Summary: Aside from being an assassin well versed in explosives, Taehyung lives an unassuming life. Until he meets Jimin, the shy new neighbour.

Warning: blood, needles, major character death

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Being an assassin is really quite tedious.

His body is constantly in pain, from all the bruises and wounds that never have time to heal. His apartment, unassuming and tucked away in an old rickety building, is a perpetual disaster - equipment covering every surface, guns stashed under the bed haphazardly in a box, and dirty laundry that smells of explosives and ferrous blood.

Well, truth be told, Taehyung is ok with the last bit about the smell of the explosives. It is his forte after all, what he's known in the industry - Orpheus, the newcomer who always ends a job with a bang. Sometimes, it happens to be entire city blocks.

What Taehyung can't get used to, is the loneliness.

He craves the human interaction sometimes, yearns for it. Even the silly small talks would do, when he's tired to the bone, and trying to cover up all the wounds from the prying eyes of the world. Just to be held in the warm gaze of another, a small moment in time where he feels heard, remembered.

And that's how he ended up chatting with the shy neighbor that moved into his building.

Full lips, bright eyes that crinkle into pretty crescents when he smiles. And Jimin smiles a lot. Sometimes his dainty hand would reach up to cover his curled up lips, and Taehyung would feel a little dazzled and catch himself staring.

They talk from time to time, standing in the dark hallway, Taehyung leaning next to the always out-of-service elevator, listening to Jimin go about little details of his day - his calico cat Danae, the new succulent plant by his window sill, sappy Christmas movies instead of a night out.

Sometimes, when he's waiting for hours for the target to arrive on location, and bored out of his mind, Taehyung toys with the idea of maybe asking Jimin out one of these days.

Until one day, he gets a text from Namjoon, his best source of work intel:
-this Jimin dude in your building, how much do u know about him?

Taehyung frowns and texts back:
-the shy one w the cat?

Namjoon's response makes him do a double take:
-yeah. Don't get complacent, u know better.

Taehyung bites his lips, hands pausing on the wires and control board he's working on, before reading Namjoon's next text:
-I think he's Icarus

Next time Taehyung sees Jimin, he asks him to go for coffee. Jimin averts his gaze, and just when Taehyung thinks he's being rejected, he hears his voice, quiet but tinged with innocent sweetness, "not a fan of bitter drinks, but maybe - if you don't mind, there's a bubble tea place close by?"

Two hours later, as Taehyung watches Jimin giggling over his childhood memories in Daegu, he's certain the infallible Namjoon has finally made a mistake. This pretty and sweet thing? With the soft ruffled hair and the cutest little giggle that sounds like a chiming golden bell? Icarus?

Taehyung has heard of Icarus. Everyone has, in the industry, although nobody has ever lived to tell what he might even look like. This is an entirely different type of assassin, someone people whisper about, the stuff of myths and lores in their line of work. The only thing known, is his penchant for poison. Needles, syringes, pills, open cuts seeped in chemicals - the autopsy reports of his targets always read like some biochemical textbook, mind boggling in the skills, but always with the signature style of creative elegance.

This morbid myth of a person that probably doesn't even exist, there's no way it's Jimin. Taehyung pushes Namjoon's warning aside, ignores it.

Until he bumps into Jimin on site one day, working.

The target is a corrupt politician, swindling millions of dollars and bankrupting entire towns. And too many insidious personal sins to count, Taehyung got bored of reading the thick file after the first pages. By the time Taehyung tracks the target down, he realizes another assassin has already relocated the target to an abandoned warehouse. Taehyung keeps at a distance and observed, breath hitching when he recognizes the familiar glint of sweetness in the masked figure's eyes. Jimin is in no rush, death was certain but it seems he wants to play, to stretch out the pain and agony and give the target what he deserved, before granting him the serenity of death. Slowly he tortures the target with different drugs and poisons, smiling nonchalantly as the target goes from crying out of pain to hallucinating to begging to be killed, a useless plaything completely under his control. Taehyung slips away quietly, hands shaking and in disbelief that he gets to witness something nobody has ever lived to tell.

That night, Taehyung starts having dreams about Jimin. The sweet and shy Jimin with an innocent smile and a tinge of sinister gleaming in his eyes, writhing under him and begging, as flames lick around them like crackling bonfire on a summer night. And the feeling of needles puncturing through his vein, the drugs making Taehyung blissfully numb, killing all the sensations saved for one - the longing to devour Jimin, to claim him whole and decimate both of them until only ashes remain.

Taehyung continues to see Jimin, feeling himself drawn towards him hopelessly, despite the fear looming on the back of his mind. They go to the old movie theater nearby sometimes, losing themselves in old films amidst an empty theater. Jimin cooks for him at his place, simple pasta dishes with bright red sauces topped with shreds of fragrant green herbs. Jimin's apartment is disarmingly gentle, filled with soft watercolour paintings and lush plants. As Danae purrs by his feet, Taehyung finds himself lost in Jimin's fond gaze and low adoring voice. He starts to have dreams about Jimin more and more, the dreams becoming more vivid as time passes, more morbid, sex amidst death and exquisite pain.

Their little illusion would've lasted longer, if Taehyung doesn't stumble home bleeding to death one day, during the darkest hour of the night, right before dawn breaks. It was his fault really, getting careless and distracted at a job right in the city. The gun shots are not fatal, and he should've called Namjoon and arranged for a hideout for a few days to recuperate. But inexplicably, Taehyung finds himself stumbling home, pausing at Jimin's door and lingering. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Taehyung hears Danae meowing on the other side of the door, and the creak of the door opening. His mind succumbs to the darkness as a sigh is breathed into the air.

Taehyung wakes up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, all bandaged up and disoriented. As he pushes himself up with one hand, he sees Jimin facing away from him, head dipped low and focused on a desk filled with bottles and open books. When Jimin turns around to face him, his lips curl into a smile, "hi, sleepyhead, or should I call you Orpheus..."

Between cups of mint tea for both of them, with his body curled next to Taehyung in bed and head resting gingerly on his shoulder, Jimin tells him everything.

The truth is, Jimin did a quick background check on Taehyung right after the first time they met. It started as a plaything, as Jimin confesses sheepishly, fun to try out subtle hypnotizing techniques (cryptic notes, flashing of similar images, sounds and patterns). Then the new drugs he's been tampering with, nothing severe of course. Taehyung gulps as he listens, feeling a chill creeping up his spine.

"Why? Why didn't you just kill me or something?"

Jimin exhales slowly and answers, "don't be silly, death is such a bore, you're much more. It's nice to feel something for once, didn't think I had it in me anymore, really."

He explains slowly, voice taking on a trance like quality. People always beg for their lives once they know they are under his control, the thrill has been long gone. No, he wants to test out something different this time. He wants to play with other emotions, the sweeter and more gentle kind. Jimin didn't believe in romance. It's a mirage, a fairytale, something people teach the weak to make them behave. But as he watches Taehyung fall deeper into his little experiment, and slowly loses his mind and would just stare at him with fondness and desperate yearning, Jimin can't help but marvel at the beauty that is love.

He becomes fascinated, obsessed. However fleeting or impermanent this love is, however drug infused and deranged they both feel, maybe, just maybe, he can allow himself to feel it a little too. Love is nothing but just another poison, a poison of the mind and the heart. And Jimin is an expert in poison after all.

Taehyung is a bit stunned, "was that a confession of love, or a death sentence? I honestly can't tell-"

His words are cut off by Jimin's soft lips meeting his. And slowly, as he sinks into the desire and drowns himself in those pretty brown eyes, Taehyung makes peace with what's he's always known deep down inside. Jimin wanted him to see everything that day when he worked on the target, has always opened up to him, in his own strange ways. They were both in this messed up thing together long before they realized. And strangely, Taehyung finally feels like he's at the right place in life.

From that day on, they are never apart from each other for long. They live like normal people when there's no job, buying grocery and making dinner together, under the ember kitchen light that casts the two of them in a warm little cocoon. Sometimes they would play Taehyung's favourite video games together, Jimin whining and cussing at how terrible he is with the controllers. When the weather's nice, they go for long walks in the park, arms looped together, hands clasped and tucked into Taehyung's jacket pocket. Taehyung loves working as a team on jobs, marvelling at his brilliant mind as he lays out every detail of the plan effortlessly.

It finally dawns on Taehyung one day, as he watches Jimin's peaceful profile in sleep, that the love he feels now also comes with a liberating sense of serenity. Death never meant anything to him before, maybe that's a requirement for their line of work, to feel numb towards that moment of extinction. But he finally understands, that the same numbness has also taken all the edges off living. He's been existing in a daze until he met Jimin, and now that they both feel so blissfully alive, there's no way he's going back to that state of haziness and limbo.

But living is never quite easy, as much as they try to dwell in the bliss and forget about the world. Slowly, old rivalries find them, new clients pitch the two of them against each other. And Taehyung grows to hate it all, how his body is wearing out from defending themselves, while his mind struggles hard to keep distrust and doubt at bay. He can see his thoughts reflected in Jimin's eyes - they chose their fates when they decided to become hired killers, people like them are not meant to live forever. The wax wings will melt one day, and love will be shattered in the dark abyss with one last glance.

If not living, then death.

So they sign up together for one last impossible target - a military head hidden deep within an old Siberian soviet base. The actual job is doable - as they descend from air, soldiers fall like dominos amidst a chain of explosives going off. By the time they finally make way to the hideout inside the base, it takes Jimin less than 15 minutes to drug the military leader and have him spew out all the information the client is looking for. But the trick of the job lies not in the target - vmin knew before entering that there's a secondary safety system within the base that would've been triggered the moment they breached. An automated system set up remotely to blast through the whole base and bury all the secrets it holds. This has always been a job with no way out.

They collapse onto the floor together, sweat mixed with blood, eyes gazing towards each other with relief.

"How much time we got?" Jimin asks, hands reaching into his backpack.

Taehyung clicks his tongue and listens to the rumbling slowly rolling towards them from the distance, "hmm, two, maybe three minutes."
Jimin's hands move swiftly, lining up the syringes with the premixed concoctions. As he reaches for Taehyung's arm, a fond little smile blooms on his lips, "just the two of us now, love."

The puncture through the skin comes as a relief, Taehyung feels his shoulders slump instantaneously. The corpses in the room, the mix of gunpowder and death in the chilly air, it all fizzles away along with the rest of the world, as they lie on the floor, deep inside each other's embrace. The concoction Jimin has injected courses through his veins, a brilliant mix of sedatives and hallucinogens. "My best creation, love," Jimin's words from a month ago reverberate on his mind, "your mind will be in a suspended state, all other sensations silenced, and those last few seconds of existence will feel like eternity. Elysium, I call it."

When their lips meet, Taehyung sees the sparks of explosions all around them, and hears the deafening blasts that remind him of fireworks in the summer as a kid. He melts under the kiss, as their thoughts blend into one and stretch into infinity.

A little paradise, just for the two of them. Their Elysium.

FIN