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The farmers’ market is busy this weekend, and the early risers wandering between the stalls seem to be moving in vast swarms.
It’s the peak of summer and the county fair is on in the next town over this weekend, which explains all of the new faces that Jacob passes, people he doesn’t recognise, people from other towns, probably. But they could be people from other agencies. They could be enemies, and that would be a problem.
Jacob is good at remembering faces, always has been, and that is one of the reasons he is who he is– what he is. That’s why he was recruited straight out of college, fresh-faced and naive. A few years, he thought. I’ll do this for a few years, and then get given an office-based position, and have lots of stories to tell to… Well, no one. You’re not allowed to tell anyone what happens in this job.
Just like in a movie, where the first rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club, the first rule of working for the Agency is that you’re someone really boring with no work stories, who runs a laundrette or writes dreary sounding books, or who raises chickens and pigs and makes money running a small farm-holding on the edge of town with your husband.
Jacob’s target is a few feet ahead of him now, but Jacob will catch up to him, easy. He has no trouble with crowds, and he has never lost a target to one, which is a record he’s very proud of, not that he brags about that kind of stuff.
His target is slim but with clearly defined muscle under the cotton button up he’s wearing, the sort that’s built naturally from doing manual work, like building, or woodwork, or farming. He is around the same height as Jacob, and has a tote bag on his shoulder, sunglasses perched atop his head, and he’s relaxed if the lightness in his step is anything to go by. Jacob smiles. His target has a cellphone in his back pocket, which hides how good Jacob knows his ass usually looks in those jeans. What a pity.
Once they’re halfway through the main section of the market, Jacob stops eyeing his target to pause and wave at the owner of the Small Bean coffee truck parked up on the other side. He can afford a second of indiscretion, confident he won’t lose his target today. The owner of the coffee truck, an ever positive guy called Juyeon who can’t be more than a year or two younger than he is, looks up from serving a tourist just long enough to give Jacob a big smile, and he knows this means there will be two iced Americanos ready for them to grab from the back of the truck when they snake back down the street after picking up fresh fruit from the stall at the very end, because that’s what will happen; his target’s path is predictable like that.
Except, when Jacob fixes his eyes on his target’s back again, it’s to watch him suddenly make a right turn and disappear from view, and a year ago this would have made the air catch in Jacob’s throat. Would have made his heart race and panic prickle at the back of his neck, and would have him thinking, no, no, don’t leave me, come back. But he’s getting more and more used to the relative safety and calm of country life now, so today he just thinks, What has he found?
When Jacob’s target reappears, he is brandishing a paper bag, and he’s grinning and waving, and calling “Cobie! Look!”
“Market’s got a new seller,” Haknyeon says, when Jacob finally catches up to him. “Cheese!”
Gotcha, Jacob thinks, reaching out to take the bag from his husband. “Oh, nice. I know the council will be happy we have a new cheesemonger. People have been having to drive to the superstore out of town for cheese for months.”
Haknyeon hums in agreement as they fall into step, heading towards the fruit stall. “So, how long did it take for you to realise I’d left the house without you?” He asks, all casual, like he hadn’t just absconded from their cottage without warning, leaving only a note that read, Come find me, if you can ;) and the time scrawled underneath.
“Less than three minutes,” Jacob says. “I’ve had you in my sight most of the walk, since you stopped at the post-office to pat that big dog.”
Hakneyon laughs. “You mean the Labradoodle that you also stopped to pat?”
“Wait.” Jacob frowns. “How did you..?”
Haknyeon grins, boyish and carefree, the way he’s always looked, except for those times when it’s literally been impossible to look carefree, like with a gun to his head or hanging over the edge of a high-rise with a hundred-foot drop underneath him. “Phone in my back pocket is just a camera. My real phone has the stream.” He pulls another phone out of his bag. “So, with this, I was watching you walk behind me.” He smiles. “I had you all to myself.”
Jacob blushes at the way he says it and Haknyeon takes his hand. “Next weekend let's play again,” he says. “But this time, give me a real head-start. Ten minutes.”
“If I give you too good a head-start, I might never see you again.” Jacob laughs, but it isn’t really funny. If they ever feel like the Agency is about to turn on them, they’ve agreed they’ll have to separate. It’ll be easier to separate on their own terms than to wait to be caught and torn apart from each other by the very same people who paired them up. He feels a little jab of panic at the thought, pictures his husband disappearing out of view and never reappearing again.
“That won’t happen.” Hakyeon squeezes his hand. “I promise,” he adds, and it’s sweet, and it’s why Jacob loves him, but the words are empty. It could happen.
“Do we need eggs?” Jacob asks, shaking off the bad thoughts. “I can’t remember if the carton was nearly empty when we made breakfast yesterday.”
“Totally empty,” Haknyeon tells him. “I put the carton in the recycling and I put eggs on my shopping list.”
“The one in your brain?” Jacob prefers to write a list, but he could memorise almost anything if he wanted to. They both have excellent memories– years of memorising instructions, coordinates and fake names has meant they do not need to do sudoku puzzles to keep their brains in shape.
(They do them anyway, at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning.)
Haknyeon nods and smiles. “Of course. I’m brains and brawn, remember?“
“Good, because it would be no good if we were out of eggs when I promised Kevin I’d whip up a batch of muffins for his choir rehearsal tonight.”
Haknyeon’s eyes light up at a muffin mention. He’s an absolute fiend for Jacob’s baking. Jacob once joked that maybe Haknyeon only married him for his culinary skills, but he knows that isn’t really true. Plus, they’re not married, not legally. Legally, they barely exist on paper. “Ooh, what flavour? Blueberry?”
“Vanilla-cranberry.”
Haknyeon pouts. He wants blueberries, he always wants blueberry muffins. Jacob laughs. “It’s what the choir requested! But if we buy enough eggs I’ll make a batch of blueberry too, just for you.”
The pout easily turns into a grin. “I swear my mouth waters when I just think of your blueberry muffins. And other stuff about you, like what you did last night when we–”
Jacob splutters. “Hakkie. We’re in public.”
“So?” He giggles. “Half of this town are going deaf.”
“Still, it’s not even 9am.” Jacob smiles. The hand-holding is probably scandalous enough to some of the residents, although no one here has ever actually said anything too disapproving to their faces. The people here are reserved, but kind enough; it’s a sleepy town with an average age of sixty five, but it’s not too far from a larger university town, so sometimes younger people pass through, especially in the Summer. There are little bubbles of students and recent grads here at the market this morning, drinking hangover smoothies and eating fresh bagels, so two guys holding hands and browsing dairy products doesn’t stick out enough to be a problem. Jacob nudges Haknyeon softly and says, “It’s a PG time of day in this town. We can talk about sex after sundown… Or at least after the aunties have had their breakfast.”
Haknyeon rolls his eyes. They’ve done a lot worse before 9am in the past, and not just slow, early morning sex in the shower, in their bed, on the kitchen table after completing a high difficulty level Sudoku puzzle. Having sex pales in comparison to the things they’ve done at dawn. Things that no man should ever have to do, that most men don’t have to.
Jacob knows the taste of blood and the feeling of it, wet and slippery and hot on his hands, and he knows what it sounds like to snap a neck, what it looks like, how heavy the body feels. He knows what it’s like to experience all of that before 9am.
It’s been a while since any of that, though. It’s been almost two years since either of them have drawn blood, aside from a few small gardening and kitchen injuries: cut fingers and scraped knees. Cut fingers and scraped knees are nothing. You can’t even smell the blood when you scrape the skin, and Jacob knows the smell of blood like the back of his hand.
Haknyeon tugs at his hand and they side-step to allow a mom with a child in a stroller to get around them
“Add a punnet of blueberries to the shopping list in your head, too, okay?” Jacob says as the family pass them by. The child waves at them and Haknyeon waves back.
“Blueberries? Okay.” Haknyeon closes his eyes and nods once. “There, now it’s added to the list.”
“What would I do without you?” Jacob asks him when they move off again to continue exploring the market.
Haknyeon scoffs. “You’d be just fine,” he says, and maybe Jacob would, maybe he’d have to be, but it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s a potential future that scares him too much. “But I wouldn’t be, not without you and your baking. I’d be hungry.”
They laugh, but the way that Haknyeon entwines their fingers on the walk back home tells Jacob he’s scared too.
When people ask them how they met, they tell them this: “It’s a boring story.”
It’s not a lie, because boring is subjective. Someone might be bored by their story. Not most people, sure, but an agent with higher security clearance than they have, with even more blood on their hands, might think it was a tame way to fall in love.
They also say, “We worked together after college,” and this is not a lie.
They did work together— in fact, they still do, except on paper they own a small-holding, raise pigs and sheep and pet chickens. Jacob is writing a novel and Haknyeon takes photos of the countryside, too. On paper they have the ideal, rural, life. In reality this still feels like a disguise, although more recently, living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere and doing sudoku and feeding chickens fits like a glove. It feels right.
Still, it’s not their real job, the one that they can’t quit. That is not quite as idyllic.
“It’s cool that you can both make a living like this,” Kevin says over dinner at the cottage one evening. “Really peaceful.”
Jacob smiles and nods. “We love the peacefulness,” he says, and he means it. Baking, wandering the market, and reading the papers in bed is his favourite way to spend a day, and it’s how they spend a lot of them now.
Kevin sighs, wistful and a little jealous, and Jacob wishes he could reach across the table and take the spoon out of his friend’s hand, push the peach cobbler out of the way and grab his hands, grip them and say, “You’re so lucky you don’t even know. You’re so lucky, I wish we could have your life. Enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy it,” and make Kevin know he has nothing to be jealous of. But he can’t, so he just offers his friend another glass of wine and pours a bigger measure than any bar would allow.
Kevin was the first friend they made when they moved out here.
He is a lyricist who never liked the city, and he lives alone with a reptile aquarium in his outbuilding, and connects with artists all over the world from right here in the middle of nowhere to sell them his songs. Kevin had turned up at their front door a week after they moved in, with a bottle of red and a home-baked pie, and he’d said, “The old ladies from the post-office told me two nice bachelors had moved in together in the old farm and wasn’t it nice that you were such close business partners, and I just knew you wouldn’t be business partners, so… Hi. I’m Kev Moon, your gaybour.”
Jacob had wanted to invite him in, but he was still wary of new people, so he’d let Kevin through the side-gate to their garden, blaming still being unpacked from the move for why he wasn’t giving him a tour of the place, and had offered to bring out some whipped cream to go with the pie. Then, he’d had gone inside and had sent a message to Haknyeon, who was out scoping out the area, to look him up. The search had come up negative: no threat, and Jacob had returned to his ‘gaybour’ with lemonade and fresh cream.
Kevin had stayed for hours. He met Haknyeon that day, gushed over their wedding rings and told them how psyched he was to meet people around here who were under fifty and knew what top and bottom meant in that context.
They’d promised to catch up every fortnight for dinner, and the Agency had confirmed they were okay with it, in fact, they said, mingling with the locals is encouraged for jobs like these.
“You have to seem like you are a normal couple,” Sangyeon had told them with a straight face when this job was pitched to them, and he hadn’t laughed when Haknyeon had said, “Well, we are a couple,” purposefully leaving any reference to normality unspoken.
It's been almost two years since the first meal with their first friend here, and Jacob thinks they’re real, genuine friends, even if he has to lie to him most of the time.
It’s special, because Kevin is his first real friend after Jaehyun and Younghoon, who were his first team with the Agency, so not really his friends as such, but he’d loved them the same. They’d worked well together, calmed each other down through tough times in their rookie years and shared awkward pats on the back that turned into longer, real, hugs. Jacob misses them sometimes.
Still, if he’d not been moved off that team he’d never have been partnered with Haknyeon, and he can’t even comprehend the idea of that.
“We have to go away for a few days next week,” Jacob tells Kevin when dinner ends. “I have meetings with my editor, and Hak will use the opportunity to speak to the buyer of an organic restaurant chain. They are really impressed with our eggs this year, apparently their brunch menu is crying out for a regular, free-range, supplier.”
The lies come so easily that it’s hard not to believe them himself, sometimes. In fact, it’s better to do just that, to tell himself it is real, because he feels less guilty about lying to friends like Kevin, then. And it isn’t just Kevin; here in town the people had welcomed them with warmth and not judgement when they’d moved into the cottage. It wasn’t something they were used to after years of constant duty, of trying not to be seen, of moving from apartment to apartment, barely keeping any friends at all, and Jacob had felt a sense of kinship almost immediately. Haknyeon had charmed every woman over fifty and some of the men, within a few weeks, and while they kept themselves to themselves for the most part, they were by no means on the outside of small-town society. It’s best to blend in, after all. Sangyeon had explicitly said so.
Jacob likes living here, likes domesticity, likes married life. He likes that they get to stay alive, for now at least. That they’re still useful to the agency, because one day they might not be, and, well, Jacob doesn’t want to think about that possibility.
When Jacob prepares meat or fish for stews or soups, Haknyeon watches him work with a wide eyed fascination. Jacob has always been the one better with tools, with knives and sharp blades. It’s a natural skill, which feels a little odd sometimes, because Jacob had never imagined himself being good with something so bad when he was a kid. He’d been in the Scouts, been camping quite a few times, knew how to tie a decent knot and use a small flick-knife if needed, but aside from that, Jacob never thought of himself as someone who could excel in violence.
Haknyeon grew up on a pig-farm, was used to wrestling with squealing creatures and prefers to use his hands, though he’s perfectly competent with a knife, too. “I just prefer doing it this way,” he’d said once, way before they first kissed, when they were still getting used to working together.
Jacob had pretended that saliva hadn’t pooled under his tongue at the twist of Haknyeon’s wrist, his grip tight around a man’s neck and they’d worked in strictly professional collaboration for four months before he’d let Haknyeon hold him down with that unexpected strength in the back of a blacked out car during mission downtime, breathing loudly with his face pushed into the leather seat and his co-agent draped over his back, one glove still on in their rush to get just enough clothes off to feel some sort of skin to skin contact.
After that night, intimacy had a new meaning.
Sex before this had often seemed perfunctory. He’d had a girlfriend in high-school, and they’d lost their virginity together in the Summer before college started, and at the time it had seemed romantic to wait and do it on a picnic rug under the stars in a field an hours drive from home, but now that doesn’t seem romantic as much as it seems like they were just doing what they thought society wanted from them.
He’d hooked up with one girl, and then a long line of guys, at college parties and that had been fun, but recruitment into the agency after college had meant no time to think about sex for a while after that. He wasn’t thinking about sex on his first job with his first team; all he could think about then was not fucking up. The safety of innocent civilians was at stake, something that had been drilled into them from day one of training. Duty and honour means serving the agency, and he’d served them well for the most part.
By the time he was paired with Haknyeon, Jacob had started to realise that sometimes innocent civilians weren’t actually at the top of the Agency’s priority list, but Jacob couldn’t exactly accuse his superiors of empty morals when he had already killed more men than he could count on two hands. Still, he felt conflicted more often than not, and Haknyeon always knew when not to push him, when to give him some quiet space and start the clean-up by himself. Haknyeon could kill with his hands, but they were still gentle hands, despite it all.
They’d been gentle cupping Jacob’s face the first time he stepped into Jacob’s space and kissed him softly on the corner of his mouth in the rain behind the Deliveries Entrance door round the back of a hotel, while they waited for Sunwoo to pick them up from a job, and they’re still gentle now, when they need to be.
Haknyeon is gentle with the chickens, and when he picks fruit. He’s gentle when he sneaks a hot, freshly baked muffin off the baking tray, and when he strokes Jacob’s hair while they watch old movies in their cottage on cooler evenings.
Jacob dices pork for a stew and Hakneyon watches, and then he massages Jacob’s fingers carefully, one by one, before they go to sleep, waiting for their domestic bubble to one day burst.
There are many things you cannot afford when you’re in this line of work.
You can’t afford to waste time. You can’t afford to stand out too much, or too little, or to let yourself become arrogant. You can’t afford to doubt your intuition and you can’t afford to get too attached to anyone you meet.
You really can’t afford to fall in love when you’re employed by a faceless agency under a pseudonym. When you’re promised money and a roof over your head and no college debts in exchange for holding onto state secrets and never letting them go, even if it means you have to die with them.
You can’t afford to, and yet they’d done it anyway. Jacob, who follows rules and respects boundaries, had done it. He’d fallen in love with a man with the longest eyelashes and the prettiest mouth, who killed people with his bare hands and, even more amazingly, Haknyeon had fallen in love right back.
Knowing death and never being allowed to acknowledge it breaks something inside of you, but finding someone you can share that with helps. And it helps if the person you find is handsome, and warm, and clever, and filled to the brim with love for you.
On the nights Jacob wakes up with a churning in his stomach, he dresses and goes out to check on the animals, walks in the long grass next to the cottage, sits on the back-porch and breathes in the fresh air, and then he goes back to bed and kisses Haknyeon on the back of his neck, or his cheek, or under his eye, and reminds himself how lucky they are to be breathing, in this bed, together.
When they decided to admit to the agency that they were romantically involved, they’d been reprimanded just as they expected to be.
“This is highly unprofessional.” Sangyeon had sighed. “But I’m not angry. Thank you for trusting me with the truth.”
They were lucky to have such a reasonable handler.
“With your allegiance to the agency being compromised by your allegiance to each other, you know you won’t be able to work in the field in the same way anymore. It’s too much of a risk,” He’d explained. “If you’d served your minimum terms you might have been asked to retire early, but you both have three years of your contracts left, so I’ll look to have you be assigned a longer-term cover job, as a couple.”
As far as outcomes go, this was one of the better ones Jacob had been expecting. Part of him thought they might tell them to stop, or keep them apart, or even hurt them, but it seemed that the Agency had use for them in their new status as romantically involved, and being useful to the Agency was the only way to stay relatively out of trouble.
When the job had come, it had come with the news they’d be moving to a small rural town up north to play house near the private airfield used by foreign governments to charter private planes into the country. “We need someone nearby, able to update us on comings and goings without standing out as unusual,” Sangyeon had explained. “It won’t be very interesting a job, at least not for a long while. It won’t be what you’re used to. But the agency agree a couple is the best fit for this, and I put your names forward.”
”Wouldn’t a heterosexual couple fit in better?” Haknyeon had asked. “This town doesn’t look like it’s exactly full of, you know…Men like us.”
”Maybe, but there’s a university near by, so they’re used to a younger, more diverse, demographic. Plus, I don’t know of any current working couples that are made up of a male and female agent.” Sangyeon smiled, sardonic. “It appears our female agents are smart enough not to fall for their co-agents. So, I’ve sent your files in and we should hear back within the week.”
When they were called back in to be told they were now a young and dynamic married couple from the city looking to take over an abandoned farm, Jacob felt strangely attached to his new life before he’d even got it. They were a dynamic young couple, and Haknyeon had told him once that his parents had owned a Pig farm back home, before they passed, so it seemed like fate.
Haknyeon had tears in his eyes when they were given their new passports and files to memorise and Sangyeon had looked overwhelmed himself.
“Thank you.” Jacob had wanted to hug Sangyeon but you don’t hug your handler, so instead he’d shaken his hand and hoped that his fondness was made clear from the brief exchange.
“What would we do without you?” Haknyeon had said, and he had hugged Sangyeon, because he stepped outside of the rule book more often than Jacob could allow himself to.
“Die, probably. And we can’t have that.” Sangyeon had looked between them, fondly. Jacob remembers feeling overwhelmed with thanks for the way he’d looked out for them, two stupid, in-love, killers.
“Enjoy it while you can,” Sangyeon had told him earnestly the day before they moved away with their new names and new background information learnt off by heart, and Jacob wasn’t sure if he meant the relationship, the job or maybe just being alive. “Do a good job and I think we’ll have a quiet next couple of years,” Sangyeon said, and he seemed to be hoping for it as much as they were.
Their first two years in the country passed by with little to do aside from log the flights that had come into the rural airbase in the dead of night. There’d been briefings every few months, and a couple of tense moments at the farmers market where Jacob was sure they’d been being tailed, and one almost-ambush in a hotel room, but aside from that, they really did get to play house a lot.
That’s why they started their weekly games of tracking each other; there are some skills that need to be kept on top of, some skills that can slip very easily, and there is no room for slipping, not in this game. They may spend more of their time doing sudoku and fucking slowly until the roosters call for morning then they had before, but they’re still in the profession of keeping alert.
They have it all, and yet it could all go up in smoke in one tapped phone-line, or a VPN hijack, or if a new face at the farmers market is someone with perfect aim and the weight of another agency’s secrets on their shoulders.
So, Jacob kisses Haknyeon one morning and says, “Get out of bed. I’ve hidden a wire somewhere downstairs, try and find it,” and that’s normal, that’s love to them. Haknyeon finds the wire in seven minutes, tackles Jacob to the floor and tickles him until he’s scrambling for mercy.
“Do we have time to fuck before the market gets too busy?” He asks, face pressed into Jacob’s neck, weighing him down.
“Probably not.” Jacob rolls his hips. He’d wanted this from the second he taped the wire underneath the counter beside the kitchen sink. “But I want to anyway.”
Kevin finishes off a muffin and folds the muffin paper into a square. “You know, when I first met you two, I was kind of jealous.”
“Of us? Why?” Haknyeon takes Kevin’s trash and folds it even smaller, good with his hands.
“You just seem so… Put together. Like you’re living in domestic bliss, you know?” Kevin smiles. “It makes me wonder… If I’d stayed with Minghyun…”
“You’d be unhappy,” Jacob points out. He’s heard a lot about Kevin’s ex, and none of it is good. Kevin, he thinks, needs to concentrate less on what his mean ex couldn’t give him and more on making himself happy. Jacob tells him this— they’re that close friends now.
“Yeah. I know, don’t mind me. I’m just being stupid and single. But, still… You two are just adorable, and it’s disgusting.” He laughs. “I love it.”
“I promise you, our life isn’t that blissful,” Jacob comforts him.
Kevin gives him a look. “I don’t believe you. Like… When did you last argue?”
Jacob thinks. “I’m sure we argued recently…” He looks at Haknyeon for help, but he just shrugs.
“See?” Kevin throws his head back and laughs. “You can’t even remember the last time you argued!”
The truth is that Jacob can remember, and he’s pretty sure Haknyeon can too. He remembers it well– the tension in Haknyeon’s face, the way his hands curled into fists the last time they’d taken someone down.
“We should kill him, to be safe,” Haknyeon had said, the foreign agent knocked out but ready to stir awake any moment.
“It’s too risky.” Jacob remembers trying to shake his head, but his neck was too stiff. He’d had to put up quite a fight. “It’ll put too many eyes on us and could ruin the operation.”
Haknyeon’s face had morphed into something fiery. “But he’s– he hurt you.”
Jacob remembers the way he’d tried to shake off the pain. “I’m fine,” he’d said, but he mustn’t have done a good enough job.
Haknyeon was already putting on his gloves.“I still think we should kill him.”
“No.” Jacob had grabbed his wrist. “It’s not necessary. He doesn’t know anything. He’s just a pawn.”
“But…”
“They sent him to bait us. To have a body, so they could find a reason to press the Agency into giving up the truth about sleeper agents like us,” Jacob had explained, but deep down Haknyeon had known this too. They were in the city for a briefing about expected flights into the airbase outside of their hometown, because it was their hometown now. The man had been waiting for them in their hotel bathroom, in the dark, and he might have got lucky except for vigilant way that Haknyeon scans dark rooms, and the fact that Jacob hears every tiny creak of an old floorboard in their cottage. They’re still working, all the time.
So, they’d surprised the intruder to their hotel room before he’d surprised them, and then they’d stood over his unconscious body, breathing heavily, listening sirens from emergency vehicles far away in the city outside.
“Okay. Okay. Call it into Sangyeon and let's pack quickly.” Haknyeon still had his gloves on. He never wore his gloves back at the cottage and he was almost a different person with them on. He was also exactly the same. “We’re just tourists. He got the wrong room. That’s all.”
Jacob loved him a lot in that moment. He loved the man who wanted to kill for him but didn’t. He loved the man who could think on his feet, who was clever in a way people never expected. He loved him, like he still loves him now, and Jacob could almost forget, sometimes, that their life as farmers, that his book about rural living, and their backstory about college, isn’t real. As though the dark hallways and surveillance cameras of the agency feel like they are the fake part of life.
Still, he can gut a man like a fish, and Haknyeon can end a life with one hand, and they hold secrets about places and people and countries that no one else can ever know. They hide secrets in the gaps in their rib cages and in the pockets of air in their lungs, in every part of their bodies that cling to each other at night.
Jacob doesn’t know what happened to the man in their hotel bathroom, but they’ve been back to the city, albeit a different hotel, a handful of times since, and they’ve never even been looked at for too long, so whatever their superiors made happen after they called it into Sangyeon and he ordered them to check out and go home must have worked.
It’s best, at this point, not to know.
“Do you ever wish the lies were real?” Haknyeon asks him on morning, biting into a peach, fresh from the tree. Juice runs down his chin and onto his naked, tanned, chest, and Jacob wants to lick it off badly, but not badly enough to do it. He has some decorum. He knows how to resist, or at least he’s trying to.
“Of course I do,” he says. He doesn’t even have to consider it. “I wish we were farmers, just farmers. I wish we hadn’t seen the things we have seen.”
Haknyeon sighs around the next bite of the peach. “Yeah. I wish we hadn’t had to do the things we have done.” He rarely admits to being affected by their line of work, not in the way Jacob does, but it’s clear in his eyes and the whimpers when he has nightmares, that what they have done in the last few years is a hundred times more harrowing than they thought they were signing up for.
“I love you,” Haknyeon says every morning and every night, and he means it, Jacob can tell when people mean the things they say— he is trained to know. When Jacob says it back he makes sure to put his everything into the words to show it’s true, and then he presses Haknyeon’s hips into the back of the sofa and peels off his sweatpants and sucks him off like he’s using it to to tell Haknyeon that he loves him too.
“Maybe,” Haknyeon says one afternoon, standing on a chair to reach the lightbulb he’s changing. “They’ll forget about us one day. They’ll lose our file and just never call us back in. Maybe there is no big job coming. We won’t be called upon, and we’ll just stay here forever.”
”Maybe.” Jacob smiles at him, passes him the new lightbulb. They work well as a team, still.
But, either fate is a stone-cold fucker, or their cottage is bugged by their bosses, because they are sent a coded message two days later to prepare for connection to a private line to share the list of flight numbers that have passed overhead in the last few months, and Jacob knows they’ll never be forgotten and they’ll always need to be ready to work.
Haknyeon slips out of the back door after dinner the next night and it takes Jacob two hours to find him, hunched over in the field of cabbages half a mile over. “Are you losing your touch?” Haknyeon teases, groaning as he stretches out his knees and stands upright.
Jacob is out of breath. This had been a difficult tracking. This had been the hardest in a long time. “I fell asleep on the couch, and then you weren’t there and— I was scared,” he admits.
Haknyeon surely can’t see his stricken expression in the dark, but he can obviously sense it because he reaches out to pull Jacob into a hug. “I’m sorry, love. I left a note.”
”I know, I found it in the end, but it had blown off the table. I thought…” Jacob takes a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. Gotcha.” He lets out a shallow, shaky, laugh.
They walk home holding hands all the way. They stay up for the whole rest of the night, and Jacob bakes a batch of muffins while Haknyeon reads to him from an old book of short stories at the table. Jacob loves to hear him read aloud, it’s equal parts relaxing and intimate in a way that feels like sex, as much as sex can be reading a book and not coming with a hand over his mouth and Hak’s mouth around his cock. They do that too, and then Haknyeon licks muffin batter from the spoon and Jacob scolds him, and then kisses him while the muffins start to burn in the oven.
When the Small Bean coffee truck first arrived in town it took up a residency on Wednesdays outside the post-office from 8am to 12pm. Then it would take off to another village or cosy rural town. It’s a clever idea, and especially popular with the elderly ladies of the communities it passes through who say that being served by Juyeon keeps them young.
Juyeon was handsome, kind and earnest, and he’d flirted with Jacob and Haknyeon when they first met, had said, “Uh. I don’t meet many people under fifty and you’re both— uh, hot, so.”
Jacob wondered back then if maybe he was looking for casual sex with a couple. If he was, they were not the couple for it. Too intense, too lost in each other. They couldn’t get used to their new names so they’d given up on using them in their house, and they’d speak in code and check their cottage for wires and wake up in the night gasping for breath, clinging to each other.
They couldn’t casually fuck the coffee truck guy.
Jacob had offered him Kevin’s number because god knows Kevin deserved someone tall, dark and handsome in his life, but Juyeon had gently refused, admitting he had a thing for a guy in the university town he set up in on Fridays.
“His name is Eric and he’s really cool,” Juyeon had gushed, and he still gushes about him now, months later.
Jacob remembers college crushes, and the way that talking to a guy could feel terrifying. He wishes that talking to attractive men felt terrifying now, but he’s known a different sort of horror, seen it in crimson pools of squirmy congealing blood, and the threat of powerful people, the sort of people so powerful that they don’t need to lift their own finger to see someone die.
The week after he trailed Haknyeon to the farmers’ market, Jacob stops by Juyeon’s truck to pick up two iced Americanos.
He’ll take one back to Haknyeon, who he left sleeping in a chair by the window, a magazine in his lap. Jacob can imagine them growing old like this.
“How’s business going?” He asks Juyeon, who wipes his hands on his apron and nods enthusiastically.
“Yeah, good. I can’t complain. And how is your book coming along?”
Ah, his book. “Great.” Jacob smiles. “I sent another draft to my editor last week,” he lies. Maybe he will write a book.
Juyeon grins back. “I can’t wait to be able to say I serve coffee to a published author. Maybe I’ll get you to write a quote for my website.”
“Well, it’s a way off publishing yet,” Jacob tells him. “Could fall through and never happen.”
His heart breaks for the honest people in his life, the ones that think the best of him. He’s lucky, in a way, that the only person who knows him inside out, the bad, the good and the very, very bad, is his boyfriend-cum-husband (they’re still not sure why the Agency specified they were to pose as a married couple, though Jacob likes to think it mean there is someone progressive in senior management). For better or for worse they might have recited, if their marriage was legal and they had the papers to be able to make those sorts of vows. As it stands, Jacob officially died years ago after a bad mission, when he was told he would have to move far away and start using a different pseud, before he partnered with Hak.
Jacob can’t get married, because he’s a ghost, but here they can be married, Haknyeon really likes to be called husband, and isn’t that magical?
“I went on a date last week,” Juyeon tells him, then. The tips of his ears are pink. “With Eric.”
“You did? Wow.” Jacob is so pleased for him. “Finally! Was it everything you hoped?”
“And more. He’s insane.” Juyeon grins ear to ear. “In a good way, I mean. Really good. I’m seeing him again tonight. And he plays basketball, so, you know…”
Jacob doesn’t know and sometimes Juyeon says things that Jacob thinks he runs in the wrong circles to understand, but he laughs anyway and says, “Have fun.”
When he gets home, Haknyeon is no longer napping. He’s pruning the trees at the back of the chicken sheds, half naked, sun-glistened, as usual. Jacob thinks about sneaking up behind him, but they’ve long learnt it’s not wise to sneak up on someone trained to kill, so he calls out to him and holds up the coffee he’s brought back, shouts. “Come over and sit in the shade with me for a while.”
It’s a perfect day, one of the best he’s had in a long while.
One of the worst days of Jacob’s life was the day that Haknyeon almost bled out in a portside warehouse.
They’d thought the job was going well at first, which seems stupidly naive looking back. Three men, they’d been told. Sunwoo had sent them the intercepted message an hour before with coordinates and a time, and it had said there’d be three enemy agents that needed ambushing.
There was a fourth man, and the fourth man meant that since Haknyeon had already taken out two of the men, and Jacob had grappled one to the ground with a gun to his temple and had got the briefcase they needed to destroy open, they were caught off-guard. The fight was over, the job was done, and then Jacob had heart the shot fired and the shout from behind him, and he was on his feet, the briefcase forgotten, within half a second.
He’d found Haknyeon on the floor and the gunman already gone. “Fuck. Who– damn. Why are you bleeding so much?”
“You don’t usually curse.” Haknyeon had tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace.
“What?”
“You said– Ow.” He was breathless. The words hurt to say, Jacob could tell. He could feel the pain as though they were connected. “They won’t be far. Go after them. Get this finished.”
“And leave you?” Jacob was on his knees by now, stripping his jacket off.
“I’ll be okay. I can— see, I’m stemming the bleeding.” Haknyeon had cupped his gloved hands over his upper leg. They were shaking.
“No, you’re bleeding out.” Jacob pushed his jacket against the wound on Haknyeon’s thigh and then grabbed his shaking hands and held them over it. “Press down on this,” he’d said, and he’d reached for the nearest body and quickly stripped it of its jacket. “I’m going to tie this one round your leg, okay, and then we have to go.”
“You have to go after them,” Haknyeon told him. It might have been the darkness of the warehouse, but his face looked ashy. “Go and kill him.”
Jacob couldn’t stand up. “No.”
“Cobie…” It was the first time Haknyeon had spoken his real name since they’d whispered them to each other between kisses months ago. “It’s safer for you if you finish the job right.”
“But if I walk away I’ll never see you again.” Jacob knew it, he knew that this would be the end for them. Even if Haknyeon didn’t die, they’d tell Jacob he was dead anyway. They did that with his last team– knows the agency told Jaehyun and Younghoon that he was dead after the job went wrong, told them it was their fault and they needed to be better, more loyal, that their own teammate’s blood was on their hands. Jacob knows thats what happened but there’s nothing he can do. He has an obituary. “I can’t– I can’t.” There are wet, hot, tears on his lips. He’s crying.
“Please,” Haknyeon had said, but the jacket tied around his leg was sopping with blood, and Jacob was so scared, and all he wanted was to not lose the only person who’d ever truly seen him.
“No,” he said. Please don’t leave, he’d thought, and then he’d somehow got Haknyeon up and they’d even picked up the briefcase on their way out, Jacob half-dragging his bleeding boyfriend with him, and into the waiting van.
The driver, Sunwoo, had said, “Shit, what happened? Did you get them all?” And he’d started the engine immediately.
“Yes,” Haknyeon had gasped on their way to the military base hospital. “All three of them. But they shot me in the process, the fuckers.”
“Shit. Okay, well it gives me an excuse to go top speed.” Sunwoo had grinned, then, putting his foot down. “Hang in there, bro. Well done on finishing the job.”
It wasn’t the first time either of them had lied in the line of duty, but it was the lie that felt like it held the most weight.
“I won’t let them separate us,” Haknyeon had told him in the hospital after surgery. “We’ve never left a job unfinished. We’re the best they have. Why would they separate us?”
Sometimes, Jacob thinks that Sangyeon knows the truth about that mission–he can see it in his eyes. But, if he does know, he’s chosen not to share that with their bosses. He chose not to mention it when they told him they were in a relationship and he chose not to mention it when their record was poured over before they were offered this job as a couple.
Jacob wonders how many men’s secrets Sangyeon pretends not to know, and whether he has any of his own.
The first time Haknyeon said, “You know I’m in love with you,” was over the body of a man with a smoking gun and the intention to use nuclear weapons on innocent people. Jacob was glad he was dead, and so was Haknyeon, and he’d thought that maybe Haknyeon was just high off a complete mission, that he didn’t mean it.
“You’re not in love with me,” Jacob had said, not unkindly, just like it was fact.
But he was, and Jacob was in love with him back.
“I’d die for you,” Haknyeon had told him once, but Jacob won’t let him. He couldn’t bear the thought of it: the fake funeral in a name that isn’t really his, the agents disguised as mourners, watching from the other side of the room.
No, if they die it will have to be far away from here, old and retired and without a care in the world.
That’s the dream, anyway.
When the day comes that they hoped wouldn’t and they are told they need to be activated into the line of duty, it starts with a gentle knock on their door.
Jacob is in his sleep-shirt when he answers, and he looks up at Sangyeon with a small yelp. It’s unnerving, like seeing a teacher on the weekend or a seeing a hair that isn’t your hair colour in your bowl of soup. Like seeing two undercover agents in sunglasses standing on your doorstep on a warm morning in Spring.
Sangyeon looks out of place sitting at the table in their little cottage and Sunwoo looks suspicious, like he’s never been in anyone else’s house before. He pokes at the petal of a flower in the vase on the table. “It's real,” he says.
“Of course it’s real.” Haknyeon looks at Sunwoo like he’s grown a second head.
Sunwoo shrugs. “You never know what's real or not, not in our line of work,” he says. He leans in and sniff at them. “They smell real.”
“Because they are. They grow in our garden.” Haknyeon glances to Jacob fondly. “He grows them.”
Jacob nods, standing awkwardly by the door.
He hopes Kevin doesn’t show up. Or Juyeon and his cute new boyfriend. How would they introduce Sangyeon and Sunwoo? They don’t look like a couple. They don’t look like anything but agents. Jacob wonders what he and Haknyeon look like to them, here in their farmhouse cottage, their little town. He’s almost angry that they’ve invaded it, even though it was probably owned by the Agency to begin with.
”It’s time,” Sangyeon tells them. “We need you to stop a plane from leaving the airbase in two weeks, on Sunday 24th. You need to remove a known spy from the flight and then ensure it is still flown out not more than 15 minutes outside of its schedule.”
“Is that all?” Haknyeon asks.
Sunwoo smiles. “Yes. By any means necessary,” he adds, and Jacob knows that means to expect to have to use force.
“It’s going to be the most hands on you’ve had to be since you came here,” Sangyeon warns them. “It can be hard for sleeper agents to re-adjust. Do I need to be worried?”
Jacob will worry, regardless. “We’re professionals,” he says. “We know the drill.”
“And if it— if it doesn’t end well, there is no one to jump in to help.” Sangyeon looks between them. “You’re on your own for this one.”
They look at each other and nod. “We know.”
Haknyeon walks Sunwoo out to the car, laughing about something while Sunwoo eats one of Jacob’s latest batch of muffins, and Sangyeon hangs back, waits on the porch until they’re at the end of the path.
“Agent, if anything unexpected happens,” Sangyeon says, pointedly, when he is sure that Sunwoo is out of earshot. “If there are more weapons than expected, weird timings, more men, you must call it in this time, okay? Promise me.”
”Of course.” Jacob’s face feels hot. “I would always call it in,” he lies. He can’t look Sangyeon in the face, he can barely breathe until Sangyeon and Sunwoo drive away in their blacked out car.
Of course Sangyeon knows about their indiscretion that time. Of course he knows there was a fourth man. He’s known all this time.
They’ll never just forget about us, Jacob thinks.
He stress-bakes three batches of muffins that evening, and Haknyeon doesn’t even steal one from the tray before it’s cooled.
The Sunday comes around quickly.
The air smells of hot metal and the aircraft hanger is dark, almost as dark as that warehouse where Haknyeon almost died and they lied to the people you can’t lie to.
The spy posing as a low-ball government official, corrupt and arrogant, has two armed security-forces, and they’re thick-set and violent, but they aren’t quick. Not like they are.
So, the ambassador doesn’t make his flight, and the papers the agency needed to stay in the country are safely returned to a locked box somewhere, and when Haknyeon peels off his gloves afterwards, there’s sweat collected at the collar around his neck.
They get back to the cottage just as the birds start to sing, and they shower together until their kisses only taste of each other and not of the acrid taste of panic.
They’re sparked up, high off adrenaline and the relief of being alive. Jacob had forgotten about this phenomenon— the one which means the sight of blood under his husband's finger nails turns him on in the moment. He helps him clean his hands, washes his hair, and rests his cheek on Haknyeon’s bare thigh while Haknyeon de-tangles his hair with his fingers. Jacob turns his cheek and kisses the scar on Haknyeon’s thigh.
“I love you,” he says, and Haknyeon says, “I love you more.”
Afterwards, once their energy is completely drained and they’re spent and panting, they lie together atop their bedsheets. “I’m hungry now,” Haknyeon mumbles
Jacob smiles. “There’s a batch of blueberry muffins on the counter in the kitchen,” he says.
Haknyeon leaves their room naked and glistening, humming a tune as he heads for the kitchen, and Jacob loves him more than he ever thought possible, even if there will be muffin crumbs in their bed after this.
Later on, they lock away their weapons and call into a remote briefing with seniors they’ve never even met before. “We are very impressed with how quickly you completed that job,” one of them says. He’s pretty, delicate looking. Jacob can tell he’s a killer. His code name is New. “Sangyeon speaks very highly of you. Would you consider coming back into the field full time?”
Jacob glances at Haknyeon, suddenly nervous. “No,” Haknyeon says immediately and Jacob’s relief is immediate.
New hums. His associate, Q, sits forward, his eyes meeting Jacob’s through the screen. “And what about you?” He asks. “Aren’t you bored out in the country playing at being civilians?”
Jacob He thinks about it, about the excitement and intensity and the power of their job. It’s always going to have some sort of appeal, but then, if they’re ever bored, they can do extra difficult sudoku puzzles, or maybe even a crossword. They can trail each other to the market and fuck on the kitchen table. They can host their new friends for dinner, eat peaches, raise chickens. They can have it all, right here, together.
“No, Sir, we aren’t,” Jacob tells Q. He takes Haknyeon’s hand and squeezes it tightly. “In fact, I think we would like to discuss the potential of early retirement.”