(on ao3)
Before Yoohyun even opens his door, Junhwan’s raising his head, ears flicking. Yoohyun eyes him; while he can’t hear anything himself, Junhwan’s ears are still sharper, so he trusts him—but whatever emotion his daemon is feeling, it isn’t alarm. If anything, it reads as pleased surprise.
Yoohyun opens the door to hyung’s laughter and understands immediately. His and Junhwan’s footsteps are cat-light as they enter their house, padding silently through the living room towards… Is the sound coming from the Horned Flame Lion’s enclosure? Yoohyun’s told hyung not to go in there unsupervised for a while! …But hearing him still laughing like that, he can’t be too angry. Not when the little beast has apparently managed to achieve what he hasn’t in the last two days. A curl of jealousy flares inside him, Junhwan’s lips pulling back to bare his teeth in the start of a growl as he presumably arrives at the same thought, but then there’s a soft, breathless giggle-snort from noona and that-
That makes them both very quiet.
They slow down as they get closer. Hyung isn’t immediately visible through the glass walls of the enclosure; Yoohyun dares to get closer, keeping to the side with some of the thicker foliage, and peers through the gaps.
Ah. There. Hyung’s lying on his side on the soft grass, the Lion perched on his hip and staring wide-eyed at… Noona, who’s up on a tree?
Yoohyun doesn’t understand. What’s so funny? He squints at the Lion, who’s doing… a grand total of precisely nothing. It’s just staring at noona and swishing its tail back and forth, the tip occasionally flicking over hyung’s side. Is it tickling him? But hyung isn’t ticklish, as far as he remembers… And even if he was, what’s noona laughing about? She’s halfway up one of the trees—Yoohyun takes a heart-stopping second to study it and make sure it’s not a Gillotinae, even though he knows objectively that she wouldn’t be stupid enough to get close to those—and peering down at hyung, wearing a silly smile.
She shifts as he watches, turning to jump across to another tree close by and scrambling up its branches. “Reckless,” Junhwan mumbles almost inaudibly, and Yoohyun agrees. There’s something almost childish about the fumbling, uncontrolled way in which she climbs. Like she’s not used to all her limbs being where they are. He remembers it from back when she’d first settled—for two weeks after that, Yoohyun and Junhwan had watched her jump off high spots and panic because she’d forgotten she couldn’t fly. (She was a cat, she’d always landed on her feet, of course, but that hadn’t stopped Junhwan from moving to catch her. Just in case.)
She’s climbing really high right now, actually. Yoohyun frowns as she clambers to the top of one particularly tall tree. Shouldn’t that be stretching their distance limit? Even if hyung’s Awakened now? She barely seems to notice, and the same goes for hyung, who continues lying there, watching her affectionately. Noona crawls out to the edge of the branch closest to hyung, peeks down at him, then hunches down and—
Her feet lift off the branch. Yoohyun and Junhwan lunge for the door. There’s rustling of cloth and grass and fur and creaking hinges and then—
And then, Yoohyun and Junhwan are staring at hyung lying on his back on the ground, noona pillowed safely on his chest and the Lion on his knees, all three of them staring back.
“Yoohyun-ah?” Hyung sits up, noona hopping up to his shoulders and winding around his neck. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Yoohyun blurts. It was only in case— “Nothing. Are you okay?”
“I… Yes…?”
“Okay.” Yoohyun nods quickly. “Good.”
There’s words at the tip of his tongue—be careful, didn’t that pull hurt, why are you in here when I said—but he never gets to say any of them, because noona narrows her eyes at Junhwan and says, “Well, in that case, let them talk, I-wanna-play-tag-you’re-it!” and flings herself at him.
Junhwan bolts entirely on 17 years’ worth of reflex, and noona chases him in circles around them, yowling when he goes too far from hyung for her to follow. Hyung snorts when Junhwan sheepishly approaches them again, only to dance away from noona’s batting paws.
“Oh, that’s no fair,” hyung wheezes, and coaxes the Lion off his knees before bracing his hands against the ground, pausing for a moment (…?), then rolling to his feet—no, foot, all his weight is on his left leg (??) for a split second before he relaxes, balanced once more. “Let’s give her a fighting chance, huh?” he says, and Yoohyun's eyes belatedly flick up from his leg to his face when he starts jogging after Junhwan. Noona gleefully gives chase with the new extension to her leash, and Yoohyun’s forced after them as they cross to the far end of the enclosure.
There’s a pleased smile on hyung’s face as he goes, childish glee in noona’s cackling as she runs, and Yoohyun watches them for a moment before deciding to drop it. He can bring up the question another time; it hardly seems fair to ruin their fun now.
He can't stop himself from smiling as he follows.
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I have a hard time talking about American law enforcement, because I have ptsd (like a therapist told me this and everything) from my own experiences with cops and because it's so balls quaking insane.
Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.
There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.
A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.
If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.
You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.
These aren't like crazy things that I'm just making up, these aren't some weird twisted way I'm looking at something, these are all very real things that we all just.. ignore? Police abolitionists and the media bring these things up all the time, and the overwhelming response to it is: so what? Don't break the law and it won't matter. Blue lives matter. More police funding. Cops should have tanks. It's insane. And I always feel like im just rambling and sound insane when I say this kind of stuff because if you wrote a book and had the dystopian government doing the stuff that the police in this country do every single day, those same people who "back the blue" would line up to say stuff like "*Books government* wouldnt have a chance before us real americans stopped them" on twitter and not even get a hint of the irony.
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