Super

50. chin up

It was late afternoon when Baekhyun entered the room.

Dying sunlight filtered in through the drawn-curtains, casting a dark shadow across the floor of the small room. Taemin sat behind his desk, which was clean for once, all papers and heavy-duty files swiped off and lying in a tall column surrounding it, a few escaped pages littering the floor of the dusty little study.

"You're still here?" the blond asked, not even looking up. His elbows were propped up against the table, his head in his hands, tufts of hair sticking out from between his fingers.

Baekhyun picked his way carefully among the fallen papers, noticing that they weren't all patent forms or reports as he'd thought earlier. Many of them were torn newspaper sheets, old and new. He glanced over one of them, eyes skipping over the bold letters of the headline—Diner Broken Into By Mutants?

"Of course," he murmured quietly. Taemin looked hungover, but he knew that it wasn't an effect of alcohol. "You stuck with me through everything, and I have enough faith in you to stand behind you through all of this."

Taemin didn't speak, but he finally let go of his head and sat up. His eyes stayed on the table, dry and tired, hands clasped together in his lap. "How many do we still have?"

Baekhyun's lips pursed. "Taemin—"

"How many?" Taemin demanded, and Baekhyun slowly clenched his jaw.

"Ten and Mark," he answered, feeling the guilt behind those words as if he'd been the reason behind. "Taeyong, Kai, and Lucas—left. I have a location on them, but I'm not going to do anything, Taemin."

"Well, don't," the man said softly. "It's my fault."

Baekhyun's eyes softened. "It's not," he said honestly. "You just think it is. Taeyong was angry because of Shao; he didn't know what he was talking about. He didn't mean it."

"He did," Taemin said frankly. "Every word. You know he did."

Baekhyun refrained from speaking.

"You want to know, too, don't you?" Taemin asked, finally looking up at him, and Baekhyun wished he hadn't. The man's eyes looked empty, his skin pale and rigid as porcelain, as if it had been bled dry and his features had been made out of paper. "Why I hid it. Knowing Irene, helping her with Sybil, all of it."

"You don't have to tell me."

"No." Taemin shook his head, shifting in his seat so he was sitting upright, eyes turned away from him to the desk again. "No. I owe it to you."

"You don't—"

"We were friends," Taemin said, interrupting him so cleanly it was as if he hadn't even heard him in the first place. "It was just a partnership at first, rich girl and street boy using each other's resources and knowledge to build something together, but it turned into more than that. I cared for her, Baekhyun, and as incriminating as it might sound, I still do. You don't know what she was like back then, before her parents' death, but I do. I remember the girl from ten years ago—smart, kind, helpful. She helped me, too."

Baekhyun suddenly felt like he had opened a door to a secret room, one he wasn't supposed to enter. Taemin's tone was calm, but the words—they way he looked when he spoke them, they sounded intimate. "Taemin, I don't—"

"We used to dream aloud to each other," Taemin continued, pressing on whenever Baekhyun tried to interrupt. "The way kids do—for years, all we had was each other. We wanted a better world, an equal world." He sounded miserable, almost broken. "A world where no one held power over another, in any form—wealth, background, superpower."