El liked to play games. It was a statement that would make most around him laugh. He did a good job cultivating this aggressive and harsh personality at Abscess. Even Bee started to believe that he enjoyed it here. He didn't, though. He wasn't sure he ever would.

Abscess was cold and white, and somewhere that El never really thought he'd thrive. He was right. Sitting next to Kay at a large conference table, the wall across from them covered in blueprints and post-it notes, El was sure that he'd never expected this would be his life.

"It has the potential to be very simple," Kay said. She wore a black pair of sweatpants and a skin-tight black shirt; her hair was loose, the first time El had seen her like this. There were dark bags under her eyes, and El was sure she hadn't slept since their last mission together, three days ago.

El eyed her and, with his perfectly trained transatlantic accent, said, "But we prepare for failure."

She sighed. It was true, and she knew it. Their last mission was supposed to go so simply, and it definitely had not. It had been a mess from beginning to end. Their target still ended up dead, but not without trying her best to stay alive.

He rolled his shoulders and stood up, wanting to look at the information they had from another angle. "This mission is just the two of us. We can't be the ones to mess it up."

Kay nodded, she stood too, her shoulders tensed, and her breathing slowed. "It is an important job, but it's not something with insanely high stakes."

El stared. "We are infiltrating an underground auction and purchasing a virus. What part of that is not high stakes?"

"It's not high stakes," Kay said. "Because there is almost no way we die. I am posing as the buyer, you are my bodyguard, together we purchase the virus and leave. The whole infiltrating part is already done for us. We've been put on the list, or at least our aliases have, so all we have to do is show up."

"Then why are we memorising the floor plan?" El asked, the frown on his face not one that he would choose to display had he any choice in the matter.

"For emergency extraction."

El sighed. It really looked like Kay needed a break. "I'm going to get us coffee. We've been up long enough that we need it at this point." Kay nodded in response and sat back down, going back to tapping on her Abscess-issued laptop. Whatever she was focused on, it probably wasn't this mission and might have to do with how their last mission together went down.

He sighed again, grumpy people sighed a lot, so El took that as a sign that he could sigh all he wanted. It was part of who he was here. He left the room, closing the door to the conference room with no windows, and walking down the hall. He ended up in the kitchen where a pot of coffee sat on the counter as it always did, usually one of the newer recruits was on coffee duty, keeping the pot full for senior members such as El or Kay.

Pouring his coffee, as well as an extra black coffee for Kay, El dug around in the fridge for caramel and chocolate sauces. If he was going to drink coffee, it was going to taste good.

By the time El returned to the conference room, Kay was pacing in front of their blueprint wall.

"Here," El said, handing her the drink in his hand.

She took a sip of it and smiled, but only for a second. Kay wasn't someone who enjoyed sharing any part of her feelings with others. El could see it plain as day.

Kay exhaled and then turned to El. "Aye wants me to tell you what happened on our last mission."

"Does it matter for this mission?"

Kay shrugged. Her hands were wound around the mug, it seemed almost as if she was nervous about something. But that didn't make sense, unless she was manipulating El in some way. Kay was never nervous, not in the seven years he's known her.

"Tell me," El said, sitting back down at the prep table, a notepad in front of him. He took a sip of his coffee, hoping the caffeine would do its job; apparently, he was really going to need it.

~

He liked his apartment. It was something that El had spent a really long time working on. Ever since he came to the US, this has been where he has lived. It was comfortable, it was warm, and there was nothing in the space that El didn't like. He lives in this place and he breathes it.

El sat on the slightly worn couch, his eyes trained on the notebook in front of him. He still had a hard time writing in English, so he'd copied everything from their board in Korean and sat on the couch, a sweater drowning his figure as he read. On the coffee table in front of him sat his mug of tea.

He exhaled. Kay had told him about the altercation she had with Jay, the old one, not the new one. He'd have to figure out a method of distinguishing them. Old-Jay and New-Jay? It wasn't like he interacted with New-Jay all that much.

He could just call them Male and Female Jay? Or perhaps Other-Jay and Jay.

El went back to paying attention to the notebook. He still had things to memorise and figure out. If this Jay person tried to stop or slow down their mission, then El had to account for it. He wasn't as serious as he pretended to be, but he still had to do his job; failure wasn't tolerated.

Anything but a perfect mission wasn't tolerated.

El knew that. So he put his mind back to his work. Back to the blueprints and the codes he'd need to memorise. The words that he'd need to put into his head and never forget.

He'd have to burn the book when he was done; it was still top secret intel. But he wasn't done memorising, so El would have to put it in the safe when he headed to bed that night.

If he ever did head to bed.