angels
⊷ 13
"This could be romantic if you didn't look at me like you wanted to kill me," Ji-yoon mumbled under her breath.
But Haechan wasn't in the mood. Not when Chenle got called to an important last-minute meeting and then left Haechan and Ji-yoon somewhere on the side of the road.
No, he didn't feel like making this romantic.
Help was on the way, however, ready to break up the tense atmosphere. Help in the form of a phone call.
Ji-yoon took her phone out of her bag. As it was buzzing in her hand, she scanned the name of the caller. It was that name that made her furrow her brows.
Haechan noticed her confusion, which was why he took a quick glimpse at her phone before she put it up to her ear.
A heart.
The name was just a single heart.
"Yeah?" she asked, eyes on the ground as she listened closely. She hummed, nodded along and at the very end parted her lips in surprise. She shook her head. "Are you sure?"
Her curiosity, concern and bewilderment were all genuine. They pulled neatly through the tone of her voice. He couldn't spot an ounce of insincerity.
It was odd though. She sounded like she always did, just with different emotions pulling at the highs and lows of her words, shortening and lengthening them.
Listening to her like this... why was he so sure that her bubbly, flirty persona was fake?
"But who authorized that?" she urged.
Immerged in the conversation, she didn't keep much attention to where she was going. Though she was placing one put in front of the other, she was moving in what was far from a straight line.
Seeing how to her right was a highly frequented road, Haechan quickly put his hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her to the sight, switching places with her.
She didn't seem to notice it, making him wonder what was so important.
"Now?" she asked in surprise. "Can I bring Haechan?"
She didn't even look at him though so Haechan tapped her shoulder in surprise. He pointed at himself and mouthed a wondering 'me?' at which she just nodded.
"Who told you that?" she asked with an awkward laugh. "No, don't worry. Everyone in Dream is really nice to me."
Haechan wasn't sure whether she was lying or not. It sounded genuine but he couldn't really tell.
He watched as she held her phone against her ear and used her free arm to call for a taxi.
And soon enough, they got a ride.
"Tell me where," she ordered as she opened the car door. She quickly grabbed Haechan's hand and pulled him into the taxi with her. Not questioning it, he went along and closed the car door.
With her phone hovering over her chest, she leaned closer to the driver.
"Café 7 on Czennies Street, please."
And the woman started driving.
"Okay, we will be there in ten minutes," she told heart. "Wait for us."
That was the last thing she said before she hung up.
Ji-yoon let her hand with her phone in it drop into her lap, while she had her eyes seemingly glued to the back of the driver's seat.
She took a deep breath, ran a hand through her hair. She pressed her head against the headrest and mumbled,
"I missed something."
She sounded upset. Haechan didn't know what she was talking about but he could tell it was something she blamed herself for.
"What's going on?" he asked eventually. His voice, though gentle and rich in concern, pierced sharply through the silence in the vehicle.
Turning her head in a rush, she quickly locked eyes with the boy.
"Whom are we meeting?" he asked further.
"A friend," she replied drily.
"A friend of yours or mine?"
She hummed thoughtfully. "Well, I guess technically he isn't my friend?" she wondered to herself before saying, "Of yours."
"Then who is it?" Haechan pushed.
She gasped, put her hand on her chest dramatically. "And ruin the surprise?" she asked, appalled.
However, right afterwards she dropped the act and leaned her head against the headrest again. She looked out of the window and just said,
"You will see in ten minutes anyway."
Although willing to protest, he knew it wouldn't get him very far considering how stubborn she proved herself to be. So he leaned back too and allowed the car ride to continue in silence.
"You can drop us off here, sir," Ji-yoon said quickly and gave him the money.
When Haechan got out of the car, he stopped almost right away. He looked around. He had never been here before yet he had heard a lot about the area and about Café 7 too.
It was a posh neighbourhood, high security, homogeneous residential population.
What was it again?
Right. One of his friends has lived here for a while.
But who--?
He didn't get to think about it much longer since Ji-yoon soon grabbed the boy's hand once again and pulled him with her.
"This way," she said in a hurry as she dragged him across the street with her, where the pedestrian lights were about to jump back to a warning red.
Once they were on the other side, her tight grip loosened and she let his hand slip past the grasp of her fingers.
She didn't even seem to care about that. About how warm her hands were. About how cold his palms felt when they were gone.
On one of the tables in front of a very cosy looking coffee shop sat an indeed familiar looking face.
"Jungwoo?" Haechan asked mindlessly, which made the boy look at them.
He got up, pulled Ji-yoon in for a hug without giving it a second thought.
"I'm glad you two made it."
"You sounded upset," Ji-yoon mumbled in return before she pushed herself away from the boy and sat down opposite him. She patted the chair to her right for Haechan to sit down on, which he did without question.
As the only one not up to date with what was happening, Haechan looked back and forth between the two.
"So? What's going on?" he asked and Jungwoo was quick to react.
"Right. So I called the coroner earlier to ask about the results. I know that it can take weeks to finish an autopsy but I call regularly in case he has any news."
This was already enough to see just how upset Jungwoo was.
He was a capable prosecutor, one of the best the country had. He always worked diligently and fast, never doing anything half-heartedly.
Once he worked on a case, he gave it his all. It was his case. His leads.
His responsibility.
So he couldn't just accept others interfering with his work.
"But when I called today he told me that they were gone."
Ji-yoon clenched her jaw. When Haechan saw this he was reminded once again of what they were talking about - the deceased were her former co-workers, after all.
"What do you mean 'gone'?" Haechan questioned.
At his question, Ji-yoon leaned closer to Jungwoo. She stemmed her elbows into the table and looked around nervously at first before asking a very uncertain,
"Do you think that zombies--"
But Jungwoo flicked his finger on her forehead. She rubbed the place with a pout.
"Could you focus?" Jungwoo pleaded. And while he seemed unimpressed by it, Haechan was surprised.
She was joking. It didn't make much sense to him at first. She disliked this situation at least as much as Jungwoo did, so why joke now?
Only when he noticed how Jungwoo relaxed a bit and how Ji-yoon smiled in return, he understood that she didn't do it for her own sake.
She just tried to lift his mood.
She smiled sheepishly. "Sorry."
They seemed pretty close.
"Then, what happened?" Haechan asked.
"The families requested that no autopsy shall be conducted. They cremated the bodies," Jungwoo said. He laughed, threw his hands in the air helplessly. "But these are homicide cases so I have the right to demand an autopsy."
Haechan frowned. "Didn't you do it?"
"Of course I did!" he said, upset that Haechan would even see the necessity to ask about it. "Someone keeps intervening."
There was no need to ask this time though because the answer already sat on the tip of Jungwoo's tongue who tried not to get upset.
But how could he not? When he was working so hard only for someone to mess it up?
"The chief prosecutor," he said under his breath.
Ji-yoon frowned. "He again?" She looked down at the table, slowly shook her head. "But I talked to him before. He is a decent guy."
"Apparently not," Jungwoo said.
"No," she denied it. "Something's not adding up. I kept an eye on him, all his other decisions-"
"Joon," Jungwoo called her.
Hearing her nickname yet again surprised Haechan. She said that, technically, the two weren't friends yet he called her in a way only Taemin and Shotaro had called her before.
People she considered family.
"Why are you defending him?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be angry?"
How could she be angry though if Jungwoo was? How could she add to it?
So she smiled when she said, "I want to be." Her grin grew. "But how can I be angry when I am sitting here, seeing your cute face?" she asked jokingly.
Jungwoo sat still for a second. Expression blank at first, he soon put a hand over his mouth and gagged.
He hit his chest carefully. "Sorry, that was my breakfast," he muttered, then got up. "How do you even come up with such cheesy things?"
He mumbled that as he got up and excused himself to the bathroom.
And when he was gone, her grin dropped immediately. She let herself fall back into her chair as she sighed.
"Are they fine?" she mumbled.
Haechan looked her up and down. He didn't quite get what she was talking about. Then again, she seemed stuck in her own world anyway.
"Who?"
She turned her head to look at him, yet her eyes got stuck on the cars that rushed by on the busy road next to them. She hummed before looking at him and saying,
"The families. The chief prosecutor can ignore Jungwoo's requests if he justifies it. A valid justification would be respecting the family's wishes." She sat up straight, leaned closer to Haechan as she wondered, "Do you think they threatened the families?"
But, of course, Haechan had no answer and so Ji-yoon sat back down and looked back at the road.
"We should check in on them. Just to make sure, you know?"
He wasn't asking Haechan, actually. She was just talking to herself and he happened to be around.
Her sincere concern surprised him. It genuinely threw him off.
Since her eyes and thoughts were somewhere else, Haechan took the opportunity to let his gaze linger on her a bit.
He hadn't taken the time to get a close look at her yet.
Her cheeks were a little puffy from the air she blew into her mouth in frustration. Her lips were a deep pink on the inside, slowly fading into a lighter one as it reached the corners. Her brown hair flowed down her shoulders in perfect waves. And her eyes-
Her deep brown eyes were wide and terrified. The little dots of light that shimmered in them suddenly seemed dark and lifeless.
The day hadn't been kind to them.
But why did it get even worse?
Haechan heard it a little too late - the tires. Tires that were screeching loudly at how forcefully the driver stepped on the gas pedal.
Ji-yoon shot up from her chair. As she took a last, hasty breath, there was not enough time left to even call out his name before she used all her strength to pull him out of his chair and push him as far away as she could.
And the little time that was left for her to get out of the way before the car crashed into the table and chairs, dragged them into the café through its windows, was barely enough.
All around them was shattered glass, spread like glitter. It looked pretty almost if it weren't for the panicked screams and smoking engine.
Panicked screams and smoking engine and blood that spread over the ground and caused the bright white glitter to turn a vibrant crimson.
Tires ⊶
✨glitter✨