i ended up changing the title last minute farewell sexy @ antithesis / synthesis.
YES this is a yugioh au i just changed the central conceit from card game interdimensional warfare to superpowered assassins. NEO = academia, haechan = reiji (haechan mindfuckery powers = LDS memory wipe technology), jaemin = shun, renjun = serena, jeno = yuto, jisung = ruri... usually my compromiseship Who In Nct rotation is markreiji jaeminserena renjunshun but it's good to challenge myself.
i really struggled a lot with this fic... this isn't how i wanted to make my nahyuck fic debut i was planning on posting pacrim au which i intend to be Good but i blacked out and came to with 2k of fmh written so i was like might as well just finish it off asap. i think primarily i'm unhappy with how lazy the writing is... cry @ the talking heads disease in that entire jmrn scene where renjun asks jaemin if he remembers their earlier conversation about jisung. usually i put more care into deciding how to phrase things in interesting and pretty ways but bc i was so tired and sick i just typed out the first words that came into my head so a lot of the prose/imagery is v direct and obvious. idk i think the final product is kinda unpolished and Basic but whatever i spent too much time on it in the first place ): ALSO characterisation was soooo hard in this fic??? nahyuck are usually quite intuitive for me to write so what the hell happen they really didn't sound like themselves at all... i added the bedsharing conversation scene very late (it's crimed from woncheol arc v au wip) but i feel like that's the only place i Got their voices right :/
things were originally a LOT more dire dynamic wise but i could not bring myself to fuck nahyuck up that badly... at first haechan was fully orchestrating everything, brainwashing jaemin into compliance (jm would have been a captured agent from the same group as jisung), but i still wanted the fic to be about [sighs] love so i changed everyone's motives so it was jaemin's choice to have haechan make him forget and haechan just trying to make the best out of a terrible situation. this was v early on like 1k into writing the fic so all i did was change
“Why would he erase my memories but not yours?”
“Because it’s worse for me to remember,” Renjun says. “But it’s worse for you to forget.”
to
“Why would he erase my memories but not yours?”
All at once the fight disappears from Renjun’s body, like lancing a wound. “Because it’s better for me to remember,” he says. “But it’s better for you to forget.”
and then i deleted the entire scene anyway. it would have been one where renjun straight up tells jaemin that haechan is fucking with his memory but then i was like why would i explain anything when i could just NOT explain anything.
as for wtf is actually going on in this fic. first of all i'm not really sure myself, i left it vague on purpose to reflect jaemin's lack of understanding but i think basically jaemin has some kind of shared past with jisung that haechan has erased his memories of, and haechan has also messed with his memories of jeno and probably mark too. at least jeno and mark were done at jaemin's request, which renjun resents him for bc he sees it as a betrayal to forget, even though jaemin is also doing it out of love. renjun keeps trying to make jaemin remember out of the desire to sabotage himself like essentially seeing how far he can push the remainder of their team before everything implodes. fucked up coping methods etc. as for jisung... either what i said earlier is still true (hence why jm can't remember when he arrived at neo) or jisung is like, an enemy agent jaemin saved for some reason and came to love and had to erase from his memory. For Reasons feel free to fill in the blanks yourself.
mark is dead @ renjun's hands, literally, and also by mark's request though i haven't settled on why exactly. jeno is probably dead, during the same event that ended in mark's death. renjun would have wanted to marry mark... mark was his ~mentor~ blah blah student surpasses teacher by the end there was a good deal of resentment on renjun's part that mark may have been intentionally feeding which is why he was able to kill mark. oh wait i got it something about mark's powers was corrupting him from the inside out and he ended up sacrificing himself to save the rest of the team but he wasn't able to inflict harm on himself so he had to ask renjun to do the deed, though renjun didn't find this out until afterwards. wtf i want to write prequel now...
also jaemin's powers are like, a little bit of everything... psychokinesis/energy manipulation/whatever. i don't remember if i actually explained that in the fic lol. "I’m sure being teenage mutant contract killers has given us plenty of transferable skills" is the best line in the whole fic.
OK it is past midnight and i am doing this on my phone so <releases this post into the void> if i think of anything else later i will edit hehehe
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