Hearts Awakened, Live Alive

Epilogue: San

"Guys like us? We have to look out for each other because no one else will."

San clearly remembered the night he had first met Wooyoung. It felt like only yesterday whenever the memory came to mind. He always had to stop and think about it, however, when he realized it'd actually been a whole two years. Crazy how time flew.

San had always been a bit cynical about life—he had a reason to be with an absentee father, his mother forced to work for Agony to pay the bills, and his grandmother sick with a terminal illness perpetually in a hospital room. He would put on a happy face and pretend he didn't have a care in the world for his customers, but before ATEEZ, he'd been a horribly bitter person on the inside. He didn't believe in silly, childish notions like miracles or love at first sight, but the first time he met Wooyoung... well, it might've just turned him into a believer. He didn't want to call it "love at first sight" even years later; it just sounded too fake, too cliché, but he honestly didn't know if there was anything else that could describe what had happened practically the second their eyes had met across that dingy bar over two years ago.

It had been raining that night—though that was nothing new, it rained practically every day—but that night had seen a particularly nasty thunderstorm. Work was always slow on nights like those and whatever clientele he did get were always bottom of the barrel. He was at his usual table in the back of the bar he frequented the most. He hadn't been approached for over two hours and no one had even looked in his direction for thirty minutes; a very slow night for him. Just as he was about to call it a night and go home empty-handed, that's when he entered the bar.

San hadn't thought much of him at first. The man was incredibly handsome, that much he could tell from across the room, but nothing else stood out about him. San hadn't seen him around before, but the man carried himself like he owned the place, dressed in trashy clothes and thick eyeliner smudged under smoky eyes. If San didn't know any better, he'd have thought the guy was another prostitute just like him. But he did now better, and by the looks of him, the guy was without a doubt some fresh-faced info-dealer. San didn't know who for but as long as he didn't bother him, San couldn't have cared less, Agony or otherwise.

San had only given him a passing glance before taking a long sip of his drink and busying himself with his phone once more. A few minutes later, however, he had felt eyes on him. He'd been at this business for so long, he knew what it felt like to be stared at by now. When he looked up from his phone, his eyes met the newcomer's smoky eyes, but San had a feeling he wasn't being stared at because the other thought he was attractive.

He had been right, too, because moments later Wooyoung had approached him and introduced himself as "Treasure". San hadn't heard that name before; it didn't belong to any organization he recognized anyway, but San hadn't been interested in finding out at the time regardless.

"Treasure" had been looking for info on one of San's clients, one of his high paying regulars. San had been through this song and dance before, however. He knew some of the men and women he slept with were horrible people and he had lots of valuable information on them. But that's also why they paid him a lot of money: to buy his silence, his loyalty, his compliance. And regardless, even if he wanted to turn around and rat all those people out if any of them caught wind that he had snitched, his life was forfeit and some poor detective would have to fish his body out of the river if he was even lucky enough to be found at all. He was a whore, nothing more. His life meant nothing to his clients.

Info-dealers would always try with him regardless. They'd flirt, they'd be friendly, offer protective and large sums of money and Wooyoung had been no different. The man was a charmer, San could give him that but there wasn't a compliment left that San hadn't heard before from a million different people. Some info-dealers would turn violent or threaten to turn him in when they realized they would get no information from him to his surprise, Wooyoung never did.