Hoseok had always been greedy.
He remembered dimly-lit wooden plank halls, small rusty boats cranking their way down the overflowed metro tracks. He remembered confined training spaces, paint peeling off the concrete walls, lockers chewed through by termites. He remembered crowding with his gang around a campfire, their only source of warmth in the damp, dingy underground, using icy steel frames as makeshift bunk beds, sleeping curled on one side with his head on an arm because there were no pillows, eyes falling shut to the sound of a softly strummed guitar.
He wondered if Raziel still played the guitar. Maybe, maybe not. He wouldn’t know. Gone were the good old days when the gang had nothing but each other, greedy, greedy, ever so greedy. With everything they obtained, they wanted more.
It was never enough.
The gang was rich now, but Serpent had replaced Hoseok as Raziel’s second-in-command. The new team seemed to be functioning just fine with the new arrangement. Perhaps they were no longer greedy.
But Hoseok remembered what it was like to have nothing and want everything. He never stopped feeling restless. Whenever he tried to calm himself down, it felt like his skin was crawling with ants, chanting that he didn’t have enough, didn’t do enough, couldn’t be enough, that he needed more,more more more.
The final race was coming soon, and no matter how well their little makeshift team performed, they wouldn’t be enough, compared to who they would be coming up against. Raziel's team. They were skilled, merciless. They had connections with everyone. Hoseok had only his team of seven. It was them against the whole world.
It was wishful thinking that they would be leaving the final race unscathed. There’d probably be casualties. And as Hoseok lay on the living room bed, flanked by Jungkook and Yoongi at either side, inhaling the rich smell of breakfast wafting over from the kitchen, he wished he had more time.
He wished he had more time to take Jungkook to meet the kids at the orphanage. The youngest had pleaded with him countless times to bring him along—he had six little brothers and sisters whom he dearly missed, and Hoseok knew that the orphans would adore the bunny-eyed boy.
He wished he had more time to talk to Taehyung, to figure out whether he was still to some degree hypnotized. He didn’t seem to be—surely the effects would have already expired—but it never hurt to check. It was Raziel who did this, after all, and Hoseok could never be sure with Raziel. He hadn’t even known his former best friend had such abilities—he had thought mind manipulation was a skill that only Serpent was capable of.
He wished he had more time to ask Jimin exactly why they had seen him hanging out with Jin’s dad that day. Namjoon had mentioned to Hoseok that he heard Jin’s dad call Jimin his errand boy at the end of the third race. This was alarming. The only reason he hadn’t pushed further on the topic was that there were more pressing matters at hand, and that he trusted Jimin’s intentions, whatever they were. Hoseok knew that the sweet boy had only the group’s best interests in mind.
Still, he worried.
He wished he had more time to get to know Namjoon. They were family by now, Hoseok reckoned, but he rarely had the chance to talk to the younger in a friend-to-friend kind of way, and family and friends were two very different things. He wanted to get to know Namjoon better—after all, if everything miraculously worked out, Hoseok would be entrusting the heart of his best friend and favorite person to this guy from seventy-years ago. He needed to know Namjoon. He needed to know that Jin’s heart was safe with Namjoon.
