. He got held back at work. In your heart you know that it’s none of these, that he’d be home by now if everything was well. You notice the chair at his dining table, knocked askew and not tucked in, and there, in the sink, the washing up left halfway through, abandoned.

It can’t be, it can’t be, but it is, and unconsciously, you find yourself searching the small space for signs of resistance, things out of place that Yunho would have never left unattended, but you find nothing, and somehow that’s worse. Terror bolts through you, quickening your heart, and you turn and flee, retaining just enough presence of mind to slam the door behind you.

You force yourself to slow in the streets, the oppressive atmosphere enough to instil some sense into you. If you’re seen running, it’ll be assumed you’re up to no good, and you need to see your mother more than ever now. Cramming the swelling wave of fear inside you into a hidden box, you tell yourself he’s fine, that he’ll be there in your flat, chatting with Ma like he used to before he began to pull away from you both.

“Pull it together,” you mutter to yourself.

The prick of your nails biting at your palms focuses you some more, and you breathe deeply, in and out like your mother always told you to, straightening your back and lifting your chin in a mockery of self assurance as you approach your street. Though you’re closer to home, the dread grows in your chest, and you gnaw at your lip until it’s raw while you wait for the lift to come.

You’re just passing the third floor when the lift rattles. Stumbling, you grip the rail and glance around wildly, wondering if it was just your imagination, and then the doors open and you’re faced with the same lifeless hallway you see every day, except the front door of the flat at the end, your flat, has been caved in like a skull. Your legs move before your brain catches up, pelting you towards it, and then the noise comes.

It’s staccato, a thundering pop pop pop that rends through your head and brings you back to a dark night spent running on rain soaked cobbles, Yunho on one side and your mother on the other, the streetlights put out so all you could see is the whites of their eyes. That sound is straight from the darkest hours of your life. Gunfire. You’re paralysed.

A scream echoes down the corridor, and it jolts you to life.

You don’t have enough breath to shout for her. A nightmare has come to reality in your apartment, but you run toward it, because you can’t leave your mother in there, lost in a space where all she must be able to see is your father being taken down and trampled by the officials again and again. Your heart gallops in your ears, a muted roar that muffles even the pound of your steps underfoot. Desperation nipping at your heels, you pray you get there in time.

Before you can stop, a woman in black tactical gear appears in front of you, and you barrel straight into her, your momentum sending both of you slamming into the floor. Flailing, you kick and thrash against her, a strangled, animal noise leaving you when she tries to pin you down. You rake your nails across her face in sheer panic, your breathing becoming shallow and rasping as a band constricts your chest.

You throw her off you at last. The official makes a last grab for you, and you lurch out of the way, so close to your mother her fingers almost graze yours. She is running towards you, her eyes wide with rage as much as horror, and then you slip on a shard of shattered glass and skid away from her, tearing the skin of your palms on the debris littered over the floor, and she’s blown sideways by a storm of bullets.

Blood splatters over you, misting the air red, and her insides bloom like a rose, her body jerked this way and that as each bullet enters and leaves, tearing through her like she’s made of tissue paper. Gunned down before your eyes, and she’d been so near. Your feet are nailed to the floor. You’re shaking so violently that your vision blurs.

Dimly, you’re aware that the expression on your face is one you’ve seen on many. You’d always wondered why they didn’t run, for their eyes were so filled with fear, but you know now that there’s nowhere to flee to: the destruction, the death, they surround you, leering at you from all sides.

Someone grabs you from behind, and this time, you don’t resist as he hauls you backward, only turning your head to keep your gaze fixed on your Ma’s body, waiting for her mangled chest to rise and fall with breath, but of course it doesn’t, because she’s gone. She’s left you in this desolate place, and you can’t follow her.

She’s dead.

The world pitches on its axis, and it takes a moment to dawn on you that it’s because you’ve been dropped, and the man that was carrying you is pointing and yelling at a figure that has appeared in the window. You raise your head, glass crunching under your elbows and burrowing into your skin as you prop yourself up, and you glimpse three masked figures, clad in black that’s splashed with vibrant red - Halateez has come, for some godforsaken reason, to witness the carnage your life has become.

And then the first one leaps into the room, immediately engaging the closest official in combat. Though you’ve never seen anyone fight like that, though there is a sureness to him that you haven’t witnessed in anything more than the topping up of your water glass or the spinning of a coin across his knuckles, you know him by the way he moves alone. Relief flashes in his gaze when you briefly glimpse his eyes, and it makes you want to throw up.

Yunho has saved you, but he can’t save your mother now.

Your eyes dart to the other two he came with, and though it takes you a moment, you recognise them as Mingi and Hongjoong - ice slithers down your spine with the epiphany that you could probably name every single one of Halateez’s eight members. Piece by piece everything falls into place, and you find yourself wishing that you had let him distance himself from you.

Yunho reaches you. He draws you into the familiarity of your arms, and you cannot wish he was far from you any more. Hiding your face in his chest, you close your eyes, and the darkness is so empty and merciful that it feels wrong to leave the pain behind.

You lift your head, twisting around to search for your mother, to feel the pain like a white hot wire strung right through you, but you’re disorientated. The apartment that was so familiar to you has morphed into a war zone, your window smashed in, furniture splintered and littered around, and there, a footprint of red, a lake of blood -

“Get her out of here, man,” a low voice says. Mingi? “We’ll handle the rest.”

“Okay,” Yunho replies, voice breaking. “Don’t - don’t leave ajumma here. Please.”

Ajumma. You almost laugh. What does it matter? It’s not really her, just the house her soul lived in, and now the lights are off and no one’s home. The thought has barely tailed off in your mind before you hate yourself for it, and you fist Yunho’s shirt in your hands as he scoops you up, one hand cradling the back of your head, keeping your face tucked into the folds of his jacket. You know he does it to shield you from seeing her body, but he’s too late for that.

He’s too late for a lot of things.

Yunho carries you for a while, and you keep your eyes shut, your fingers curled tightly in his shirt. It’s too easy to get lost in the dark. The gentle rocking of his footsteps pauses, other voices conversing with his, low and hushed; a hand squeezes yours, and you reluctantly pull yourself away from the grand emptiness behind your eyelids.

You look at the other two. “What - what happened?”

“Someone ratted Yunho out,” Hongjoong supplies. “It was just his routine, his usual whereabouts, not his identity, but it brought the officials to your house. I’m sorry.”

You understand now why he’d been trying to keep you at arms length, why he’d stopped his routine visits to see you and charm the socks off your Ma the same way he always had, but it was all for nothing. Maybe the mole’s information was too outdated, or maybe fate simply decided to be cruel, to make all the pain he caused by distancing himself worth nothing.

You avert your gaze before you see anyone’s pity. “Yunho?”

“Yes, tiny?”

“Can you take me home, please?”

“It’s not safe for you to go back,” he tells you softly. “Is it alright if we take you back to the base?”

“That’s okay.”

You don’t remember much of the journey. You walk some of it, always hovering as close to Yunho as you can. No one says much, and you wish they’d speak, because the silence leaves you with yourself, with the strange feeling that aside from Yunho, you’ve been left alone in this world, an adult but still an orphan, a fraction of the greater collateral damage.

Eventually, you end up huddled on a bathroom floor, the tiles’ cold seeping through your trouser legs - the Halateez base seems to be a repurposed warehouse, concealed among many other similar buildings. Yunho sits opposite you, holding your hand steady, your palm facing the ceiling as he disinfects the torn skin there and picks out the broken glass. There’s a gash in your trousers and a deep scrape down your thigh beneath, and he cleans that too, deft and sure like he’s done this before.

Most likely, he's probably done it a million times, on himself and on others. You’re too numb to feel shocked, too numb to feel anything more than a slight prickle of discomfort as he wipes alcohol swabs over wounds that could have been so much worse.

In truth, you’re fazed out, your mind lost at sea so that all you can hear is the crash of the waves, slapping against the sides of a boat far from water tight. Your head tips back and hits the cabinet behind you with a listless thunk. Your dull eyes won’t well up. There’s an absence in your chest where something world shaking should be, and in its place is a choking logic that feels like apathy.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Yunho murmurs, squeezing your hand. “Are you still with me?”

You blink. Yes, you’re still with him, still present inside the chamber of your skull, but you wish you weren’t. Where is the grief, to wrest control from you and turn you into a raging, awful creature? Where is the sorrow, to drown your soul in its torrential rain? Nothing’s there. It feels like you don’t exist.

“I just don’t get why you didn’t tell me,” you reply quietly.

“I couldn’t live with myself if you got hurt,” he says. “I was too selfish to distance myself sooner.” He looks up at you. “You’re who I think about when I ask myself who I fight for. I couldn’t make you a target by telling you.”

“It didn’t matter anyway,” you snap, suddenly bitter. “They came looking for you, and now Ma is dead.”

Yunho can’t deny it, nor will he; he looks at you helplessly, anguished, and you detect grief there too, a pain that he bears on his back alongside the weight of yet another life on his hands. You wish then that you would break, that the tears would come and fill the silence so you don’t have to hear your accusations echo back at you, but they don’t, and maybe it’s right that you aren’t abstained from hearing the cruelty of your own words.

There’s a choice here. The pain in your chest is acute, so sharp that it’s a fickle knife in your hand, and you could bury it into his chest, over and over again so that he bleeds as much as she did, but it wasn’t him that gave the order to fire at will, was it? It would be easy to make him hurt. You won’t. You can’t make him carry this too.

Yunho loved your mother just as you did, and as he sits in front of you, falling apart before your eyes, buckling under the accusation you’d launched savagely at him, you know it hurts him like it hurts you, white hot and incomprehensible. Without him, you’ll shatter, and without you, he’ll fragment.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, voice trembling. “I didn’t mean that. I just, I can’t right now. Please, I - I need some space.”

“Okay,” he replies. “There’s a spare room at the end of the corridor. I’m here if you need, and if you don’t want… If you’d prefer, Mingi’s room is opposite mine.”

It breaks his heart to say it, but he says it anyway, and you’re reminded that he’s a good man, maybe the best. What happened was not his doing, but the actions of an authority that deems your mother a necessary death for the possible capture of a member of Halateez, and you will not side with them.

You ache too much to look him in the eye right now, but you know you will never blame him.

Night comes with its own challenges.

The need to blame burns itself out, fast as an angry fire, and the ashes it leaves are far worse. For a long time, you cannot fall asleep, but when you do, you see your mother fall a thousand times, the thud of the bullets impacting on her flesh and the squelch as they exit through the other side playing over and over in your head until you long for anything but to be left alone with that. It takes you less than a second to decide where to go.

The floor is cold beneath your bare feet as you creep across the corridor, arms wrapped around yourself in a vain attempt to keep yourself warm. Your breathing comes out short and ragged, and your head spins, thoughts orbiting the wreck those bullets made of your mother’s body. It’s instinct that leads you down to his room, and you ease the door open, slipping through and shutting it quietly behind you.

Wordlessly, you burrow under Yunho’s blankets and press yourself to his side. His breathing is slow, his chest warm and solid enough that you realise how violently you’re trembling, and as you huddle by his side, he begins to stir, his arm looping around you and enveloping you in him. Your fingers knot themselves into the fabric of his sleep shirt, and you clench your fists, trying to calm yourself.

“Sweetheart?” Yunho asks, bleary eyed.

It’s just him, same as he always has been, yet at the sound of his voice rough with sleep, you shatter into a million pieces, ugly sobs shuddering through you until you soak his shirt with tears. You mourn a world uprooted and pruned in all the wrong places, a world so fucked up that there are days you think there’s no way back, but mostly, you mourn a world without your mother.

Nothing else remains to distract you from her absence. The daze of shock is gone, as is the vengeful fury, and now all that remains is blood and a lifeless body where she should have been. It pours out of you, grief accompanied by the tears in their floods, and not even Yunho can hold you together, but you don’t want him to. This isn’t something that you’ll allow to just pass you by.

“I’m sorry,” Yunho says, eyes wet as yours.

You prop yourself up on your elbows. “Do you - do you think it will get better?”

“I… don’t know.”

He falls silent, and you wrap your arms around him, hiding your face in his neck and holding him tight; after a while, he brings a hand up and you lace your fingers with his. His chest rises and falls beneath you with every breath, his heartbeat steady under your ear, and you tip your chin up, kiss his cheek. In response, his grip tightens around you, and it gives you the strength to think about what she’d want.

ROCKY

I'm putting Rocky here at the beginning, because I'm not entirely sure Rocky actually takes place in the Afterlife. It COULD, but it feels more like Halateez, knowing they're a suicide squad and will have to die in order to complete the time loop that they're in, need to hype themselves up for their inevitable end, but they're not willing to just give up.

So basically they're training in the warehouse bunker (from the Fever Diaries and HALA HALA) to fight death itself.

ANSWER

We have two versions of Ateez in the MV, and two versions of the MV, because this is where the Ateez and Halateez came together for one Last Supper, and then split on their two journeys.

The Korean version follows World A, but the Japanese version follows Halateez. We start following Halateez in the Japanese mvs from here on out EXCLUSIVELY, and of course, Ateez in the regular mvs.

Both versions of the mv are FULL of underworld and time/space imagery.

We have Mingi in the boat, looking like he's crossing over the River Styx into the afterlife.

Yunho staring at himself in the mirrors, as if trapped in some kind of place where he has to face himself in order to move on to somewhere else. (we will see this again.)

Hongjoong on the giant clock, in a space somewhere beyond time.

Seonghwa and Jongho looking like they're still passing through the veil of death.

And Yeosang, San, and Wooyoung, standing in the snow? ash? somewhere indefinable.

They've met their other selves, and Halateez, our suicide squad, moved on to the place they knew in Wonderland (another MV full of liminal/transitional spaces and imagery) they couldn't come back from: death.

LIMITLESS

Okay, this is a weird take, but follow me here: I think Limitless is represents the closing of the time loop and Halateez's demise.

So my theory was that Ateez and Halateez are the same people from different points on the timeline, and when someone time travels, they become quantumly entangled with their past self and take over their body or consciousness, so essentially a version of them has to die. (Think Hot Tub Time Machine, or X-Men: Days of Future Past.)

Halateez, knowing they have to close the time loop, knowing that that means they will have to die in order for Ateez to take their place on the timeline, knowing they will be fighting death soon--will have to fight THEMSELVES first.

And there can be only one victor.

UTOPIA

They've died, and closed the time loop, but their journey is not over. They've finally arrived in the afterlife, but where exactly are they?

Yunho's mirrors are back, but this time all of them have arrived in the same waiting place that he was in in Answer.

They want to find heaven, but they have a long way to go.

We also get some more familiar imagery that we will see again in Ash: theater seats, as if they're watching their life replayed for them before they can move on. Interestingly, the seats shift from blue to red and back again several times and is most notably blue only when they're sitting in the seats.

They've seen their life replay, but where will they go when they leave this place? We get glimpses of a possible answer.

Heaven?

Or maybe Hell?

BIRTHDAY

Crossing freshly over into the afterlife can be confusing, a place where dreams and reality melt together and anything becomes possible.

We have coin imagery, as if they've paid the ferryman the fee to cross over into the Underworld.

Their souls are not yet weighed, their dreams not yet reality. They're still crossing over.

*Birthday alternate theory: this goes at the end of the afterlife timeline, just before Paradigm, and represents them paying the Ferryman to cross OUT of the Underworld. They have to cross through a dreamland to get to the doorway in Paradigm, and they will be resurrected on the otherside, essentially making it their BIRTHDAY.

NOT OKAY

This is as close to Hell as our Black Pirates get, but I don't see Not Okay as them ending up in Hell. I see it more as Purgatory, a place where they can be cleansed of the traumas that held them down in their past life, which they will ultimately break free of and wake in a new place that much closer to paradise.

Each of them faces their demons and wins, and they stand strong together at the end...even as fate rushes to overtake them yet again.

ASH

Battered and bruised and torn apart by their traumas, they wake up in a different place this time, a place of forgetting. The River Lethe, where their past life will wash away from them, the memories filed away, burned to ash, fading to nothing.

It's a funeral for their old selves, who they used to be and never will be again.

That's why the theater seats from Utopia are ragged and worn down. They cannot watch what they cannot remember.

But they are not willing to go down without a fight. Especially Mingi.

DREAMERS

They've lost their memories and passed through the River Lethe, but where are they? Heaven? Or somewhere else? What more perfect place to lull pirates into thinking they're in Heaven than a beautiful island with a gorgeous ocean where they can play in the waves?

But this can't be Heaven. This is a false Elysian Field of Dreams.

Why do I think that? Because Mingi, who couldn't forget and wouldn't stop in Ash, is not here, and it can only be Heaven if they're all together.

(yes, I know this was filmed during his hiatus and that's actually why he's not here BUT LET ME COOK!!!)

And while they can't remember, they seem to know something is missing and leave space for him.

The unexplained crystals could be a clue to his whereabouts, something that tells them they're missing something, or someone, important. If only they can remember...

(no, I do not think that's Sopro, despite the cube shape. Sopro is red and was red even before Wooyoung swallowed her and woke her up. If it's Sopro, she might be dead and in the Afterlife helping them???)

YOUTH

I know this isn't a Japanese mv. I KNOW.

But somehow, somewhere down the line, after Dreamers and probably after some other things we have not yet seen happens, this will be Mingi and Yunho getting their memories back and then running off to find the others as the false Heaven withers and dies, and that's that on that.

Do not argue with me. I won't hear it.

We even get Yunho's mirror back, which they shatter into pieces. They don't need to look back. They're not Orpheus and Eurydice. They're escaping the afterlife. Together.

Period.

BAD

After rejecting their false Heaven, they find themselves in a place like the MCU's Void, a place where people, places, and things pruned from the timeline go to be devoured, memories finally erased to nothing. That's why the warehouse (from Fever Diaries, HALA HALA and Rocky) is full of trash: it's their memories that they came to get back.

The place looks like the backrooms, a truly liminal space, a limbo where nothing and everything exists all at once.

Can they escape with their memories?

PARADIGM

I cannot place this one yet. This is the end of the journey, just before they leave the afterlife and yes I do think Halateez WILL leave the afterlife.

Once they return to our world, with their awakened memories and traumas, we'll get IT's You and Everything. (I could place Youth here too but I feel like that takes place BEFORE the limbo of Bad.)

And MATZ? Matz are looking for their crew and dealing with the messed up Sopro-caused Halazia world they've resurrected into once they leave the Afterlife, and realize their past Halateez selves have time traveled to the future to meet their past Ateez selves in Answer and wow did that sentence make no sense or what?

Time loop is gonna time loop.

We don't have the full story yet, so all of this could change and switch around, or maybe I'm swinging and missing on everything. I mean, I probably am.

But I love playing in the lore sandbox. Try and stop me.