you left your shadow here ; yeonbin

3 - northern downpour

The tension as Yeonjun and Beomgyu prepared to head out was palpable,
leaving their skin a constellation of nerve endings and them biting their tongues instead of suggesting a change on plans. This wasn't like the errands they usually ran — planned through weeks and months before, each of them pinned on a vital role and familiar, bored so, with the course of action.

And the way the current methods didn't resemble their usual, well-known, desired approach mirrored in the way Taehyun fiddled with the loose ends of his plaster that covered a small cut that he had sustained while attempting to assist Beomgyu at cooking earlier that day as well as in the way Kai had been pacing room after room for the past hours.

Yeonjun could tell that they didn't like this, staying behind and waiting for Beomgyu and him to return, but he dropped any suggestion along the lines of "are you sure that you don't need any backup?", "we could at least step by and tell you whether someone's inside on night watch," or "let us please hide somewhere close by for emergencies" without further explanation after having gone through the execution and the reasons for every decision enough times.

Fitting two more people into a plan with unmeasurable variables raised the probability for wreckage, because the more unmeasurable the equation on one side the messier the outcome on the other.

Although the serene hours of the night tried to lull Yeonjun into a sense of odd habit and ease — the four of them only occasionally busied with the order of business usually sitting on the roof over a cup of coffee and switching between humoured banter and the filtered mischief of life — Yeonjun couldn't block out that the situation was throwing him off his usual cool. 

In no parallel universe did spontaneity rank as one of his strong qualities and the fact that they had gotten their theft on the grand academic library in motion during the wee hours of this very morning stirred a sense of stress and rush in his gut. That or the fourth cup of coffee of the day which sat forgotten on the dining table.

"We'll be back by midnight," Yeonjun assured as he stood in the doorframe and waited for Beomgyu to stash his gun into the inside of his jacket, his own pressing safely against ribs.

Beomgyu eyed the weapon for a moment, as though he was debating on leaving it there, but he picked it up eventually, and it was about the only situation Yeonjun had seen Beomgyu willingly handle hardware. He preferred silent weapons, if at all, although he knew his way around guns better than anyone Yeonjun knew — his experience a dark reminder of a past, Beomgyu unwilling to put his finger on the trigger and let the bullet raze what grass had grown over it as a matter of principle.

Within a matter of seconds, Beomgyu had stepped out of the door and was already way ahead of Yeonjun, leading the way and turning into quiet alleyways that posed a necessary detour so as to avoid the late evening's crush of people. Having lived in Taikallin all his life, Beomgyu knew the academy's campus better than Yeonjun, which was roughly the only reason Yeonjun had agreed to let Beomgyu shadow him at all.

Their blind ambition could spiral out of control too easily, and Yeonjun could only just grasp the strings of his own actions and get out, but not if he had to think beyond his own safety. In one way, he was doing this because the books really could make a difference: relieve them from the ache of feeling the magic course through their veins, help them understand why it was so misunderstood and buried, preventing ancient secrets from slipping into the wrong hands, and maybe even loosen them from the fear of their enemies closing in on them.

The other side of the coin was that Yeonjun was a little addicted to the adrenaline surging up within his veins, getting high off of the triumph of freedom, fearlessness, and the trophy, dealing with trial and error and one after another solving and sorting out the errors when coming up with a game plan.