TARGET || HEEJAKE

12

"You've never told me about your family." Jake blurted unmindfully, while staring at the ceiling laying on his bed.

"I don't have much of a family..." Heeseung started.

"I'm sorry for-"

"No." Heeseung jolted in his seat and the chair scraped the floor while he turned to face Jake, "No. They aren't- dead. Not all of them."

He looked at Jake. Jake looked at him. They stared at each other for what felt like hours. Jake broke the gaze turning on his bed and waited for Heeseung to start. After a few seconds, Heeseung dropped his gaze to the floor and gulped, once.

"What about your aunt?" Jake prompted.

Heeseung looked into space and opened his mouth to speak, but closed it immediately. Then opened, and closed. Open. Close. Open. Sigh. Jake noticed him having to take little breathers, so he tried to ease it up. God, this was the most sympathetic he had ever felt for someone. He felt. Wrong, wrong, he should not feel. Not for Heeseung. He is a target.

"What's...her name?"

"Lee..." Heeseung, still staring at blankness, paused and thought. Then dropped his head slowly, "I don't remember."

Jake turned to him and his spine stiffened the slightest. "You don't...Are you close? You and your aunt?"

Heeseung shook his head, almost immediately, as if happy to know the correct answer to even a single question.

"When did you last see her?" The question came to him reflexively, but his voice was softer. No. No feeling sorry for someone else.

The other shook his head again, "Probably when I was... four or five?"

And yet, he mourned her. Jake theorized that Heeseung might have been happier while mourning his aunt, than after receiving the news of her being alive, again. And by some miraculous way that it had altered him, everything about it, about Heeseung, felt way normal. More normal. Normaler than if it had happened to him. But it couldn't, because he never had a family.

Now, it felt more difficult to start talking. The silence felt like the right choice, as staring at Heeseung did. Jake found out at that moment that he loved his hair. And his lashes maybe, from how thick they were. And his lips-

"I have a cat." Heeseung said.

Of all moments he could've opened his mouth, he chose this, and of all things he could've chosen to say, he picked his cat. It stirred Jake, but amused him too, but little did he acknowledge it. He helped lean on the headboard. It didn't take long for him to search for Heeseung's eyes, because they were resting right on his. He hated that he liked it, but masked it anyway.

"I call him Ddongsik. He's not too big yet, but he's very playful." Heeseung laughed, but it looked as if he had been holding it down his throat. "I haven't seen him since last semester."

Jake felt genuine hurt for him. He hadn't seen Layla for only a few days but the first thing he would do, what he had been doing, was to hug Layla once he finished this mission. Poor thing had to wait more than ever only to meet Jake only for a few days before he was put elsewhere.

"He could play with Layla. She's good at making friends." Jake cheered.

It brought up the mood and cut loose the tension Heeseung had been holding on to, and his face said it. "He'd like it too."

"Any siblings?" Jake folded his legs and sat attentively.

But, Heeseung dulled. The words pulled all of that colour, even if little, out of his face. Jake sensed what he had done wrong and recoiled internally. He had pulled at the wrong string. He gulped down shame which he shouldn't even have felt in the first place. Not all of them.