"Holy shit, I think we did it?" LC breathed. "Did I just help tell off an honest to god real life fed?!" His chat must have been going crazy, because he was staring blankly off into his eyescreen, past all of us.
"You're the man, LC!" Some random person cheered.
I didn't feel like celebrating. I turned away. Taejun's words echoed hollowly. You always run when you're overwhelmed.
I'm constantly overwhelmed.
The fact that this hurt was entirely my own doing didn't sit well with me either.
Someone caught me by the arm. I winced. It was still sore from Taejun's twisting. "Jae, where are you going?" It was Eunsoo.
"Away," I said hollowly. "Anywhere. I don't know."
Ryusuke was watching me with a surprisingly sad expression. I realized that this is what he had meant earlier when he expressed his concern that Taejun and I would fight. A hundred pounds of guilt seemed to crash down on me. It seemed that I was always the only one blind to all the consequences of my actions. I always acted first, never thinking ahead.
Seol-hee, who never knew how to read the room, bounced up to me. "Heol! That was your brother? He's so-"
"Shut the hell up, Seol-hee," Eunsoo interrupted, before she could finish. He looked at me quickly. But my blood was already boiling.
LC's drone buzzed into my face. "We've got to get a comment from Jester himself, seeing how he's the star in all this. Jester, what was the last thing you said to that fed that made him go away?"
This time, the sensors of the drone weren't fast enough to avoid my hand, and I crushed it in my fist like an oversized mosquito.
"Yo! What are you doing?" LC sputtered.
"I'm done talking about this," I said. The tone of my voice made LC stagger back, even though he was surely upset that I had just destroyed his property. I walked back to my car.
Eunsoo slammed his hands on the hood of my Z as I was starting it up, giving me pause. I rolled the window down. He stuck his head in. "Seriously, dude, where are you even going?" he asked in exasperation, even though I should have been the one exasperated that he was smacking my car.
"I just want to go for a drive," I said woodenly.
"Where?!"
"Let me come with you," Ryusuke interjected, surprising us all. Before any of us could protest, he had climbed into the passenger seat of my Z.
I looked at him with a dead-eyed stare. I considered storming to the passenger side and dragging him out, GTA-style. Ryusuke seemed to sense my treacherous intentions and quickly buckled himself in. Eunsoo was still hanging in the frame of my window, now staring at Ryusuke open-mouthed.
"Please. Please for the love of God, don't do anything stupid while Ryu's in the car with you," he said finally.
"Well now I'm just going to go back to the garage," I growled unhappily. I revved my engine and Eunsoo flinched back. The gravel crunched underneath us as I urged the car forward.
"Seol-hee and I'll be right behind," he called to us.
Ryu and I were silent for the first part of the drive. I kept expecting him to start into a lecture, or at least rub it in my face with a 'I told you so', but he just kept looking out the window. I decided to step on the throttle a little to see his reaction.
There was none.
Finally, I was irritated and uncomfortable with his presence. "Why did you come with me?" I asked, none too nicely.
"I can see that you shouldn't be alone right now," he answered, still looking out the window.
"So you're babysitting me?"
"No. I just want to be here with you. As a friend."
For some reason that made my throat feel a little tight. I don't know what came over me but suddenly I just said, "I don't know what to do."
Maybe I never knew to begin with. I didn't know if I was talking about where we were going, my relationship with my brother, or the debt, or what I was doing with my life. I felt like a mouse in a maze that just kept crashing into one dead end after another.
"It's ok," Ryu said. "None of us do."
"Doesn't seem that way for my brother." I wished I could just be as resilient and determined as Taejun was. When he was my age, he was already well on his way to paving his path in life.
"I promise you, your hyung is just as lost as any of us."
I glanced over at him in disbelief, but Ryu was still serenely looking out the window.
"You don't know him," I insisted. "He's nothing like me. He's always been so fucking perfect."
"If he was so perfect," Ryu said quietly, "your relationship wouldn't be like this. You think you're the one making all the mistakes here. But your brother isn't perfect. He's made them too."
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but it stayed annoyingly stuck like a pill. "Like what," I managed to say.
"He shouldn't have walked away today."
"I told him to," I said.
"That doesn't mean he should have."
I didn't say anything. If only Ryu knew the last thing I had said to him. There was nothing he could have said or done after that last wound.
So I wasn't the only one who ran when overwhelmed.
But I would never know what could have happened if he stayed, because he hadn't.
Without Taejun, I felt so alone. We had grown up as allies in this oppressive world. My parents hadn't known how to raise me, or teach me how to survive in it. But Taejun had always known. Or at least pretended like he did well enough until it worked out. He had always been there for me, until one day, he wasn't.
Since he had been gone, I'd just stumbled into bad decision after bad decision, until I was drowning in a sea of problems I couldn't even begin to find the solutions for.
Even with Ryusuke sitting just a few feet away, I felt alone. My Nissan Z enclosed me like a bubble from the rest of the world who saw but didn't care about what was within. I remembered crying in an alley as a child. The utter, desolate loneliness from that time had never left me. It had grown with me, draping itself over my heart like armor. Its thick presence had always kept me a few inches apart from everyone else.
Not even Taejun had been able to reach me again.
"Do you feel alone without your family?" Ryu asked gently, as though he had read my thoughts. I swiped my sleeve roughly over my face and looked at him in alarm. He had finally turned from the window and was watching me.
I snapped my gaze back to the road, determined not to say anything else, even though my damning silences always gave away the answer I couldn't say. Yes.
"You don't have to keep being by yourself, you know. If you want, you can choose your own family. Blood isn't always the strongest bond."
It was a bit of a cliche thing to say, and I almost laughed. Ryu and I were sitting in a racing car, talking about found families like Dominic Torreto and Brian o'Connor. Despite knowing he was trying to help, I snarkily replied, "Yeah? You speaking from experience?"
Ryu turned to look out the window again, and I felt bad for snapping at him. The awkward silence was stifling in the closed space inside the car. At last, Ryu sighed and answered,
"Yeah."
—-------------
Ryusuke surprised me one last time as we stepped out of my Nissan Z at the garage. "Bringing LC to your conflict was the wrong thing to do. I'm sorry," he said. His voice was tight with remorse.
I knew his intention had been to get backup for when Taejun eventually resorted to force, as we were prone to doing. But the pressure of LC's viewers had caused both Taejun and I to recoil away from each other instead of working towards reconciliation.
"I understand if you blame me for what happened today," he said.
The thought had never crossed my mind. "Of course not," I said, stunned. "You were trying to help."
We moved out of the way as Eunsoo drove his car into the garage. He really had been right behind us. I had seen his Subaru BRZ in my rearview the whole drive back.
"Tight fit," he commented as he stepped out.
"Where's Seol-hee?" I asked.
Eunsoo looked sheepish. "She uh… she wanted to stay at the meet." Not for the first time, I felt hurt by the shallowness of Seol-hee.
We went upstairs.
"Any word from Sungmin?" Ryusuke asked.
Eunsoo checked. "No."
Even though I had mocked them earlier for always needing Sungmin to tell them what to do, without Sungmin, and after the last two nights, we really were all lost.
"Maybe we should all just get smashed drunk again," Eunsoo suggested.
Honestly, that was exactly what I was hoping to do.
—---------
I was awakened from sweet oblivion by someone nudging me with a foot again for the second time in two days. How did I keep finding myself in these situations? Even half asleep, I decided the foot was much gentler and not Jungho's goon's foot.
"Christ, you lot really did decide to fuck up the rest of your weekend." Sungmin's familiar voice made my eyes fly open.
"We have all this sofa, and yet only one of you is half on it." That was me. I'm not really sure how, but I had halfway slid off the sofa and had happily been sleeping with my upper half on the ground.
I was grumpily awake with a dull, pounding headache, but I don't think Ryu or Eunsoo were. I couldn't see them from my position on the ground, so I struggled to right myself.
As I did so, Sungmin stormed over to the other side of the coffee table. He grabbed a pair of ankles. Eunsoo yowled like an alleycat as he was dragged out of sleep and off Ryu, who he had apparently been sleeping on.
"I don't even want to know," Sungmin told him, as Eunsoo tried to blink himself into consciousness.
"Sungmin! You're back," Eunsoo exclaimed, a little obviously.
Despite saying he was going to let us fuck up our own weekend, it was only Sunday and Sungmin had returned after all. With all of us sitting on the floor looking up at him, I felt like we were a group of nursery kids being reprimanded by a surly teacher.
"Yeah. I saw you dumbasses on LC's stream last night. I thought it was pretty clear that we were supposed to be laying low?" Sungmin-seosaeng growled. The three nursery school kids exchanged glances.
"I don't have any reason to hide from my brother," I said finally.
"Yeah, that played out real well for you, didn't it?" Sungmin said.
"Actually, it kind of did. I don't think he's going to go back to the meet?" Eunsoo offered hopefully.
Sungmin fixed Eunsoo with a withering look. Finally, he let out a long-suffering sigh. "Sure. I guess. At least your narc brother didn't end up dragging another one of us Tigers off to god knows where." He fixed me with a hard look. "Jae… you alright?"
I was really tired of my family drama becoming so publicized. "Yeah. I am." I stood up to get a glass of water so my head would stop pounding.
Sungmin waited for me to get back before he continued. "You guys left early so you missed LC's announcement last night."
I looked at him blearily. I really didn't want anything more to do with LC's channel.
"He wants to set up a time attack relay tournament."
"What! What happened to no races for a while?" Eunsoo said.
I thought the same thing. He had been so adamant about it, and had even screamed at me over it. And now in the space of one night he had turned around completely and was now organizing an entire tournament?
"That should have been the plan," Sungmin growled. He shot me an accusatory look that I didn't much appreciate. "But after Jae incited his chat and then put on a little show for them with his narc brother, the majority of his chat demanded one to 'celebrate the jjapsae defeat'."
Taejun wasn't police, but whatever.
"That's idiotic," Ryusuke said. "Even if Jae's hyung isn't going to follow Jae around, he might still be keeping tabs on the meet."
"That's LC's concern as well. So he's taking the time attack relays into three new places over the next three weeks, and he's only going to let the attendees know the time and place two hours before," Sungmin explained.
"Three weeks?! That's a long ass tournament," Eunsoo exclaimed.
"Yeah, and since it's a tournament, it's an open pot until the end," Sungmin said.
"It's going to be huge," Eunsoo breathed. My interest was definitely piqued despite my irritation with LC's channel. But… I couldn't wait three weeks for a payout, even if it was big. I needed a constant cash flow, or I'd go under from the compounding interest.
"Luckily for us, LC is limiting it to a three man relay to keep it under the radar. Sometimes it's five," Sungmin added, for my benefit. "So let's decide. Should we do it?"
"Why wouldn't we?" I asked in surprise.
Sungmin shot me a look. "Hoojin was our best driver."
"It's not Jae's fault Hoojin decided to try to fight a literal NIS agent," Ryusuke said sympathetically. I was glad that Ryu stood up for me so I didn't have to say it and look like a dick. "Jaehyun's been racing well, too. I think he can stand in for Hoojin."
"Well then, that means one of you two needs to sit out. So which one of you wants to race?"
"I'll do it," Eunsoo piped up. I felt bad that Ryu had stood up for me, then got excluded from the race.
Sungmin turned to Ryu. "You ok with sitting out?"
"Yeah. I can help coordinate from roadside." Ryu didn't look too bothered. If anything he was a little relieved looking.
"Is LC still going to be holding other races in the meantime?" I asked in alarm.
"Doubt it," Sungmin said. He pulled out his phone. "I'll let LC know our roster for now, if he hasn't banned us."
We watched him type. "Pfft. LC says the only reason he's letting us in is because chat demands Jester. You've really become a sensation in his chat. Well, that's settled."
"This calls for donkkaseu," Eunsoo said gleefully. "Ryu, let's go get some from that place you like. I'm starving."
"Ugh. Why can't you just call it tonkatsu?" Ryu said. Despite his complaint, he got up cheerfully with Eunsoo.
"Because we're in Korea now, jjokbari," Eunsoo said. He jumped out of the way of Ryu's half-hearted kick.
"Urusai! Kimchi-yaro." Despite the pleased look on cheeky Eunsoo's face, I assumed Ryu was cursing him out. He looked at me and Sungmin. "You guys coming?"
"You two go first. I've got something to say to Jaehyun," Sungmin said.
I looked at him suspiciously. I really wasn't in the mood for any lectures. Eunsoo had already gone downstairs, but Ryu shot us a concerned look as he followed him. I readied myself for a fight.
"Don't look at me like that, Jae. I'm not your dad," Sungmin sighed. "I just wanted to say that Do Hoon came to see me yesterday."
My antagonistic stance immediately became a surprised one.
"Guess he wanted to find you after you returned his car. He asked me if you were with me," Sungmin said.
"What did you tell him?" I asked.
"I told him the truth," he said honestly. "I don't think he was happy to hear that, but he asked me to ask you if you'd consider going back to work for him."
I felt a little choked up. I was still hurting from our last encounter. I didn't think I deserved to go back to work for Do Hoon-nim, after what I'd done to him. Even though I had returned the car, the way I had so quickly blacked him out in my mind still weighed heavily on me. I shook my head.
Sungmin watched my expression carefully, trying to read it. "I guessed as much. But anyways, Do Hoon told me to give this to you."
He handed me an envelope. As I took it, the familiar weight of it pressed heavily against my hand and my heart. I knew instantly what was inside.
"Alright, let's go catch up to Ryu and Eunsoo."
Right before we stepped into our individual cars (because we were car guys and always drove separate apparently), Sungmin suddenly said, "He must care about you a lot."
I looked at him questioningly.
"He asked me to keep you on the straight and narrow." He was looking at me intently now.
I couldn't bear Sungmin's look. I got into my car and shut the door.