westwhere | sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)

Lee Chang gave Mingyu a sharp look at the mockery, the title making his expression grow darker.

"I stand against letting the infected - the deathless - be used as a tool by the powerful to oppress their people," he said tightly. "Here, or at home. It is not a side. So yes, despite it being bigger than me, despite it being older than me, I take responsibility for my actions and the consequences they wreak."

He did lean in, even though he felt it was half a trap - the quiet speech meant to get him closer so that he would have an even harder time detangling himself. And yet he fell for it. Allowed it. He wasn't sure if it was for the novelty of having someone treat him this way, or...

... Well. Or.

"I don't think it's wrong of me to be concerned."

Mingyu arches an eyebrow sharply at the answer. Is the kid being cheeky? Or just comes from a horribly abusive, broken home? With five siblings, well.

He has to see where this goes. So, expression entirely neutral, he fetches the decidedly middle-shelf booze, pours two glasses straight (and room temperature, sorry Five), and pushes one to his pint sized guest.

"It's strong," he warns.

To his surprise, he actually follows through and fetches him a glass. That's what he gets for making snap judgments and letting his temper get ahead of him. Some people are more useful than they initially seem.

He takes the glass that's offered and swirls the liquid around. It gets one sniff before he takes a generous swallow. The burn is enough to get him to clear his throat, and once he lowers it, he seems momentarily fascinated by the fact. Then he takes another swallow to chase it down. (Compared to what he drank in the apocalypse... it's fair to say he's not as picky when it comes to booze.)

The glance back up is belated, though the sentiment is genuine for once. "Thank you."

Oh? Trouble with the Viet Cong back where you came from?

[Rachel, what are you even talking about.]

Okay, fine, "rescued from a salt mine by the underground", then. Not sure what else to call them. "Anti-slavery folks"? "Harriet Tubman otherkin"?

Rachel looks around, hunches her shoulders, and mumbles, "It's a stuffed animal."

Then, desperate to redirect: "You're missing stuff, too?"

[Inchresting. Rachel's not as dumb as she looks - or acts - so all of this is extremely good information for her to have.]

No kidding. I like to watch people, too, but for different reasons. [Mostly to figure out who might be hunting her. The one good thing about being yeeted here to Skyrim's uglier cousin full of zombies and salt is that those bastards from HexaDyne can't follow her. Probably. Still...better for her not to let those skills get rusty.]

Any luck picking up the local lingo? I'm guessing it's not much like where I came from. I'm not coming up with anything that sounds much like what I learned in Latin class, anyway.

"Your sense of responsibility towards our jailers is overblown," Mingyu reminded sharply, tilting his head back in a look of defiance that also, incidentally, bared his pale neck towards Lee Chang.

"We sat in those same cells you freed those monsters from. How could you have known what they were? Perhaps if we had not all been drugged and jailed alike, none of this would have happened. Very little fault lies in you," he went on, reaching out with one hand to cup Lee Chang's cheek.

"Don't let your feelings of inadequacy from home follow you here."

"Our jailers are the same who raised the dead," He said bluntly, seeing that pale stipe of flesh. Teasing him. He shoved it out of mind, though he did lean in so that he only really had to speak in a low rumbling murmur.

"The responsibility I feel towards them extends only to their deaths." He let out a hard breath. "I simply--" He cut off, breathing hard as he tried to push himself away from the man again. He was still frustrated, still unwilling to really thinking about what was frustrating him.

"I did my duty," he replied a little crisply. "It isn't inadequacy, Mingyu. It is necessary. Does it not bother you? Seeing the way the people here are cowed under the will of deathless masters?"

Blinking slowly, Mingyu mulled over how he felt about the situation. He hadn't let himself feel much since arriving. He remembered the sleep deprivation, the disorientation, the homesickness and longing. Being possessed of the notion that there were more doors opened by this land than closed, that the fact of him being here allowed for the possibility of Fox being here as well.

His feelings for their actual situation beyond wariness and discontent...

"There's always something. Someone with their heel on the throats of their lessers. I do not have the luxury of being bothered, Lee Chang. I have to survive."

But of course he was bothered. Had always been. Home, here. He had just never been strong enough to shoulder the problem as his own. That was Fox.

That was Fox, and just look where it got the two of them.

"And I do not have the luxury of ignoring it," He replied. He took the small lapse in Mingyu's tactics to sit back up, finally out of the gravitational pull that the other man exerted on him so seemingly easily.

"There are some things more important than my survival, Mingyu."

As the man well knew. After all, Lee Chang had already made that sacrifice. The fact that he was living to tell of it was an accident.

"How exactly do you expect me to turn a blind eye to it?"

"I suppose I might've known," Mingyu murmured, sitting up himself as Lee Chang tried to pull away. He adjusted his robe, feeling a strange sort of chill overtake him. Probably just a draft.

"A man always tells you who he is upfront in his actions, and you've been trying to leave me behind since I met you."

The big heroic gestures. Mingyu should've trusted his instincts on that one, kept to idle teasing.

"Do as you like," he dismissed softly, sighing out his breath. He didn't look at Lee Chang again.

"I wouldn't be me if I wasn't alone."

He hadn't seen it coming, though he should have. Ever since Mingyu had taken Lee Chang's memories - had shared his own in return -- he'd had a strange understanding of Mingyu that he hadn't really had for anyone. Not even himself.

And yet he still had his blind spots.

He let out a hard breath, before reaching out while Mingyu was looking away, sliding a hand around the back of the man's neck and dragging him in abruptly to steal a hard kiss.

"Don't be a fool," He chastised, his voice quiet and rough.

Edited 2021-04-22 03:22 (UTC)

The kiss took Mingyu off guard, stole the very breath from him in short order. He blinked, uncomprehending, finding something in Lee Chang's voice just then made him shiver.

"How am I the fool?" he asked, though his voice came tight and strained, almost fragile. "You're the one who won't stop looking for a cause to die for."

“I’m looking for a purpose to live for,” he corrected quietly.

He only pulled back far enough to meet Mingyu’s gaze with a steely one of his own.

“You know better than anyone that I was raised for only two things.” To survive. To take the crown.

“Is it so incomprehensible that I need to put something of what I am - what it made me - to good use?”

Something to live for.

There was something indescribably tight in Mingyu's chest at that, though he couldn't (or perhaps more accurately, refused to) identify it. Instead he swallowed hard, gave Lee Chang's shoulder a hard shove, and then wrapped both arms around the man's middle to pull him in tight.

"It's not what you are. It's just what you know. You can learn new things. I did." Mingyu lifted his arm, the one with the lotus tattoo. "You can be different. For better or worse. Don't let it be worse."

'Don't be like me.'

The shove pushed him off balance enough to have no recourse when Mingyu pulled him in, other than to half catch himself with one arm planted on Mingyu’s knee.

“I don’t think protecting people is letting it be worse,” he murmured quietly. “Haven’t you wondered why I was brought here? I have no magic, no power. All I have is what I know. And that happens to be how to fight the thing here that hurts the people the most. Don’t you think that means something?”

Meaning. Mingyu wanted to laugh. He was so far past looking to anything for meaning. If life had taught him anything, it was that there was no meaning to anything, no rhyme or reason to the tragedies that befell some while others lived unfettered and free.

There was only human nature. Human heartlessness. Human greed.

"Things don't happen for a reason, they just do. They just happen, Highness," Mingyu whispered low, face half hidden in Lee Chang's shoulder. "I heard once, read somewhere—"

Mingyu swallowed hard against a too-tight throat, forcing the rest of his words out.

"...that life is just a series of rooms. And who you end up in those rooms with determines the entire course of your life. I think about that more and more lately. It's just... where you are and who you meet. That's all. There's no greater meaning. If it wasn't for me—"

He knew, somehow, in that moment, that they were no longer talking about him anymore. They were talking about a ghost - a man Lee Chang had only met through Mingyu’s memories.

“We are the ones who forge our legacies, Mingyu.” A pause, and then quietly: “As he forged his.”

It was a gamble, talking about Mingyu’s paramour that way. But he didn’t believe that it was Mingyu’s fault.

“Your existence is not a curse you give to others.”

"Some legacy," Mingyu replied bitterly, sounding hoarse. People didn't even realize he was gone, speculation of his absence tapering to disinterest. Fox had been a ghost long before he disappeared, and now...

"If anyone was meant for more, it was him, but I—" he choked out, then shook his head, clutching to Lee Chang painfully tight. "...this isn't about me, anyway. It's about you."

“Maybe he still is,” Lee Chang replied, quiet but firm. There was still a chance that Mingyu would find the man. Regardless of the mixed feelings it gave him.

“You’re the one who decided that me wanting to do something about the problem I caused meant that I was abandoning you,” he remained quietly, threading fingers into Mingyu’s hair and then tugging him up to force the man to look at him.

“Who told me it didn’t matter, because you always ended up alone. This has been about you from the start.”

Edited 2021-04-22 04:18 (UTC)

"Hmm- sorry, haven't seen it." Mina puts her hands on her hips looking around a bit annoyed "Right! I had a backback and such- it had my phone and other stuff. So maybe it got lost with your stuff, too."

Just enough for a few greetings so far, and I think I am doing alright with small numbers, too. It's all very different from what I'm used to.

... Curiously, some of the people from our little group speak almost exactly the same language as I do, even though we clearly come from different worlds. It's quite handy.

Were you out for a reason? Do you need to go to the market for something?

Edited 2021-04-22 16:05 (UTC)

"You're not just trying to do something about it," Mingyu insisted, meeting Lee Chang's gaze with a frantic glimmer of… something in the dark brown of his eyes, not the cold steel that normally lived there but not quite warmth either.

"You're still acting like a royal, like a crown prince waiting for the burden of king. This group, the others like us— Half of them are incurable busybodies, helpful and nosy to their own detriment. I don't care about that. But you— You act as though you are responsible for all of it, for all of them, for every single ounce of suffering to be found. And that will get you killed or worse every time."

He let out a hard breath, tilting his head as he frowned at Mingyu, rubbing a thumb over the man’s cheek.

He wanted to ask And what would you care if I do?, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to voice it. Instead, he murmured:

“I have seen too many many fail to take any responsibility, or to shun difficulty when it was presented to them. I watched the nobles of a city take the only ship and flee to leave the rest of the people to suffer and die by the plague. I know what it looks like when I don’t do anything, Mingyu. My fault or not. And if I survive, I have to live both with what I’ve done, and what I haven’t done.” A pause, and a sigh, finally leaning back just a little, though he was still touching Mingyu’s face, as if he couldn’t quite get himself to let go.

“I’ve met my death before, Mingyu. I know what will matter most to me, when I meet it again.”

Edited 2021-04-22 23:10 (UTC)

There is something really wrong with this kid. Mingyu himself coughed a little the first time he had a sip of the stuff he's serving up now. Frowning, he leans back a little, taking in the boy's... what, four foot frame? Does he even weigh ninety pounds? How much could someone that small drink before dying of alcohol poisoning? Killing a child by giving him straight liquor is definitely bad optics.

He refills Fives drink anyway.

"You're welcome. Do your siblings know you drink like this?"

sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)

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