#oki doki

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over a briefing room right before everything goes wrong.

You’d learned to recognize it over the years. The specific quality of air when a mission is about to become a problem, something too still, too careful, like the room itself is holding its breath. You’d felt it in Marseille right before the extraction went sideways. You’d felt it in Prague two seconds before your handler’s voice crackled off comms entirely.

You feel it now, sitting in the third chair from the left in Sub-Level 2, watching Director Yoon click to the next slide.

The slide has two photos on it.

One of them is you.

The other is Lee Minho.

“Codename: Stitch,” Director Yoon says, gesturing to you with the laser pointer. Then she moves it to him. “Codename: Thread.” A pause. “Effective immediately, you’ll be operating as a joint unit under the Meridian protocol.”

The silence after that is a different kind. The kind that comes from two people in the same room deciding, simultaneously, not to say what they’re thinking.

You glance sideways. Minho is already looking at you and the expression on his face is exactly what you’d expect — nothing. Controlled, clean, every reaction filed somewhere behind his eyes where you can’t reach it. It’s infuriating precisely because you know you’re doing the same thing.

“With respect,” Minho says, looking back at Yoon. His voice is polite in that way that means the opposite. “Is there a reason you’re pairing two solo-track operatives on a joint assignment.”

“There’s always a reason,” Yoon says. “I’m not required to share all of them.”

“The op?” you ask.

She clicks forward. The next slide is a photograph of a man in his mid-fifties, silver-haired, the kind of face that looks trustworthy in the way only practiced liars manage. Below the photo: Viktor Selim. Arms broker. Six countries, fourteen aliases.

“Selim is attending a private auction in Vienna in eleven days,” Yoon says. “He’s brokering the sale of a weapons guidance system stolen from a NATO facility in Gdańsk eight months ago. The buyer is unknown. The system ends up in the wrong hands and we’re looking at a regional destabilization scenario with global implications.” She clicks again. The next slide is an invitation — cream colored, embossed — for something called the Weiss Foundation Gala. “The auction is embedded within this event. Invitation only. Donors, diplomats, very old money.”

You already see where this is going.

“The cover,” Minho says flatly.

“Married couple. Recently relocated to Geneva. He’s a private equity consultant, she works in art acquisition.” Yoon doesn’t blink. “You’ll have eleven days of joint preparation. Backstory, behavioral alignment, social conditioning. The legend is already built. You just have to inhabit it.”

Another silence.

“When do we start,” you say. Not a question.

The apartment they put you in for prep is in the 4th arrondissement, which means Yoon either has a sense of humor or genuinely believes proximity to good pastry will improve your working relationship. You’re not ruling either out.

Minho gets there first. You know this because when you let yourself in with the key card there’s already a coffee on the kitchen counter — one cup, not two — and a folder open on the table, and his jacket draped over the back of a chair like he’s lived here for years. Like he’s already decided which parts of the space are his.

You drop your bag by the door, clock the apartment in about four seconds — two exits, good sightlines from the main windows, second bedroom door half open — and then look at the coffee.

“you could’ve made two,” you say.

“I didn’t know when you’d arrive.”

“We were on the same flight.”

“I got off faster.”

You look at him. He looks at you. This is how it usually goes.

You’d met Minho eighteen months ago during a joint debrief after an op in Jakarta where your paths had overlapped by about forty minutes of real time and considerably more in the aftermath. You’d reached the same conclusions via slightly different routes and submitted reports that were nearly identical in structure, almost word for word on the key assessments. Director Yoon had apparently flagged this as remarkable.

You’d found it annoying.

Not because he was wrong. Because he wasn’t, and that was somehow worse — the particular irritation of encountering someone who thinks the way you do and having nowhere to put the friction of it. You could argue with someone sloppy. You could dismiss someone reckless. Minho was neither, which meant every disagreement you had with him was a real one, fully loaded, no cheap exits.

“What’s the social schedule,” you say, pulling out the chair across from him.

He slides the folder toward you. “Three pre-gala events. A private dinner on the eighth, a gallery opening on the tenth, the gala itself on the eleventh. Selim attends all three. He’ll be vetting potential buyers at the dinner which means we need to be visible and credible by then.” He leans back. “The legend says we’ve been married four years.”

“I know what the legend says.”

“Then you know we need a working shorthand by the eighth.” A slight tilt of his head. “That’s six days.”

“I’m aware of how numbers work.”

He almost smiles. Doesn’t reach anything. “you keep doing that.”

“Doing what.”

“Saying things I’ve already accounted for, like you’re correcting me.”

“Maybe I am.”

“You’re not.”

You hold his gaze a second longer than necessary, then look down at the folder. “The gallery opening. What’s the objective.”

And like that, you’re working. Which is the only thing you’ve ever been any good at.

The behavioral conditioning, as Yoon calls it, is a clinical way of describing something that is profoundly strange in practice.

You have to learn each other. Not the op-relevant surface stuff — you already know his field record, his response times, his preferred sidearm, the three languages he’s fluent in and the two he just functions in. You know his codename and his clearance and the general architecture of how he moves through a problem.

You don’t know how he takes his coffee (black, no exceptions, you find out on day one) or what he does when he can’t sleep (reads, apparently, actual novels, nothing useful) or the way he goes very quiet right before he says something that lands.

He doesn’t know those things about you either and you can feel him cataloging them. The same way you are. It’s like being studied by someone using the same methodology you use, which means you can see every observation as it’s being made, and it makes your skin feel strange.

“The story of how we met,” he says on the second evening. You’re both at the table, files spread out, working through the social logistics. “Yoon’s team has a version in the legend packet.”

“I read it.”

“Do you like it.”

You glance up. “It doesn’t matter if I like it.”

“It matters if you can deliver it convincingly.” He sets down his pen. “The dinner is a small room. Twelve, maybe fifteen people. Someone will ask. Probably more than once.”

You look at the legend packet. The official story has you meeting at a charity function in London, introduced by a mutual friend. It’s fine. Clean. Completely forgettable.

“It’s too smooth,” you say.

“Agreed.”

You look up again. He’s watching you.

“Couples fight about how they met,” you say. “Not seriously but — one person always remembers it differently. Small things. Who spoke first, what the other person was wearing. It’s not a problem, it’s texture. Makes it real.”

Minho is quiet for a second. “So we adjust the legend.”

“We keep the frame, change the details. Give ourselves something to disagree about.”

“What do we disagree about.”

You think. “You thought I was with someone else when we met. Spent the whole conversation being careful about it. Found out later I wasn’t.”

Something shifts briefly in his expression. “And your version.”

“I knew you thought that and I didn’t correct you because I wanted to see what you’d do.”

The shift again. Harder to read this time.

“that’s very you,” he says.

“It’s also very you,” you say. “You’d have done the same.”

He looks at you for a moment. “probably,” he says. And then he picks up his pen and you go back to work and you don’t examine why that exchange feels like it settled something.

The first real test is a dry run at a restaurant on the fifth day — one of the agency’s consultants playing a suspicious contact, stress-testing the cover.

You’d agreed beforehand: minimal physical contact, only what’s natural, let it develop in the room instead of choreographing it. You’d both made this point separately, at almost the same time, and there’d been a short pause where you both registered that.

The consultant’s name is Mr. Park and he’s good. Warm and probing in equal measure, the kind of social pressure that doesn’t feel like pressure until you’re halfway through the main course and realize he’s gotten considerably more out of you than you intended.

He asks how you met. Minho tells the London story — their version, the one you’d built — and does something small with it, a slight smile at a specific detail, like the memory has texture. You pick it up without thinking, add the correction about what you were actually wearing, which contradicts what he said, and his eyes cut to you with exactly the right quality of fond exasperation.

“she always does this,” he tells Park.

“You’re wrong,” you say pleasantly.

“I’m not wrong, I was there.”

“So was I, that’s my point.”

Park laughs. The conversation moves on.

Afterward outside on the street Minho stops walking for a second. You stop too.

“the detail about the dress,” he says.

“What about it.”

“That wasn’t in the legend.”

“No.”

He looks at you. “It was good.”

You start walking again. “I know.”

He falls into step beside you and you’re almost to the corner before he says, quietly: “you picked up on the smile.”

“You did it on purpose.”

“I wanted to see if you’d catch it.”

“I caught it.”

“you did,” he says. And there’s something in his voice that isn’t quite the usual temperature, something slightly less managed, and you decide not to look at him for the rest of the walk back.

Six days of this and you know things about Lee Minho you didn’t want to know.

You know he gets up before you every morning, not by much but enough. You know he makes noise in the kitchen on purpose because he figured out on day two that you wake up disoriented and the sound gives you a second to orient before you have to be a person. You know this because you’d do the exact same thing and you recognized the logic of it immediately and it made you furious.

You know he doesn’t argue for the sake of winning. He argues when he thinks something matters. His threshold for what matters is very high and very specific and it lines up with yours in a way that should probably be classified.

You know that the thing that reads as coldness from the outside isn’t coldness. It’s precision. He doesn’t waste warmth on things that don’t warrant it, which means when it appears it’s real, and you’ve started noticing when it appears.

This is a problem.

Not a mission problem. The mission is, professionally speaking, going fine. The cover is solid. You move well together in social environments which neither of you had been certain about, given that you’d never operated in the same room for longer than a debrief. The professional problem is actually the personal one — somewhere in six days of learning the shape of each other, the dislike had started to change texture.

It was still there. That was the thing. You still found him aggravating in all the specific ways you always had — the absolute certainty in his own assessments, the way he sometimes got to a conclusion a second before you and didn’t announce it but you could tell, the complete lack of wasted motion in everything he did that made you want to introduce some chaos on principle.

But underneath that, or alongside it, something else had moved in.

You didn’t say anything about it. Neither did he. You were both, you suspected, pretending very competently that it wasn’t there, which was both a professional strength and a significant personal failing.

The dinner is on the eighth. A private house in the 16th, candlelit and expensive, twelve people including Viktor Selim and a woman you identify within four minutes as his security lead despite the evening gown.

You and Minho arrive slightly late, which is correct for the cover — established couple, comfortable, not performing eagerness. He has his hand at the small of your back when you walk in, which is also correct, the exact degree of casual familiarity that reads as long term, and you’re aware of it in a way you shouldn’t be, or at least not this much.

Selim is across the room. You see him register you both in the first sweep he does of new arrivals — assessing, not suspicious, just the automatic cataloging of a careful man.

“he’s looking,” Minho says, very low, close to your ear. Not a whisper, just quiet. The kind of thing that looks like intimacy from across a room.

“I know. Don’t react to him yet.”

“I know.”

You take a glass from a passing tray and turn slightly toward Minho, angling yourself so Selim has a profile view. “He’ll come to us,” you say. “He’s that kind of man.”

“How long.”

“Forty minutes. He wants to watch first.”

Minho makes a small sound that means he agrees and you have a brief strange moment of registering that you’ve developed a communication system that runs on sounds and small movements and you’re not entirely sure when that happened.

Selim comes over in thirty five minutes, which is close enough that you file it as a minor win. He’s charming in that specific way that means he’s done it thousands of times. He asks the right questions — what brings you to Paris, how long in Geneva, do you know the so-and-sos in Zurich. Minho handles the business detail, you handle the social warmth, and it works the way things work when two people have divided a task correctly without discussing it.

At some point Selim says something mildly dismissive about art acquisition — your cover’s profession — in the way that men like him sometimes do, a light condescension dressed up as a joke, and you feel Minho’s hand shift slightly against your back.

Not much. Just — present. A small pressure that says I noticed, I’m here, do you want to handle it or should I.

You handle it. Smooth, smiling, precise enough that Selim adjusts his register for the rest of the conversation without quite knowing why.

Later in the car Minho says: “the hand thing.”

“What hand thing,” you say. Even though you know.

“When he made the comment.”

“I noticed.”

“And?”

You watch the city go past outside the window. “It was useful.”

“It wasn’t calculated,” he says. “I want to be accurate about that.”

You turn your head. He’s looking out his own window.

“okay,” you say.

“I’m just — noting it.”

“noted,” you say, and somehow that word carries a lot more than it should, and you both let it sit there for the rest of the drive.

The gallery opening is easy, comparatively. You’ve got Selim’s measure now and he’s warming to you — to the cover — the way marks do when they’ve decided you’re safe. The danger zone is always after that, when they start talking more freely, because free-talking men sometimes say something that makes them remember they should be careful.

You manage it. Minho manages it. You do the thing where you bicker mildly about something minor — this time whether you’d been to this particular artist’s last show — and Selim watches with the indulgent look people get watching other people’s long marriages, which means the cover is doing exactly what it needs to.

What isn’t supposed to be happening is that the bickering is, increasingly, just you two talking. Overlapping, correcting, building on what the other said — the line between performing it and just doing it has become something you’re having trouble finding.

In the car again. It’s become your space, the car. The in-between.

“you told him we’d been to Lisboa in April,” Minho says.

“The legend has us in Lisboa in April.”

“He might verify.”

“I know. I already laid a trail. The hotel, the restaurant, the gallery we supposedly visited. It’s clean.”

A pause. “when did you do that.”

“Before the dinner.”

Another pause, different quality. “you didn’t mention it.”

“You’d have done it yourself if I hadn’t.”

“That’s not the point. We’re operating jointly. You should have—”

“I would’ve told you if you’d asked,” you say, and there’s more edge in it than you intended. “I wasn’t hiding it, I just—” You stop.

“you just what,” he says. His voice has changed. Still even, but different even.

“I’m used to working alone,” you say. True. Also not the whole truth.

“So am I,” he says.

Silence. The city moves past. You’re tired in that specific way you get after hours of being on — performing, maintaining — and the tiredness has apparently decided to affect your defenses because you say, before you’ve decided to: “You were right about the Lisboa detail. I should’ve told you.”

He doesn’t say I know or yes you should have, which is half of what you’d expected.

He says: “I’ve been doing the same thing. Two items I didn’t table. I’ll send them over tonight.”

You look at him. He’s looking forward, profile clean in the passing streetlights. “okay,” you say.

“We work better when we’re actually joint,” he says. “I don’t love it either but it’s true.”

“I know it’s true.”

“Then we should act like it.”

“Agreed,” you say, and somehow that sits easier than it should, and you both let the rest of the drive go quiet.

The night before the gala, neither of you sleeps much.

You know this about each other because you’re both in the kitchen at 2am, and the difference between this moment and the first evening is significant enough that you both notice it and neither of you says anything.

He makes two coffees this time without being asked.

You sit at the table with the operation files spread out even though you have them memorized, because having something to look at makes the sitting easier.

“Contingencies,” Minho says.

“If the security lead makes us, we’re tourists. Lost the invitation, a friend got us in, we don’t know Selim.”

“If Selim makes us.”

“Mission’s burned and we get out. The system’s not on-site tonight, it’s in transit. Yoon has the intercept team on the transport route.” You pause. “The gala is just the intelligence layer. Selim’s contact, the handoff protocol. We’re not extraction, we’re information.”

“right.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “And if something else goes wrong.”

You look up. “Define something else.”

He looks at you over the rim. “The cover. If someone pushes harder than expected on the personal detail.”

“We hold. The legend is solid.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says, and his voice has the quality it gets when he’s decided something matters.

You hold his gaze. The kitchen is quiet. It’s 2am and you’re eleven days into an op and the line between cover and something else has been blurring for days in a way that is operationally inadvisable and you know it and so does he.

“Minho,” you say.

“I’m aware,” he says. “I’m not — I’m not doing anything with it. I just think we should name it so it doesn’t become a variable we’re not accounting for.”

This is such a him thing to say. Name the variable. Account for it. Don’t let it run loose in the margins.

“fine,” you say. “it’s a variable.”

“yes.”

“It doesn’t affect the mission.”

“no,” he says. “but it’s there.”

“it’s there,” you agree.

And then you both go back to the files and the kitchen stays quiet and neither of you does anything about the variable, because you are both, above everything else, professionals.

But it’s there. You both know it. And somehow that’s enough for right now.

The gala is beautiful in the way that things built for the purposes of concealment often are — every surface worth looking at, every detail designed to direct the eye away from whatever’s actually happening underneath.

You understand this. You’ve been doing the same thing for eleven days.

You arrive as the Leins. That’s the legend’s surname — you’d found it mildly annoying when you first read it in the packet and you’ve never said so. Minho, you suspect, feels the same. He’d also never said so.

The room is large, high ceilinged, full of people doing what people do at these events — performing their own legend, everyone with a version of themselves calibrated for the occasion. You move through it well. You always have, both of you, and together you’re better at it than either of you alone, which is something you’d have resisted admitting three weeks ago and which is now simply true.

Selim is at the far end of the room. He sees you and raises his glass, which means you’ve cleared his vetting process, which means the last eleven days worked.

“there,” Minho says quietly.

“I see him.” You’re watching the room, not Selim specifically — the contact will come to Selim, not the other way around. “The contact arrives within the first hour. Yoon’s brief said Selim doesn’t like to wait.”

“Northeast corner,” Minho says. “The man in the grey jacket. He’s been watching the entrance.”

You find him. Clock him. “He’s not the contact.”

“No, he’s the advance. Contact comes after the advance confirms the room.”

“Ten minutes,” you say.

“Eight,” Minho says.

You don’t argue. Minor point.

It’s seven minutes.

The contact is a woman, which you’d both flagged as a possibility in your respective assessments and which Yoon’s briefing had listed as unlikely. She moves to Selim smoothly, the greeting warm enough to read as social, and you reposition without discussing it — you drift right, Minho drifts left, covering angles.

This is the part you’re good at. Not just the social performance, though you’re good at that too. The spatial awareness, the way you read a room’s geometry and slot into it, covering angles without referencing each other because you don’t need to. You’ve done this in other configurations, other teams, other ops, and it’s never felt quite like this — the particular fluency of two people thinking the same way.

You get the contact’s name from a greeting exchange close enough to catch. Minho gets her associate’s name from the man she arrived with. You don’t compare notes because you don’t need to — you’re both noting everything and you’ll debrief in the car.

Selim drifts toward you thirty minutes later, warm, relaxed, the ease of a man who thinks he’s read the room correctly.

“the Leins,” he says, and that small possessive — already abbreviated to a group noun — means you’ve been accepted.

Minho puts his hand at your waist and it’s the cover, entirely the cover, and you lean into it the minimal degree that reads as habitual, that reads as four years, and you feel rather than see the slight shift in how he holds himself — the precise millimeter adjustment that looks like ease but isn’t, that looks like unconscious comfort but is something slightly more deliberate and slightly less calculated than either of those things.

The conversation with Selim runs twenty minutes. You gather what Yoon needs. It’s enough.

The car again.

You give Yoon’s team the verbal summary over comms — names, logistics, confirmation of the handoff timeline. Six minutes. When you’re done Minho drops the earpiece into his jacket pocket and the silence is different from mission silence. It’s the silence that comes after.

“good,” he says.

“Yes.”

“The contact’s name checks against a flag in the German database. Yoon will have it.”

“I know. I flagged it while you were getting the associate’s ID.”

He nods. You watch the city again. You’ve watched this city go past so many times in this car that you know the route back in your bones.

“After the debrief,” Minho says.

You glance over.

“We’ll be reassigned. Separately, probably.” He’s looking out his window. “Yoon said the joint unit was specific to Meridian.”

“I know.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I wanted to name that one too,” he says. “so it’s not—” He pauses, which is unusual for him, Minho who is always precise with language. “so it’s not a variable we’re not accounting for.”

You look at him. The streetlights move across his face and you’ve spent eleven days learning the architecture of his expressions, the small tells, the places where the control doesn’t quite reach.

“That’s a different kind of variable,” you say.

“yes,” he says. “I know.”

“Minho.”

“I’m not—” He stops again. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just being accurate.”

“You’re always being accurate.”

“it’s a failing,” he says, and there it is — the thing underneath the precision, a small dry humor that surfaces when his guard is at low tide, that you’ve come to catalog the way you catalog everything — carefully, and with more attention than you intended to give it.

“It’s not a failing,” you say.

He looks over.

“It’s annoying,” you say. “but it’s not a failing.”

Something changes in his face. Not much. Enough.

“after the debrief,” he says again.

“after the debrief,” you agree.

The car keeps moving. The city keeps going past. You don’t do anything about the variable because you are almost back to the apartment and the debrief is tomorrow and there are procedures to follow, reports to file, a mission to close properly.

But after the debrief.

You’re both accounting for it.

and somewhere in the space between cover and collapse, the line disappears — not with a dramatic crossing but with the quiet, certain recognition that two people who think in the same sharp register have, without meaning to, started thinking of each othher.

© softasapril — 2O26