He had a black eye forming, bruising already beginning to throb around his eyelid. In the morning, he'd have a wonderful swollen eye to present to Kyuhyun, and Eeteuk would give him hell about it, but for now, Kangin just spat blood (and one of his teeth) onto the pavement and continued sauntering down the street. The guy who had been stupid enough to pick a fight with him lay in the doorway of a building, where Kangin had beaten him back. He might not even been breathing. Last Kangin had seen, he'd been twitching. That was something, at least.
The camera at the end of the road tracked his movements around the corner. He no longer tried to act like he couldn't see it watching him, and only the old remnants of fear that he liked to pretend no longer existed stopped him from lifting a hand and waving at whoever was watching him. Instead, he kept his head down and hid his face from view. They didn't have him on their extensive database, and he planned on keeping it that way.
The vibration against his leg made him duck into a nearby doorway, into the shadows where the camera wouldn't be able to see him. It was only in the darkness that they couldn't see you; he wanted them to see the phone that he pulled out of his pocket even less than he wanted them to see his face. He held it against his ear, said, "Yeah?", leaned against the door and fell through it into the front hallway of someone's house. No one rushed to see what the noise was. Strange, he thought, as he stood back up, brushing himself off and cursing. Then he smelled decomposition, and thought about all the reasons why they maybe weren't coming to see what the noise was, and didn't really want to find out.
"Are you finished?" Eeteuk asked him, snooty because of Kangin swearing. Not like he was a grown man or anything, and not like Eeteuk lived with a bunch of guys with mouths dirtier than one of the street rats who died each day.
"I'm fine," Kangin said. "Don't worry about that."
"Where the hell are you? I've been trying to call you for the past half hour."
"I had some business to take care of," Kangin said, closing the door to the house. He'd think about that another time. "I got distracted."
"You were in another fight, weren't you?"
"No," Kangin lied smoothly. There was a pause, as Kangin kicked the door frame. He was so used to lying his face off that now he was going to get shit from Eeteuk about both being in a fight and lying about it. "Uh," he said, trying to change the subject in the hopes that Eeteuk would forget that he'd asked about it in the near future. "Did the new guy wake up yet?"
"About half an hour ago," Eeteuk replied, after another pause. The line tonight was terrible; Eeteuk sounded like he was talking through bubble wrap. "He looked like he was going into shock but it seemed to pass. He's resting in Donghae's room."
"Resting in the room where the ceiling is crumbling away so that you wake up with new pieces of plaster coating you?" Kangin asked, idly looking around. A glint caught his eye, and he saw that the camera was trained on the doorway. There was no way it could see what he was doing, but whoever was watching had obviously realised that he was up to something that he needed to hide. That was obviously enough. "Hey, listen, I'm going to have to go. There are probably a couple of Gees on their way."
"You did get into a fight," Eeteuk accused.
"Only a little one," Kangin said.
"We'll talk later," Eeteuk said, and hung up on him. Kangin stowed the phone back in his pocket, and since he could do it in the shadows, flipped the camera off, before he flicked up his hood over his head and stepped back out into the street.
Henry brushed another piece of plaster from his face with a frown. The back of his neck, where his spine met his skull, itched where they had taken the chip out earlier. Afterwards, they'd offered him a choice of band aid, red with a cartoon mouse with huge ears, or white with a yellow sponge with a face. He'd thought they were joking, but it turned out that they weren't. He'd gone with the sponge one, because the guy whose room he was currently lying in assured him that he was the best.
Something felt disconnected in his brain, like a tugging that had been there for as long as he could remember had suddenly ceased to be. It felt weird and made him light headed; he was lying still but the ceiling was spinning. Or maybe it was just falling down around him. That seemed likely too. Did people live on the floor above him? How did they not fall through? Mind you, from what he'd seen, the rest of the building wasn't in much better shape.
There was a bang from outside the room, and muffled cursing. This was the most stressful place he'd ever been expected to "rest" in. If he wasn't scared that the building was about to collapse in on him, then he would have been too scared to sleep in case one of the other guys -- who he hadn't really been introduced to -- decided they didn't really like there being a new guy in their gang.
There was a knock at the door; it swung open with a creak that only could have come from the depths of hell. It sounded like it was being tortured. He winced, the noise hurting his head, which was already painful thanks to the surgery, and sat up. A boy, maybe a couple of years older than him, with hair that fell over his face and a black shirt, rather sheer through too much washing, stepped inside, holding a tray of cakes. "Um," he said nervously, "I just baked these and no one else has the time to try them. Would you mind?"
Henry stared.
Fifteen minutes later, he'd eaten four of the spicy sponge cakes and was starting on his fifth. The boy who had made them, Ryeowook, was watching him appreciatively, apparently not even caring that Henry was demolishing his batch, and probably was going to eat them all. He hadn't realised until he'd laid eyes on the food just how ravenously hungry he had been. "You made these?" Henry asked, around a mouthful, almost spraying the bed with crumbs. Ryeowook nodded. "They're great! How did you get the ingredients?"
"On the black market," Ryeowook said. Henry's mouth fell open, probably giving Ryeowook a good look at his creation in mid-chew. Ryeowook didn't look like he had the strength to squash a spider, never mind navigate the notorious black market. "I had some pieces of one of those old film cameras going spare that I didn't need, swapped them for the flour and sugar. I had the flavouring from the last time I made carrot cake."
Henry wanted to comment on that, but he couldn't work out how to say what he wanted to say in Korean; he simply snapped his mouth shut and continued chewing thoughtfully. He looked at his half-eaten cake suspiciously, as if pieces of plaster were lurking to choke him. Then he thought that maybe they'd been poisoned. The way Ryeowook was watching was like he was a particularly interesting experiment. He swallowed, and waited to die. Ryeowook clapped his hands.
"I'm so glad to have someone new to try my creations out on," he said happily. "Yehsung-hyung doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, and no one else will sit still for long enough."
"You bake often?" Henry asked, guiltily finishing off the cake in his hand. Of course Ryeowook wasn't trying to poison him. He was far too paranoid -- and, as he looked at the plate of cakes again, he had a sweet tooth that was really too strong.
Ryeowook nodded solemnly, like cakes were Serious Business. "It's my stress relief."
Henry picked up a sixth cake with a sigh. Most people just went out and had a fight. Trust the first guy Henry met to be the one most likely to fatten him up.
Sungmin's boots made barely any noise on the floor; the floorboards were far too old and damaged to hold a heavy foot. The leather of his boots was as worn down as the building, but age and wear and tear had made both things precious to him. The way the tops of his boots folded over gave them character, just like the way you could never be sure if you weren't going to fall through the floor made the building an interesting place to live in.
An arm reached out from a nearby doorway and pulled him flush against a body, his back against someone's chest. "So I was thinking," Siwon's voice said in his ear. "Me, you, dinner tonight.Coffee."
"Why do I feel like that's a euphemism?" Sungmin wriggled out of his grasp and turned around. Siwon was just smiling at him, leaning casually against the wall. He looked like a cocky asshole, and Sungmin hated letting him down when he got like that. Except he really didn't. "I can't, Heechul wants me to help him with something."
The cocky asshole look faded into a wry smile. "And you'd rather stalk the streets with Heechul-hyung than have dinner with me?"
Sungmin shrugged. Siwon reached out and pulled him against him, sliding one of his knees, leather clad as usual, between Sungmin's thighs. "What can I do?" Sungmin asked, sighing dramatically. "I already agreed to help Heechul-hyung, and you know that he doesn't like people cancelling on him, especially not when it's for sex."
"Hey," Siwon said, nipping his bottom lip with his teeth. "I said coffee. No one said anything about sex."
"It was implied!" Sungmin protested, weakly, because Siwon's hand was creeping up his shirt.
"Want me to talk to Heechul-hyung?" Siwon asked quietly. "I'm sure someone else can go with him."
Sungmin shook his head. "He's already in a foul mood, don't think that I'm going with him because I want to. We can have 'dinner'" -- complete with air quotation marks -- "another time. I know you're always hungry."
Siwon leered down at him, hitching him just that little bit closer. "You know it," he said, kissed him, then added, in English, "baby." Sungmin had to pull away so he could double over with laughter. Siwon ruffled his hair, which then caused another five minute diversion as Sungmin put it back in place. "Do you know where they put the new guy?" Siwon wanted to know. "I'm supposed to take him to the operations room."
"They put him in Donghae's room," Sungmin said.
"Why?" Siwon asked. "His first experience of the house does not need to be an overriding fear that it will fall down around him. Poor guy."
"That's what I said," Sungmin said. His chest vibrated; he reached inside his jacket and pulled out his phone, groaning when he saw the user ID head princess. "It's Heechul, I must be late. Damn it, he's going to be impossible tonight. I'll talk to -- I'll be back late."
"Bye, darlin'," Siwon drawled, like a guy from one of those old films that they'd managed to get hold of (the VCR player had been a bitch to re-assemble). Sungmin kissed him quickly and ran off, holding his phone to his ear and saying, "I'll be there in a minute, stop yelling at me." Siwon watched him go, then turned about face and headed for Donghae's room.
Donghae was loitering around outside, kicking miserably at a wall. He couldn't kick too hard or else his foot would do through the plaster, and plaster was expensive. "Ryeowook is feeding the new boy cake," he told Siwon sulkily. "Kyuhyun banned me from even being in the same vicinity as cake."
"Hyung," Siwon said, slinging an arm across his shoulder and hugging him. "Your life is so hard." He released him and opened the door to Donghae's bedroom. There was an empty tray on the bed that Ryeowook and the new guy was sitting on, talking together.
"Aw, man," Donghae said, bounding into the room and picking up the tray and smelling it. "How long ago did you finish these?"
"About half an hour ago," Ryeowook said.
"I've been outside," Donghae said, tossing the tray back down. Remnants of crumbs scattered all over his bedsheets. "I wanted to talk to Henry too."
Siwon too was looking wistfully at the tray, but unlike Donghae, he could have actually had some. "Kyuhyun wants to see Henry in the operations room," he said, looking at the new boy, with his long, over grown shaggy hair and chubby cheeks. He could practically see Sungmin's fingers itching to style the mess on top of his head. "Uh, Ryeowook, Kibum is making dinner tonight, and last I saw, there was smoke coming from the kitchen."
There was only one thing that pissed Ryeowook off, and that was people messing up his kitchen. Kibum had either been very brave or very stupid to have started without Ryeowook there to keep an eye on him -- or maybe he just didn't give a shit. It was Kibum, after all. Ryeowook left, eyes narrowed like he was out for blood. Donghae was picking up crumbs from his bed and putting them in his mouth with a pout on his face. Henry was watching him blankly.
"Come on," Siwon said, holding the door open for Henry. He came, shoes breaking the latest pieces of plaster into white dust as he walked across Donghae's carpet. Out in the hallway, Siwon asked in his very best English, "You from Canada?"
"Toronto," Henry said with a nod.
"Korea, why?"
Henry frowned, and tried his best to say, "You guys are the only ones who can take the chips out," in Korean. His grammar and pronunciation were fucked up, but Siwon got the general idea of what he was trying to say. His lips curled into a smile.
"Our reputation proceeds us," he murmured happily, then gave Henry a long sideways glance. He must be smarter than he looked, to be able to get all the way to Korea, and find one of them to contact, when he was being tracked all the way, and he didn't speak much Korean. He must have also been desperate to get the chip removed. Quite beyond the effort it took to get there, it was something to agree to a life of service at his age. He could only have been what, eighteen? Nineteen?
"Siwon, you're here," Kyuhyun said, when he led Henry into the operations room. He looked tired and stressed out, so no different to usual. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Kyuhyun was only twenty-four himself. Eeteuk was bent over a map in the corner of the room, and Eunhyuk was swinging around in a desk chair, watching some security footage, chewing on a strawberry lace. On the floor next to Kyuhyun, Zhou Mi was stretched out on his front, head nestled in his arms. He appeared to be fast asleep. "Henry, come sit down here."
He motioned to the desk chair next to Kyuhyun's. Having clearly met Kyuhyun before, Henry didn't look nearly so scared as he had looked while walking with Siwon, and he sat down without a word. Kyuhyun too had screens in front of him, but he seemed to be watching live footage of a woman in an office. "I'm going to show you what we do, Henry," Kyuhyun said, adjusting the screen. "You see this woman? She's the secretary to the Minister of Action Control. We got some information a few days ago that suggested that she was going to introduce some legislation to him that would bring the age of chipping down to three years old. We got hold of a copy of the bill, which also would bring harsher punishments on anyone participating in rebellious action of any kind. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Henry had spent three months in Korea before he'd managed to get hold of someone from this group. He understood a lot more than he could speak, and any words that he didn't understand, he was able to work out from the context. He nodded. Kyuhyun nodded back. "You know that with the chips, they monitor your actions and keep you in line. You know that once removed and destroyed, your data is wiped from the system, like you had never existed. That's what we did to you. This woman wants to control the actions of three year olds. She hasn't submitted the bill yet. We're going to make sure that she never does."
He rolled his chair to the side and almost ran over the leg of the guy lying next to him on the floor, who woke up, mumbled a little, shifted out of the way, and fell back asleep. Kyuhyun picked up what looked like a cell phone from the counter, though the buttons were physical, nothing like the touch screen phones that Henry was used to. "Old technology," Kyuhyun said, waving the phone a little. "Watch carefully."
He punched a number into the phone -- 07725459943 -- and held it to his ear. There was a whining, a buzz, and then a click. The woman on the screen went stock still, freezing in mid-motion, one of her arms awkwardly held above her head where she'd been stretching. Kyuhyun paused a minute, then said, voice smooth as cream, "Lower your arm."
The woman on the screen lowered her arm. Now both were held stiffly by her side. "Open your drawer and take out the gun that you have hidden here," Kyuhyun said. The woman reached into the drawer of her desk and took out a shotgun, holding it loosely. "Put it to your temple." She did so; she looked a little like a robot, movements jerky and static. "Pull the trigger."
Henry had just a moment's notice to scrunch his eyes shut, but when he cracked one open, the woman was still on the screen, albeit missing most of her head. She was slumped over her desk, gun on the floor. Henry could only thank god that the image was black and white; the dark splatters on the wall opposite were bad enough as it was. Kyuhyun lowered the phone, and pressed a button to disconnect the call. He lay the phone back down. No one else seemed to be paying attention.
"You killed her?" Henry asked, lips numb.
Kyuhyun shrugged. "She was a bad person," he said. "That's what we do."
Henry couldn't help but feel that perhaps their lines of bad and good were drawn a little skewed. The woman hadn't even had a chance to do anything yet, but they'd killed her in cold blood. Then he remembered how those years of his childhood before the chip, that he could barely remember, remained the only times in his life where he could remember the feeling of freedom and happiness, and nodded. Yes, anyone who wanted to implant the chips were fair game.
"There's a flaw in the chips that old phones, like this one," -- Kyuhyun motioned to the phone he'd laid down -- "can take advantage of. They don't think that this old stuff exists anymore, because they think they destroyed it all. Well, if that's the case, then they didn't try very hard. These old phones are ten-a-penny on the black market. With the right serial number, you can take control of any person in the entire world, just through a mobile telephone."
Henry shivered at the thought. There was something creepy about the idea, and he reached up and touched the plaster on the back of his neck. "No one else can do it like we do," Kyuhyun said, a sliver of smugness in his voice, the first real emotion Henry had detected.
Eunhyuk suddenly started cheering, and Siwon, who had been watching the same screen over his shoulder, stepped back and turned away, looking grossed out. "Donghae was right," he called over to Kyuhyun. "The Minister for Justice does use prostitutes. It's taken me three hours, but I finally found the right video."
"Great," Kyuhyun said. Even with good news, his voice remained flat and somewhat sarcastic. "Blackmail is my favourite past time. You can turn it off now."
"No way," Eunhyuk said, looking affronted at the idea. "It's like free porn!" There was a bang in the corner, where Eeteuk had just hit his head off the desk.
The camera at the end of the road tracked his movements around the corner. He no longer tried to act like he couldn't see it watching him, and only the old remnants of fear that he liked to pretend no longer existed stopped him from lifting a hand and waving at whoever was watching him. Instead, he kept his head down and hid his face from view. They didn't have him on their extensive database, and he planned on keeping it that way.
The vibration against his leg made him duck into a nearby doorway, into the shadows where the camera wouldn't be able to see him. It was only in the darkness that they couldn't see you; he wanted them to see the phone that he pulled out of his pocket even less than he wanted them to see his face. He held it against his ear, said, "Yeah?", leaned against the door and fell through it into the front hallway of someone's house. No one rushed to see what the noise was. Strange, he thought, as he stood back up, brushing himself off and cursing. Then he smelled decomposition, and thought about all the reasons why they maybe weren't coming to see what the noise was, and didn't really want to find out.
"Are you finished?" Eeteuk asked him, snooty because of Kangin swearing. Not like he was a grown man or anything, and not like Eeteuk lived with a bunch of guys with mouths dirtier than one of the street rats who died each day.
"I'm fine," Kangin said. "Don't worry about that."
"Where the hell are you? I've been trying to call you for the past half hour."
"I had some business to take care of," Kangin said, closing the door to the house. He'd think about that another time. "I got distracted."
"You were in another fight, weren't you?"
"No," Kangin lied smoothly. There was a pause, as Kangin kicked the door frame. He was so used to lying his face off that now he was going to get shit from Eeteuk about both being in a fight and lying about it. "Uh," he said, trying to change the subject in the hopes that Eeteuk would forget that he'd asked about it in the near future. "Did the new guy wake up yet?"
"About half an hour ago," Eeteuk replied, after another pause. The line tonight was terrible; Eeteuk sounded like he was talking through bubble wrap. "He looked like he was going into shock but it seemed to pass. He's resting in Donghae's room."
"Resting in the room where the ceiling is crumbling away so that you wake up with new pieces of plaster coating you?" Kangin asked, idly looking around. A glint caught his eye, and he saw that the camera was trained on the doorway. There was no way it could see what he was doing, but whoever was watching had obviously realised that he was up to something that he needed to hide. That was obviously enough. "Hey, listen, I'm going to have to go. There are probably a couple of Gees on their way."
"You did get into a fight," Eeteuk accused.
"Only a little one," Kangin said.
"We'll talk later," Eeteuk said, and hung up on him. Kangin stowed the phone back in his pocket, and since he could do it in the shadows, flipped the camera off, before he flicked up his hood over his head and stepped back out into the street.
Henry brushed another piece of plaster from his face with a frown. The back of his neck, where his spine met his skull, itched where they had taken the chip out earlier. Afterwards, they'd offered him a choice of band aid, red with a cartoon mouse with huge ears, or white with a yellow sponge with a face. He'd thought they were joking, but it turned out that they weren't. He'd gone with the sponge one, because the guy whose room he was currently lying in assured him that he was the best.
Something felt disconnected in his brain, like a tugging that had been there for as long as he could remember had suddenly ceased to be. It felt weird and made him light headed; he was lying still but the ceiling was spinning. Or maybe it was just falling down around him. That seemed likely too. Did people live on the floor above him? How did they not fall through? Mind you, from what he'd seen, the rest of the building wasn't in much better shape.
There was a bang from outside the room, and muffled cursing. This was the most stressful place he'd ever been expected to "rest" in. If he wasn't scared that the building was about to collapse in on him, then he would have been too scared to sleep in case one of the other guys -- who he hadn't really been introduced to -- decided they didn't really like there being a new guy in their gang.
There was a knock at the door; it swung open with a creak that only could have come from the depths of hell. It sounded like it was being tortured. He winced, the noise hurting his head, which was already painful thanks to the surgery, and sat up. A boy, maybe a couple of years older than him, with hair that fell over his face and a black shirt, rather sheer through too much washing, stepped inside, holding a tray of cakes. "Um," he said nervously, "I just baked these and no one else has the time to try them. Would you mind?"
Henry stared.
Fifteen minutes later, he'd eaten four of the spicy sponge cakes and was starting on his fifth. The boy who had made them, Ryeowook, was watching him appreciatively, apparently not even caring that Henry was demolishing his batch, and probably was going to eat them all. He hadn't realised until he'd laid eyes on the food just how ravenously hungry he had been. "You made these?" Henry asked, around a mouthful, almost spraying the bed with crumbs. Ryeowook nodded. "They're great! How did you get the ingredients?"
"On the black market," Ryeowook said. Henry's mouth fell open, probably giving Ryeowook a good look at his creation in mid-chew. Ryeowook didn't look like he had the strength to squash a spider, never mind navigate the notorious black market. "I had some pieces of one of those old film cameras going spare that I didn't need, swapped them for the flour and sugar. I had the flavouring from the last time I made carrot cake."
Henry wanted to comment on that, but he couldn't work out how to say what he wanted to say in Korean; he simply snapped his mouth shut and continued chewing thoughtfully. He looked at his half-eaten cake suspiciously, as if pieces of plaster were lurking to choke him. Then he thought that maybe they'd been poisoned. The way Ryeowook was watching was like he was a particularly interesting experiment. He swallowed, and waited to die. Ryeowook clapped his hands.
"I'm so glad to have someone new to try my creations out on," he said happily. "Yehsung-hyung doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, and no one else will sit still for long enough."
"You bake often?" Henry asked, guiltily finishing off the cake in his hand. Of course Ryeowook wasn't trying to poison him. He was far too paranoid -- and, as he looked at the plate of cakes again, he had a sweet tooth that was really too strong.
Ryeowook nodded solemnly, like cakes were Serious Business. "It's my stress relief."
Henry picked up a sixth cake with a sigh. Most people just went out and had a fight. Trust the first guy Henry met to be the one most likely to fatten him up.
Sungmin's boots made barely any noise on the floor; the floorboards were far too old and damaged to hold a heavy foot. The leather of his boots was as worn down as the building, but age and wear and tear had made both things precious to him. The way the tops of his boots folded over gave them character, just like the way you could never be sure if you weren't going to fall through the floor made the building an interesting place to live in.
An arm reached out from a nearby doorway and pulled him flush against a body, his back against someone's chest. "So I was thinking," Siwon's voice said in his ear. "Me, you, dinner tonight.Coffee."
"Why do I feel like that's a euphemism?" Sungmin wriggled out of his grasp and turned around. Siwon was just smiling at him, leaning casually against the wall. He looked like a cocky asshole, and Sungmin hated letting him down when he got like that. Except he really didn't. "I can't, Heechul wants me to help him with something."
The cocky asshole look faded into a wry smile. "And you'd rather stalk the streets with Heechul-hyung than have dinner with me?"
Sungmin shrugged. Siwon reached out and pulled him against him, sliding one of his knees, leather clad as usual, between Sungmin's thighs. "What can I do?" Sungmin asked, sighing dramatically. "I already agreed to help Heechul-hyung, and you know that he doesn't like people cancelling on him, especially not when it's for sex."
"Hey," Siwon said, nipping his bottom lip with his teeth. "I said coffee. No one said anything about sex."
"It was implied!" Sungmin protested, weakly, because Siwon's hand was creeping up his shirt.
"Want me to talk to Heechul-hyung?" Siwon asked quietly. "I'm sure someone else can go with him."
Sungmin shook his head. "He's already in a foul mood, don't think that I'm going with him because I want to. We can have 'dinner'" -- complete with air quotation marks -- "another time. I know you're always hungry."
Siwon leered down at him, hitching him just that little bit closer. "You know it," he said, kissed him, then added, in English, "baby." Sungmin had to pull away so he could double over with laughter. Siwon ruffled his hair, which then caused another five minute diversion as Sungmin put it back in place. "Do you know where they put the new guy?" Siwon wanted to know. "I'm supposed to take him to the operations room."
"They put him in Donghae's room," Sungmin said.
"Why?" Siwon asked. "His first experience of the house does not need to be an overriding fear that it will fall down around him. Poor guy."
"That's what I said," Sungmin said. His chest vibrated; he reached inside his jacket and pulled out his phone, groaning when he saw the user ID head princess. "It's Heechul, I must be late. Damn it, he's going to be impossible tonight. I'll talk to -- I'll be back late."
"Bye, darlin'," Siwon drawled, like a guy from one of those old films that they'd managed to get hold of (the VCR player had been a bitch to re-assemble). Sungmin kissed him quickly and ran off, holding his phone to his ear and saying, "I'll be there in a minute, stop yelling at me." Siwon watched him go, then turned about face and headed for Donghae's room.
Donghae was loitering around outside, kicking miserably at a wall. He couldn't kick too hard or else his foot would do through the plaster, and plaster was expensive. "Ryeowook is feeding the new boy cake," he told Siwon sulkily. "Kyuhyun banned me from even being in the same vicinity as cake."
"Hyung," Siwon said, slinging an arm across his shoulder and hugging him. "Your life is so hard." He released him and opened the door to Donghae's bedroom. There was an empty tray on the bed that Ryeowook and the new guy was sitting on, talking together.
"Aw, man," Donghae said, bounding into the room and picking up the tray and smelling it. "How long ago did you finish these?"
"About half an hour ago," Ryeowook said.
"I've been outside," Donghae said, tossing the tray back down. Remnants of crumbs scattered all over his bedsheets. "I wanted to talk to Henry too."
Siwon too was looking wistfully at the tray, but unlike Donghae, he could have actually had some. "Kyuhyun wants to see Henry in the operations room," he said, looking at the new boy, with his long, over grown shaggy hair and chubby cheeks. He could practically see Sungmin's fingers itching to style the mess on top of his head. "Uh, Ryeowook, Kibum is making dinner tonight, and last I saw, there was smoke coming from the kitchen."
There was only one thing that pissed Ryeowook off, and that was people messing up his kitchen. Kibum had either been very brave or very stupid to have started without Ryeowook there to keep an eye on him -- or maybe he just didn't give a shit. It was Kibum, after all. Ryeowook left, eyes narrowed like he was out for blood. Donghae was picking up crumbs from his bed and putting them in his mouth with a pout on his face. Henry was watching him blankly.
"Come on," Siwon said, holding the door open for Henry. He came, shoes breaking the latest pieces of plaster into white dust as he walked across Donghae's carpet. Out in the hallway, Siwon asked in his very best English, "You from Canada?"
"Toronto," Henry said with a nod.
"Korea, why?"
Henry frowned, and tried his best to say, "You guys are the only ones who can take the chips out," in Korean. His grammar and pronunciation were fucked up, but Siwon got the general idea of what he was trying to say. His lips curled into a smile.
"Our reputation proceeds us," he murmured happily, then gave Henry a long sideways glance. He must be smarter than he looked, to be able to get all the way to Korea, and find one of them to contact, when he was being tracked all the way, and he didn't speak much Korean. He must have also been desperate to get the chip removed. Quite beyond the effort it took to get there, it was something to agree to a life of service at his age. He could only have been what, eighteen? Nineteen?
"Siwon, you're here," Kyuhyun said, when he led Henry into the operations room. He looked tired and stressed out, so no different to usual. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Kyuhyun was only twenty-four himself. Eeteuk was bent over a map in the corner of the room, and Eunhyuk was swinging around in a desk chair, watching some security footage, chewing on a strawberry lace. On the floor next to Kyuhyun, Zhou Mi was stretched out on his front, head nestled in his arms. He appeared to be fast asleep. "Henry, come sit down here."
He motioned to the desk chair next to Kyuhyun's. Having clearly met Kyuhyun before, Henry didn't look nearly so scared as he had looked while walking with Siwon, and he sat down without a word. Kyuhyun too had screens in front of him, but he seemed to be watching live footage of a woman in an office. "I'm going to show you what we do, Henry," Kyuhyun said, adjusting the screen. "You see this woman? She's the secretary to the Minister of Action Control. We got some information a few days ago that suggested that she was going to introduce some legislation to him that would bring the age of chipping down to three years old. We got hold of a copy of the bill, which also would bring harsher punishments on anyone participating in rebellious action of any kind. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Henry had spent three months in Korea before he'd managed to get hold of someone from this group. He understood a lot more than he could speak, and any words that he didn't understand, he was able to work out from the context. He nodded. Kyuhyun nodded back. "You know that with the chips, they monitor your actions and keep you in line. You know that once removed and destroyed, your data is wiped from the system, like you had never existed. That's what we did to you. This woman wants to control the actions of three year olds. She hasn't submitted the bill yet. We're going to make sure that she never does."
He rolled his chair to the side and almost ran over the leg of the guy lying next to him on the floor, who woke up, mumbled a little, shifted out of the way, and fell back asleep. Kyuhyun picked up what looked like a cell phone from the counter, though the buttons were physical, nothing like the touch screen phones that Henry was used to. "Old technology," Kyuhyun said, waving the phone a little. "Watch carefully."
He punched a number into the phone -- 07725459943 -- and held it to his ear. There was a whining, a buzz, and then a click. The woman on the screen went stock still, freezing in mid-motion, one of her arms awkwardly held above her head where she'd been stretching. Kyuhyun paused a minute, then said, voice smooth as cream, "Lower your arm."
The woman on the screen lowered her arm. Now both were held stiffly by her side. "Open your drawer and take out the gun that you have hidden here," Kyuhyun said. The woman reached into the drawer of her desk and took out a shotgun, holding it loosely. "Put it to your temple." She did so; she looked a little like a robot, movements jerky and static. "Pull the trigger."
Henry had just a moment's notice to scrunch his eyes shut, but when he cracked one open, the woman was still on the screen, albeit missing most of her head. She was slumped over her desk, gun on the floor. Henry could only thank god that the image was black and white; the dark splatters on the wall opposite were bad enough as it was. Kyuhyun lowered the phone, and pressed a button to disconnect the call. He lay the phone back down. No one else seemed to be paying attention.
"You killed her?" Henry asked, lips numb.
Kyuhyun shrugged. "She was a bad person," he said. "That's what we do."
Henry couldn't help but feel that perhaps their lines of bad and good were drawn a little skewed. The woman hadn't even had a chance to do anything yet, but they'd killed her in cold blood. Then he remembered how those years of his childhood before the chip, that he could barely remember, remained the only times in his life where he could remember the feeling of freedom and happiness, and nodded. Yes, anyone who wanted to implant the chips were fair game.
"There's a flaw in the chips that old phones, like this one," -- Kyuhyun motioned to the phone he'd laid down -- "can take advantage of. They don't think that this old stuff exists anymore, because they think they destroyed it all. Well, if that's the case, then they didn't try very hard. These old phones are ten-a-penny on the black market. With the right serial number, you can take control of any person in the entire world, just through a mobile telephone."
Henry shivered at the thought. There was something creepy about the idea, and he reached up and touched the plaster on the back of his neck. "No one else can do it like we do," Kyuhyun said, a sliver of smugness in his voice, the first real emotion Henry had detected.
Eunhyuk suddenly started cheering, and Siwon, who had been watching the same screen over his shoulder, stepped back and turned away, looking grossed out. "Donghae was right," he called over to Kyuhyun. "The Minister for Justice does use prostitutes. It's taken me three hours, but I finally found the right video."
"Great," Kyuhyun said. Even with good news, his voice remained flat and somewhat sarcastic. "Blackmail is my favourite past time. You can turn it off now."
"No way," Eunhyuk said, looking affronted at the idea. "It's like free porn!" There was a bang in the corner, where Eeteuk had just hit his head off the desk.
................................................
The woman that Heechul had wanted to watch was one of the most boring people Sungmin had ever done surveillance on. They'd been waiting all night for something to happen, but she'd come home from wherever she worked, made dinner, watched television and gone to bed. Heechul was antsy, because she'd drawn the curtains and he couldn't see inside. Sungmin wasn't sure whether there was a reason to the whole thing, or whether Heechul had just decided to take up being a peeping tom.
"I could be having dinner with Siwon," he said miserably. The dumpster they were sitting on in an alley opposite the woman's house smelled disgusting. "I could have been having sex right now."
"Shut up," Heechul said, rapping his fingernails against the lid of the dumpster. He looked like he was ready to snap, but Sungmin wasn't scared of Heechul; he was too easily distracted in a fight by his hair being messed up.
"Why are we sitting here?" Sungmin whined. "She's gone to bed, there's nothing more to see. I'm tired!"
"Would you stop complaining? I need her serial number, okay? I've been trying to find it for months, but she won't let it up."
"Does Kyuhyun know you're scoping her out?"
Heechul's fingernails stopped, then continued double time. "No."
"So this isn't official business?" Heechul shook his head. Sungmin thought he understood why he looked like he was going to snap, and while he wasn't scared, he proceeded carefully out of respect. "Was she one of the--"
Heechul shook his head before Sungmin could finish the question, hair flipping back and forth across his face. "She worked at the detention center, though," he said. He was biting his nails now, varnish chipping away in his mouth. "She might not have been one of them, but she was still a fucking bitch."
"Have you thought about coming to her house when she's not here?" Sungmin suggested, a little flippant. Heechul stuck his middle finger up at him. "This is pointless, hyung. We're going to die of hypothermia at this rate, plus she's asleep."
"I could just go in there and shoot her in the head now," Heechul said idly.
"Do you have any gloves?" Sungmin asked. Heechul shook his head. "Fingerprints, hyung."
Heechul smirked. "It's not like they've got me on the system anymore," he said. "Maybe a few years back that would have worried me, but not now."
"You should still be careful," Sungmin said, dropping down from the dumpster and crouching when he hit the floor to stop his hood from falling from his face. A camera had been focused on them all night, the person watching on the other end probably taking them for tramps of some sort. None of the Gees had arrived, in any case, but he still didn't want them to see his face. The lack of recognition on their screen would set alarm bells ringing. Heechul clambered down too, far less gracefully than Sungmin had managed it.
The walk back to headquarters was long and difficult, trying to avoid being seen by the cameras that saw practically every inch of ground of the city. By the time they arrived it was close to four in the morning, and Sungmin was dead on his feet. Heechul, in his usual nocturnal fashion, was as perky and awake as he ever was, which meant that he wasn't very perky whatsoever. Sungmin left him at the stairs, stumbling up them and along to his room, tripping as he went. He barely had the energy to take his clothes off, and fell into bed in his boxer shorts, still wearing his socks.
Siwon woke up, pulled him close with his arm around his waist, and then pushed him away again. "You stink," he said.
"Thanks," Sungmin said sullenly, cuddling back up to him. "Heechul had us sitting on a rubbish bin all night."
"Shower," Siwon said, chin on Sungmin's head but his nose turned up.
"In the morning," Sungmin said, and fell asleep.
Kyuhyun was the only other person awake in the entire building. Heechul wandered into the operations room eating the food that Ryeowook had plated him for him since he was out. Kyuhyun was working on something, goggles on his face and soldering iron beading silver onto the circuit in front of him. Zhou Mi was lying on the floor. Heechul poked him with a toe, and he grumbled in his sleep and turned onto his side. "Shouldn't he be doing that in a bed?" he asked, sitting down and putting his plate on the table.
"We'd never see each other then," Kyuhyun said. Heechul rolled his eyes. "Where have you been? Ryeowook said that neither you nor Sungmin turned up for dinner."
"We were doing stuff," Heechul said vaguely. "I thought Kibum was making dinner tonight."
"He burnt it," Kyuhyun said. "They decided it would be easier to just let Ryeowook make it. Looking up old contacts?"
Heechul didn't know whether he liked or hated how Kyuhyun referred to the people from the detention center that Heechul had spent his teenage years in. It amused him, because it was so understated, but it suggested a level of friendship that he didn't want associated with those people. They had not been his friends. Also, he wasn't merely looking them up. He was picking them off, one by one. "In a manner of speaking," he eventually replied. Kyuhyun sighed.
"Kangin isn't this hell bent on revenge," he said. "Why can't you be more like Kangin?"
"What, and go out and beat people up for kicks?" Heechul looked up and saw Kyuhyun smiling at him wryly. He snorted. "Bastard, I thought you were serious."
"Kangin has a black eye," Kyuhyun said, laying his soldering iron down and motioning in a circle around his eye. "From a fight. Eeteuk looked like he was ready to give him another one when he saw."
"You should put a behavioural chip in," Heechul said, picking at the leftover rice with his fingers. "Make him docile and obedient."
"Do you have any idea how expensive those things are? They're like gold dust. I'm not going to waste one of those on Kangin, if I managed to get hold of one." His eyes flicked back to Zhou Mi sleeping on the floor. No matter how much good they did as a group, as individuals they were all incredibly selfish. Heechul knew that if he ever stumbled on a behavioural chip, he probably wouldn't let Kyuhyun have it, no matter how much Heechul loved Zhou Mi. "Besides, you can never get ones that haven't been used before, and I don't want a pre-programmed one."
"Why not just make one yourself, then?" Heechul could remember the few months he spent with one of the chips inserted. It had been like hell, wanting to do something but being unable to make your body do something other than the rules that you had been given in the program. It had been a last ditch attempt by his parents to get him to change his ways; they'd thought that it would affect him permanently. He'd been worse than ever before as soon as it came out.
"I don't know how," Kyuhyun admitted. "It's seriously sophisticated technology, and I don't have even the most basic blueprints to build on. Besides, who will I test it on? It could kill my guinea pig, so I'm hardly likely to use one of you, and if I use someone else, a random person from the streets, then I'm not better than any of them."
"Well, if you ever find one," Heechul said, yawning and standing up, "let me know. You never know when one of those things will come in handy." He picked up his plate and said goodbye. Kyuhyun mumbled something back, already snapping his goggles back over his face and picking up his iron. When Heechul left the room, he heard Zhou Mi say something in Mandarin. He thought it was just in his sleep, but then he heard Kyuhyun reply to him in the same language and guessed that it hadn't been.
The house was silent as he made his way to the kitchen to dump his plate in the sink for someone else to wash in the morning, and then up to the third floor to his bedroom. While everyone always seemed surprised when they found out that he had the smallest bedroom, in reality he'd picked well, because it ensured that he could never have a roommate. Kangin had chosen a big room on the second floor and he was stuck sharing with both Shindong and Eunhyuk, and now it looked like Donghae was going to be stuck with the new guy.
The room was cold when he arrived. He'd accidentally left the window open, or so he assumed, because he checked every hiding place in case someone had climbed in. It was stupid, because it was the third floor, but let it never be said that he wasn't paranoid as fuck. He shut it with a slam, undressed and climbed into bed. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling for another hour, before he finally drifted off.
He was woken far too early by a knock at his door. He groaned something unintelligible, but the door opened anyway. It was Hankyung, with some kid with stupid hair. "This is Heechul," Hankyung said cheerfully. Heechul untangled himself from his sheets and sat up, hair all over his face.
"Fuck off," he growled.
"Good morning to you too, Princess," Hankyung said. The boy next to him was eyeing Heechul warily. "'Chul, this is Henry, he's the newest addition."
"Nngh," Heechul said, which translated to I don't care. He flopped back down and swung his head around so it was hanging off the side of the bed. "Kyungie," he groaned. "What time is it?"
"It's one in the afternoon," Hankyung said, coming into the room uninvited and beginning to tidy Heechul's clothes up. "So don't bitch at me about waking you up early."
Henry was still standing in the doorway, watching Hankyung tidy up. Heechul was staring at him, almost upside down. "You look like Hamtaro," he said.
Henry looked at him nervously. "Who?"
"Ask Donghae to show you."
Hankyung threw Heechul's underwear from last night at his head. "You naked under there?" he asked, leering a little.
"Wouldn't you like to know," Heechul said, throwing them back.
"I would," Hankyung said, and he stalked over and tried to take the covers from over Heechul's hips. Heechul shrieked and clung onto them for dear life, and the whole thing ended up with them on the floor, helpless with laughter, Heechul with the covers wrapped around his waist like a long skirt. Hankyung kissed his forehead and stood up, and opened the curtains. Heechul shied away from the light like he was some sort of vampire. "Go shower," Hankyung told him. "You smell like garbage for some reason."
"Get the fuck out," Heechul said imperiously, pointing towards the door. Hankyung followed the order, closing the door behind him just as Heechul got to his feet. He was chuckling still.
"Um," Henry said in Mandarin. "Are you two fucking or something?"
"Don't be stupid," Hankyung said. "Of course not."
Zhou Mi was trying to convince Kyuhyun to go to sleep, but Kyuhyun had missed his chance. He always timed the small amount of sleep he needed to catch around Zhou Mi's endless sleep schedule, so that they would wake up at the same time. Sleeping was such a wasteful activity to him that he hated having to do it by himself. He yawned again into his bowl of cereal and Zhou Mi fretted.
"Just a nap, Kui Xian," he said, tugging on Kyuhyun's sleeve. "Just an hour or so. You'll feel better for it."
"I'll feel better if you left me alone," Kyuhyun said, pulling his sleeve from Zhou Mi's grasp. A day or two without sleep, Kyuhyun could cope with, but now he was going onto his third day and he didn't think he could cope with Zhou Mi's hassling. He'd messed up his soldering the night before because his hands had been shaking too much, and that stuff was hard enough to come across without him wasting it. He still wasn't going to sleep, not until Zhou Mi did, which would be in -- he checked his watch -- another nine hours.
"I'll make you some coffee," Zhou Mi said, jumping to his feet and grabbing the empty mug in front of Kyuhyun.
"Not that one," he said, reaching out and taking it back out of his hands. "That's Yehsung's."
"Oh, you're right." Zhou Mi opened one of the cupboards and reached in and took out Kyuhyun's blue mug. "Sorry, I've just woken up."
You've just woken up, Kyuhyun thought, and soon you'll be asleep again. He sighed and dropped his spoon in his bowl, where it made a smushing noise against the remains of his breakfast. Once, when he'd been a kid, his parents had gotten hold of some sugar. Cornflakes without sugar had never been interesting again. Zhou Mi put a mug of strong, black coffee in front of him triumphantly. Kyuhyun sipped it and grimaced. Zhou Mi's face fell. "Do you want milk? Or sugar? Wait, we don't have sugar."
"No one has sugar," Kyuhyun muttered.
"Well, Ryeowook has caster sugar, but I'm not sure what that would be like in coffee."
"This is fine," Kyuhyun said, gulping down a mouthful. So long as it kept him awake for just another nine hours, it was fine. Zhou Mi brightened up and started cleaning up his cereal bowl. Kyuhyun watched him, resigned, long having given up on telling Zhou Mi that he wasn't a kid and didn't need to be mothered like one. Donghae bounded into the room, and Zhou Mi promptly put the coffee machine in the top cupboard where Donghae had no chance of reaching it. Where no one but Zhou Mi or Siwon had a chance of reaching it, in fact.
"You're no fun," Donghae said with a grin as he started loading bread onto the grill, six slices. Sometimes it was sickening, the amount of food Donghae went through. It was just lucky there was a black market, and they knew their way around it. "You look dead on your feet," Donghae told Kyuhyun. "Like a zombie. Braaains."
Kyuhyun drank the rest of his coffee in one, long, mouth-blistering gulp, and stood up to splash some cold water on his face from the sink. Zhou Mi stood watching him, playing with his fingers. Sungmin and Siwon walked in. Sungmin looked tired after his late night, his hair still wet from the shower he must have just taken. He clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth at Kyuhyun's face. "Go sleep, Kyu," he said, sitting down as Siwon reached up to free the coffee pot. "There's no point in you staying awake, we'll manage without you for just this morning."
"I've got things to do," Kyuhyun said. "Brains to...pick." He glanced at Donghae, smothering his toast in strawberry jam. "Where's Shindong?"
"Operations room," Eeteuk said, coming into the room. "He couldn't sleep so he went to the market, and he's got some things he wants you to see -- holy, Kyuhyun, will you go to bed?"
Kyuhyun snarled and stormed out of the room. Zhou Mi followed on his heels, trying to sooth his frazzled nerves. Kyuhyun ended up snapping at him, which meant that Zhou Mi sat on the floor next to Kyuhyun's chair silently while Shindong showed Kyuhyun the new pieces of technology that he'd found that morning. He'd managed to swap some of Ryeowook's spare flour for some more solder, which calmed Kyuhyun down a little. When Shindong had left, Kyuhyun reached down and ran his hands through Zhou Mi's hair. Zhou Mi stood up, face closed off.
"Mimi," Kyuhyun said softly. "I'm sorry, okay? I'm so tired, I didn't meant to snap."
Zhou Mi's blank expression broke in a second, and he smiled, bending down to kiss Kyuhyun on the mouth. "That's okay," he said. "I know. You really should sleep, though."
"I will do when you do," Kyuhyun said.
Ryeowook found Yehsung in the otherwise empty operations room, staring at one of the screens. On the camera, a man was pacing up and down an office. He was short and rather tubby, balding on top. "Who is he?" Ryeowook asked, slipping onto Yehsung's lap. Yehsung wrapped his arms around his waist and paused, musingly.
"Some guy," he said eventually. "I don't know his name, though I got his serial number from his office."
"What's he done?" Ryeowook asked, resting his head back against Yehsung's shoulder.
"Remember a month or so back when we put your picture in the paper under a fake name in order to pull off that sting with the retired general?" Ryeowook nodded; it had been a controversial move, and had annoyed Yehsung, because pictures could be dangerous, but it had been Kyuhyun's idea, so no one had really argued. It had worked well, in the end. "He was one of the other guys who replied to the ad."
"Huh?" Then Ryeowook understood; they'd advertised him as a rent boy, after all. "Oh, I see." He leaned forward and looked more closely at the guy, before shuddering and leaning back. "No thanks." Yehsung's hold tightened. "You've got his serial number? What were you going to do with it?"
"Kill him." Ryeowook gasped, shocked, his hands leaping up to his mouth, and Yehsung said sheepishly, "Okay, well, maybe not kill him. Maybe make him go out and get beaten around a little bit. I'm not too sure yet, I'm still thinking about it."
"Why?"
"Because he wanted you."
"Other people replied to the ad."
"Five others did," Yehsung said. "I've got all their serial numbers too. I'd make them all beat each other up if I could work out how to man 5 phones at the same time."
"You're jealous," Ryeowook said. "It's cute."
"Not hot?"
"Only a little bit," Ryeowook said, with a laugh. Yehsung smiled, put his hand on Ryeowook's chin and twisted his head around so he could kiss him. Ryeowook, because Yehsung being jealous was a lot hotter than he had let on, moaned into his mouth and pulled him closer. Yehsung pushed him onto the counter, half getting to his feet so that he could stand between Ryeowook's knees, kissing him. Ryeowook hooked a leg around Yehsung's waist.
The door swung open, and Kangin recoiled backwards. "Not here," he shouted, as Ryeowook pushed Yehsung away and tried to straighten his clothes. Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were behind him, but Zhou Mi hadn't seen, and Kyuhyun looked like he couldn't see anything anyway. Ryeowook opened his mouth to say something, but Zhou Mi had just come in and shook his head quickly. Ryeowook frowned, but didn't say anything.
"Just need to pick up the post-its," Kyuhyun said, slurring his words a little. He picked up a spanner, stared at it, and then put it back down. Yehsung picked up the post-it notes and handed them to him. Kyuhyun stared at them for a good minute before shaking his head and putting them back down. Yehsung and Kangin exchanged glances, Kangin rolling his eyes. "No, no," Kyuhyun said. "I need -- something. Not pieces of paper. Post its!"
Zhou Mi picked up the metal pins that they used to push things into their corkboard and put the tub in Kyuhyun's hands. "Yes!" Kyuhyun said, waving it in their faces. "This. All useless."
"Get him to bed, Zhou Mi," Yehsung said, rolling his eyes. "I don't understand why he isn't there already."
"He refuses to go until I do," Zhou Mi said, and then he jumped forward to stop Kyuhyun from beginning on his soldering, since he was likely to just burn himself.
"So you go too." Kangin sat down in one of the desk chairs, spinning it in a circle once before stopping it. "You must have been awa--" And then he stopped, because no one really talked about Zhou Mi's sleeping habits.
"Okay," Zhou Mi said after an awkward pause. He grabbed Kyuhyun's shoulders and began ushering him to the door. "Bed, Kui Xian!" Kyuhyun mumbled something, looking like the mere mention of bed was enough to knock him out. They met Hankyung and Henry on their way up the stairs. "Hi," Zhou Mi said cheerfully. Kyuhyun raised a hand half-heartedly and didn't stop on his trudge to his room. By the time they reached it, even Zhou Mi was beginning to crash, his tongue starting to get heavy in his mouth and his eyes burning.
Kyuhyun pulled his t-shirt off and faceplanted on the bed, grabbing Zhou Mi's pillow and pulling it against his chest to hug. Zhou Mi, the room swaying, managed to get into his pyjamas and half-managed to drag the pillow away from Kyuhyun's hold before he was out for the count too.
"I could be having dinner with Siwon," he said miserably. The dumpster they were sitting on in an alley opposite the woman's house smelled disgusting. "I could have been having sex right now."
"Shut up," Heechul said, rapping his fingernails against the lid of the dumpster. He looked like he was ready to snap, but Sungmin wasn't scared of Heechul; he was too easily distracted in a fight by his hair being messed up.
"Why are we sitting here?" Sungmin whined. "She's gone to bed, there's nothing more to see. I'm tired!"
"Would you stop complaining? I need her serial number, okay? I've been trying to find it for months, but she won't let it up."
"Does Kyuhyun know you're scoping her out?"
Heechul's fingernails stopped, then continued double time. "No."
"So this isn't official business?" Heechul shook his head. Sungmin thought he understood why he looked like he was going to snap, and while he wasn't scared, he proceeded carefully out of respect. "Was she one of the--"
Heechul shook his head before Sungmin could finish the question, hair flipping back and forth across his face. "She worked at the detention center, though," he said. He was biting his nails now, varnish chipping away in his mouth. "She might not have been one of them, but she was still a fucking bitch."
"Have you thought about coming to her house when she's not here?" Sungmin suggested, a little flippant. Heechul stuck his middle finger up at him. "This is pointless, hyung. We're going to die of hypothermia at this rate, plus she's asleep."
"I could just go in there and shoot her in the head now," Heechul said idly.
"Do you have any gloves?" Sungmin asked. Heechul shook his head. "Fingerprints, hyung."
Heechul smirked. "It's not like they've got me on the system anymore," he said. "Maybe a few years back that would have worried me, but not now."
"You should still be careful," Sungmin said, dropping down from the dumpster and crouching when he hit the floor to stop his hood from falling from his face. A camera had been focused on them all night, the person watching on the other end probably taking them for tramps of some sort. None of the Gees had arrived, in any case, but he still didn't want them to see his face. The lack of recognition on their screen would set alarm bells ringing. Heechul clambered down too, far less gracefully than Sungmin had managed it.
The walk back to headquarters was long and difficult, trying to avoid being seen by the cameras that saw practically every inch of ground of the city. By the time they arrived it was close to four in the morning, and Sungmin was dead on his feet. Heechul, in his usual nocturnal fashion, was as perky and awake as he ever was, which meant that he wasn't very perky whatsoever. Sungmin left him at the stairs, stumbling up them and along to his room, tripping as he went. He barely had the energy to take his clothes off, and fell into bed in his boxer shorts, still wearing his socks.
Siwon woke up, pulled him close with his arm around his waist, and then pushed him away again. "You stink," he said.
"Thanks," Sungmin said sullenly, cuddling back up to him. "Heechul had us sitting on a rubbish bin all night."
"Shower," Siwon said, chin on Sungmin's head but his nose turned up.
"In the morning," Sungmin said, and fell asleep.
Kyuhyun was the only other person awake in the entire building. Heechul wandered into the operations room eating the food that Ryeowook had plated him for him since he was out. Kyuhyun was working on something, goggles on his face and soldering iron beading silver onto the circuit in front of him. Zhou Mi was lying on the floor. Heechul poked him with a toe, and he grumbled in his sleep and turned onto his side. "Shouldn't he be doing that in a bed?" he asked, sitting down and putting his plate on the table.
"We'd never see each other then," Kyuhyun said. Heechul rolled his eyes. "Where have you been? Ryeowook said that neither you nor Sungmin turned up for dinner."
"We were doing stuff," Heechul said vaguely. "I thought Kibum was making dinner tonight."
"He burnt it," Kyuhyun said. "They decided it would be easier to just let Ryeowook make it. Looking up old contacts?"
Heechul didn't know whether he liked or hated how Kyuhyun referred to the people from the detention center that Heechul had spent his teenage years in. It amused him, because it was so understated, but it suggested a level of friendship that he didn't want associated with those people. They had not been his friends. Also, he wasn't merely looking them up. He was picking them off, one by one. "In a manner of speaking," he eventually replied. Kyuhyun sighed.
"Kangin isn't this hell bent on revenge," he said. "Why can't you be more like Kangin?"
"What, and go out and beat people up for kicks?" Heechul looked up and saw Kyuhyun smiling at him wryly. He snorted. "Bastard, I thought you were serious."
"Kangin has a black eye," Kyuhyun said, laying his soldering iron down and motioning in a circle around his eye. "From a fight. Eeteuk looked like he was ready to give him another one when he saw."
"You should put a behavioural chip in," Heechul said, picking at the leftover rice with his fingers. "Make him docile and obedient."
"Do you have any idea how expensive those things are? They're like gold dust. I'm not going to waste one of those on Kangin, if I managed to get hold of one." His eyes flicked back to Zhou Mi sleeping on the floor. No matter how much good they did as a group, as individuals they were all incredibly selfish. Heechul knew that if he ever stumbled on a behavioural chip, he probably wouldn't let Kyuhyun have it, no matter how much Heechul loved Zhou Mi. "Besides, you can never get ones that haven't been used before, and I don't want a pre-programmed one."
"Why not just make one yourself, then?" Heechul could remember the few months he spent with one of the chips inserted. It had been like hell, wanting to do something but being unable to make your body do something other than the rules that you had been given in the program. It had been a last ditch attempt by his parents to get him to change his ways; they'd thought that it would affect him permanently. He'd been worse than ever before as soon as it came out.
"I don't know how," Kyuhyun admitted. "It's seriously sophisticated technology, and I don't have even the most basic blueprints to build on. Besides, who will I test it on? It could kill my guinea pig, so I'm hardly likely to use one of you, and if I use someone else, a random person from the streets, then I'm not better than any of them."
"Well, if you ever find one," Heechul said, yawning and standing up, "let me know. You never know when one of those things will come in handy." He picked up his plate and said goodbye. Kyuhyun mumbled something back, already snapping his goggles back over his face and picking up his iron. When Heechul left the room, he heard Zhou Mi say something in Mandarin. He thought it was just in his sleep, but then he heard Kyuhyun reply to him in the same language and guessed that it hadn't been.
The house was silent as he made his way to the kitchen to dump his plate in the sink for someone else to wash in the morning, and then up to the third floor to his bedroom. While everyone always seemed surprised when they found out that he had the smallest bedroom, in reality he'd picked well, because it ensured that he could never have a roommate. Kangin had chosen a big room on the second floor and he was stuck sharing with both Shindong and Eunhyuk, and now it looked like Donghae was going to be stuck with the new guy.
The room was cold when he arrived. He'd accidentally left the window open, or so he assumed, because he checked every hiding place in case someone had climbed in. It was stupid, because it was the third floor, but let it never be said that he wasn't paranoid as fuck. He shut it with a slam, undressed and climbed into bed. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling for another hour, before he finally drifted off.
He was woken far too early by a knock at his door. He groaned something unintelligible, but the door opened anyway. It was Hankyung, with some kid with stupid hair. "This is Heechul," Hankyung said cheerfully. Heechul untangled himself from his sheets and sat up, hair all over his face.
"Fuck off," he growled.
"Good morning to you too, Princess," Hankyung said. The boy next to him was eyeing Heechul warily. "'Chul, this is Henry, he's the newest addition."
"Nngh," Heechul said, which translated to I don't care. He flopped back down and swung his head around so it was hanging off the side of the bed. "Kyungie," he groaned. "What time is it?"
"It's one in the afternoon," Hankyung said, coming into the room uninvited and beginning to tidy Heechul's clothes up. "So don't bitch at me about waking you up early."
Henry was still standing in the doorway, watching Hankyung tidy up. Heechul was staring at him, almost upside down. "You look like Hamtaro," he said.
Henry looked at him nervously. "Who?"
"Ask Donghae to show you."
Hankyung threw Heechul's underwear from last night at his head. "You naked under there?" he asked, leering a little.
"Wouldn't you like to know," Heechul said, throwing them back.
"I would," Hankyung said, and he stalked over and tried to take the covers from over Heechul's hips. Heechul shrieked and clung onto them for dear life, and the whole thing ended up with them on the floor, helpless with laughter, Heechul with the covers wrapped around his waist like a long skirt. Hankyung kissed his forehead and stood up, and opened the curtains. Heechul shied away from the light like he was some sort of vampire. "Go shower," Hankyung told him. "You smell like garbage for some reason."
"Get the fuck out," Heechul said imperiously, pointing towards the door. Hankyung followed the order, closing the door behind him just as Heechul got to his feet. He was chuckling still.
"Um," Henry said in Mandarin. "Are you two fucking or something?"
"Don't be stupid," Hankyung said. "Of course not."
Zhou Mi was trying to convince Kyuhyun to go to sleep, but Kyuhyun had missed his chance. He always timed the small amount of sleep he needed to catch around Zhou Mi's endless sleep schedule, so that they would wake up at the same time. Sleeping was such a wasteful activity to him that he hated having to do it by himself. He yawned again into his bowl of cereal and Zhou Mi fretted.
"Just a nap, Kui Xian," he said, tugging on Kyuhyun's sleeve. "Just an hour or so. You'll feel better for it."
"I'll feel better if you left me alone," Kyuhyun said, pulling his sleeve from Zhou Mi's grasp. A day or two without sleep, Kyuhyun could cope with, but now he was going onto his third day and he didn't think he could cope with Zhou Mi's hassling. He'd messed up his soldering the night before because his hands had been shaking too much, and that stuff was hard enough to come across without him wasting it. He still wasn't going to sleep, not until Zhou Mi did, which would be in -- he checked his watch -- another nine hours.
"I'll make you some coffee," Zhou Mi said, jumping to his feet and grabbing the empty mug in front of Kyuhyun.
"Not that one," he said, reaching out and taking it back out of his hands. "That's Yehsung's."
"Oh, you're right." Zhou Mi opened one of the cupboards and reached in and took out Kyuhyun's blue mug. "Sorry, I've just woken up."
You've just woken up, Kyuhyun thought, and soon you'll be asleep again. He sighed and dropped his spoon in his bowl, where it made a smushing noise against the remains of his breakfast. Once, when he'd been a kid, his parents had gotten hold of some sugar. Cornflakes without sugar had never been interesting again. Zhou Mi put a mug of strong, black coffee in front of him triumphantly. Kyuhyun sipped it and grimaced. Zhou Mi's face fell. "Do you want milk? Or sugar? Wait, we don't have sugar."
"No one has sugar," Kyuhyun muttered.
"Well, Ryeowook has caster sugar, but I'm not sure what that would be like in coffee."
"This is fine," Kyuhyun said, gulping down a mouthful. So long as it kept him awake for just another nine hours, it was fine. Zhou Mi brightened up and started cleaning up his cereal bowl. Kyuhyun watched him, resigned, long having given up on telling Zhou Mi that he wasn't a kid and didn't need to be mothered like one. Donghae bounded into the room, and Zhou Mi promptly put the coffee machine in the top cupboard where Donghae had no chance of reaching it. Where no one but Zhou Mi or Siwon had a chance of reaching it, in fact.
"You're no fun," Donghae said with a grin as he started loading bread onto the grill, six slices. Sometimes it was sickening, the amount of food Donghae went through. It was just lucky there was a black market, and they knew their way around it. "You look dead on your feet," Donghae told Kyuhyun. "Like a zombie. Braaains."
Kyuhyun drank the rest of his coffee in one, long, mouth-blistering gulp, and stood up to splash some cold water on his face from the sink. Zhou Mi stood watching him, playing with his fingers. Sungmin and Siwon walked in. Sungmin looked tired after his late night, his hair still wet from the shower he must have just taken. He clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth at Kyuhyun's face. "Go sleep, Kyu," he said, sitting down as Siwon reached up to free the coffee pot. "There's no point in you staying awake, we'll manage without you for just this morning."
"I've got things to do," Kyuhyun said. "Brains to...pick." He glanced at Donghae, smothering his toast in strawberry jam. "Where's Shindong?"
"Operations room," Eeteuk said, coming into the room. "He couldn't sleep so he went to the market, and he's got some things he wants you to see -- holy, Kyuhyun, will you go to bed?"
Kyuhyun snarled and stormed out of the room. Zhou Mi followed on his heels, trying to sooth his frazzled nerves. Kyuhyun ended up snapping at him, which meant that Zhou Mi sat on the floor next to Kyuhyun's chair silently while Shindong showed Kyuhyun the new pieces of technology that he'd found that morning. He'd managed to swap some of Ryeowook's spare flour for some more solder, which calmed Kyuhyun down a little. When Shindong had left, Kyuhyun reached down and ran his hands through Zhou Mi's hair. Zhou Mi stood up, face closed off.
"Mimi," Kyuhyun said softly. "I'm sorry, okay? I'm so tired, I didn't meant to snap."
Zhou Mi's blank expression broke in a second, and he smiled, bending down to kiss Kyuhyun on the mouth. "That's okay," he said. "I know. You really should sleep, though."
"I will do when you do," Kyuhyun said.
Ryeowook found Yehsung in the otherwise empty operations room, staring at one of the screens. On the camera, a man was pacing up and down an office. He was short and rather tubby, balding on top. "Who is he?" Ryeowook asked, slipping onto Yehsung's lap. Yehsung wrapped his arms around his waist and paused, musingly.
"Some guy," he said eventually. "I don't know his name, though I got his serial number from his office."
"What's he done?" Ryeowook asked, resting his head back against Yehsung's shoulder.
"Remember a month or so back when we put your picture in the paper under a fake name in order to pull off that sting with the retired general?" Ryeowook nodded; it had been a controversial move, and had annoyed Yehsung, because pictures could be dangerous, but it had been Kyuhyun's idea, so no one had really argued. It had worked well, in the end. "He was one of the other guys who replied to the ad."
"Huh?" Then Ryeowook understood; they'd advertised him as a rent boy, after all. "Oh, I see." He leaned forward and looked more closely at the guy, before shuddering and leaning back. "No thanks." Yehsung's hold tightened. "You've got his serial number? What were you going to do with it?"
"Kill him." Ryeowook gasped, shocked, his hands leaping up to his mouth, and Yehsung said sheepishly, "Okay, well, maybe not kill him. Maybe make him go out and get beaten around a little bit. I'm not too sure yet, I'm still thinking about it."
"Why?"
"Because he wanted you."
"Other people replied to the ad."
"Five others did," Yehsung said. "I've got all their serial numbers too. I'd make them all beat each other up if I could work out how to man 5 phones at the same time."
"You're jealous," Ryeowook said. "It's cute."
"Not hot?"
"Only a little bit," Ryeowook said, with a laugh. Yehsung smiled, put his hand on Ryeowook's chin and twisted his head around so he could kiss him. Ryeowook, because Yehsung being jealous was a lot hotter than he had let on, moaned into his mouth and pulled him closer. Yehsung pushed him onto the counter, half getting to his feet so that he could stand between Ryeowook's knees, kissing him. Ryeowook hooked a leg around Yehsung's waist.
The door swung open, and Kangin recoiled backwards. "Not here," he shouted, as Ryeowook pushed Yehsung away and tried to straighten his clothes. Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were behind him, but Zhou Mi hadn't seen, and Kyuhyun looked like he couldn't see anything anyway. Ryeowook opened his mouth to say something, but Zhou Mi had just come in and shook his head quickly. Ryeowook frowned, but didn't say anything.
"Just need to pick up the post-its," Kyuhyun said, slurring his words a little. He picked up a spanner, stared at it, and then put it back down. Yehsung picked up the post-it notes and handed them to him. Kyuhyun stared at them for a good minute before shaking his head and putting them back down. Yehsung and Kangin exchanged glances, Kangin rolling his eyes. "No, no," Kyuhyun said. "I need -- something. Not pieces of paper. Post its!"
Zhou Mi picked up the metal pins that they used to push things into their corkboard and put the tub in Kyuhyun's hands. "Yes!" Kyuhyun said, waving it in their faces. "This. All useless."
"Get him to bed, Zhou Mi," Yehsung said, rolling his eyes. "I don't understand why he isn't there already."
"He refuses to go until I do," Zhou Mi said, and then he jumped forward to stop Kyuhyun from beginning on his soldering, since he was likely to just burn himself.
"So you go too." Kangin sat down in one of the desk chairs, spinning it in a circle once before stopping it. "You must have been awa--" And then he stopped, because no one really talked about Zhou Mi's sleeping habits.
"Okay," Zhou Mi said after an awkward pause. He grabbed Kyuhyun's shoulders and began ushering him to the door. "Bed, Kui Xian!" Kyuhyun mumbled something, looking like the mere mention of bed was enough to knock him out. They met Hankyung and Henry on their way up the stairs. "Hi," Zhou Mi said cheerfully. Kyuhyun raised a hand half-heartedly and didn't stop on his trudge to his room. By the time they reached it, even Zhou Mi was beginning to crash, his tongue starting to get heavy in his mouth and his eyes burning.
Kyuhyun pulled his t-shirt off and faceplanted on the bed, grabbing Zhou Mi's pillow and pulling it against his chest to hug. Zhou Mi, the room swaying, managed to get into his pyjamas and half-managed to drag the pillow away from Kyuhyun's hold before he was out for the count too.
.........................................................
It was Hankyung and Siwon who took Henry to the black market to introduce him to how things worked there. Henry was glad about this on two levels. On the first, Hankyung was Chinese and Siwon spoke some Mandarin, so Henry didn't have to struggle with Korean quite so much. On the second, they both looked like they could defend themselves in a fight. They were still sorting a gun out for Henry, and he felt that if he had to go to the black market without a weapon, at the very least he should go with the strongest guys in the gang.
Hankyung had laughed when Henry had casually mentioned that. "If you really were with the strongest guys in the gang," he said, as they weaved down alley after alley until Henry thought they had no way of finding their way back, "then we'd have Sungmin and Kangin with us too. Siwon and I can look after you, though. We won't get any trouble. The guys down here know us."
"Down where?" Henry asked, just as Hankyung bent down and lifted a manhole cover up. Rather than a simple drop down, there was a set of stairs, so that it was more like a trap-door disguised to look like a manhole cover. Henry looked around, noting that it was a blind spot that the cameras couldn't reach. There was shouting from down below, the faint sound of people shouting out their wares.
Siwon hitched the bag of stuff they had to trade over his shoulder and said, "Let's go."
Down the stairs led to a cavernous room, with a high ceiling and water running down the walls. It stunk of damp and sweat, too many bodies crammed together. It was teaming with life, stalls packed up close to one another, all selling something different. Henry stared around himself, fascinated. So many things that he'd never seen before -- so many things that he'd only ever seen in books! Hankyung smiled at the expression on his face, and nudged Siwon. "He looks like you did when I first brought you down here," he said.
"Yeah, but you know," Siwon said, leaning back as a woman walked past, a baby strapped to her back, "I was like, twelve."
"Eighteen," Hankyung corrected. "Henry's age. You reacted the exact same way." He pointed to the ceiling, and the walls. "We're still in the sewer, but the refuse is diverted to another route. This place was a refuge for people who didn't want to be chipped back when it was first being introduced. Then they turned it into this place when the rationing and cuts were introduced. Or so I was told," he added with a smile. "I mean, I'm Chinese, it's not my history."
"There are so many people," Henry said. "Surely they'll get caught by the government, this many people with chips?"
"No." Hankyung shook his head. "These people don't even register for the big jobs. There's no one keeping tabs on them, because no one cares what these people do. The only ones that they could be keeping tabs on are us--" he grinned -- "and we don't have chips."
Siwon smiled at and exchanged small talk with an old woman sitting behind a table piled with old books. "Heechul likes books," Hankyung said, putting a hand on Henry's shoulder and directing him from the stall to another one further down. "The woman who owns that stall only takes food, though, and we don't always have a lot to spare."
The stall that they stopped in front of was being manned by a pretty boy with multi-coloured hair. He appeared to be selling scrap pieces of metal and paper, none of which looked particularly worthwhile to Henry's eyes. The boy wasn't even looking after them that much, and he certainly didn't look old enough to be selling anything of any worth on the black market; he looked younger than Henry himself. "Hey, Key," Hankyung said, leaning over the table. The boy looked up, reached underneath the table, and poked something.
Another boy lifted his head up. He looked like Donghae, but he looked more like -- Henry swallowed. He had three tone blonde hair and a pencil stuck behind his ear. "Hyung!" he said, grinning at Hankyung and then looking curiously at Henry. "You're back. Where's Heechul-hyung?"
"Resting," Hankyung said, though the last Henry had seen, Heechul was storming through the house screaming about needing some more shampoo and "could someone please go get him some because he couldn't go outside looking like this". "Listen, Jonghyun, we need the blueprints of a house. Have you got them?"
"It depends which house," Jonghyun said, getting out from under the table and sitting on a nearby chair, "and it depends on what you're offering."
"Number 44, Sah-jung Street," Hankyung said, as Siwon neared. "A man, Choi Hyung-dan. We're offering whatever you want from this bag." He motioned to Siwon, who handed the bag over to Jonghyun, who promptly handed it over to Key, who started rummaging around in it. He pulled out a bright pink t-shirt, and some sort of flat, shiny disc. He pulled on Jonghyun's sleeve and motioned with his hands. Jonghyun frowned, then turned to Hankyung.
"What's on the CD?" he asked. Key was looking under the table for something, and eventually pulled out the weirdest looking machine Henry had ever seen. It was big and clumsy looking, but it had headphones sticking out of it. Key pressed a button and the top of it flipped open. He put the disc inside it and closed the top, then put the headphones on.
"I have no idea," Hankyung said. "Donghae found it, months ago. Some girl group, it was all in Korean, I couldn't understand."
Key was smiling and bouncing in his seat. Jonghyun rolled his eyes, and bent under the table and came back up with a piece of paper folded into four. "Here's your blueprints. You know the deal, make sure it doesn't get back to us and we'll make sure--"
"Yeah, I got it," Hankyung said, waving his hand.
"Is Minho around?" Siwon asked, taking the bag back from Jonghyun. "We need some circuit boards, Kyuhyun wants them."
"He's taken Taemin up top for a bit," Jonghyun said, biting the end of his pencil. Key switched his machine off and put it back under the desk, and then did some more hand motions. "He says that Onew is manning his stall while he's up there, though." Key narrowed his eyes at him, clearly picking up the note of disbelief, and Jonghyun stuck his tongue out at him.
"Cool," Hankyung said. "Come on, Henry."
Henry, however, wasn't paying attention. He was leaning over the desk, looking at what he now realised was blueprints of technology and buildings, disguised to look worthless. "The detention center in Chun-nyan," he said, almost feverishly. "Do you have the blueprints of that?"
Jonghyun was staring at him. "Fuck no," he said. "I've only got blueprints of places I can break into. No one can break into that place."
Hankyung could see that Henry fought hard against disappointment at this news, but it still showed on his face. Henry was part of them now, but being part of the group didn't mean that anyone knew you, or even had to know you. They had all joined up for their own reasons, had all wanted the chips out for one reason or another, and so long as Henry didn't betray them, no one would question why he was there.
"What's wrong with Key?" Henry asked Hankyung later that night. Hankyung had been reading a book, probably something he'd lifted from Heechul's room, forehead creased as he struggled to make out the Korean words. He looked up at Henry's question, looking glad of the distraction.
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't talk, the entire time we were there."
Hankyung winced. He closed the book, using his thumb to hold his place. "Yeah, he can't talk. A few years back, maybe four? He got stopped on the street by a couple of Gees, a routine check, you know? He's always been good at not panicking in those situations, but he was never very good at not answering back. They started harrassing him, he gave them cheek, and they held him down and cut his tongue from his mouth."
"Urgh," Henry said, sticking his own tongue out and touching it with his finger, as if to prove that it was still there.
"We got revenge for him, in a round about way. Took us a couple of years to complete it because we didn't want it getting back to Key. He copes well with it, for someone who was such a chatterbox before. He developed some sort of sign language with Jonghyun, no one else understands a word of it, but it gets him through. It's not like Jonghyun lets him out of his sight anymore." Hankyung sighed. "Sometimes I'm convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Heechul. He's worse than Key for not thinking about what he's going to say."
"Heechul is very--" Henry wanted to say 'brittle', but he wasn't sure whether Hankyung would take it as an insult. He shrugged, and Hankyung laughed.
"He is, rather," he said. "He spent a lot of time in that detention center that you mentioned at the market this morning." He paused; Henry got the feeling that he was waiting for Henry to explain why he'd been asking about that place. Henry kept a straight face, and didn't. When the pause continued, Hankyung said, "They're not nice places."
Henry turned white.
Kibum was working on something in his room when Donghae came running in, jumped on the bed, and sent the delicate computer chip flying. "Donghae!" Kibum yelled, shoving him off the bed and onto the floor. "Fuck off, hyung, I'm trying to do something."
Donghae pouted at him, then lay on his back on the floor and stuck his feet up onto the bed. "I'm bored," he announced.
Kibum collected up the things he'd been working on, grumbling. "I don't care," he said, leaning back over the work, and soldering two pieces of wire together. The goggles on his face looked strange with the glasses underneath them. "I'm busy."
"What are you doing?" Donghae sat up, and put his chin on the bed so he could watch Kibum work.
Kibum held up the tiny chip. "I'm corrupting the data on this. If I can get it to work correctly, it should disable lock systems. All that eye reader technology, fingerprint technology, absolutely useless. You'd be able to get into a building and no one would even realise something was wrong." Donghae whistled, and Kibum bent over the chip again. "Of course, that's if I can get it to work."
"Sounds impressive," Donghae said. "Ryeowook told Kyuhyun about what you did to the kitchen. Kyuhyun says that you're not allowed to cook anymore. That makes two of us now."
"Fine by me. It was worthwhile Ryeowook's rage to get off kitchen duty."
"Kibum, did you do it on purpose?"
Kibum was bent over the chip, but a smile was clearly visible on his face. "Of course not."
"I'm telling Kyuhyun," Donghae said happily. He jumped up, to go do just that.
"Tell him I'll do it again if he puts me on kitchen duty," Kibum said absently to the closed bedroom door.
Sungmin was swinging in his desk chair as he told the prostitute that they'd hacked into exactly which photographs to take of the Minister for Justice, naked and tied to the bed. He was a repulsive man, absolutely gross, and Sungmin had volunteered for the job because no one else could really be trusted to either not take it as a personal porn shoot, or not to simply take it too far. Once the girl had the pictures, he said, "And now put your clothes back and leave."
It was boring, switching between cameras and just waiting for her to get to the place that he'd told her to go, so he doodled on a piece of paper. No one else was in the operations room, so it wasn't like he had anyone he could talk to. He'd drawn a couple of flowers, a pretty block pattern for fabric, and a sketch of what he thought Henry's hair should look like -- he was going to get to work on that soon -- before she was at the place he wanted her to be. "Leave the camera there," he said, watched as she did so, and then hung up. She came to on the video feed, shaking her head in confusion, and looking around the strange place she'd found herself in. Not his problem. He turned the screen off.
He stood up and stretched, back popping back into place. He needed to go pick up the camera from the drop up point before someone else saw it -- and someone else would see it, that kind of technology would fetch a high price on the black market. He pulled his boots on, swung his leather jacket over his shoulders, flipped his hood up, and headed out of the house.
This late at night, there weren't many people out, and those that were weren't the kind of people Sungmin particularly wanted to associate himself with. He made it all the way to the pick up point without anything happening, other than a couple of crude shouts, but as he picked up the camera from the hollow it had been put in, an arm fastened around his neck and the point of a knife pressed against his pulse point. A voice, harsh from too much smoking, said, "Hey pretty boy, how about you hand over that camera, huh?"
Sungmin reached up and took the man's wrist, wrenched it forward and twisted it until he heard the bone snap. As the man doubled over, holding his wrist to his chest in pain, Sungmin brought his elbow down on the top of his spine. He heard something crack, and then man fell to the ground, eyes open and lifeless. Sungmin stared at him for a long minute, then said, "Oops." He hadn't meant to kill him. Then he shrugged and stepped over the body so he could go home.
Back in the operations room, Donghae and Eunhyuk were using one of the screens to play a video game they had bought from the market. Heechul was sitting in a chair with his foot on a table, painting his nails turquoise. The room was full of the smell of it. Sungmin wrinkled his nose as he sat in front of one of the laptops to upload the pictures that had been taken. "Smells," he said.
"So does your face," Heechul murmured, too focused on his nails to put much thought into his comeback. Sungmin inserted the chip from the camera into the drive, and wrinkled his nose even harder when the pictures opened up on the screen.
"This guy is so unfortunate looking," he said, clicking through them. "What's more unfortunate is that his fat doesn't hide his dick. I could have done without seeing that."
"The hell are you looking at?" Heechul asked.
"Die, motherfucker!" Eunhyuk shouted, banging into Donghae's shoulder with his own in an attempt at psyching him out. It never worked. You could only get Donghae's attention to focus on video games, and that meant that he was the best.
Siwon came into the room, looked around, then headed over to Sungmin, slinging his arms across his shoulders. "I was looking for you."
"I was out," Sungmin said, motioning to the screen. Siwon looked at the pictures, then gagged.
"Did you take those?"
"No, I made a whore take them, but I had to go pick up the camera."
Siwon was frowning at him, pulling away but keeping his hands on his shoulders. "You smell like smoke and alcohol," he said. "Did you go to a bar or something?"
"No, that would be the now very dead guy who tried to mug me for the camera," Sungmin said.
"Did he hurt you?"
"He didn't get a chance."
"And Kyuhyun says I need to stop being such a psychopath," Heechul muttered.
"That's because you do." Hankyung had come in through the other door without anyone really noticing, even though he was so tall and had bright blonde hair. Heechul jumped and upset his bottle of nail polish. Hankyung caught it and placed it back on the table safely. "Nice colour."
"Don't make me pour it over your head," Heechul threatened. He turned, as if to dab at Hankyung's clothes with his brush, but Hankyung distracted him by running a hand through his hair. "You're going to mess it up," Heechul grumbled, even as he leaned into the touch. He lay his head against Hankyung's hip, eyes closed.
"I need your superior good looks for something," Hankyung said to Siwon, who looked surprised. "Kyuhyun wants us to get into a party that's going on in two nights time, up in the upper circles. I can't go because they'll pick up immediately on my accent and want to know who I am and what my number is. He wants you and Eeteuk to go, there's some information about the therapy they're inflicting on kids at the -- you know -- in the house."
"You can say detention center," Heechul said lazily, fingers picking at the side seam of Hankyung's jeans. "It's not like I'm going to freak out or anything."
Not with Hankyung here, Sungmin thought, watching them together. Heechul lived like he was constantly being reminded of all the bad memories, while being around Hankyung was like he was remembering the one good memory he still had in his mind. Hankyung took the brush out of Heechul's hands and put it back in the bottle so that he wouldn't get any of the varnish anywhere.
"Kibum is working on forging some invitations for you," Hankyung said. "You've still got your fake ID, right?" Siwon nodded. "Kyuhyun said he'd brief you about it tomorrow morning after breakfast. He's working in the surgery, if you wanted to talk to him beforehand, though."
"No, that's okay," Siwon said quickly, shuddering. Sungmin smiled, and squeezed his hand. Siwon hated the surgery room, not least because it smelled like blood and burnt metal, which was a sickening combination. Sungmin sighed, and shut the laptop, unable to take looking at the naked Minister for Justice for one second longer. Siwon began massaging his shoulders.
Hankyung pulled out a seat and sat down next to Heechul, who was starting on his fingernails with a shocking pink colour. "Where are you getting these colours?" Hankyung asked incredulously. Last week, Heechul's toenails had been yellow, and his fingernails black. Kangin had joked about paiting the rest of him to match, like one of those flying insects that had gone extinct a couple of generations back.
"Market," Heechul said, tongue poking through his teeth.
"What are you trading for them?"
"My first born child. Your first born child. Kyuhyun's head on a silver platter." Hankyung poked his cheek, and Heechul relented. "Okay, I'm selling the books that I've already read three times."
"You're trading in the books that I spent ages looking for, for nail varnish that will run out eventually? Shame on you."
"You keep stealing them anyways."
"Plus you're going to leave the lids off and the varnish will all dry up."
"I did that once."
Hankyung snorted. Sungmin moaned, leaning back into Siwon's touch, who smiled, looking a little too pleased with himself. Heechul gagged. Eunhyuk lay his head on the desk and pretended to cry, as Donghae jumped to his feet and did a victory dance around the room. He knocked over a lamp, which knocked over Heechul's open varnish bottle, which splattered pink all over the table. There was a long moment of terrible silence, before Donghae tore from the room, and Heechul raced after him, screaming obscenities.
Hankyung had laughed when Henry had casually mentioned that. "If you really were with the strongest guys in the gang," he said, as they weaved down alley after alley until Henry thought they had no way of finding their way back, "then we'd have Sungmin and Kangin with us too. Siwon and I can look after you, though. We won't get any trouble. The guys down here know us."
"Down where?" Henry asked, just as Hankyung bent down and lifted a manhole cover up. Rather than a simple drop down, there was a set of stairs, so that it was more like a trap-door disguised to look like a manhole cover. Henry looked around, noting that it was a blind spot that the cameras couldn't reach. There was shouting from down below, the faint sound of people shouting out their wares.
Siwon hitched the bag of stuff they had to trade over his shoulder and said, "Let's go."
Down the stairs led to a cavernous room, with a high ceiling and water running down the walls. It stunk of damp and sweat, too many bodies crammed together. It was teaming with life, stalls packed up close to one another, all selling something different. Henry stared around himself, fascinated. So many things that he'd never seen before -- so many things that he'd only ever seen in books! Hankyung smiled at the expression on his face, and nudged Siwon. "He looks like you did when I first brought you down here," he said.
"Yeah, but you know," Siwon said, leaning back as a woman walked past, a baby strapped to her back, "I was like, twelve."
"Eighteen," Hankyung corrected. "Henry's age. You reacted the exact same way." He pointed to the ceiling, and the walls. "We're still in the sewer, but the refuse is diverted to another route. This place was a refuge for people who didn't want to be chipped back when it was first being introduced. Then they turned it into this place when the rationing and cuts were introduced. Or so I was told," he added with a smile. "I mean, I'm Chinese, it's not my history."
"There are so many people," Henry said. "Surely they'll get caught by the government, this many people with chips?"
"No." Hankyung shook his head. "These people don't even register for the big jobs. There's no one keeping tabs on them, because no one cares what these people do. The only ones that they could be keeping tabs on are us--" he grinned -- "and we don't have chips."
Siwon smiled at and exchanged small talk with an old woman sitting behind a table piled with old books. "Heechul likes books," Hankyung said, putting a hand on Henry's shoulder and directing him from the stall to another one further down. "The woman who owns that stall only takes food, though, and we don't always have a lot to spare."
The stall that they stopped in front of was being manned by a pretty boy with multi-coloured hair. He appeared to be selling scrap pieces of metal and paper, none of which looked particularly worthwhile to Henry's eyes. The boy wasn't even looking after them that much, and he certainly didn't look old enough to be selling anything of any worth on the black market; he looked younger than Henry himself. "Hey, Key," Hankyung said, leaning over the table. The boy looked up, reached underneath the table, and poked something.
Another boy lifted his head up. He looked like Donghae, but he looked more like -- Henry swallowed. He had three tone blonde hair and a pencil stuck behind his ear. "Hyung!" he said, grinning at Hankyung and then looking curiously at Henry. "You're back. Where's Heechul-hyung?"
"Resting," Hankyung said, though the last Henry had seen, Heechul was storming through the house screaming about needing some more shampoo and "could someone please go get him some because he couldn't go outside looking like this". "Listen, Jonghyun, we need the blueprints of a house. Have you got them?"
"It depends which house," Jonghyun said, getting out from under the table and sitting on a nearby chair, "and it depends on what you're offering."
"Number 44, Sah-jung Street," Hankyung said, as Siwon neared. "A man, Choi Hyung-dan. We're offering whatever you want from this bag." He motioned to Siwon, who handed the bag over to Jonghyun, who promptly handed it over to Key, who started rummaging around in it. He pulled out a bright pink t-shirt, and some sort of flat, shiny disc. He pulled on Jonghyun's sleeve and motioned with his hands. Jonghyun frowned, then turned to Hankyung.
"What's on the CD?" he asked. Key was looking under the table for something, and eventually pulled out the weirdest looking machine Henry had ever seen. It was big and clumsy looking, but it had headphones sticking out of it. Key pressed a button and the top of it flipped open. He put the disc inside it and closed the top, then put the headphones on.
"I have no idea," Hankyung said. "Donghae found it, months ago. Some girl group, it was all in Korean, I couldn't understand."
Key was smiling and bouncing in his seat. Jonghyun rolled his eyes, and bent under the table and came back up with a piece of paper folded into four. "Here's your blueprints. You know the deal, make sure it doesn't get back to us and we'll make sure--"
"Yeah, I got it," Hankyung said, waving his hand.
"Is Minho around?" Siwon asked, taking the bag back from Jonghyun. "We need some circuit boards, Kyuhyun wants them."
"He's taken Taemin up top for a bit," Jonghyun said, biting the end of his pencil. Key switched his machine off and put it back under the desk, and then did some more hand motions. "He says that Onew is manning his stall while he's up there, though." Key narrowed his eyes at him, clearly picking up the note of disbelief, and Jonghyun stuck his tongue out at him.
"Cool," Hankyung said. "Come on, Henry."
Henry, however, wasn't paying attention. He was leaning over the desk, looking at what he now realised was blueprints of technology and buildings, disguised to look worthless. "The detention center in Chun-nyan," he said, almost feverishly. "Do you have the blueprints of that?"
Jonghyun was staring at him. "Fuck no," he said. "I've only got blueprints of places I can break into. No one can break into that place."
Hankyung could see that Henry fought hard against disappointment at this news, but it still showed on his face. Henry was part of them now, but being part of the group didn't mean that anyone knew you, or even had to know you. They had all joined up for their own reasons, had all wanted the chips out for one reason or another, and so long as Henry didn't betray them, no one would question why he was there.
"What's wrong with Key?" Henry asked Hankyung later that night. Hankyung had been reading a book, probably something he'd lifted from Heechul's room, forehead creased as he struggled to make out the Korean words. He looked up at Henry's question, looking glad of the distraction.
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't talk, the entire time we were there."
Hankyung winced. He closed the book, using his thumb to hold his place. "Yeah, he can't talk. A few years back, maybe four? He got stopped on the street by a couple of Gees, a routine check, you know? He's always been good at not panicking in those situations, but he was never very good at not answering back. They started harrassing him, he gave them cheek, and they held him down and cut his tongue from his mouth."
"Urgh," Henry said, sticking his own tongue out and touching it with his finger, as if to prove that it was still there.
"We got revenge for him, in a round about way. Took us a couple of years to complete it because we didn't want it getting back to Key. He copes well with it, for someone who was such a chatterbox before. He developed some sort of sign language with Jonghyun, no one else understands a word of it, but it gets him through. It's not like Jonghyun lets him out of his sight anymore." Hankyung sighed. "Sometimes I'm convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Heechul. He's worse than Key for not thinking about what he's going to say."
"Heechul is very--" Henry wanted to say 'brittle', but he wasn't sure whether Hankyung would take it as an insult. He shrugged, and Hankyung laughed.
"He is, rather," he said. "He spent a lot of time in that detention center that you mentioned at the market this morning." He paused; Henry got the feeling that he was waiting for Henry to explain why he'd been asking about that place. Henry kept a straight face, and didn't. When the pause continued, Hankyung said, "They're not nice places."
Henry turned white.
Kibum was working on something in his room when Donghae came running in, jumped on the bed, and sent the delicate computer chip flying. "Donghae!" Kibum yelled, shoving him off the bed and onto the floor. "Fuck off, hyung, I'm trying to do something."
Donghae pouted at him, then lay on his back on the floor and stuck his feet up onto the bed. "I'm bored," he announced.
Kibum collected up the things he'd been working on, grumbling. "I don't care," he said, leaning back over the work, and soldering two pieces of wire together. The goggles on his face looked strange with the glasses underneath them. "I'm busy."
"What are you doing?" Donghae sat up, and put his chin on the bed so he could watch Kibum work.
Kibum held up the tiny chip. "I'm corrupting the data on this. If I can get it to work correctly, it should disable lock systems. All that eye reader technology, fingerprint technology, absolutely useless. You'd be able to get into a building and no one would even realise something was wrong." Donghae whistled, and Kibum bent over the chip again. "Of course, that's if I can get it to work."
"Sounds impressive," Donghae said. "Ryeowook told Kyuhyun about what you did to the kitchen. Kyuhyun says that you're not allowed to cook anymore. That makes two of us now."
"Fine by me. It was worthwhile Ryeowook's rage to get off kitchen duty."
"Kibum, did you do it on purpose?"
Kibum was bent over the chip, but a smile was clearly visible on his face. "Of course not."
"I'm telling Kyuhyun," Donghae said happily. He jumped up, to go do just that.
"Tell him I'll do it again if he puts me on kitchen duty," Kibum said absently to the closed bedroom door.
Sungmin was swinging in his desk chair as he told the prostitute that they'd hacked into exactly which photographs to take of the Minister for Justice, naked and tied to the bed. He was a repulsive man, absolutely gross, and Sungmin had volunteered for the job because no one else could really be trusted to either not take it as a personal porn shoot, or not to simply take it too far. Once the girl had the pictures, he said, "And now put your clothes back and leave."
It was boring, switching between cameras and just waiting for her to get to the place that he'd told her to go, so he doodled on a piece of paper. No one else was in the operations room, so it wasn't like he had anyone he could talk to. He'd drawn a couple of flowers, a pretty block pattern for fabric, and a sketch of what he thought Henry's hair should look like -- he was going to get to work on that soon -- before she was at the place he wanted her to be. "Leave the camera there," he said, watched as she did so, and then hung up. She came to on the video feed, shaking her head in confusion, and looking around the strange place she'd found herself in. Not his problem. He turned the screen off.
He stood up and stretched, back popping back into place. He needed to go pick up the camera from the drop up point before someone else saw it -- and someone else would see it, that kind of technology would fetch a high price on the black market. He pulled his boots on, swung his leather jacket over his shoulders, flipped his hood up, and headed out of the house.
This late at night, there weren't many people out, and those that were weren't the kind of people Sungmin particularly wanted to associate himself with. He made it all the way to the pick up point without anything happening, other than a couple of crude shouts, but as he picked up the camera from the hollow it had been put in, an arm fastened around his neck and the point of a knife pressed against his pulse point. A voice, harsh from too much smoking, said, "Hey pretty boy, how about you hand over that camera, huh?"
Sungmin reached up and took the man's wrist, wrenched it forward and twisted it until he heard the bone snap. As the man doubled over, holding his wrist to his chest in pain, Sungmin brought his elbow down on the top of his spine. He heard something crack, and then man fell to the ground, eyes open and lifeless. Sungmin stared at him for a long minute, then said, "Oops." He hadn't meant to kill him. Then he shrugged and stepped over the body so he could go home.
Back in the operations room, Donghae and Eunhyuk were using one of the screens to play a video game they had bought from the market. Heechul was sitting in a chair with his foot on a table, painting his nails turquoise. The room was full of the smell of it. Sungmin wrinkled his nose as he sat in front of one of the laptops to upload the pictures that had been taken. "Smells," he said.
"So does your face," Heechul murmured, too focused on his nails to put much thought into his comeback. Sungmin inserted the chip from the camera into the drive, and wrinkled his nose even harder when the pictures opened up on the screen.
"This guy is so unfortunate looking," he said, clicking through them. "What's more unfortunate is that his fat doesn't hide his dick. I could have done without seeing that."
"The hell are you looking at?" Heechul asked.
"Die, motherfucker!" Eunhyuk shouted, banging into Donghae's shoulder with his own in an attempt at psyching him out. It never worked. You could only get Donghae's attention to focus on video games, and that meant that he was the best.
Siwon came into the room, looked around, then headed over to Sungmin, slinging his arms across his shoulders. "I was looking for you."
"I was out," Sungmin said, motioning to the screen. Siwon looked at the pictures, then gagged.
"Did you take those?"
"No, I made a whore take them, but I had to go pick up the camera."
Siwon was frowning at him, pulling away but keeping his hands on his shoulders. "You smell like smoke and alcohol," he said. "Did you go to a bar or something?"
"No, that would be the now very dead guy who tried to mug me for the camera," Sungmin said.
"Did he hurt you?"
"He didn't get a chance."
"And Kyuhyun says I need to stop being such a psychopath," Heechul muttered.
"That's because you do." Hankyung had come in through the other door without anyone really noticing, even though he was so tall and had bright blonde hair. Heechul jumped and upset his bottle of nail polish. Hankyung caught it and placed it back on the table safely. "Nice colour."
"Don't make me pour it over your head," Heechul threatened. He turned, as if to dab at Hankyung's clothes with his brush, but Hankyung distracted him by running a hand through his hair. "You're going to mess it up," Heechul grumbled, even as he leaned into the touch. He lay his head against Hankyung's hip, eyes closed.
"I need your superior good looks for something," Hankyung said to Siwon, who looked surprised. "Kyuhyun wants us to get into a party that's going on in two nights time, up in the upper circles. I can't go because they'll pick up immediately on my accent and want to know who I am and what my number is. He wants you and Eeteuk to go, there's some information about the therapy they're inflicting on kids at the -- you know -- in the house."
"You can say detention center," Heechul said lazily, fingers picking at the side seam of Hankyung's jeans. "It's not like I'm going to freak out or anything."
Not with Hankyung here, Sungmin thought, watching them together. Heechul lived like he was constantly being reminded of all the bad memories, while being around Hankyung was like he was remembering the one good memory he still had in his mind. Hankyung took the brush out of Heechul's hands and put it back in the bottle so that he wouldn't get any of the varnish anywhere.
"Kibum is working on forging some invitations for you," Hankyung said. "You've still got your fake ID, right?" Siwon nodded. "Kyuhyun said he'd brief you about it tomorrow morning after breakfast. He's working in the surgery, if you wanted to talk to him beforehand, though."
"No, that's okay," Siwon said quickly, shuddering. Sungmin smiled, and squeezed his hand. Siwon hated the surgery room, not least because it smelled like blood and burnt metal, which was a sickening combination. Sungmin sighed, and shut the laptop, unable to take looking at the naked Minister for Justice for one second longer. Siwon began massaging his shoulders.
Hankyung pulled out a seat and sat down next to Heechul, who was starting on his fingernails with a shocking pink colour. "Where are you getting these colours?" Hankyung asked incredulously. Last week, Heechul's toenails had been yellow, and his fingernails black. Kangin had joked about paiting the rest of him to match, like one of those flying insects that had gone extinct a couple of generations back.
"Market," Heechul said, tongue poking through his teeth.
"What are you trading for them?"
"My first born child. Your first born child. Kyuhyun's head on a silver platter." Hankyung poked his cheek, and Heechul relented. "Okay, I'm selling the books that I've already read three times."
"You're trading in the books that I spent ages looking for, for nail varnish that will run out eventually? Shame on you."
"You keep stealing them anyways."
"Plus you're going to leave the lids off and the varnish will all dry up."
"I did that once."
Hankyung snorted. Sungmin moaned, leaning back into Siwon's touch, who smiled, looking a little too pleased with himself. Heechul gagged. Eunhyuk lay his head on the desk and pretended to cry, as Donghae jumped to his feet and did a victory dance around the room. He knocked over a lamp, which knocked over Heechul's open varnish bottle, which splattered pink all over the table. There was a long moment of terrible silence, before Donghae tore from the room, and Heechul raced after him, screaming obscenities.
................................................
It was Hankyung and Siwon who took Henry to the black market to introduce him to how things worked there. Henry was glad about this on two levels. On the first, Hankyung was Chinese and Siwon spoke some Mandarin, so Henry didn't have to struggle with Korean quite so much. On the second, they both looked like they could defend themselves in a fight. They were still sorting a gun out for Henry, and he felt that if he had to go to the black market without a weapon, at the very least he should go with the strongest guys in the gang.
Hankyung had laughed when Henry had casually mentioned that. "If you really were with the strongest guys in the gang," he said, as they weaved down alley after alley until Henry thought they had no way of finding their way back, "then we'd have Sungmin and Kangin with us too. Siwon and I can look after you, though. We won't get any trouble. The guys down here know us."
"Down where?" Henry asked, just as Hankyung bent down and lifted a manhole cover up. Rather than a simple drop down, there was a set of stairs, so that it was more like a trap-door disguised to look like a manhole cover. Henry looked around, noting that it was a blind spot that the cameras couldn't reach. There was shouting from down below, the faint sound of people shouting out their wares.
Siwon hitched the bag of stuff they had to trade over his shoulder and said, "Let's go."
Down the stairs led to a cavernous room, with a high ceiling and water running down the walls. It stunk of damp and sweat, too many bodies crammed together. It was teaming with life, stalls packed up close to one another, all selling something different. Henry stared around himself, fascinated. So many things that he'd never seen before -- so many things that he'd only ever seen in books! Hankyung smiled at the expression on his face, and nudged Siwon. "He looks like you did when I first brought you down here," he said.
"Yeah, but you know," Siwon said, leaning back as a woman walked past, a baby strapped to her back, "I was like, twelve."
"Eighteen," Hankyung corrected. "Henry's age. You reacted the exact same way." He pointed to the ceiling, and the walls. "We're still in the sewer, but the refuse is diverted to another route. This place was a refuge for people who didn't want to be chipped back when it was first being introduced. Then they turned it into this place when the rationing and cuts were introduced. Or so I was told," he added with a smile. "I mean, I'm Chinese, it's not my history."
"There are so many people," Henry said. "Surely they'll get caught by the government, this many people with chips?"
"No." Hankyung shook his head. "These people don't even register for the big jobs. There's no one keeping tabs on them, because no one cares what these people do. The only ones that they could be keeping tabs on are us--" he grinned -- "and we don't have chips."
Siwon smiled at and exchanged small talk with an old woman sitting behind a table piled with old books. "Heechul likes books," Hankyung said, putting a hand on Henry's shoulder and directing him from the stall to another one further down. "The woman who owns that stall only takes food, though, and we don't always have a lot to spare."
The stall that they stopped in front of was being manned by a pretty boy with multi-coloured hair. He appeared to be selling scrap pieces of metal and paper, none of which looked particularly worthwhile to Henry's eyes. The boy wasn't even looking after them that much, and he certainly didn't look old enough to be selling anything of any worth on the black market; he looked younger than Henry himself. "Hey, Key," Hankyung said, leaning over the table. The boy looked up, reached underneath the table, and poked something.
Another boy lifted his head up. He looked like Donghae, but he looked more like -- Henry swallowed. He had three tone blonde hair and a pencil stuck behind his ear. "Hyung!" he said, grinning at Hankyung and then looking curiously at Henry. "You're back. Where's Heechul-hyung?"
"Resting," Hankyung said, though the last Henry had seen, Heechul was storming through the house screaming about needing some more shampoo and "could someone please go get him some because he couldn't go outside looking like this". "Listen, Jonghyun, we need the blueprints of a house. Have you got them?"
"It depends which house," Jonghyun said, getting out from under the table and sitting on a nearby chair, "and it depends on what you're offering."
"Number 44, Sah-jung Street," Hankyung said, as Siwon neared. "A man, Choi Hyung-dan. We're offering whatever you want from this bag." He motioned to Siwon, who handed the bag over to Jonghyun, who promptly handed it over to Key, who started rummaging around in it. He pulled out a bright pink t-shirt, and some sort of flat, shiny disc. He pulled on Jonghyun's sleeve and motioned with his hands. Jonghyun frowned, then turned to Hankyung.
"What's on the CD?" he asked. Key was looking under the table for something, and eventually pulled out the weirdest looking machine Henry had ever seen. It was big and clumsy looking, but it had headphones sticking out of it. Key pressed a button and the top of it flipped open. He put the disc inside it and closed the top, then put the headphones on.
"I have no idea," Hankyung said. "Donghae found it, months ago. Some girl group, it was all in Korean, I couldn't understand."
Key was smiling and bouncing in his seat. Jonghyun rolled his eyes, and bent under the table and came back up with a piece of paper folded into four. "Here's your blueprints. You know the deal, make sure it doesn't get back to us and we'll make sure--"
"Yeah, I got it," Hankyung said, waving his hand.
"Is Minho around?" Siwon asked, taking the bag back from Jonghyun. "We need some circuit boards, Kyuhyun wants them."
"He's taken Taemin up top for a bit," Jonghyun said, biting the end of his pencil. Key switched his machine off and put it back under the desk, and then did some more hand motions. "He says that Onew is manning his stall while he's up there, though." Key narrowed his eyes at him, clearly picking up the note of disbelief, and Jonghyun stuck his tongue out at him.
"Cool," Hankyung said. "Come on, Henry."
Henry, however, wasn't paying attention. He was leaning over the desk, looking at what he now realised was blueprints of technology and buildings, disguised to look worthless. "The detention center in Chun-nyan," he said, almost feverishly. "Do you have the blueprints of that?"
Jonghyun was staring at him. "Fuck no," he said. "I've only got blueprints of places I can break into. No one can break into that place."
Hankyung could see that Henry fought hard against disappointment at this news, but it still showed on his face. Henry was part of them now, but being part of the group didn't mean that anyone knew you, or even had to know you. They had all joined up for their own reasons, had all wanted the chips out for one reason or another, and so long as Henry didn't betray them, no one would question why he was there.
"What's wrong with Key?" Henry asked Hankyung later that night. Hankyung had been reading a book, probably something he'd lifted from Heechul's room, forehead creased as he struggled to make out the Korean words. He looked up at Henry's question, looking glad of the distraction.
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't talk, the entire time we were there."
Hankyung winced. He closed the book, using his thumb to hold his place. "Yeah, he can't talk. A few years back, maybe four? He got stopped on the street by a couple of Gees, a routine check, you know? He's always been good at not panicking in those situations, but he was never very good at not answering back. They started harrassing him, he gave them cheek, and they held him down and cut his tongue from his mouth."
"Urgh," Henry said, sticking his own tongue out and touching it with his finger, as if to prove that it was still there.
"We got revenge for him, in a round about way. Took us a couple of years to complete it because we didn't want it getting back to Key. He copes well with it, for someone who was such a chatterbox before. He developed some sort of sign language with Jonghyun, no one else understands a word of it, but it gets him through. It's not like Jonghyun lets him out of his sight anymore." Hankyung sighed. "Sometimes I'm convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Heechul. He's worse than Key for not thinking about what he's going to say."
"Heechul is very--" Henry wanted to say 'brittle', but he wasn't sure whether Hankyung would take it as an insult. He shrugged, and Hankyung laughed.
"He is, rather," he said. "He spent a lot of time in that detention center that you mentioned at the market this morning." He paused; Henry got the feeling that he was waiting for Henry to explain why he'd been asking about that place. Henry kept a straight face, and didn't. When the pause continued, Hankyung said, "They're not nice places."
Henry turned white.
Kibum was working on something in his room when Donghae came running in, jumped on the bed, and sent the delicate computer chip flying. "Donghae!" Kibum yelled, shoving him off the bed and onto the floor. "Fuck off, hyung, I'm trying to do something."
Donghae pouted at him, then lay on his back on the floor and stuck his feet up onto the bed. "I'm bored," he announced.
Kibum collected up the things he'd been working on, grumbling. "I don't care," he said, leaning back over the work, and soldering two pieces of wire together. The goggles on his face looked strange with the glasses underneath them. "I'm busy."
"What are you doing?" Donghae sat up, and put his chin on the bed so he could watch Kibum work.
Kibum held up the tiny chip. "I'm corrupting the data on this. If I can get it to work correctly, it should disable lock systems. All that eye reader technology, fingerprint technology, absolutely useless. You'd be able to get into a building and no one would even realise something was wrong." Donghae whistled, and Kibum bent over the chip again. "Of course, that's if I can get it to work."
"Sounds impressive," Donghae said. "Ryeowook told Kyuhyun about what you did to the kitchen. Kyuhyun says that you're not allowed to cook anymore. That makes two of us now."
"Fine by me. It was worthwhile Ryeowook's rage to get off kitchen duty."
"Kibum, did you do it on purpose?"
Kibum was bent over the chip, but a smile was clearly visible on his face. "Of course not."
"I'm telling Kyuhyun," Donghae said happily. He jumped up, to go do just that.
"Tell him I'll do it again if he puts me on kitchen duty," Kibum said absently to the closed bedroom door.
Hankyung had laughed when Henry had casually mentioned that. "If you really were with the strongest guys in the gang," he said, as they weaved down alley after alley until Henry thought they had no way of finding their way back, "then we'd have Sungmin and Kangin with us too. Siwon and I can look after you, though. We won't get any trouble. The guys down here know us."
"Down where?" Henry asked, just as Hankyung bent down and lifted a manhole cover up. Rather than a simple drop down, there was a set of stairs, so that it was more like a trap-door disguised to look like a manhole cover. Henry looked around, noting that it was a blind spot that the cameras couldn't reach. There was shouting from down below, the faint sound of people shouting out their wares.
Siwon hitched the bag of stuff they had to trade over his shoulder and said, "Let's go."
Down the stairs led to a cavernous room, with a high ceiling and water running down the walls. It stunk of damp and sweat, too many bodies crammed together. It was teaming with life, stalls packed up close to one another, all selling something different. Henry stared around himself, fascinated. So many things that he'd never seen before -- so many things that he'd only ever seen in books! Hankyung smiled at the expression on his face, and nudged Siwon. "He looks like you did when I first brought you down here," he said.
"Yeah, but you know," Siwon said, leaning back as a woman walked past, a baby strapped to her back, "I was like, twelve."
"Eighteen," Hankyung corrected. "Henry's age. You reacted the exact same way." He pointed to the ceiling, and the walls. "We're still in the sewer, but the refuse is diverted to another route. This place was a refuge for people who didn't want to be chipped back when it was first being introduced. Then they turned it into this place when the rationing and cuts were introduced. Or so I was told," he added with a smile. "I mean, I'm Chinese, it's not my history."
"There are so many people," Henry said. "Surely they'll get caught by the government, this many people with chips?"
"No." Hankyung shook his head. "These people don't even register for the big jobs. There's no one keeping tabs on them, because no one cares what these people do. The only ones that they could be keeping tabs on are us--" he grinned -- "and we don't have chips."
Siwon smiled at and exchanged small talk with an old woman sitting behind a table piled with old books. "Heechul likes books," Hankyung said, putting a hand on Henry's shoulder and directing him from the stall to another one further down. "The woman who owns that stall only takes food, though, and we don't always have a lot to spare."
The stall that they stopped in front of was being manned by a pretty boy with multi-coloured hair. He appeared to be selling scrap pieces of metal and paper, none of which looked particularly worthwhile to Henry's eyes. The boy wasn't even looking after them that much, and he certainly didn't look old enough to be selling anything of any worth on the black market; he looked younger than Henry himself. "Hey, Key," Hankyung said, leaning over the table. The boy looked up, reached underneath the table, and poked something.
Another boy lifted his head up. He looked like Donghae, but he looked more like -- Henry swallowed. He had three tone blonde hair and a pencil stuck behind his ear. "Hyung!" he said, grinning at Hankyung and then looking curiously at Henry. "You're back. Where's Heechul-hyung?"
"Resting," Hankyung said, though the last Henry had seen, Heechul was storming through the house screaming about needing some more shampoo and "could someone please go get him some because he couldn't go outside looking like this". "Listen, Jonghyun, we need the blueprints of a house. Have you got them?"
"It depends which house," Jonghyun said, getting out from under the table and sitting on a nearby chair, "and it depends on what you're offering."
"Number 44, Sah-jung Street," Hankyung said, as Siwon neared. "A man, Choi Hyung-dan. We're offering whatever you want from this bag." He motioned to Siwon, who handed the bag over to Jonghyun, who promptly handed it over to Key, who started rummaging around in it. He pulled out a bright pink t-shirt, and some sort of flat, shiny disc. He pulled on Jonghyun's sleeve and motioned with his hands. Jonghyun frowned, then turned to Hankyung.
"What's on the CD?" he asked. Key was looking under the table for something, and eventually pulled out the weirdest looking machine Henry had ever seen. It was big and clumsy looking, but it had headphones sticking out of it. Key pressed a button and the top of it flipped open. He put the disc inside it and closed the top, then put the headphones on.
"I have no idea," Hankyung said. "Donghae found it, months ago. Some girl group, it was all in Korean, I couldn't understand."
Key was smiling and bouncing in his seat. Jonghyun rolled his eyes, and bent under the table and came back up with a piece of paper folded into four. "Here's your blueprints. You know the deal, make sure it doesn't get back to us and we'll make sure--"
"Yeah, I got it," Hankyung said, waving his hand.
"Is Minho around?" Siwon asked, taking the bag back from Jonghyun. "We need some circuit boards, Kyuhyun wants them."
"He's taken Taemin up top for a bit," Jonghyun said, biting the end of his pencil. Key switched his machine off and put it back under the desk, and then did some more hand motions. "He says that Onew is manning his stall while he's up there, though." Key narrowed his eyes at him, clearly picking up the note of disbelief, and Jonghyun stuck his tongue out at him.
"Cool," Hankyung said. "Come on, Henry."
Henry, however, wasn't paying attention. He was leaning over the desk, looking at what he now realised was blueprints of technology and buildings, disguised to look worthless. "The detention center in Chun-nyan," he said, almost feverishly. "Do you have the blueprints of that?"
Jonghyun was staring at him. "Fuck no," he said. "I've only got blueprints of places I can break into. No one can break into that place."
Hankyung could see that Henry fought hard against disappointment at this news, but it still showed on his face. Henry was part of them now, but being part of the group didn't mean that anyone knew you, or even had to know you. They had all joined up for their own reasons, had all wanted the chips out for one reason or another, and so long as Henry didn't betray them, no one would question why he was there.
"What's wrong with Key?" Henry asked Hankyung later that night. Hankyung had been reading a book, probably something he'd lifted from Heechul's room, forehead creased as he struggled to make out the Korean words. He looked up at Henry's question, looking glad of the distraction.
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't talk, the entire time we were there."
Hankyung winced. He closed the book, using his thumb to hold his place. "Yeah, he can't talk. A few years back, maybe four? He got stopped on the street by a couple of Gees, a routine check, you know? He's always been good at not panicking in those situations, but he was never very good at not answering back. They started harrassing him, he gave them cheek, and they held him down and cut his tongue from his mouth."
"Urgh," Henry said, sticking his own tongue out and touching it with his finger, as if to prove that it was still there.
"We got revenge for him, in a round about way. Took us a couple of years to complete it because we didn't want it getting back to Key. He copes well with it, for someone who was such a chatterbox before. He developed some sort of sign language with Jonghyun, no one else understands a word of it, but it gets him through. It's not like Jonghyun lets him out of his sight anymore." Hankyung sighed. "Sometimes I'm convinced that the same thing is going to happen to Heechul. He's worse than Key for not thinking about what he's going to say."
"Heechul is very--" Henry wanted to say 'brittle', but he wasn't sure whether Hankyung would take it as an insult. He shrugged, and Hankyung laughed.
"He is, rather," he said. "He spent a lot of time in that detention center that you mentioned at the market this morning." He paused; Henry got the feeling that he was waiting for Henry to explain why he'd been asking about that place. Henry kept a straight face, and didn't. When the pause continued, Hankyung said, "They're not nice places."
Henry turned white.
Kibum was working on something in his room when Donghae came running in, jumped on the bed, and sent the delicate computer chip flying. "Donghae!" Kibum yelled, shoving him off the bed and onto the floor. "Fuck off, hyung, I'm trying to do something."
Donghae pouted at him, then lay on his back on the floor and stuck his feet up onto the bed. "I'm bored," he announced.
Kibum collected up the things he'd been working on, grumbling. "I don't care," he said, leaning back over the work, and soldering two pieces of wire together. The goggles on his face looked strange with the glasses underneath them. "I'm busy."
"What are you doing?" Donghae sat up, and put his chin on the bed so he could watch Kibum work.
Kibum held up the tiny chip. "I'm corrupting the data on this. If I can get it to work correctly, it should disable lock systems. All that eye reader technology, fingerprint technology, absolutely useless. You'd be able to get into a building and no one would even realise something was wrong." Donghae whistled, and Kibum bent over the chip again. "Of course, that's if I can get it to work."
"Sounds impressive," Donghae said. "Ryeowook told Kyuhyun about what you did to the kitchen. Kyuhyun says that you're not allowed to cook anymore. That makes two of us now."
"Fine by me. It was worthwhile Ryeowook's rage to get off kitchen duty."
"Kibum, did you do it on purpose?"
Kibum was bent over the chip, but a smile was clearly visible on his face. "Of course not."
"I'm telling Kyuhyun," Donghae said happily. He jumped up, to go do just that.
"Tell him I'll do it again if he puts me on kitchen duty," Kibum said absently to the closed bedroom door.
Sungmin was swinging in his desk chair as he told the prostitute that they'd hacked into exactly which photographs to take of the Minister for Justice, naked and tied to the bed. He was a repulsive man, absolutely gross, and Sungmin had volunteered for the job because no one else could really be trusted to either not take it as a personal porn shoot, or not to simply take it too far. Once the girl had the pictures, he said, "And now put your clothes back and leave."
It was boring, switching between cameras and just waiting for her to get to the place that he'd told her to go, so he doodled on a piece of paper. No one else was in the operations room, so it wasn't like he had anyone he could talk to. He'd drawn a couple of flowers, a pretty block pattern for fabric, and a sketch of what he thought Henry's hair should look like -- he was going to get to work on that soon -- before she was at the place he wanted her to be. "Leave the camera there," he said, watched as she did so, and then hung up. She came to on the video feed, shaking her head in confusion, and looking around the strange place she'd found herself in. Not his problem. He turned the screen off.
He stood up and stretched, back popping back into place. He needed to go pick up the camera from the drop up point before someone else saw it -- and someone else would see it, that kind of technology would fetch a high price on the black market. He pulled his boots on, swung his leather jacket over his shoulders, flipped his hood up, and headed out of the house.
This late at night, there weren't many people out, and those that were weren't the kind of people Sungmin particularly wanted to associate himself with. He made it all the way to the pick up point without anything happening, other than a couple of crude shouts, but as he picked up the camera from the hollow it had been put in, an arm fastened around his neck and the point of a knife pressed against his pulse point. A voice, harsh from too much smoking, said, "Hey pretty boy, how about you hand over that camera, huh?"
Sungmin reached up and took the man's wrist, wrenched it forward and twisted it until he heard the bone snap. As the man doubled over, holding his wrist to his chest in pain, Sungmin brought his elbow down on the top of his spine. He heard something crack, and then man fell to the ground, eyes open and lifeless. Sungmin stared at him for a long minute, then said, "Oops." He hadn't meant to kill him. Then he shrugged and stepped over the body so he could go home.
Back in the operations room, Donghae and Eunhyuk were using one of the screens to play a video game they had bought from the market. Heechul was sitting in a chair with his foot on a table, painting his nails turquoise. The room was full of the smell of it. Sungmin wrinkled his nose as he sat in front of one of the laptops to upload the pictures that had been taken. "Smells," he said.
"So does your face," Heechul murmured, too focused on his nails to put much thought into his comeback. Sungmin inserted the chip from the camera into the drive, and wrinkled his nose even harder when the pictures opened up on the screen.
"This guy is so unfortunate looking," he said, clicking through them. "What's more unfortunate is that his fat doesn't hide his dick. I could have done without seeing that."
"The hell are you looking at?" Heechul asked.
"Die, motherfucker!" Eunhyuk shouted, banging into Donghae's shoulder with his own in an attempt at psyching him out. It never worked. You could only get Donghae's attention to focus on video games, and that meant that he was the best.
Siwon came into the room, looked around, then headed over to Sungmin, slinging his arms across his shoulders. "I was looking for you."
"I was out," Sungmin said, motioning to the screen. Siwon looked at the pictures, then gagged.
"Did you take those?"
"No, I made a whore take them, but I had to go pick up the camera."
Siwon was frowning at him, pulling away but keeping his hands on his shoulders. "You smell like smoke and alcohol," he said. "Did you go to a bar or something?"
"No, that would be the now very dead guy who tried to mug me for the camera," Sungmin said.
"Did he hurt you?"
"He didn't get a chance."
"And Kyuhyun says I need to stop being such a psychopath," Heechul muttered.
"That's because you do." Hankyung had come in through the other door without anyone really noticing, even though he was so tall and had bright blonde hair. Heechul jumped and upset his bottle of nail polish. Hankyung caught it and placed it back on the table safely. "Nice colour."
"Don't make me pour it over your head," Heechul threatened. He turned, as if to dab at Hankyung's clothes with his brush, but Hankyung distracted him by running a hand through his hair. "You're going to mess it up," Heechul grumbled, even as he leaned into the touch. He lay his head against Hankyung's hip, eyes closed.
"I need your superior good looks for something," Hankyung said to Siwon, who looked surprised. "Kyuhyun wants us to get into a party that's going on in two nights time, up in the upper circles. I can't go because they'll pick up immediately on my accent and want to know who I am and what my number is. He wants you and Eeteuk to go, there's some information about the therapy they're inflicting on kids at the -- you know -- in the house."
"You can say detention center," Heechul said lazily, fingers picking at the side seam of Hankyung's jeans. "It's not like I'm going to freak out or anything."
Not with Hankyung here, Sungmin thought, watching them together. Heechul lived like he was constantly being reminded of all the bad memories, while being around Hankyung was like he was remembering the one good memory he still had in his mind. Hankyung took the brush out of Heechul's hands and put it back in the bottle so that he wouldn't get any of the varnish anywhere.
"Kibum is working on forging some invitations for you," Hankyung said. "You've still got your fake ID, right?" Siwon nodded. "Kyuhyun said he'd brief you about it tomorrow morning after breakfast. He's working in the surgery, if you wanted to talk to him beforehand, though."
"No, that's okay," Siwon said quickly, shuddering. Sungmin smiled, and squeezed his hand. Siwon hated the surgery room, not least because it smelled like blood and burnt metal, which was a sickening combination. Sungmin sighed, and shut the laptop, unable to take looking at the naked Minister for Justice for one second longer. Siwon began massaging his shoulders.
Hankyung pulled out a seat and sat down next to Heechul, who was starting on his fingernails with a shocking pink colour. "Where are you getting these colours?" Hankyung asked incredulously. Last week, Heechul's toenails had been yellow, and his fingernails black. Kangin had joked about paiting the rest of him to match, like one of those flying insects that had gone extinct a couple of generations back.
"Market," Heechul said, tongue poking through his teeth.
"What are you trading for them?"
"My first born child. Your first born child. Kyuhyun's head on a silver platter." Hankyung poked his cheek, and Heechul relented. "Okay, I'm selling the books that I've already read three times."
"You're trading in the books that I spent ages looking for, for nail varnish that will run out eventually? Shame on you."
"You keep stealing them anyways."
"Plus you're going to leave the lids off and the varnish will all dry up."
"I did that once."
Hankyung snorted. Sungmin moaned, leaning back into Siwon's touch, who smiled, looking a little too pleased with himself. Heechul gagged. Eunhyuk lay his head on the desk and pretended to cry, as Donghae jumped to his feet and did a victory dance around the room. He knocked over a lamp, which knocked over Heechul's open varnish bottle, which splattered pink all over the table. There was a long moment of terrible silence, before Donghae tore from the room, and Heechul raced after him, screaming obscenities.
...........................................................
Henry had gone back to the market to find Jonghyun and Key again, who had recognised him from last time. He'd asked about the blueprints of the detention center, and had recieved the same answer, no matter how much he begged and attempted to bribe them. Jonghyun wouldn't have helped him even if he could; the detention center was one place he would never go within a mile of, he'd said, and Key had nodded next to him. Henry had left, downhearted.
No one in the house had been able to help him either, though he didn't exactly go around openly asking about it. Too many questions would have just looked suspicious. Ryeowook had just stared at him with wide eyes, and asked why he wanted to know about that place. Henry shrugged, and Ryeowook shook his head. "It's not a good place, Henry," he said. "It's best to not talk too much about it. Don't mention it in front of Heechul-hyung or Kangin-hyung."
Donghae had pretended that he hadn't understood the question when Henry asked him about the detention center. Henry had known he'd been pretending because of the way his eyes had widened just before he'd said "No understand!" in English. Henry had already asked Hankyung. He'd have asked Zhou Mi as the only other Chinese person, but Zhou Mi was always asleep.
It was frustrating, that now he no longer had the chip and could move freely, he was still just as stuck as he always had been.
Kibum's breathing was heavy, lying on his back in his bed, as Donghae flopped down next to him, and stuck his elbow in his side as he buried his face in Kibum's neck. "Get away," Kibum said, pushing at him. "I'm far too hot for that."
"Oh, but you are far too hot," Donghae said with a grin. Kibum pushed at him one more time, and then gave up. He wrapped an arm around Donghae's shoulders and focused on getting his heartbeat down to a normal level. Everything felt sticky and sweaty.
"Hey," he said, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. Well, he said knock, he really meant someone banging their fist repeatedly against the wood, so that plaster fell from the cieling. Donghae laughed.
"Like my room," he said.
"Kibum," Kyuhyun yelled through the door. "I need you to help me with something, I can't get this program to work."
"If you can't do anything about it, what do you expect me to do?" Kibum shouted back. Kyuhyun being smarter than him had never failed to grind on Kibum's nerves. "And it's Kibum-hyung!"
"Just get out here," Kyuhyun said.
"Fine," Kibum said grumpily, and started getting out of bed, trying to find his pants among all the other articles of clothing on the floor. He picked up a couple of computer chips and threw them on his desk, before pulling his pants on, and a random t-shirt that he'd found. He slipped out of the door, trying to keep it as closed as possible so that Kyuhyun wouldn't see Donghae still lounging naked on the bed. "What?"
"Are you finished?" Kyuhyun asked, sarcastic and mocking. Kibum flipped him off. "Come on, I need your help."
Zhou Mi had his head on the table in the operations room, fast asleep. Kyuhyun shoved him to the side so he could show Kibum the software he was working on. It was a program which would be able to hack into up to ten security feeds at the same time; previously, they'd only been able to hack into one, then hack into the next. It took them another two hours to work out how to do it, and by the time they'd finished, Kibum really just wanted to go to bed.
"Can I go now?" he asked Kyuhyun, who nodded, not really paying attention, as he was too busy hacking into ten different cameras. Kibum trailed back up to his room and opened his door slowly, fully expecting what he saw; no sign of Donghae existed. No body asleep in his bed, no clothes on the floor. He sighed, and bent down to pick up a paperclip. It wasn't like he was surprised.
Yehsung woke up before the screaming started, because Ryeowook was shaking. He still wasn't fast enough for wake Ryeowook before the monsters in his nightmares caught up with him, so that Ryeowook started screaming and thrashing around on the bed, tiny, thin limbs wild enough to cause serious damage if Yehsung wasn't careful. He managed to catch his wrists and he pinched the skin between his nails, hard enough so that Ryeowook would have a bruise in the morning. Ryeowook jerked awake, the screams stopping but the tears beginning.
"It's okay," Yehsung said, gathering him in and crooning against Ryeowook's temple, like he was a child. "It's fine, Ryeowook, don't worry."
"They were chasing me again," Ryeowook sobbed. "It was all so dark, they'd killed everyone, and they were chasing me and chasing me and chasing me--"
"Shh," Yehsung said, hand on the back of Ryeowook's head to bring him closer in the hopes of comforting him some more. "It was just a nightmare, Ryeowook, it's not going to happen."
"It already has," Ryeowook sobbed. "It already has."
"But not to us," Yehsung said. "In the past, Ryeowook. It's not going to happen again, because you've got us now. I'm still here. I will always be here."
Ryeowook was screaming in his sleep again. The sound of it, just down the hall, had woken Heechul up, and for a brief, mad second, he'd thought he was back in the detention center, where the sound of people screaming had been the thing that lulled him to sleep at night. He lay there for a long moment, listening as Ryeowook's screams turned to sobs, as Yehsung tried to sooth him, and then he got out of bed, unable to cope with the loneliness of his tiny room.
He didn't bother knocking on Hankyung's door, just swinging it straight open. Hankyung jerked upright, like he normally did, always on the lookout for someone attacking him, but then he took in Heechul's figure in the darkness and held out his arms. Heechul folded into them, Hankyung arranging the bedsheets around them so they were cocooned in them. "Nightmare?" he asked, lips brushing against Heechul's forehead.
"Ryeowook's having one," Heechul said. Hankyung's heartbeat kept him from shaking too hard. "He woke me up."
"Was Yehsung there?"
"I heard his voice."
"Good."
Hankyung's hand on the back of Heechul's neck soothed him back into sleep, and the next thing he knew, sunlight was coming through the crack in Hankyung's curtains and hitting him square in his eyes. Hankyung wasn't around, but his bed still smelled like him; Heechul burrowed into the warmth, trying to imagine that he could take that smell and carry it with him everywhere. Even the mere thought relaxed him.
Hankyung came back into the room, fully dressed but his hair wet from a recent shower. "You look good in my bed," he said, patting the lump under the covers, the vague area of Heechul's body.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," Heechul said before he could stop himself. Hankyung stared at him. Heechul ducked his head, because he was blushing and he didn't want Hankyung seeing. Hankyung put his hand to Heechul's forehead.
"You're burning up," he said teasingly. "Are you coming down with something?"
"Fuck off," Heechul muttered, slapping his hand away. He pulled the covers over his head for a minute, and heard Hankyung moving around the room. When he pulled them back down because he was too hot, Hankyung was stuffing a pair of leather gloves in his pocket. "Are you going on a job?" Heechul asked, sitting up. Hankyung nodded, pulling a black balaclava out of his wardrobe too.
"We need Choi Hyung-dan's serial number," he said. "Siwon and I are breaking into his house to see if we can find his documentation."
"Who is that guy, anyway? Kyuhyun seems determined to get his number."
"I don't know, and I don't ask," Hankyung said. "I just do. I'd rather do my dirty work this way than have to man the phones."
"Manning the phones can be fun," Heechul said. He caught Hankyung frowning at him from the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look at him, Hankyung was smiling.
"Make sure you have breakfast," he said.
Siwon attached a tripwire to one of the security cameras outside the house, so that the system would fault out. With the click that sounded, the power on the cameras went off, and they could break in without fear of being caught on film. They went in the back door, so that they couldn't be seen from the street. Choi Hyung-dan's house was pretty swanky inside. Hankyung whistled under his breath, as they took off the heavy hoods they had on to hide their faces. Hankyung brushed his hair, somewhat sweaty, from his eyes, and pulled his face mask off. "It's amazing what wealth can buy you," he said.
"It doesn't make you happy," Siwon reminded him. Hankyung knew that fine well. Heechul's family had been pretty wealthy, and he was one of the unhappiest people Hankyung had ever met.
"Right," Hankyung said, stuffing his hood in the bag that Siwon was carrying. "Where do you think these documents will be?"
They started in the office at the top of the three storey house. It was important to do a thorough search without disturbing too much, otherwise the owner would get suspicious, and while they didn't look like they would be, Siwon and Hankyung were the best at what they did. Siwon was careful with everything that he did, and Hankyung was brought up to be deftly fingered. They moved things and put them back where they'd found them, looking for the distinctive orange form for the microchip's serial number. It wasn't in the office, or any of the four bedrooms they looked in.
"Attic?" Siwon suggested. Hankyung shrugged; sometimes people kept the important documents in the attic, clearly figuring that people wouldn't expect them to put the number that their life depended on in such a place. They were heading back up the stairs to the third floor to find the entrance to the attic when they heard the front door slam below them, and voices, as Choi Hyung-dan and someone else entered the house. Siwon and Hankyung exchanged looks, before Siwon silently held out his bag for Hankyung to take his face mask out of. They fastened them over their faces and casually walked back down the stairs.
There were two men standing in the lobby, who looked first shocked, then terrified, as Siwon pulled the gun from his waistband and trained it on them. One of them, the taller, made a move to hit a button on the side of the wall, clearly to set off some sort of alarm, but Hankyung pulled his own gun out, held it up to his head, and cocked the trigger. Then he snatched up the serial number form that he'd spotted on the sideboard, and they left the house. The alarm started ringing out as soon as they stepped out of the door, but they knew this city like no one else. There was no hope of catching them.
They spent the whole journey home laughing about how easy it had all been in the end, and when they arrived back, Siwon headed up to his room while Hankyung headed to the operations room to hand over the form to Kyuhyun. Zhou Mi and Heechul were playing cards. "You're back," Heechul said blankly, like he was just commenting on the weather.
"I am," Hankyung agreed, putting the form down in front of Kyuhyun. He was watching something on a screen, and barely took his eyes off it. He moved it closer to him, though, so he'd clearly seen. Hankyung nodded his head, and wandered over to stand behind Heechul. "What are you playing?" he asked.
"Poker," Zhou Mi said, frowning at his cards. Clearly this wasn't going well. Hankyung could well understand; Heechul was ruthless, and it wasn't like Zhou Mi had much of a poker face. Hankyung patted Heechul's waist.
"Not strip poker?" he asked.
"Only if you join in," Heechul said, tipping his head back so he could grin at Hankyung, a real smile that never failed to make something dark stir in Hankyung's stomach. He smiled back, opened his mouth to say something --
"Not in here, please," Kyuhyun said.
"Aw, Kyuhyun," Heechul drawled, laying a card on the table. "You don't want to see Zhou Mi naked?"
"I already see it far too much."
"Kui Xian!" Zhou Mi cried, pouting. Kyuhyun turned his head to the side for the second it took to mockingly blow a kiss in his direction, before turning back to his screen. He pressed a button on the keyboard in front of him, and a whole bunch of text in English came up. He groaned.
"Want me to get Henry?" Hankyung asked. His hand was gently stroking up and down Heechul's side. He wriggled, like Hankyung was tickling him, and Hankyung stopped, putting both hands on Heechul's shoulders so he could trace his thumb up and down the knobs where Heechul's spine pressed against his skin.
"No, it's fine," Kyuhyun said. He pressed another button, and the text disappeared. "It just didn't happen like I thought it would."
"What's supposed to happen?" Heechul asked. Kyuhyun didn't answer for such a long time that eventually it dawned on them that he wasn't going to answer. Heechul sighed, and lay another card on the table. "Okay, Seasoning, how about -- oh." Zhou Mi was asleep, head on the table. "Damn it. I was going to win, too!"
"What were you betting on?"
"If I won, he was going to cook instead of me tonight."
"You're cooking tonight?" Hankyung paused, thoughtfully, then said, "Hey, Kyuhyun, do you have a job I can do tonight so I don't have to eat here?"
"Fuck you," Heechul said, pinching his side.
Sungmin wandered into the bedroom he shared with Siwon and found Siwon sitting on the bed pulling faces at a baby girl, who looked to be about three months old. She was giggling. Sungmin stopped, walked back out the room, then came back in. No, the baby was still there, and now Siwon was smiling at him. "What on earth...?"
"She was dumped on the doorstep," Siwon said, laughing at the expression on his face. "We're just waiting for our contact at the orphanage to turn up to take her away."
"Oh," Sungmin said. He put his finger out and the baby's hand closed around it, that tight grip of a baby that seemed impossible to break -- or maybe you just didn't want to break it.
"Can we keep her?" Siwon asked. Sungmin pulled his finger away quickly, choking on his tongue. Keep a baby? In this environment, where Yehsung and Hankyung were always smoking, and Kangin and Heechul were always drinking, and everyone was always swearing, and Ryeowook screamed in the night and, and Siwon was smiling, almost laughing.
"You joking, aren't you?" Sungmin asked flatly.
"Of course I am," Siwon said. "I mean, I love kids but this isn't somewhere you can raise one."
Thinking about it, though -- "She'd be a kickass kid though."
"Probably," Siwon said. "Especially if we were looking after her. She'd be able to defend herself against any potential rapist or murderer out there."
Sungmin sat down on the bed and leaned forward, blowing his cheeks out. The baby giggled, reached out and pulled one of his hairs out. "She's cute," he said. Thinking about her future, though -- a life in an orphanage, a life without any choices or opportunities. She'd go into prostitution at some point, possibly even as a child. Maybe she'd be dead of disease or starvation before she'd even reached the age Sungmin was now. She'd get chipped aged six, and then the government would know what she was doing, all the time. He sat back up. "I'm not old enough to be a father," he said.
"No," Siwon agreed. "I'm not either."
"And there are things to think about, like where she'd stay. We're already out of rooms here, and the others would probably not be happy about having a kid running around."
"That's true," Siwon said.
They sat in silence for a long minute, Siwon bouncing the baby girl on his knee, and Sungmin just staring at her, little face alight with laughter. He lifted his head and looked Siwon straight in the eye. "You weren't really joking about wanting to keep her, were you?" he asked.
"No," Siwon said. "I wasn't."
"This is why they don't let you look after the kids," Sungmin said weakly.
Kangin liked the feeling of bones breaking beneath his knuckles because it felt like payback for all the times that he'd been beaten up. It wasn't like he didn't feel guilty about it -- he wasn't as much of a psychopath as Heechul, who simply took pleasure in hurting people -- but it wasn't like the guilt he felt was enough to stop him from getting into fights. The only thing that could possibly stop him was Eeteuk, and Eeteuk was part of the reason that Kangin got into fights anyway.
"I just have a lot of anger," he told Eeteuk plaintively, as Eeteuk glared at him. "Would you rather I did this or did drugs in order to calm myself down?"
"I'd rather you just got over it," Eeteuk said through gritted teeth.
"Why not go tell Heechul that?" Kangin asked. "I'm sure he'll take that as well as I take it."
"Because you're not mentally unhinged, Kangin. You have the capacity to get over it."
"I'm going to tell him that you called him mentally unhinged," Kangin said sulkily. He inspected the blood on his knuckles from his latest bar fight. He'd been fighting against three other guys, but once their blood was spilled it wasn't like they were any different; they all just became stains on his hands. He liked that. He opened his mouth to say it, then closed it again. Eeteuk probably wouldn't approve. Eeteuk didn't really approve of anything Kangin did.
Eeteuk silently handed him a wash cloth soaked with water. It was ice cold, maybe because their hot water supply had run out, or maybe because Eeteuk was punishing him. Either way, Kangin grumbled as he washed the blood from his face and his hands. He hissed as he touched his mouth, where he'd bit through his lip after a punch had landed on his jaw. Eeteuk sighed, and took it off him, dabbing at the cut himself. "You're an idiot," he said. "Some day you're going to come across someone tougher than you, and who knows what will happen then?"
"The only people tougher than me are the people living in this house," Kangin said, "and they're hardly likely to beat me up, are they?"
"They might do," Eeteuk said, and then added, muttering, "if I pay them to."
"You wouldn't do that," Kangin said.
"No, I wouldn't," Eeteuk agreed. "Because I'd be the one stuck getting the blood off the floor."
Kangin grinned, and as Eeteuk pulled his hand away, wash cloth stained with blood, he reached out and took Eeteuk's wrist. It wasn't as thin as when Kangin had first done it, and while Eeteuk still wasn't as strong as Kangin, he was far stronger than he had been back then. He struggled, trying to pull away, but Kangin just tugged him forward, his other hand coming to rest against Eeteuk's hip. He stretched his head up, as if to kiss him.
"Kangin," Eeteuk said, stepping back. "Don't."
Kangin sighed. Weird how Eeteuk had changed so much on the outside, strengthened by the past ten years on the street, yet he hadn't changed at all on the inside, still the rich boy traumatised into hiding any sign of sexuality. "Hyung," he said, but Eeteuk's eyes were pleading with him. Kangin let go of his wrist.
"I need a drink," he said.
No one in the house had been able to help him either, though he didn't exactly go around openly asking about it. Too many questions would have just looked suspicious. Ryeowook had just stared at him with wide eyes, and asked why he wanted to know about that place. Henry shrugged, and Ryeowook shook his head. "It's not a good place, Henry," he said. "It's best to not talk too much about it. Don't mention it in front of Heechul-hyung or Kangin-hyung."
Donghae had pretended that he hadn't understood the question when Henry asked him about the detention center. Henry had known he'd been pretending because of the way his eyes had widened just before he'd said "No understand!" in English. Henry had already asked Hankyung. He'd have asked Zhou Mi as the only other Chinese person, but Zhou Mi was always asleep.
It was frustrating, that now he no longer had the chip and could move freely, he was still just as stuck as he always had been.
Kibum's breathing was heavy, lying on his back in his bed, as Donghae flopped down next to him, and stuck his elbow in his side as he buried his face in Kibum's neck. "Get away," Kibum said, pushing at him. "I'm far too hot for that."
"Oh, but you are far too hot," Donghae said with a grin. Kibum pushed at him one more time, and then gave up. He wrapped an arm around Donghae's shoulders and focused on getting his heartbeat down to a normal level. Everything felt sticky and sweaty.
"Hey," he said, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. Well, he said knock, he really meant someone banging their fist repeatedly against the wood, so that plaster fell from the cieling. Donghae laughed.
"Like my room," he said.
"Kibum," Kyuhyun yelled through the door. "I need you to help me with something, I can't get this program to work."
"If you can't do anything about it, what do you expect me to do?" Kibum shouted back. Kyuhyun being smarter than him had never failed to grind on Kibum's nerves. "And it's Kibum-hyung!"
"Just get out here," Kyuhyun said.
"Fine," Kibum said grumpily, and started getting out of bed, trying to find his pants among all the other articles of clothing on the floor. He picked up a couple of computer chips and threw them on his desk, before pulling his pants on, and a random t-shirt that he'd found. He slipped out of the door, trying to keep it as closed as possible so that Kyuhyun wouldn't see Donghae still lounging naked on the bed. "What?"
"Are you finished?" Kyuhyun asked, sarcastic and mocking. Kibum flipped him off. "Come on, I need your help."
Zhou Mi had his head on the table in the operations room, fast asleep. Kyuhyun shoved him to the side so he could show Kibum the software he was working on. It was a program which would be able to hack into up to ten security feeds at the same time; previously, they'd only been able to hack into one, then hack into the next. It took them another two hours to work out how to do it, and by the time they'd finished, Kibum really just wanted to go to bed.
"Can I go now?" he asked Kyuhyun, who nodded, not really paying attention, as he was too busy hacking into ten different cameras. Kibum trailed back up to his room and opened his door slowly, fully expecting what he saw; no sign of Donghae existed. No body asleep in his bed, no clothes on the floor. He sighed, and bent down to pick up a paperclip. It wasn't like he was surprised.
Yehsung woke up before the screaming started, because Ryeowook was shaking. He still wasn't fast enough for wake Ryeowook before the monsters in his nightmares caught up with him, so that Ryeowook started screaming and thrashing around on the bed, tiny, thin limbs wild enough to cause serious damage if Yehsung wasn't careful. He managed to catch his wrists and he pinched the skin between his nails, hard enough so that Ryeowook would have a bruise in the morning. Ryeowook jerked awake, the screams stopping but the tears beginning.
"It's okay," Yehsung said, gathering him in and crooning against Ryeowook's temple, like he was a child. "It's fine, Ryeowook, don't worry."
"They were chasing me again," Ryeowook sobbed. "It was all so dark, they'd killed everyone, and they were chasing me and chasing me and chasing me--"
"Shh," Yehsung said, hand on the back of Ryeowook's head to bring him closer in the hopes of comforting him some more. "It was just a nightmare, Ryeowook, it's not going to happen."
"It already has," Ryeowook sobbed. "It already has."
"But not to us," Yehsung said. "In the past, Ryeowook. It's not going to happen again, because you've got us now. I'm still here. I will always be here."
Ryeowook was screaming in his sleep again. The sound of it, just down the hall, had woken Heechul up, and for a brief, mad second, he'd thought he was back in the detention center, where the sound of people screaming had been the thing that lulled him to sleep at night. He lay there for a long moment, listening as Ryeowook's screams turned to sobs, as Yehsung tried to sooth him, and then he got out of bed, unable to cope with the loneliness of his tiny room.
He didn't bother knocking on Hankyung's door, just swinging it straight open. Hankyung jerked upright, like he normally did, always on the lookout for someone attacking him, but then he took in Heechul's figure in the darkness and held out his arms. Heechul folded into them, Hankyung arranging the bedsheets around them so they were cocooned in them. "Nightmare?" he asked, lips brushing against Heechul's forehead.
"Ryeowook's having one," Heechul said. Hankyung's heartbeat kept him from shaking too hard. "He woke me up."
"Was Yehsung there?"
"I heard his voice."
"Good."
Hankyung's hand on the back of Heechul's neck soothed him back into sleep, and the next thing he knew, sunlight was coming through the crack in Hankyung's curtains and hitting him square in his eyes. Hankyung wasn't around, but his bed still smelled like him; Heechul burrowed into the warmth, trying to imagine that he could take that smell and carry it with him everywhere. Even the mere thought relaxed him.
Hankyung came back into the room, fully dressed but his hair wet from a recent shower. "You look good in my bed," he said, patting the lump under the covers, the vague area of Heechul's body.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," Heechul said before he could stop himself. Hankyung stared at him. Heechul ducked his head, because he was blushing and he didn't want Hankyung seeing. Hankyung put his hand to Heechul's forehead.
"You're burning up," he said teasingly. "Are you coming down with something?"
"Fuck off," Heechul muttered, slapping his hand away. He pulled the covers over his head for a minute, and heard Hankyung moving around the room. When he pulled them back down because he was too hot, Hankyung was stuffing a pair of leather gloves in his pocket. "Are you going on a job?" Heechul asked, sitting up. Hankyung nodded, pulling a black balaclava out of his wardrobe too.
"We need Choi Hyung-dan's serial number," he said. "Siwon and I are breaking into his house to see if we can find his documentation."
"Who is that guy, anyway? Kyuhyun seems determined to get his number."
"I don't know, and I don't ask," Hankyung said. "I just do. I'd rather do my dirty work this way than have to man the phones."
"Manning the phones can be fun," Heechul said. He caught Hankyung frowning at him from the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look at him, Hankyung was smiling.
"Make sure you have breakfast," he said.
Siwon attached a tripwire to one of the security cameras outside the house, so that the system would fault out. With the click that sounded, the power on the cameras went off, and they could break in without fear of being caught on film. They went in the back door, so that they couldn't be seen from the street. Choi Hyung-dan's house was pretty swanky inside. Hankyung whistled under his breath, as they took off the heavy hoods they had on to hide their faces. Hankyung brushed his hair, somewhat sweaty, from his eyes, and pulled his face mask off. "It's amazing what wealth can buy you," he said.
"It doesn't make you happy," Siwon reminded him. Hankyung knew that fine well. Heechul's family had been pretty wealthy, and he was one of the unhappiest people Hankyung had ever met.
"Right," Hankyung said, stuffing his hood in the bag that Siwon was carrying. "Where do you think these documents will be?"
They started in the office at the top of the three storey house. It was important to do a thorough search without disturbing too much, otherwise the owner would get suspicious, and while they didn't look like they would be, Siwon and Hankyung were the best at what they did. Siwon was careful with everything that he did, and Hankyung was brought up to be deftly fingered. They moved things and put them back where they'd found them, looking for the distinctive orange form for the microchip's serial number. It wasn't in the office, or any of the four bedrooms they looked in.
"Attic?" Siwon suggested. Hankyung shrugged; sometimes people kept the important documents in the attic, clearly figuring that people wouldn't expect them to put the number that their life depended on in such a place. They were heading back up the stairs to the third floor to find the entrance to the attic when they heard the front door slam below them, and voices, as Choi Hyung-dan and someone else entered the house. Siwon and Hankyung exchanged looks, before Siwon silently held out his bag for Hankyung to take his face mask out of. They fastened them over their faces and casually walked back down the stairs.
There were two men standing in the lobby, who looked first shocked, then terrified, as Siwon pulled the gun from his waistband and trained it on them. One of them, the taller, made a move to hit a button on the side of the wall, clearly to set off some sort of alarm, but Hankyung pulled his own gun out, held it up to his head, and cocked the trigger. Then he snatched up the serial number form that he'd spotted on the sideboard, and they left the house. The alarm started ringing out as soon as they stepped out of the door, but they knew this city like no one else. There was no hope of catching them.
They spent the whole journey home laughing about how easy it had all been in the end, and when they arrived back, Siwon headed up to his room while Hankyung headed to the operations room to hand over the form to Kyuhyun. Zhou Mi and Heechul were playing cards. "You're back," Heechul said blankly, like he was just commenting on the weather.
"I am," Hankyung agreed, putting the form down in front of Kyuhyun. He was watching something on a screen, and barely took his eyes off it. He moved it closer to him, though, so he'd clearly seen. Hankyung nodded his head, and wandered over to stand behind Heechul. "What are you playing?" he asked.
"Poker," Zhou Mi said, frowning at his cards. Clearly this wasn't going well. Hankyung could well understand; Heechul was ruthless, and it wasn't like Zhou Mi had much of a poker face. Hankyung patted Heechul's waist.
"Not strip poker?" he asked.
"Only if you join in," Heechul said, tipping his head back so he could grin at Hankyung, a real smile that never failed to make something dark stir in Hankyung's stomach. He smiled back, opened his mouth to say something --
"Not in here, please," Kyuhyun said.
"Aw, Kyuhyun," Heechul drawled, laying a card on the table. "You don't want to see Zhou Mi naked?"
"I already see it far too much."
"Kui Xian!" Zhou Mi cried, pouting. Kyuhyun turned his head to the side for the second it took to mockingly blow a kiss in his direction, before turning back to his screen. He pressed a button on the keyboard in front of him, and a whole bunch of text in English came up. He groaned.
"Want me to get Henry?" Hankyung asked. His hand was gently stroking up and down Heechul's side. He wriggled, like Hankyung was tickling him, and Hankyung stopped, putting both hands on Heechul's shoulders so he could trace his thumb up and down the knobs where Heechul's spine pressed against his skin.
"No, it's fine," Kyuhyun said. He pressed another button, and the text disappeared. "It just didn't happen like I thought it would."
"What's supposed to happen?" Heechul asked. Kyuhyun didn't answer for such a long time that eventually it dawned on them that he wasn't going to answer. Heechul sighed, and lay another card on the table. "Okay, Seasoning, how about -- oh." Zhou Mi was asleep, head on the table. "Damn it. I was going to win, too!"
"What were you betting on?"
"If I won, he was going to cook instead of me tonight."
"You're cooking tonight?" Hankyung paused, thoughtfully, then said, "Hey, Kyuhyun, do you have a job I can do tonight so I don't have to eat here?"
"Fuck you," Heechul said, pinching his side.
Sungmin wandered into the bedroom he shared with Siwon and found Siwon sitting on the bed pulling faces at a baby girl, who looked to be about three months old. She was giggling. Sungmin stopped, walked back out the room, then came back in. No, the baby was still there, and now Siwon was smiling at him. "What on earth...?"
"She was dumped on the doorstep," Siwon said, laughing at the expression on his face. "We're just waiting for our contact at the orphanage to turn up to take her away."
"Oh," Sungmin said. He put his finger out and the baby's hand closed around it, that tight grip of a baby that seemed impossible to break -- or maybe you just didn't want to break it.
"Can we keep her?" Siwon asked. Sungmin pulled his finger away quickly, choking on his tongue. Keep a baby? In this environment, where Yehsung and Hankyung were always smoking, and Kangin and Heechul were always drinking, and everyone was always swearing, and Ryeowook screamed in the night and, and Siwon was smiling, almost laughing.
"You joking, aren't you?" Sungmin asked flatly.
"Of course I am," Siwon said. "I mean, I love kids but this isn't somewhere you can raise one."
Thinking about it, though -- "She'd be a kickass kid though."
"Probably," Siwon said. "Especially if we were looking after her. She'd be able to defend herself against any potential rapist or murderer out there."
Sungmin sat down on the bed and leaned forward, blowing his cheeks out. The baby giggled, reached out and pulled one of his hairs out. "She's cute," he said. Thinking about her future, though -- a life in an orphanage, a life without any choices or opportunities. She'd go into prostitution at some point, possibly even as a child. Maybe she'd be dead of disease or starvation before she'd even reached the age Sungmin was now. She'd get chipped aged six, and then the government would know what she was doing, all the time. He sat back up. "I'm not old enough to be a father," he said.
"No," Siwon agreed. "I'm not either."
"And there are things to think about, like where she'd stay. We're already out of rooms here, and the others would probably not be happy about having a kid running around."
"That's true," Siwon said.
They sat in silence for a long minute, Siwon bouncing the baby girl on his knee, and Sungmin just staring at her, little face alight with laughter. He lifted his head and looked Siwon straight in the eye. "You weren't really joking about wanting to keep her, were you?" he asked.
"No," Siwon said. "I wasn't."
"This is why they don't let you look after the kids," Sungmin said weakly.
Kangin liked the feeling of bones breaking beneath his knuckles because it felt like payback for all the times that he'd been beaten up. It wasn't like he didn't feel guilty about it -- he wasn't as much of a psychopath as Heechul, who simply took pleasure in hurting people -- but it wasn't like the guilt he felt was enough to stop him from getting into fights. The only thing that could possibly stop him was Eeteuk, and Eeteuk was part of the reason that Kangin got into fights anyway.
"I just have a lot of anger," he told Eeteuk plaintively, as Eeteuk glared at him. "Would you rather I did this or did drugs in order to calm myself down?"
"I'd rather you just got over it," Eeteuk said through gritted teeth.
"Why not go tell Heechul that?" Kangin asked. "I'm sure he'll take that as well as I take it."
"Because you're not mentally unhinged, Kangin. You have the capacity to get over it."
"I'm going to tell him that you called him mentally unhinged," Kangin said sulkily. He inspected the blood on his knuckles from his latest bar fight. He'd been fighting against three other guys, but once their blood was spilled it wasn't like they were any different; they all just became stains on his hands. He liked that. He opened his mouth to say it, then closed it again. Eeteuk probably wouldn't approve. Eeteuk didn't really approve of anything Kangin did.
Eeteuk silently handed him a wash cloth soaked with water. It was ice cold, maybe because their hot water supply had run out, or maybe because Eeteuk was punishing him. Either way, Kangin grumbled as he washed the blood from his face and his hands. He hissed as he touched his mouth, where he'd bit through his lip after a punch had landed on his jaw. Eeteuk sighed, and took it off him, dabbing at the cut himself. "You're an idiot," he said. "Some day you're going to come across someone tougher than you, and who knows what will happen then?"
"The only people tougher than me are the people living in this house," Kangin said, "and they're hardly likely to beat me up, are they?"
"They might do," Eeteuk said, and then added, muttering, "if I pay them to."
"You wouldn't do that," Kangin said.
"No, I wouldn't," Eeteuk agreed. "Because I'd be the one stuck getting the blood off the floor."
Kangin grinned, and as Eeteuk pulled his hand away, wash cloth stained with blood, he reached out and took Eeteuk's wrist. It wasn't as thin as when Kangin had first done it, and while Eeteuk still wasn't as strong as Kangin, he was far stronger than he had been back then. He struggled, trying to pull away, but Kangin just tugged him forward, his other hand coming to rest against Eeteuk's hip. He stretched his head up, as if to kiss him.
"Kangin," Eeteuk said, stepping back. "Don't."
Kangin sighed. Weird how Eeteuk had changed so much on the outside, strengthened by the past ten years on the street, yet he hadn't changed at all on the inside, still the rich boy traumatised into hiding any sign of sexuality. "Hyung," he said, but Eeteuk's eyes were pleading with him. Kangin let go of his wrist.
"I need a drink," he said.
.........................................................
"Kibum," Heechul said, "have you seen Donghae anywhere?"
"Why would I have seen Donghae anywhere?"
"I don't know," Heechul said sarcastically. "Maybe because you're fucking him?"
"Just because I'm fucking him doesn't mean I know where he is twenty four seven," Kibum said, shooting Heechul a glare. "Why don't you go ask Eunhyuk? He'll know better than me, you know those two are practically joined at the hip."
Heechul had already been to see Eunhyuk, who had told him that he and Donghae weren't fucking, so how was he supposed to know, and had then told him to go ask Kibum. Heechul turned on his foot and stormed away. He was having a bad day. He'd woken up after a nightmare with tears on his face, and that had just pissed him off. Even if he had been asleep, there was no need for him to cry. He'd stopped crying about it years ago. Still, the dream had stayed with him all day, playing on his mind, reliving the memory of rough hands prising his legs apart. He'd been pissed off enough, but now he couldn't find Donghae, and there was a hair on the top of his head that wouldn't lie flat.
Most everyone was taking one look at his face today and avoiding him, even Sungmin, who had opened his mouth at breakfast and then snapped it shut when Heechul had met his eyes. Henry practically shied away into the wall as Heechul stormed past him. Hankyung, just behind Henry -- and of course he was, because Hankyung always seemed to be with Henry -- reached out and snagged Heechul's wrist. "What's wrong with you?" he asked.
"Fucking hair," Heechul said, trying to pull away. "Won't lie flat. Doing my fucking head in."
Hankyung reached out and tried to make it lie down. "Huh," he said. "It's like, springy."
Even Hankyung wasn't helping Heechul's mood today. "I know," he said, through gritted teeth. "You do not have to point it out even more."
"Did you have a nightmare?" Hankyung asked quietly. It still surprised Heechul sometimes, even after ten years years of friendship, that Hankyung could tap in so easily to whatever affected Heechul's mood. There could have been a thousand things that made Heechul feel like stabbing someone -- his hair not lying flat was one of them, and Heechul had already told him that -- but Hankyung always realised exactly what the problem was.
"There were hands," Heechul said, aware that Henry was watching them. "They were all over me -- like a memory."
Hankyung pulled him into a hug. Heechul winced as his nose got squished against Hankyung's chest, but it helped, just a little. He still felt on edge when Hankyung released him. "Have you seen Donghae?" he asked. Hankyung raised an eyebrow and shook his head.
"Donghae was going to the market," Henry supplied helpfully. "He needed some rope for something."
"The bastard just can't stay in the fucking house when I need him," Heechul said, storming off. Hankyung watched him go, looking worried. He looked like he was trying to work out if he should follow, or just leave well enough alone. Henry knew what he would have done if he was in his shoes, but then Hankyung never seemed particularly scared of Heechul. In fact, very few people seemed honestly scared of Heechul. They may tread carefully around him, but Henry could see that that was just about respect; whatever had happened to Heechul wasn't something that anyone wanted to remind him of, and unfortunately no one would actually tell Henry. The thing was, he would have really liked to know.
"Come on," Hankyung muttered, deciding to just leave Heechul to get on with it. Henry had seen Heechul get into moods like that already, and he'd only been living in the house for a couple of weeks. Usually, he calmed down.
The market was busy at this time of day, or maybe Heechul had just spent too much time away from it. He didn't like the way everyone crushed in on him, and he usually never went near the place unless he was with someone else, preferably Hankyung, or at least someone who looked like they'd rip any attacker's head from their shoulders if they looked at Heechul funny. Kangin was usually good for that; if anyone so much as glanced at Heechul, he'd be up in their faces, demanding to know what their problem was. That usually ended in a fight, though, so Eeteuk had asked Kyuhyun to tell them that they weren't allowed in the market together anymore. It was a shame; it had been kind of fun.
Now, however, he was trying to fight his way through the crowds in order to find Donghae. He had a vague inkling of where he could be. After all, Donghae wouldn't have come to the market without paying a visit to their best informants. As usual, the table that Jonghyun and Key inhabited was completely deserted of customers. When Heechul arrived there, nerves frayed almost to breaking point, the two were having a conversation of some sorts, Key motioning with his hands and Jonghyun answering him out loud.
"No," he said, just before he saw Heechul. "Look, I don't care how cute he was. There is no way I'll ever be able to find plans for that detention center."
After the morning he'd had, the last thing he needed to hear was anything about the detention center. He could feel himself tensing up already, breath catching, and he focused on breathing normally. The last thing he needed was a panic attack down here. He interrupted Key in the middle of signing something by blurting out, "Who wanted to know about that place?"
It was the first the other two had noticed him, and Key lowered his hands looking both guilty and a little wary. Jonghyun jumped up. "Hyung!" he cried happily. "It's been a while."
Heechul wanted to reach across and grab his collar by his throat and shake him, but he just about managed to stop himself. His hands twitched. "Jonghyun," he ground out. "Answer me. Who was asking about that place?"
Jonghyun avoided his eyes for a long time, before he muttered, "Your newest guy. Henry or something? He wanted plans for them." He looked up at Heechul earnestly. "I told him I didn't have any though. No one has any."
"Have you seen Donghae?" Heechul asked, emotionless. Jonghyun was looking at him nervously, but also pityingly. Heechul couldn't take pity, not today. "Jonghyun, where the fuck did Donghae go?"
"He went to see Minho," Jonghyun said quickly. Heechul turned on his heel and pushed back through the crowds to where Minho's table was. Minho looked happy to see him -- he always was one to suck up to them, Heechul thought unfavourably, not willing to see the bright side of anything today -- right until he actually caught sight of Heechul's face. He gave Heechul the very basics -- "Donghae-hyung bought some rope and micro-chips, then left about ten minutes ago" -- without giving Heechul time to snap at him, which was good. Heechul was getting really tired of being fucked around.
Ryeowook was baking again. He'd managed to pick up chocolate at the market, which had just blown Yehsung's mind. It wasn't even possible to find half the stuff that Ryeowook maanged to locate and sometimes Yehsung entertained notions that Ryeowook had other connections that no one else knew about. That made him laugh, because it would be so like Ryeowook to use overseas contacts to get ingredients for baking.
He was attacking the cake mixture like it was one of the ghosts that ran after him in his nightmares. Yehsung was half-watching him, but mostly he was fiddling with a chain of rosary beads that his mother had left him. He usually wore them around his neck, hidden under his clothes, but he'd woken up that morning with a strange feeling in his stomach and just looking at the necklace made him feel better. It reminded him of his mother, the softness of her hugs, and he'd found himself thinking about the religion that she'd described to him, the religion that she'd been a strong believer in. By the time he was born, being a so-called Catholic had been banned. He'd listened to stories of churches filled with songs, leather lined books and men in white robes, and thought it all seemed like another world, a perfect world.
She had believed in it so much. Even while she was bleeding in his arms, she'd been happy that she would be able to stand in front of God and pass into Heaven. It had been no comfort to him. That perfect world had ceased to be generations ago. He couldn't see it without her there to tell him.
He sighed and looped the beads around his wrist a couple of times like a makeshift bracelet. Ryeowook poured his mixture into a bowl and then dumped the other bowl in front of Yehsung. "Here," he said. "Cheer up, hyung."
Yehsung picked half-heartedly at the leftover mixture in the bowl, grumbling about how he didn't even like chocolate, no matter how rare it was to get to eat it. Ryeowook muttered that he was just ungrateful. Yehsung's mouth fell open at that, shocked into silence, and then he started eating the mixture in earnest, just to prove that he wasn't ungrateful in any way. Ryeowook snatched it back off him and handed it to Henry almost before the boy had stepped in the room. He blinked, confused, at the sudden weight in his arms.
"Have that," Ryeowook told him. "Yehsung-hyung doesn't want it."
"I do want it," Yehsung protested, though he was motioning for Henry to eat it.
"Whatever," Ryeowook said, rolling his eyes and going to put the cake in the oven to bake. Hankyung laughed as he sat down, sweeping his finger in the leftover mixture bowl. Henry winced, but Hankyung ignored him.
"I've never seen cake baking be so fierce," Hankyung said, slightly teasingly. Ryeowook blushed slightly, chastened somewhat, so his slamming of the oven door wasn't quite so harsh as it had seemed like it was going to be. Yehsung sent Hankyung a thankful glance; anyone who could thaw one of Ryeowook's annoyed moods was a saviour in his eyes. He stood up and slipped his hands around Ryeowook's waist. He had flour streaked along his neck. Yehsung pressed his lips against it. Ryeowook huffed, and pushed him away.
"Don't you have somewhere to be?" he asked.
"Nope," Yehsung said cheerfully, hitching himself up onto a kitchen unit and then steeling himself in case it collapsed under his weight. It almost wasn't enough when Heechul crashed into the kitchen, scaring them all almost out of their wits. Yehsung and Hankyung had their guns out before they could even really think about what they were doing, but Heechul was not in the mood for paying attention to anything. Within the space of seconds, he was in the room, and Henry was on the floor holding his chin, staring in amazement. One blink of Yehsung's eyes later, Heechul was standing over Henry, shaking him by the collar.
"Why the fuck are you going around asking about that place?" he screamed, Henry's head close to smashing off the concrete flooring. He had his hands around Heechul's wrists but couldn't break his hold. "What the fuck does that place have to do with you? You shouldn't go around asking about that fucking place, are you trying to get every Gee in the area down on our fucking heads? You fucking moron."
By that point, everyone had had time to react to what was happening, and Hankyung, confused as hell as to what was going on, knew that he at least had to try to break it up. He hooked his arms under Heechul's and tried to drag him away, but Heechul was like a man possessed. The second Hankyung managed to loosen his hold on Henry, Heechul turned around and lashed out at Hankyung, hitting him across the face with the back of his hand. The force of it knocked Hankyung back a couple of steps, where he stood for a few seconds. He touched his mouth, where blood was welling up.
The sight of it snapped Heechul out of his rage. "Hankyung," he said, voice wavering a little. "Hankyung, I --"
"You're what?" Hankyung asked, breathing harsh. "You're not going to say you're sorry, Heechul, because you're never sorry for anything."
Behind Heechul, Henry was picking himself up off the floor, rubbing at his neck. Ryeowook rushed to help him, while Yehsung was eyeing the situation between Heechul and Hankyung warily. It was amazing how quickly Heechul's mood could change sometimes; now that the red mist had gone -- and god only knew what that had been about -- he looked small and somewhat scared. Normally Hankyung would have tried to comfort him, but Hankyung was the one that Yehsung was watching for sudden movements from. He could be dangerous like this.
Heechul reached out to try to touch Hankyung's mouth, but Hankyung flung his hand away. Ryeowook flinched; Heechul almost did. Then, without saying a word, he left the kitchen. Henry cleared his throat. "Ge," he said, wanting to explain why he'd been looking into the place that most people had clearly wanted to avoid talking about, but Hankyung cut him off.
"Shut up, Henry," he said, and he too, left the room. Yehsung whistled, low.
"He's in a mood too, now," he said. "This is going to be a fun place to live in now."
The party was taking place in a large townhouse just a few streets from the government buildings in the direct center of the city. It made both Siwon and Eeteuk nervous, coming so close to the Institution that posed a threat to them, but Shindong, driving the black car that they'd highjacked, didn't seem overly bothered. They were all in black suits, which had cost them more CDs than Heechul had really wanted to part with, but good quality clothes in Siwon and Shindong's sizes were hard to come by and Key had had to go searching to find them. Siwon shifted nervously in the back seat, leather squeaking.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" he murmured to Eeteuk. "I mean, Kibum's good at forgery, but is he really good enough to get us into a party this close to the Institution? I mean, this guy lives this close, he must be important."
"Kyuhyun wouldn't have sent us if he didn't think it was safe," Eeteuk said reasonably. Siwon pressed his lips together. Eeteuk knew what he was thinking, because Eeteuk was thinking it himself. Thinking the best of their leader was just what they had to do, but in reality, Kyuhyun probably hadn't thought of the risk at all. He wanted the information, and so they had to get the information no matter what danger to their lives. The thing about Kyuhyun was that he was clever, but he was young, and he wasn't very emotional. He wasn't perfect, like they sometimes liked to pretend; he made mistakes. Zhou Mi was proof enough of that.
Shindong cut the engine after parking on the other side of the street. A few other cars were parked outside the house, but mostly people were making their way by foot. A young couple, girl in a heavily beaded gown, was just climbing the stairs to the door. Shindong twisted in his seat to look at them. "You remember the plan?"
"Yes," Eeteuk said tensely. "Get in there, find the information as soon as possible, get out."
"Don't let our faces get caught on camera and don't let yourself get pulled into a conversation with anyone," Siwon recited.
"Right," Shindong said. "Well, I'll be here. Waiting. Good luck and all that."
Getting in the doors was easy enough; the doorman was easily fooled by their fake invitation, and he didn't realise that they weren't anybody who was actually supposed to be at the party. His job was just to accept invitations, and theirs seemed legitimate. Inside, glamorous people wandered through a light and airy house, decorated tastefully in remnants of old ages that had been deemed worthy enough of the new regime. There were few cameras, mostly trained on the front door; by ducking their heads as if bowing to someone, they were able to get past those without getting their images taken.
They wandered once around the house so that they looked both like they were supposed to be there, and also like they weren't anti-social; if they'd stood still, someone may have tried to speak to them, while if they kept moving, they looked like they had a purpose and no one bothered them. Near the stairs to the first floor, Eeteuk said, loudly enough so that the couple of people nearby could hear him, "I simply must go to the bathroom. Hold my drink, would you?"
"Okay," Siwon said agreeably, taking the half-empty champagne glass from Eeteuk's hand (they'd poured most of the alcohol into a potted plant when no one was looking, so that it appeared they were actually drinking). Eeteuk started up the stairs, and no one paid any attention to it. Siwon looped the building again, and when he arrived back at the stairs, a whole different group of people were standing there. He tapped one of them on the shoulder. "Excuse me," he said. "Could you look after my drinks while I go to the bathroom?"
"Sure," said the guy, and Siwon put his drinks down onto a nearby table, and started up the stairs himself. He bypassed what was obviously the bathroom and headed for the place that had been labelled as the office on the floor plans that Jonghyun had provided them with. He pushed open the door and hissed, "It's me."
Eeteuk stepped out from behind a bookcase, mostly in shadow. "Right," he said. "Keep watch while I try to find this file."
Siwon nodded, and sandwiched himself with the door, half in, half out of the room. Eeteuk began searching through the desk drawers, where he found nothing of interest, then onto the filing cabinets. Siwon began tapping a tune out on the door frame; Sungmin had 'borrowed' a CD from Heechul and had been playing it non-stop, the chorus of it going round and round in Siwon's head. Eeteuk was just going onto the second last cabinet when Siwon stopped tapping; he heard footsteps.
"Someone's coming," he said, slipped out of the room and holding the door open just enough to speak. "I'll distract them, meet me downstairs."
The intruder turned out to be an older woman, thin and well made up. She looked at Siwon suspiciously as he sauntered down the hallway towards her. "What are you doing along here?" she asked, gathering her soft grey shawl around her shoulders.
"I'm afraid I got lost coming from the bathroom," Siwon said apologetically. "I've been trying to find my way back."
"You're in quite the wrong part of the house."
"I'm terribly sorry. You're my hostess, aren't you?" She nodded; his hunch had paid off. He smiled charmingly. "You couldn't help me find my way back, could you? I would be so grateful."
She was more than willing to help him. The thing about the wives of these government officials was that they were often starved of attention from their husbands, so any handsome face -- and Siwon had an exceedingly handsome face -- that looked their way made their day. He kept up the conversation on the way down the stairs, so that by the time they were at the bottom, his suggestion that they grab a drink and find a "private spot" was accepted with a giggle quite unbefitting someone of her age. With sleights of hands that would have impressed even Donghae, Siwon managed to ply her with so many drinks that in the fifteen minutes that it took Eeteuk to find what he needed and get back downstairs that she was hanging all over him, getting dangerously close to kissing him.
Eeteuk nodded his head to him from across the room, and Siwon tilted his head in acknowledgement. He put an arm around the shoulder of the hostess and surreptitiously squeezed against a pressure point. She slumped over him, unconscious. The people around them tittered, thinking she had passed out from drinking too much. Siwon gently pushed her off him and stood up, adjusting his tuxedo. A man across the way caught his eye and grinned; Siwon smiled back, and then got out of the house as quickly as he possibly could.
They were a couple of streets away before Eeteuk pulled the file from out of his jacket and put it on his knee. "It was in the very last filing cabinet," he said, annoyed. "Labelled something different to what Kyuhyun had told me, I had to look inside to check. It's interesting reading."
"Really? Let me see." Siwon reached across for it, but Eeteuk moved it out of his reach, swallowing.
"You don't want to see," he said. Siwon stopped and pulled his hand back, curling his fingers in. "I'll take this to Kyuhyun if you want to go back to your room," Eeteuk continued. "It's getting late."
It was very late indeed by the time they got back, picking their way through endless back streets as to confuse anyone who might have been attempting to follow them. Donghae was lying in the front entrance to the house, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling for some reason. Siwon poked him with his foot and asked, "What's up?"
"Can't sleep," Donghae shrugged. "There is tension in this house."
"There is?" Siwon concentrated, but couldn't feel anything.
"Oh no, what's happened now?" Eeteuk asked, sighing. "Does Kyuhyun know? Has someone had a fight? Has Kangin done something?"
"Heechul and Henry argued." Donghae's ball hit the ceiling, thump thump, then didn't quite manage it. In the silence he said, "Heechul-hyung hit Hankyung-hyung."
"Heechul...hit Hankyung? What are you talking about?"
Donghae shrugged, which was hard to do when you were lying flat on your back. "Heechul-hyung was angry about something that Henry did and Hankyung-hyung tried to stop him and Heechul-hyung hit him. Henry is moping around our room, so I can't sleep."
"I heard Heechul-hyung and Hankyung-hyung had a fight," Siwon said, sliding his jacket from his shoulders. Sungmin was lying on their bed holding a book in front of his face, which he lowered to look at Siwon. "Any idea what it was about?"
"Something about Heechul--"
"Yelling at Henry? Yeah, that's what Donghae said. Any idea why that was?"
"No one has any idea," Sungmin said, folding the page of his book over and laying it by the side of the bed. "Heechul-hyung disappeared right after, no one knows where he went. Someone said something about going to find him, but Kangin pointed out that he'd probably just gone to get drunk somewhere."
"Hankyung-hyung?"
"In his room. You know what he's like after he almost loses his temper." Siwon nodded, slipped out of his shirt and lay it against the dresser, glad to be free of it. He'd have to see what the situation was like tomorrow, and maybe try to do some reconciliation. Sungmin squinted at him and said, "Why is there lipstick on your collar?" His voice was cold like ice.
"Uh," Siwon said, peering at his shirt. He hadn't noticed that. "There was this woman, she almost caught us. I had to distract her. Poor thing, she was kind of desperate."
"What did she look like?" Sungmin asked.
"Ugly," Siwon said promptly, taking off his pants and placing them on top of the shirt. He made his way over to the bed, pulling back the covers and climbing in, curling a little so his head was butting against Sungmin's side. "Really ugly, massive wart right on her nose, like a witch. I almost threw up."
Sungmin hummed, arms folded. Siwon straighted up on the bed and pulled him closer, rubbing his forehead against Sungmin's temple. "You been waiting up for me?"
"Mm hmm." Sungmin's fingers began dancing over his stomach; Siwon's muscles tensed under the skin, breath catching almost subconsciously. "Thought you might need something relaxing when you got home?"
"I was mauled by a desperate trophy wife," Siwon said, slipping his hand down to rest against Sungmin's hip. "Relaxation sounds wonderful."
He was woken some time later by a loud bang, and Hankyung's voice saying, "Sungmin, it's just me, it's just -- fuck, my arm!" from somewhere in the vicinity of the floor. Siwon sat up, brushing his hair back from his face. Sungmin stood up, naked but looking unbothered by it. Hankyung was sprawled on his front on the floor, his arm having been twisted behind his back at painful angle. He rolled onto his back, breathing heavily. "I knocked," he said. "No one answered."
"We were sleeping," Siwon said, reaching down the side of the bed and tossing Sungmin his underwear. He pulled them on and then helped Hankyung up.
"Sorry, hyung," he said.
"I didn't even touch you," Hankyung said. "Nice to see that your reflexes aren't getting any slower."
Sungmin smiled, then got back into bed and lay on his front sleepily. Siwon rubbed his back and said, "What's up?"
Hankyung suddenly looked nervous. "Have you heard from Heechul? It's just he hasn't come home yet."
"No," Siwon said slowly. "What time is it, anyway?"
"Almost 3AM."
"Oh." Siwon glanced at his own underwear lying by the side of the bed. Sungmin had rolled onto his back and he, too, looked worried. "Well, want to go look for him?"
"I'm going to go," Hankyung said. He'd pulled out his phone and was flipping it open and closed, as if that would bring a message from Heechul faster. "You two just stay here."
"No, I'll come," Siwon said, swinging his legs out of the bed to get dressed, but Hankyung was already standing in the doorway, shaking his head.
"It's okay, Siwon," he said, smile not really reaching his eyes. "He'll be fine, he'll just be so drunk that he can't remember where he lives. I'll call you, when I find him."
"Hyung--" Siwon started, but Hankyung had already left, switching the light back off as he went. Both Siwon and Sungmin were silent for a while, before Sungmin moved to rest his head against Siwon's chest.
"He'll be fine," he said. "He always is."
"It's not him I'm worried about," Siwon said. "Hankyung-hyung will be beating himself up about this for weeks anyway. If a single hair on Heechul's head is touched, I don't even know what he'll do."
"Why would I have seen Donghae anywhere?"
"I don't know," Heechul said sarcastically. "Maybe because you're fucking him?"
"Just because I'm fucking him doesn't mean I know where he is twenty four seven," Kibum said, shooting Heechul a glare. "Why don't you go ask Eunhyuk? He'll know better than me, you know those two are practically joined at the hip."
Heechul had already been to see Eunhyuk, who had told him that he and Donghae weren't fucking, so how was he supposed to know, and had then told him to go ask Kibum. Heechul turned on his foot and stormed away. He was having a bad day. He'd woken up after a nightmare with tears on his face, and that had just pissed him off. Even if he had been asleep, there was no need for him to cry. He'd stopped crying about it years ago. Still, the dream had stayed with him all day, playing on his mind, reliving the memory of rough hands prising his legs apart. He'd been pissed off enough, but now he couldn't find Donghae, and there was a hair on the top of his head that wouldn't lie flat.
Most everyone was taking one look at his face today and avoiding him, even Sungmin, who had opened his mouth at breakfast and then snapped it shut when Heechul had met his eyes. Henry practically shied away into the wall as Heechul stormed past him. Hankyung, just behind Henry -- and of course he was, because Hankyung always seemed to be with Henry -- reached out and snagged Heechul's wrist. "What's wrong with you?" he asked.
"Fucking hair," Heechul said, trying to pull away. "Won't lie flat. Doing my fucking head in."
Hankyung reached out and tried to make it lie down. "Huh," he said. "It's like, springy."
Even Hankyung wasn't helping Heechul's mood today. "I know," he said, through gritted teeth. "You do not have to point it out even more."
"Did you have a nightmare?" Hankyung asked quietly. It still surprised Heechul sometimes, even after ten years years of friendship, that Hankyung could tap in so easily to whatever affected Heechul's mood. There could have been a thousand things that made Heechul feel like stabbing someone -- his hair not lying flat was one of them, and Heechul had already told him that -- but Hankyung always realised exactly what the problem was.
"There were hands," Heechul said, aware that Henry was watching them. "They were all over me -- like a memory."
Hankyung pulled him into a hug. Heechul winced as his nose got squished against Hankyung's chest, but it helped, just a little. He still felt on edge when Hankyung released him. "Have you seen Donghae?" he asked. Hankyung raised an eyebrow and shook his head.
"Donghae was going to the market," Henry supplied helpfully. "He needed some rope for something."
"The bastard just can't stay in the fucking house when I need him," Heechul said, storming off. Hankyung watched him go, looking worried. He looked like he was trying to work out if he should follow, or just leave well enough alone. Henry knew what he would have done if he was in his shoes, but then Hankyung never seemed particularly scared of Heechul. In fact, very few people seemed honestly scared of Heechul. They may tread carefully around him, but Henry could see that that was just about respect; whatever had happened to Heechul wasn't something that anyone wanted to remind him of, and unfortunately no one would actually tell Henry. The thing was, he would have really liked to know.
"Come on," Hankyung muttered, deciding to just leave Heechul to get on with it. Henry had seen Heechul get into moods like that already, and he'd only been living in the house for a couple of weeks. Usually, he calmed down.
The market was busy at this time of day, or maybe Heechul had just spent too much time away from it. He didn't like the way everyone crushed in on him, and he usually never went near the place unless he was with someone else, preferably Hankyung, or at least someone who looked like they'd rip any attacker's head from their shoulders if they looked at Heechul funny. Kangin was usually good for that; if anyone so much as glanced at Heechul, he'd be up in their faces, demanding to know what their problem was. That usually ended in a fight, though, so Eeteuk had asked Kyuhyun to tell them that they weren't allowed in the market together anymore. It was a shame; it had been kind of fun.
Now, however, he was trying to fight his way through the crowds in order to find Donghae. He had a vague inkling of where he could be. After all, Donghae wouldn't have come to the market without paying a visit to their best informants. As usual, the table that Jonghyun and Key inhabited was completely deserted of customers. When Heechul arrived there, nerves frayed almost to breaking point, the two were having a conversation of some sorts, Key motioning with his hands and Jonghyun answering him out loud.
"No," he said, just before he saw Heechul. "Look, I don't care how cute he was. There is no way I'll ever be able to find plans for that detention center."
After the morning he'd had, the last thing he needed to hear was anything about the detention center. He could feel himself tensing up already, breath catching, and he focused on breathing normally. The last thing he needed was a panic attack down here. He interrupted Key in the middle of signing something by blurting out, "Who wanted to know about that place?"
It was the first the other two had noticed him, and Key lowered his hands looking both guilty and a little wary. Jonghyun jumped up. "Hyung!" he cried happily. "It's been a while."
Heechul wanted to reach across and grab his collar by his throat and shake him, but he just about managed to stop himself. His hands twitched. "Jonghyun," he ground out. "Answer me. Who was asking about that place?"
Jonghyun avoided his eyes for a long time, before he muttered, "Your newest guy. Henry or something? He wanted plans for them." He looked up at Heechul earnestly. "I told him I didn't have any though. No one has any."
"Have you seen Donghae?" Heechul asked, emotionless. Jonghyun was looking at him nervously, but also pityingly. Heechul couldn't take pity, not today. "Jonghyun, where the fuck did Donghae go?"
"He went to see Minho," Jonghyun said quickly. Heechul turned on his heel and pushed back through the crowds to where Minho's table was. Minho looked happy to see him -- he always was one to suck up to them, Heechul thought unfavourably, not willing to see the bright side of anything today -- right until he actually caught sight of Heechul's face. He gave Heechul the very basics -- "Donghae-hyung bought some rope and micro-chips, then left about ten minutes ago" -- without giving Heechul time to snap at him, which was good. Heechul was getting really tired of being fucked around.
Ryeowook was baking again. He'd managed to pick up chocolate at the market, which had just blown Yehsung's mind. It wasn't even possible to find half the stuff that Ryeowook maanged to locate and sometimes Yehsung entertained notions that Ryeowook had other connections that no one else knew about. That made him laugh, because it would be so like Ryeowook to use overseas contacts to get ingredients for baking.
He was attacking the cake mixture like it was one of the ghosts that ran after him in his nightmares. Yehsung was half-watching him, but mostly he was fiddling with a chain of rosary beads that his mother had left him. He usually wore them around his neck, hidden under his clothes, but he'd woken up that morning with a strange feeling in his stomach and just looking at the necklace made him feel better. It reminded him of his mother, the softness of her hugs, and he'd found himself thinking about the religion that she'd described to him, the religion that she'd been a strong believer in. By the time he was born, being a so-called Catholic had been banned. He'd listened to stories of churches filled with songs, leather lined books and men in white robes, and thought it all seemed like another world, a perfect world.
She had believed in it so much. Even while she was bleeding in his arms, she'd been happy that she would be able to stand in front of God and pass into Heaven. It had been no comfort to him. That perfect world had ceased to be generations ago. He couldn't see it without her there to tell him.
He sighed and looped the beads around his wrist a couple of times like a makeshift bracelet. Ryeowook poured his mixture into a bowl and then dumped the other bowl in front of Yehsung. "Here," he said. "Cheer up, hyung."
Yehsung picked half-heartedly at the leftover mixture in the bowl, grumbling about how he didn't even like chocolate, no matter how rare it was to get to eat it. Ryeowook muttered that he was just ungrateful. Yehsung's mouth fell open at that, shocked into silence, and then he started eating the mixture in earnest, just to prove that he wasn't ungrateful in any way. Ryeowook snatched it back off him and handed it to Henry almost before the boy had stepped in the room. He blinked, confused, at the sudden weight in his arms.
"Have that," Ryeowook told him. "Yehsung-hyung doesn't want it."
"I do want it," Yehsung protested, though he was motioning for Henry to eat it.
"Whatever," Ryeowook said, rolling his eyes and going to put the cake in the oven to bake. Hankyung laughed as he sat down, sweeping his finger in the leftover mixture bowl. Henry winced, but Hankyung ignored him.
"I've never seen cake baking be so fierce," Hankyung said, slightly teasingly. Ryeowook blushed slightly, chastened somewhat, so his slamming of the oven door wasn't quite so harsh as it had seemed like it was going to be. Yehsung sent Hankyung a thankful glance; anyone who could thaw one of Ryeowook's annoyed moods was a saviour in his eyes. He stood up and slipped his hands around Ryeowook's waist. He had flour streaked along his neck. Yehsung pressed his lips against it. Ryeowook huffed, and pushed him away.
"Don't you have somewhere to be?" he asked.
"Nope," Yehsung said cheerfully, hitching himself up onto a kitchen unit and then steeling himself in case it collapsed under his weight. It almost wasn't enough when Heechul crashed into the kitchen, scaring them all almost out of their wits. Yehsung and Hankyung had their guns out before they could even really think about what they were doing, but Heechul was not in the mood for paying attention to anything. Within the space of seconds, he was in the room, and Henry was on the floor holding his chin, staring in amazement. One blink of Yehsung's eyes later, Heechul was standing over Henry, shaking him by the collar.
"Why the fuck are you going around asking about that place?" he screamed, Henry's head close to smashing off the concrete flooring. He had his hands around Heechul's wrists but couldn't break his hold. "What the fuck does that place have to do with you? You shouldn't go around asking about that fucking place, are you trying to get every Gee in the area down on our fucking heads? You fucking moron."
By that point, everyone had had time to react to what was happening, and Hankyung, confused as hell as to what was going on, knew that he at least had to try to break it up. He hooked his arms under Heechul's and tried to drag him away, but Heechul was like a man possessed. The second Hankyung managed to loosen his hold on Henry, Heechul turned around and lashed out at Hankyung, hitting him across the face with the back of his hand. The force of it knocked Hankyung back a couple of steps, where he stood for a few seconds. He touched his mouth, where blood was welling up.
The sight of it snapped Heechul out of his rage. "Hankyung," he said, voice wavering a little. "Hankyung, I --"
"You're what?" Hankyung asked, breathing harsh. "You're not going to say you're sorry, Heechul, because you're never sorry for anything."
Behind Heechul, Henry was picking himself up off the floor, rubbing at his neck. Ryeowook rushed to help him, while Yehsung was eyeing the situation between Heechul and Hankyung warily. It was amazing how quickly Heechul's mood could change sometimes; now that the red mist had gone -- and god only knew what that had been about -- he looked small and somewhat scared. Normally Hankyung would have tried to comfort him, but Hankyung was the one that Yehsung was watching for sudden movements from. He could be dangerous like this.
Heechul reached out to try to touch Hankyung's mouth, but Hankyung flung his hand away. Ryeowook flinched; Heechul almost did. Then, without saying a word, he left the kitchen. Henry cleared his throat. "Ge," he said, wanting to explain why he'd been looking into the place that most people had clearly wanted to avoid talking about, but Hankyung cut him off.
"Shut up, Henry," he said, and he too, left the room. Yehsung whistled, low.
"He's in a mood too, now," he said. "This is going to be a fun place to live in now."
The party was taking place in a large townhouse just a few streets from the government buildings in the direct center of the city. It made both Siwon and Eeteuk nervous, coming so close to the Institution that posed a threat to them, but Shindong, driving the black car that they'd highjacked, didn't seem overly bothered. They were all in black suits, which had cost them more CDs than Heechul had really wanted to part with, but good quality clothes in Siwon and Shindong's sizes were hard to come by and Key had had to go searching to find them. Siwon shifted nervously in the back seat, leather squeaking.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" he murmured to Eeteuk. "I mean, Kibum's good at forgery, but is he really good enough to get us into a party this close to the Institution? I mean, this guy lives this close, he must be important."
"Kyuhyun wouldn't have sent us if he didn't think it was safe," Eeteuk said reasonably. Siwon pressed his lips together. Eeteuk knew what he was thinking, because Eeteuk was thinking it himself. Thinking the best of their leader was just what they had to do, but in reality, Kyuhyun probably hadn't thought of the risk at all. He wanted the information, and so they had to get the information no matter what danger to their lives. The thing about Kyuhyun was that he was clever, but he was young, and he wasn't very emotional. He wasn't perfect, like they sometimes liked to pretend; he made mistakes. Zhou Mi was proof enough of that.
Shindong cut the engine after parking on the other side of the street. A few other cars were parked outside the house, but mostly people were making their way by foot. A young couple, girl in a heavily beaded gown, was just climbing the stairs to the door. Shindong twisted in his seat to look at them. "You remember the plan?"
"Yes," Eeteuk said tensely. "Get in there, find the information as soon as possible, get out."
"Don't let our faces get caught on camera and don't let yourself get pulled into a conversation with anyone," Siwon recited.
"Right," Shindong said. "Well, I'll be here. Waiting. Good luck and all that."
Getting in the doors was easy enough; the doorman was easily fooled by their fake invitation, and he didn't realise that they weren't anybody who was actually supposed to be at the party. His job was just to accept invitations, and theirs seemed legitimate. Inside, glamorous people wandered through a light and airy house, decorated tastefully in remnants of old ages that had been deemed worthy enough of the new regime. There were few cameras, mostly trained on the front door; by ducking their heads as if bowing to someone, they were able to get past those without getting their images taken.
They wandered once around the house so that they looked both like they were supposed to be there, and also like they weren't anti-social; if they'd stood still, someone may have tried to speak to them, while if they kept moving, they looked like they had a purpose and no one bothered them. Near the stairs to the first floor, Eeteuk said, loudly enough so that the couple of people nearby could hear him, "I simply must go to the bathroom. Hold my drink, would you?"
"Okay," Siwon said agreeably, taking the half-empty champagne glass from Eeteuk's hand (they'd poured most of the alcohol into a potted plant when no one was looking, so that it appeared they were actually drinking). Eeteuk started up the stairs, and no one paid any attention to it. Siwon looped the building again, and when he arrived back at the stairs, a whole different group of people were standing there. He tapped one of them on the shoulder. "Excuse me," he said. "Could you look after my drinks while I go to the bathroom?"
"Sure," said the guy, and Siwon put his drinks down onto a nearby table, and started up the stairs himself. He bypassed what was obviously the bathroom and headed for the place that had been labelled as the office on the floor plans that Jonghyun had provided them with. He pushed open the door and hissed, "It's me."
Eeteuk stepped out from behind a bookcase, mostly in shadow. "Right," he said. "Keep watch while I try to find this file."
Siwon nodded, and sandwiched himself with the door, half in, half out of the room. Eeteuk began searching through the desk drawers, where he found nothing of interest, then onto the filing cabinets. Siwon began tapping a tune out on the door frame; Sungmin had 'borrowed' a CD from Heechul and had been playing it non-stop, the chorus of it going round and round in Siwon's head. Eeteuk was just going onto the second last cabinet when Siwon stopped tapping; he heard footsteps.
"Someone's coming," he said, slipped out of the room and holding the door open just enough to speak. "I'll distract them, meet me downstairs."
The intruder turned out to be an older woman, thin and well made up. She looked at Siwon suspiciously as he sauntered down the hallway towards her. "What are you doing along here?" she asked, gathering her soft grey shawl around her shoulders.
"I'm afraid I got lost coming from the bathroom," Siwon said apologetically. "I've been trying to find my way back."
"You're in quite the wrong part of the house."
"I'm terribly sorry. You're my hostess, aren't you?" She nodded; his hunch had paid off. He smiled charmingly. "You couldn't help me find my way back, could you? I would be so grateful."
She was more than willing to help him. The thing about the wives of these government officials was that they were often starved of attention from their husbands, so any handsome face -- and Siwon had an exceedingly handsome face -- that looked their way made their day. He kept up the conversation on the way down the stairs, so that by the time they were at the bottom, his suggestion that they grab a drink and find a "private spot" was accepted with a giggle quite unbefitting someone of her age. With sleights of hands that would have impressed even Donghae, Siwon managed to ply her with so many drinks that in the fifteen minutes that it took Eeteuk to find what he needed and get back downstairs that she was hanging all over him, getting dangerously close to kissing him.
Eeteuk nodded his head to him from across the room, and Siwon tilted his head in acknowledgement. He put an arm around the shoulder of the hostess and surreptitiously squeezed against a pressure point. She slumped over him, unconscious. The people around them tittered, thinking she had passed out from drinking too much. Siwon gently pushed her off him and stood up, adjusting his tuxedo. A man across the way caught his eye and grinned; Siwon smiled back, and then got out of the house as quickly as he possibly could.
They were a couple of streets away before Eeteuk pulled the file from out of his jacket and put it on his knee. "It was in the very last filing cabinet," he said, annoyed. "Labelled something different to what Kyuhyun had told me, I had to look inside to check. It's interesting reading."
"Really? Let me see." Siwon reached across for it, but Eeteuk moved it out of his reach, swallowing.
"You don't want to see," he said. Siwon stopped and pulled his hand back, curling his fingers in. "I'll take this to Kyuhyun if you want to go back to your room," Eeteuk continued. "It's getting late."
It was very late indeed by the time they got back, picking their way through endless back streets as to confuse anyone who might have been attempting to follow them. Donghae was lying in the front entrance to the house, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling for some reason. Siwon poked him with his foot and asked, "What's up?"
"Can't sleep," Donghae shrugged. "There is tension in this house."
"There is?" Siwon concentrated, but couldn't feel anything.
"Oh no, what's happened now?" Eeteuk asked, sighing. "Does Kyuhyun know? Has someone had a fight? Has Kangin done something?"
"Heechul and Henry argued." Donghae's ball hit the ceiling, thump thump, then didn't quite manage it. In the silence he said, "Heechul-hyung hit Hankyung-hyung."
"Heechul...hit Hankyung? What are you talking about?"
Donghae shrugged, which was hard to do when you were lying flat on your back. "Heechul-hyung was angry about something that Henry did and Hankyung-hyung tried to stop him and Heechul-hyung hit him. Henry is moping around our room, so I can't sleep."
"I heard Heechul-hyung and Hankyung-hyung had a fight," Siwon said, sliding his jacket from his shoulders. Sungmin was lying on their bed holding a book in front of his face, which he lowered to look at Siwon. "Any idea what it was about?"
"Something about Heechul--"
"Yelling at Henry? Yeah, that's what Donghae said. Any idea why that was?"
"No one has any idea," Sungmin said, folding the page of his book over and laying it by the side of the bed. "Heechul-hyung disappeared right after, no one knows where he went. Someone said something about going to find him, but Kangin pointed out that he'd probably just gone to get drunk somewhere."
"Hankyung-hyung?"
"In his room. You know what he's like after he almost loses his temper." Siwon nodded, slipped out of his shirt and lay it against the dresser, glad to be free of it. He'd have to see what the situation was like tomorrow, and maybe try to do some reconciliation. Sungmin squinted at him and said, "Why is there lipstick on your collar?" His voice was cold like ice.
"Uh," Siwon said, peering at his shirt. He hadn't noticed that. "There was this woman, she almost caught us. I had to distract her. Poor thing, she was kind of desperate."
"What did she look like?" Sungmin asked.
"Ugly," Siwon said promptly, taking off his pants and placing them on top of the shirt. He made his way over to the bed, pulling back the covers and climbing in, curling a little so his head was butting against Sungmin's side. "Really ugly, massive wart right on her nose, like a witch. I almost threw up."
Sungmin hummed, arms folded. Siwon straighted up on the bed and pulled him closer, rubbing his forehead against Sungmin's temple. "You been waiting up for me?"
"Mm hmm." Sungmin's fingers began dancing over his stomach; Siwon's muscles tensed under the skin, breath catching almost subconsciously. "Thought you might need something relaxing when you got home?"
"I was mauled by a desperate trophy wife," Siwon said, slipping his hand down to rest against Sungmin's hip. "Relaxation sounds wonderful."
He was woken some time later by a loud bang, and Hankyung's voice saying, "Sungmin, it's just me, it's just -- fuck, my arm!" from somewhere in the vicinity of the floor. Siwon sat up, brushing his hair back from his face. Sungmin stood up, naked but looking unbothered by it. Hankyung was sprawled on his front on the floor, his arm having been twisted behind his back at painful angle. He rolled onto his back, breathing heavily. "I knocked," he said. "No one answered."
"We were sleeping," Siwon said, reaching down the side of the bed and tossing Sungmin his underwear. He pulled them on and then helped Hankyung up.
"Sorry, hyung," he said.
"I didn't even touch you," Hankyung said. "Nice to see that your reflexes aren't getting any slower."
Sungmin smiled, then got back into bed and lay on his front sleepily. Siwon rubbed his back and said, "What's up?"
Hankyung suddenly looked nervous. "Have you heard from Heechul? It's just he hasn't come home yet."
"No," Siwon said slowly. "What time is it, anyway?"
"Almost 3AM."
"Oh." Siwon glanced at his own underwear lying by the side of the bed. Sungmin had rolled onto his back and he, too, looked worried. "Well, want to go look for him?"
"I'm going to go," Hankyung said. He'd pulled out his phone and was flipping it open and closed, as if that would bring a message from Heechul faster. "You two just stay here."
"No, I'll come," Siwon said, swinging his legs out of the bed to get dressed, but Hankyung was already standing in the doorway, shaking his head.
"It's okay, Siwon," he said, smile not really reaching his eyes. "He'll be fine, he'll just be so drunk that he can't remember where he lives. I'll call you, when I find him."
"Hyung--" Siwon started, but Hankyung had already left, switching the light back off as he went. Both Siwon and Sungmin were silent for a while, before Sungmin moved to rest his head against Siwon's chest.
"He'll be fine," he said. "He always is."
"It's not him I'm worried about," Siwon said. "Hankyung-hyung will be beating himself up about this for weeks anyway. If a single hair on Heechul's head is touched, I don't even know what he'll do."
................................................
Heechul woke up feeling like he'd swallowed a bunch of snakes in the night; his stomach was churning, and he groaned and rolled onto his front, hiding his face from the light managing to break through his makeshift curtains. His tongue was fuzzy and dry. He desperately needed a drink, and he lifted his head up slowly and cracked up a eye. A glass of water lay on his bedside table. He sipped it gratefully, then lay back down, closing his eyes against a sudden onslaught of nausea. The back of his neck itched. He couldn't remember how he got home last night.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
The explosion that ripped through the detention center had been hard for Kangin to set up. It had taken more than a few months of careful planning: watching the guards and working out when shifts changed; trying to find materials that he would have been able to use for exposives; working out which wall would be best to blow a hole through. He'd been beaten more than once for trying to steal things, but he'd been able to cope with them, thinking about all the things that he'd managed to get away with; the petrol in a small canister under his bunk, and the gunpowder that he'd taken from one of the basements. It had taken a long time, but now he was finally free.
Well, almost free. He'd tried to find Heechul to bring with him, but Heechul had been moved from his block not two weeks earlier, and Kangin couldn't bide his time waiting for him to get moved back; it could never happen. Heechul could have been dead for all Kangin knew. He had moments to act after the explosion. As guards rushed to find out what was happening on the other side of the building and to fight the fire which had broken out, he raced across the courtyard and jumped into the now empty front seat of the van that had pulled into the center grounds not three minutes earlier. Kangin couldn't drive, had never been taught, but he knew where the pedals were, and he pressed down on the accelerator, hard.
He was out of the gates before anyone even realised he was gone, and he was a couple of streets away before they were able to get their wits about them to follow. He was another few streets away before he glanced behind himself and realised that there was a frightened looking face looking at him through the grate dividing the front of the van from where they kept the detainees. Kangin jumped, and the van swerved and crashed straight into a lamp-post.
The collision jerked him forward, and he mentally congratualted himself on putting on a seatbelt. There had been a bang from the back. Kangin cursed; he'd been stopped far too close to the center. He scrambled around in the glove capartment, and managed to find a gun with some ammunition. Jumping out of the front cab, he raced around to the back and pulled open the doors to the van. The boy he'd seen earlier was sitting on the floor, rubbing his side, looking white. Kangin waved the gun at him. "Get up," he said. "Get out of there."
The boy hesitated for just a moment before he clambered to his feet and obetiantly got out of the van. Kangin grabbed him by the collar -- he was dressed in a fucking shirt and tie, what kind of a rich boy was he? -- and began pulling him away from the main street, where there were cameras everywhere, and down an alley. They needed to get away from the crash sight as quickly as possible.
Kangin didn't stop running -- and making sure that the boy with him ran -- for over half an hour, at which point he forced his way into an abandoned building and shoved the boy with him onto a bundle of blankets on the floor. The boy fell heavily, and Kangin would have felt slightly guilty if he wasn't scared and riding high from escaping. He trained the gun on the boy, who scrambled backward until he was pressed against the wall.
"Who are you?" Kangin asked.
The boy looked like he was in the middle of a panic attack, but he managed to stammer out, "I'm Park Jungsu, I live at number 58 Gyun-ah Place, I -- who are you? Why have you brought me here?"
"I'm Kangin," Kangin said. The nickname he'd taken on while in the detention center was safe enough to use. "I didn't mean to bring you with me, the van was supposed to be empty."
"I was going to a place that was going to help me," Jungsu said, almost in tears. "My parents were getting me help, and now you've kidnapped me!"
"No they weren't," Kangin said, staring at him. "Do you have any idea where you'd been sent?" Jungsu avoided his eyes, twisting one of the blankets on the floor between his fingers, and Kangin realised that he did know exactly where he was being sent, he was just in denial about his purpose there. "That place, it wouldn't have helped you. It would have destroyed you." Jungsu was pretty, and obviously niave; rich boys like him never lasted in the detention center. The only reason Heechul had still been going kind-of-strong last Kangin had seen was because Heechul had sworn to have revenge, and he wasn't going to die before he could get it.
"You said they were going to help you," Kangin said curiously. "Help you with what?" Jungsu didn't answer. "Well, not that it really matters. You're not going there now. You're going to have to come with me, you've seen my face, you could give them my description."
Jungsu's delusion clearly ran deep. "No, I have to go there! I have to get better, you don't understand, I have to make my parents proud." Kangin opened his mouth to tell him that once he'd entered that place, even his parents, whoever they were, wouldn't be able to get him back out. "Anyway, they'll have your chip number, they'll be able to find us anyway."
Kangin grinned. "There's this guy," he said. "He can take out the chips, I heard about it in the center. I'm going to track him down and get him to take out my chip, and you're going to come with me."
Hankyung had been watching the detention center for a month now without being able to work out a way in, but now things were happening that he simply had to take advantage off. Guards had spread out in order to track down the boy who Hankyung had seen escaping in the van, and it hadn't been hard to wait for one to walk into a secluded area and knock him out. Pulling on the guy's uniform and tugging the cap down over his face, Hankyung could pass easily for one of them. With that, he simply sauntered into the detention center.
Inside the buildings, it was mostly deserted, apart from a few guards distracted by the inmates who were taking the chance to attempt their own escape. Hankyung ran past two guards beating a female inmate and after a few tense minutes managed to locate a computer room. Checking that no one was around, he typed a chip serial number into the records and a cell number came up: block D, room 377. As far as he could tell, that was the block he was in. He left, walking fast so that he looked like he had somewhere to be, a purpose of some kind.
The cells opened via identification card; luckily Hankyung managed to find one in the pocket of the uniform he'd stolen. He swiped it against the screen set into the lock and it clicked up. Slowly, he pushed it open, revealing a small room with a set of bunk beds on the left hand side, and a toilet on the right. A body, almost naked, lay on the floor next to the toilet. It looked to be male, though the hair was long, and also strangely wet. The part of his legs that Hankyung could see were covered in bruises.
He didn't pay it much attention, though, because Zhi was lying on the bunkbed, flat on his back, eyes closed. Hankyung strode over to him, lay a hand on his shoulder to wake him up, then withdrew sharply. He was -- cold.
Behind him, the body that he'd thought was dead suddenly stirred, rolling over and wide eyes looking at him through strands of hair. "He's dead," he said, voice raspy. "The one before you killed him."
"No," Hankyung whispered, and this time he took Zhi by the shoulders and shook him, hard. Zhi's head fell back, mouth falling slack, and Hankyung dropped him back onto the bed, horrified. "Zhi--"
Behind him, the bloody and bruised boy was crawling towards the open door. Hankyung swallowed down his grief, steeling himself against the sight of his brother dead on the bed. He had to make a choice; he could take Zhi's body and give him a proper burial, or he could --
He turned sharply. The boy on the floor fell still, almost like he was playing dead. Hankyung took long, slow steps to reach him, and noticed how the tensed up with each footstep. Hankyung stooped down in front of him, watched how he almost curled in on himself, as if to cause any blows he was about to experience to hurt less. "I'm not going to hurt you," Hankyung murmured. "I'm going to get you out of here. You need to act dead, okay?"
"What are you talking about?" The boy's voice sounded like he hadn't had water in days. He also sounded highly suspicious, like he was waiting for Hankyung to change, like he thought this was just an act. Hankyung lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.
"I'm here to help," he said. "Just do as I say, and pretend like you're dead." Hankyung slid his arms around the boy's body, and lifted him up. He weighed next to nothing, arms like twigs. He was tense and kept trying to edge away from Hankyung's body. Hankyung sent one last look at the still body of his brother, and then left the room.
No one paid much attention to the guard with the apparently dead body in his arms. They were too busy trying to maintain order amongst those who were still alive, the skinny broken creatures who had seen that one of them had found freedom and now wanted to taste it too. Hankyung lay the boy in his arms across the backseat of one of the cars in the front courtyard, then hotwired the engine into starting without keys. He pulled out of the gates slowly, carefully, hat pulled low and nodding his head to the people who he passed.
And then, they were free.
He exhaled when they were a few streets away, and with the relief at being away, he found himself crying. All that time spent trying to work out how to get into that place, only to be what, a few hours too late? How long had Zhi been dead when Hankyung had found him? Had he really just been that little too late? The frustration was too much; he pulled the car into a side street and lay his head over the steering wheel, sobbing.
After five minutes, he pulled himself together, and lifted his head. The boy on the back seat had moved so that he could rest his head against the front passenger seat wearily. He was looking at Hankyung curiously, but still suspicious. "Who are you?" he wanted to know. "Why did you rescue me?"
"Someone had to," Hankyung said simply. He got out of the car and pulled open one of the back doors, helping the boy out. He couldn't stand. Hankyung lifted him into his arms again, holding him closer than he had in the detention center. The boy hesitated, then lay his head against Hankyung's chest, right where his heart was. "I'm Hankyung. The dead boy in your cell was my brother. I couldn't save him, so I saved you."
"I'm Heechul," the boy in his arms said. "I am beyond saving."
CURRENT DAY
After throwing up, Heechul slumped on the bathroom floor, forehead pressed against the rim. He was shaking. At some point, Yehsung had appeared behind him and asked if he wanted him to go get Hankyung. Heechul had been unable to answer, but apparently Yehsung had done it anyway, because a hand rubbed against his back and Hankyung's voice said, "Are you okay?"
"No," Heechul said. His throat hurt. "I'm not."
"Here." Hankyung pulled him back, so that his back was against the bath, and handed him another glass of water. He smoothed the hair back from Heechul's face, holding the glass to his mouth. "You need to be more careful when you're drinking. Stop drinking so much."
"How else will I forget," Heechul muttered, teeth clanking against the rim of the glass. "How did I get home?"
"I brought you home." Heechul had a vague memory of Hankyung's arms warm around him, but couldn't work out if it was from last night, or from when they'd first met. "I found you slumped outside some dirty bar. Surprised you even went in there, it looked like a dive."
"Drinks were probably cheap," Heechul said. "I didn't have much money." Hankyung sighed, and helped Heechul to his feet. Heechul groaned, head pounding. "At least it doesn't take much to get me drunk," he said.
"I wouldn't count that as something to be thankful for," Hankyung said, cracking a smile as he watched Heechul stagger back down the hallway to his bedroom. "I'll call you out for lunch, should I?" Heechul's reply was just to stick his middle finger up before he slammed his bedroom door shut. Hankyung went down to the kitchen, still smiling. A few people were in there, pottering around doing their own thing. Siwon had a large cup of coffee in the table in front of him.
"You look happy," he said. "Heechul-hyung is okay, then?"
"Fine," Hankyung said, pouring himself a cup. "Hungover, but otherwise fine. Where's Sungmin?"
"Asleep. We couldn't sleep until we'd heard that Heechul-hyung was fine. He's trying to catch up on some sleep, but I've got things I need to get done today."
Hankyung winced. "Sorry for waking you last night."
"That's okay."
Donghae looked tired too, but he wasn't allowed coffee, so he was just slumped over the table looking miserable. "Donghae, do you know where Henry is?" Hankyung asked him.
"In our room," Donghae muttered. "He couldn't sleep because he thought you were angry at him, and I couldn't sleep because of all the negative energy."
"What does that even mean?" Siwon asked. "Seriously, hyung. What are you talking about?"
"Right, I'm going to go see Henry," Hankyung said, downing his coffee and putting his cup in the sink. He left the kitchen to the sounds of Siwon and Donghae bickering over whether there really was such a thing as dark energy. The problem, as far as Hankyung could tell, was that Heechul had left the discs of that Sailor Moon cartoon he'd got at the market laying around, and Donghae had somehow watched them. Donghae had trouble discerning fantasy from reality sometimes.
Henry was sitting his bed, bent over a picture in a frame, which he quickly tried to hide when Hankyung opened the door. "No, no, let me see," Hankyung said, holding out a hand. After a pause, Henry handed over the picture. It was of him, and a girl who looked like she could have been Donghae's younger sister; Hankyung had to do a double take. They were posing together, the warm smiles on their faces and peace signs signals of defiance. "Your girlfriend?" Hankyung asked, handing the picture back.
"No," Henry said. "Just a friend. Amber. We went to high school together."
"She's Canadian too?"
"No, she's American. Moved up to Canada halfway through middle school." Henry was staring at the picture, biting his bottom lip. Hankyung didn't understand what these school systems were -- China had no form of education system anymore -- but didn't say anything. "I'm sorry, ge, about yesterday."
Hankyung sighed, running a hand through his hair. "You don't have to apologise," he said. "Heechul should really be saying sorry, but we both know he won't. I don't know why you're so interested in the detention center, Henry, but Heechul was right. If you keep asking about it, you'll bring the Gees down on our head, and we work hard to stop them from being able to find us."
"I know." Henry bowed his head. "I'm sorry."
Hankyung had the strangest urge to ruffle Henry's hair, like he had done once to Zhi's. "Henry," he said softly. "Just because we hadn't been detained in there, doesn't mean that we haven't been affected by that place. My brother was taken there when he was younger than you, and when I next saw him, he was dead. I don't want to see you get too curious and end up like him."
"I'll be careful," Henry promised. He looked like he was going to say more. Hankyung was going to tell him that he wanted him to stop, never mind be careful. Both were interrupted by a knock at the door, and Sungmin's head poking through. He looked remarkably perky for someone who had, according to Siwon, been trying to catch up on his sleep.
"Henry-ah," he trilled, brandishing a pair of scissors. "It's time for a haircut."
Hankyung decided to leave Henry to his fate.
Zhou Mi's mouth tasted weird. Kyuhyun looked at him curiously when he pulled back. Weird, but not bad, just...unusual. "What have you been eating?" he asked.
"Ryeowook made chocolate cookies," Zhou Mi said. "Want one?"
"Chocolate," Kyuhyun said slowly. "Right." Well, that explained why he hadn't been able to place the taste. "No, thanks. Pass me that screwdriver, will you?" Zhou Mi handed them over, looking over Kyuhyun's work like he knew what was going on.
"Can I help?" he asked.
"Of course you can," Kyuhyun said. "You can help by standing there and doing nothing."
Zhou Mi pouted. Kyuhyun ignored him, instead carefully removing the back from the computer tower in front of him. Inside lay circuits for the taking. He set about dismantling it, Zhou Mi watching curiously. "What are you doing?" he asked. Kyuhyun didn't answer for a long time, concentrating. "Kui Xian, what are you doing? Kui Xian."
"I just need the things out of this," Kyuhyun said calmly. Zhou Mi had a hand on the small of his back. "There are some useful stuff in here, even if the actual machine doesn't work anymore."
Zhou Mi wanted to ask why Kyuhyun needed the things out of the computer, but he was unlikely to tell even Zhou Mi. Unlike Kibum, who always told if asked, Kyuhyun never really spoke about the things he was working on. Zhou Mi had always thought that it was in case whatever he was doing didn't work out; that way, he didn't lose face. A lot of Kyuhyun's reputation came from being a genius who could make anything work, but that was just because Kyuhyun only let people hear about the things that worked out. If Kyuhyun told people about his plans, then maybe he'd have to actually use them before he knew whether they'd work or not. He'd stopped doing that after what had happened to Zhou Mi.
"Kui Xian, we should go watch a movie," Zhou Mi decided. Kyuhyun glanced at him, surprised.
"Why?"
"Because you're always working and I'm always asleep," Zhou Mi said, simply. Kyuhyun's eyes darted away from his for just a second. "We need to spend more time together."
Kyuhyun looked at what he'd been working on, and then at Zhou Mi's earnest face, and lay down his screwdriver. "Fine, but I get to choose the movie."
"But you'll choose something scary."
"As opposed to what? The Adventures of Hello Kitty or something?"
"Don't be mean about the greatest film ever, Kui Xian."
In what they'd dubbed "the movie room" (which was really just a tiny room at the back of the house with a small sofa, an old television that Kibum had spent months trying to get to work properly, and a bunch of movies that they'd picked up over the years from the market), Zhou Mi sat down while Kyuhyun flicked through the DVDs they had and eventually settled on a film about a lone survivor of a plague living in New York. "Yay, end of civilization films," Zhou Mi said wryly, as Kyuhyun inserted the disc.
"Shut up and move over," Kyuhyun said, almost sitting on Zhou Mi's legs to prove his point. Neither of them were particularly comfortable in the tiny room; it was too small for them to really stretch their legs out, and a spring from the sofa was poking into Kyuhyun's back, but they worked themselves into a positition that was almost okay and settled down to watch.
When the hero's wife and child was killed, Zhou Mi snuffled. Kyuhyun mockingly presented him with his sleeve to dry his tears on. Zhou Mi pushed him away, almost pushing him right off the sofa. "It's sad," he protested. Kyuhyun snorted. "Just think, Kui Xian, if we had been born in that time. Maybe we'd have married someone and had kids."
"You? Marry a woman?"
"Well."
"Maybe we'd have gotten married and had kids and maybe they'd have been killed in a freak helicopter accident too," Kyuhyun said, voice flat. He wasn't one for wishful thinking, and he certainly wasn't one for thinking of a life without Zhou Mi. "Maybe we'd have been just as unhappy then as we are now."
"You're unhappy, Kui Xian?" Zhou Mi asked, putting a hand on the back of Kyuhyun's neck.
Kyuhyun took a while to answer, but eventually he said, "No, of course not."
TEN YEARS EARLIER
The explosion that ripped through the detention center had been hard for Kangin to set up. It had taken more than a few months of careful planning: watching the guards and working out when shifts changed; trying to find materials that he would have been able to use for exposives; working out which wall would be best to blow a hole through. He'd been beaten more than once for trying to steal things, but he'd been able to cope with them, thinking about all the things that he'd managed to get away with; the petrol in a small canister under his bunk, and the gunpowder that he'd taken from one of the basements. It had taken a long time, but now he was finally free.
Well, almost free. He'd tried to find Heechul to bring with him, but Heechul had been moved from his block not two weeks earlier, and Kangin couldn't bide his time waiting for him to get moved back; it could never happen. Heechul could have been dead for all Kangin knew. He had moments to act after the explosion. As guards rushed to find out what was happening on the other side of the building and to fight the fire which had broken out, he raced across the courtyard and jumped into the now empty front seat of the van that had pulled into the center grounds not three minutes earlier. Kangin couldn't drive, had never been taught, but he knew where the pedals were, and he pressed down on the accelerator, hard.
He was out of the gates before anyone even realised he was gone, and he was a couple of streets away before they were able to get their wits about them to follow. He was another few streets away before he glanced behind himself and realised that there was a frightened looking face looking at him through the grate dividing the front of the van from where they kept the detainees. Kangin jumped, and the van swerved and crashed straight into a lamp-post.
The collision jerked him forward, and he mentally congratualted himself on putting on a seatbelt. There had been a bang from the back. Kangin cursed; he'd been stopped far too close to the center. He scrambled around in the glove capartment, and managed to find a gun with some ammunition. Jumping out of the front cab, he raced around to the back and pulled open the doors to the van. The boy he'd seen earlier was sitting on the floor, rubbing his side, looking white. Kangin waved the gun at him. "Get up," he said. "Get out of there."
The boy hesitated for just a moment before he clambered to his feet and obetiantly got out of the van. Kangin grabbed him by the collar -- he was dressed in a fucking shirt and tie, what kind of a rich boy was he? -- and began pulling him away from the main street, where there were cameras everywhere, and down an alley. They needed to get away from the crash sight as quickly as possible.
Kangin didn't stop running -- and making sure that the boy with him ran -- for over half an hour, at which point he forced his way into an abandoned building and shoved the boy with him onto a bundle of blankets on the floor. The boy fell heavily, and Kangin would have felt slightly guilty if he wasn't scared and riding high from escaping. He trained the gun on the boy, who scrambled backward until he was pressed against the wall.
"Who are you?" Kangin asked.
The boy looked like he was in the middle of a panic attack, but he managed to stammer out, "I'm Park Jungsu, I live at number 58 Gyun-ah Place, I -- who are you? Why have you brought me here?"
"I'm Kangin," Kangin said. The nickname he'd taken on while in the detention center was safe enough to use. "I didn't mean to bring you with me, the van was supposed to be empty."
"I was going to a place that was going to help me," Jungsu said, almost in tears. "My parents were getting me help, and now you've kidnapped me!"
"No they weren't," Kangin said, staring at him. "Do you have any idea where you'd been sent?" Jungsu avoided his eyes, twisting one of the blankets on the floor between his fingers, and Kangin realised that he did know exactly where he was being sent, he was just in denial about his purpose there. "That place, it wouldn't have helped you. It would have destroyed you." Jungsu was pretty, and obviously niave; rich boys like him never lasted in the detention center. The only reason Heechul had still been going kind-of-strong last Kangin had seen was because Heechul had sworn to have revenge, and he wasn't going to die before he could get it.
"You said they were going to help you," Kangin said curiously. "Help you with what?" Jungsu didn't answer. "Well, not that it really matters. You're not going there now. You're going to have to come with me, you've seen my face, you could give them my description."
Jungsu's delusion clearly ran deep. "No, I have to go there! I have to get better, you don't understand, I have to make my parents proud." Kangin opened his mouth to tell him that once he'd entered that place, even his parents, whoever they were, wouldn't be able to get him back out. "Anyway, they'll have your chip number, they'll be able to find us anyway."
Kangin grinned. "There's this guy," he said. "He can take out the chips, I heard about it in the center. I'm going to track him down and get him to take out my chip, and you're going to come with me."
Hankyung had been watching the detention center for a month now without being able to work out a way in, but now things were happening that he simply had to take advantage off. Guards had spread out in order to track down the boy who Hankyung had seen escaping in the van, and it hadn't been hard to wait for one to walk into a secluded area and knock him out. Pulling on the guy's uniform and tugging the cap down over his face, Hankyung could pass easily for one of them. With that, he simply sauntered into the detention center.
Inside the buildings, it was mostly deserted, apart from a few guards distracted by the inmates who were taking the chance to attempt their own escape. Hankyung ran past two guards beating a female inmate and after a few tense minutes managed to locate a computer room. Checking that no one was around, he typed a chip serial number into the records and a cell number came up: block D, room 377. As far as he could tell, that was the block he was in. He left, walking fast so that he looked like he had somewhere to be, a purpose of some kind.
The cells opened via identification card; luckily Hankyung managed to find one in the pocket of the uniform he'd stolen. He swiped it against the screen set into the lock and it clicked up. Slowly, he pushed it open, revealing a small room with a set of bunk beds on the left hand side, and a toilet on the right. A body, almost naked, lay on the floor next to the toilet. It looked to be male, though the hair was long, and also strangely wet. The part of his legs that Hankyung could see were covered in bruises.
He didn't pay it much attention, though, because Zhi was lying on the bunkbed, flat on his back, eyes closed. Hankyung strode over to him, lay a hand on his shoulder to wake him up, then withdrew sharply. He was -- cold.
Behind him, the body that he'd thought was dead suddenly stirred, rolling over and wide eyes looking at him through strands of hair. "He's dead," he said, voice raspy. "The one before you killed him."
"No," Hankyung whispered, and this time he took Zhi by the shoulders and shook him, hard. Zhi's head fell back, mouth falling slack, and Hankyung dropped him back onto the bed, horrified. "Zhi--"
Behind him, the bloody and bruised boy was crawling towards the open door. Hankyung swallowed down his grief, steeling himself against the sight of his brother dead on the bed. He had to make a choice; he could take Zhi's body and give him a proper burial, or he could --
He turned sharply. The boy on the floor fell still, almost like he was playing dead. Hankyung took long, slow steps to reach him, and noticed how the tensed up with each footstep. Hankyung stooped down in front of him, watched how he almost curled in on himself, as if to cause any blows he was about to experience to hurt less. "I'm not going to hurt you," Hankyung murmured. "I'm going to get you out of here. You need to act dead, okay?"
"What are you talking about?" The boy's voice sounded like he hadn't had water in days. He also sounded highly suspicious, like he was waiting for Hankyung to change, like he thought this was just an act. Hankyung lay a comforting hand on his shoulder.
"I'm here to help," he said. "Just do as I say, and pretend like you're dead." Hankyung slid his arms around the boy's body, and lifted him up. He weighed next to nothing, arms like twigs. He was tense and kept trying to edge away from Hankyung's body. Hankyung sent one last look at the still body of his brother, and then left the room.
No one paid much attention to the guard with the apparently dead body in his arms. They were too busy trying to maintain order amongst those who were still alive, the skinny broken creatures who had seen that one of them had found freedom and now wanted to taste it too. Hankyung lay the boy in his arms across the backseat of one of the cars in the front courtyard, then hotwired the engine into starting without keys. He pulled out of the gates slowly, carefully, hat pulled low and nodding his head to the people who he passed.
And then, they were free.
He exhaled when they were a few streets away, and with the relief at being away, he found himself crying. All that time spent trying to work out how to get into that place, only to be what, a few hours too late? How long had Zhi been dead when Hankyung had found him? Had he really just been that little too late? The frustration was too much; he pulled the car into a side street and lay his head over the steering wheel, sobbing.
After five minutes, he pulled himself together, and lifted his head. The boy on the back seat had moved so that he could rest his head against the front passenger seat wearily. He was looking at Hankyung curiously, but still suspicious. "Who are you?" he wanted to know. "Why did you rescue me?"
"Someone had to," Hankyung said simply. He got out of the car and pulled open one of the back doors, helping the boy out. He couldn't stand. Hankyung lifted him into his arms again, holding him closer than he had in the detention center. The boy hesitated, then lay his head against Hankyung's chest, right where his heart was. "I'm Hankyung. The dead boy in your cell was my brother. I couldn't save him, so I saved you."
"I'm Heechul," the boy in his arms said. "I am beyond saving."
CURRENT DAY
After throwing up, Heechul slumped on the bathroom floor, forehead pressed against the rim. He was shaking. At some point, Yehsung had appeared behind him and asked if he wanted him to go get Hankyung. Heechul had been unable to answer, but apparently Yehsung had done it anyway, because a hand rubbed against his back and Hankyung's voice said, "Are you okay?"
"No," Heechul said. His throat hurt. "I'm not."
"Here." Hankyung pulled him back, so that his back was against the bath, and handed him another glass of water. He smoothed the hair back from Heechul's face, holding the glass to his mouth. "You need to be more careful when you're drinking. Stop drinking so much."
"How else will I forget," Heechul muttered, teeth clanking against the rim of the glass. "How did I get home?"
"I brought you home." Heechul had a vague memory of Hankyung's arms warm around him, but couldn't work out if it was from last night, or from when they'd first met. "I found you slumped outside some dirty bar. Surprised you even went in there, it looked like a dive."
"Drinks were probably cheap," Heechul said. "I didn't have much money." Hankyung sighed, and helped Heechul to his feet. Heechul groaned, head pounding. "At least it doesn't take much to get me drunk," he said.
"I wouldn't count that as something to be thankful for," Hankyung said, cracking a smile as he watched Heechul stagger back down the hallway to his bedroom. "I'll call you out for lunch, should I?" Heechul's reply was just to stick his middle finger up before he slammed his bedroom door shut. Hankyung went down to the kitchen, still smiling. A few people were in there, pottering around doing their own thing. Siwon had a large cup of coffee in the table in front of him.
"You look happy," he said. "Heechul-hyung is okay, then?"
"Fine," Hankyung said, pouring himself a cup. "Hungover, but otherwise fine. Where's Sungmin?"
"Asleep. We couldn't sleep until we'd heard that Heechul-hyung was fine. He's trying to catch up on some sleep, but I've got things I need to get done today."
Hankyung winced. "Sorry for waking you last night."
"That's okay."
Donghae looked tired too, but he wasn't allowed coffee, so he was just slumped over the table looking miserable. "Donghae, do you know where Henry is?" Hankyung asked him.
"In our room," Donghae muttered. "He couldn't sleep because he thought you were angry at him, and I couldn't sleep because of all the negative energy."
"What does that even mean?" Siwon asked. "Seriously, hyung. What are you talking about?"
"Right, I'm going to go see Henry," Hankyung said, downing his coffee and putting his cup in the sink. He left the kitchen to the sounds of Siwon and Donghae bickering over whether there really was such a thing as dark energy. The problem, as far as Hankyung could tell, was that Heechul had left the discs of that Sailor Moon cartoon he'd got at the market laying around, and Donghae had somehow watched them. Donghae had trouble discerning fantasy from reality sometimes.
Henry was sitting his bed, bent over a picture in a frame, which he quickly tried to hide when Hankyung opened the door. "No, no, let me see," Hankyung said, holding out a hand. After a pause, Henry handed over the picture. It was of him, and a girl who looked like she could have been Donghae's younger sister; Hankyung had to do a double take. They were posing together, the warm smiles on their faces and peace signs signals of defiance. "Your girlfriend?" Hankyung asked, handing the picture back.
"No," Henry said. "Just a friend. Amber. We went to high school together."
"She's Canadian too?"
"No, she's American. Moved up to Canada halfway through middle school." Henry was staring at the picture, biting his bottom lip. Hankyung didn't understand what these school systems were -- China had no form of education system anymore -- but didn't say anything. "I'm sorry, ge, about yesterday."
Hankyung sighed, running a hand through his hair. "You don't have to apologise," he said. "Heechul should really be saying sorry, but we both know he won't. I don't know why you're so interested in the detention center, Henry, but Heechul was right. If you keep asking about it, you'll bring the Gees down on our head, and we work hard to stop them from being able to find us."
"I know." Henry bowed his head. "I'm sorry."
Hankyung had the strangest urge to ruffle Henry's hair, like he had done once to Zhi's. "Henry," he said softly. "Just because we hadn't been detained in there, doesn't mean that we haven't been affected by that place. My brother was taken there when he was younger than you, and when I next saw him, he was dead. I don't want to see you get too curious and end up like him."
"I'll be careful," Henry promised. He looked like he was going to say more. Hankyung was going to tell him that he wanted him to stop, never mind be careful. Both were interrupted by a knock at the door, and Sungmin's head poking through. He looked remarkably perky for someone who had, according to Siwon, been trying to catch up on his sleep.
"Henry-ah," he trilled, brandishing a pair of scissors. "It's time for a haircut."
Hankyung decided to leave Henry to his fate.
Zhou Mi's mouth tasted weird. Kyuhyun looked at him curiously when he pulled back. Weird, but not bad, just...unusual. "What have you been eating?" he asked.
"Ryeowook made chocolate cookies," Zhou Mi said. "Want one?"
"Chocolate," Kyuhyun said slowly. "Right." Well, that explained why he hadn't been able to place the taste. "No, thanks. Pass me that screwdriver, will you?" Zhou Mi handed them over, looking over Kyuhyun's work like he knew what was going on.
"Can I help?" he asked.
"Of course you can," Kyuhyun said. "You can help by standing there and doing nothing."
Zhou Mi pouted. Kyuhyun ignored him, instead carefully removing the back from the computer tower in front of him. Inside lay circuits for the taking. He set about dismantling it, Zhou Mi watching curiously. "What are you doing?" he asked. Kyuhyun didn't answer for a long time, concentrating. "Kui Xian, what are you doing? Kui Xian."
"I just need the things out of this," Kyuhyun said calmly. Zhou Mi had a hand on the small of his back. "There are some useful stuff in here, even if the actual machine doesn't work anymore."
Zhou Mi wanted to ask why Kyuhyun needed the things out of the computer, but he was unlikely to tell even Zhou Mi. Unlike Kibum, who always told if asked, Kyuhyun never really spoke about the things he was working on. Zhou Mi had always thought that it was in case whatever he was doing didn't work out; that way, he didn't lose face. A lot of Kyuhyun's reputation came from being a genius who could make anything work, but that was just because Kyuhyun only let people hear about the things that worked out. If Kyuhyun told people about his plans, then maybe he'd have to actually use them before he knew whether they'd work or not. He'd stopped doing that after what had happened to Zhou Mi.
"Kui Xian, we should go watch a movie," Zhou Mi decided. Kyuhyun glanced at him, surprised.
"Why?"
"Because you're always working and I'm always asleep," Zhou Mi said, simply. Kyuhyun's eyes darted away from his for just a second. "We need to spend more time together."
Kyuhyun looked at what he'd been working on, and then at Zhou Mi's earnest face, and lay down his screwdriver. "Fine, but I get to choose the movie."
"But you'll choose something scary."
"As opposed to what? The Adventures of Hello Kitty or something?"
"Don't be mean about the greatest film ever, Kui Xian."
In what they'd dubbed "the movie room" (which was really just a tiny room at the back of the house with a small sofa, an old television that Kibum had spent months trying to get to work properly, and a bunch of movies that they'd picked up over the years from the market), Zhou Mi sat down while Kyuhyun flicked through the DVDs they had and eventually settled on a film about a lone survivor of a plague living in New York. "Yay, end of civilization films," Zhou Mi said wryly, as Kyuhyun inserted the disc.
"Shut up and move over," Kyuhyun said, almost sitting on Zhou Mi's legs to prove his point. Neither of them were particularly comfortable in the tiny room; it was too small for them to really stretch their legs out, and a spring from the sofa was poking into Kyuhyun's back, but they worked themselves into a positition that was almost okay and settled down to watch.
When the hero's wife and child was killed, Zhou Mi snuffled. Kyuhyun mockingly presented him with his sleeve to dry his tears on. Zhou Mi pushed him away, almost pushing him right off the sofa. "It's sad," he protested. Kyuhyun snorted. "Just think, Kui Xian, if we had been born in that time. Maybe we'd have married someone and had kids."
"You? Marry a woman?"
"Well."
"Maybe we'd have gotten married and had kids and maybe they'd have been killed in a freak helicopter accident too," Kyuhyun said, voice flat. He wasn't one for wishful thinking, and he certainly wasn't one for thinking of a life without Zhou Mi. "Maybe we'd have been just as unhappy then as we are now."
"You're unhappy, Kui Xian?" Zhou Mi asked, putting a hand on the back of Kyuhyun's neck.
Kyuhyun took a while to answer, but eventually he said, "No, of course not."
.............................................
"Siwon and Sungmin are acting weird," Donghae said, swinging back on his chair. Kyuhyun was meticulously piecing a circuit board together, goggles over his face and only one ear really on the conversation.
"Of course they are," he muttered, the silver flare from the solder making him look ill. "They're always acting weird. It's because they're actually somewhat sane and functional."
"Weird for them," Donghae clarified. "Secretive. Siwon won't tell me anything."
"Maybe," Kyuhyun suggested, "they just don't want everyone knowing their business."
Donghae frowned. "That's strange."
"Like I said," Kyuhyun said absently. "Somewhat sane."
"I'm bored," Donghae said, playing finger football with the small balls of solder that were lying around.
"Where's Eunhyuk?"
"He's with that whore. He stole some chocolate from Ryeowook, he figures that should do him good for a week or something."
"He should just marry her," Kyuhyun said, with a roll of his eyes. He was joking, of course. Marriage stopped being viable for people of their status generations ago.
"He would do," Donghae said, "if she even gave a shit about him."
Heechul walked into the room, looking far more awake and aware than he had the entire day before. He hadn't surfaced until Ryeowook had called that dinner was ready, and had left halfway through to throw up (Ryeowook had not been impressed). Today, however, he seemed relatively normal; his hair was looking perfect, if that was any sign. "Oh, good, Donghae, I found you," he said. "I've got a job for you."
"Yeah?" Donghae was playing with a piece of scrap metal, a long wire of copper that he was twisting into knots. Kyuhyun hadn't noticed yet, but once he did, he'd be annoyed. Heechul pulled it out of Donghae's hands and lay it on the table. He placed a photo of a woman in Donghae's hands.
"I need you to find something on this woman," he said. "I've been trying to find her serial number for weeks now. I've searched her office and her house, but it's not there. All I can think is that she's carrying it on her person. I need you to get it off her."
"With force or with magic?" Donghae asked, wiggling his fingers in Heechul's face. Heechul smiled.
"With whatever you want," he said, wrapping his arms around Donghae's shoulders. "Just make sure you get it."
"Sure, hyung," Donghae said, snuggling into the hug. Heechul was a bony son of a bitch, but Donghae would never say no to a hug. There was something about not remembering your childhood that made you rather partial to needless affection as you got older. "When do you want it by?"
"As soon as you can possibly get it."
"I'll go now!" Donghae shot upright and raced from the room. Heechul watched him go with a fond expression.
"Always so eager to please," he said.
Kyuhyun sighed and lay down what he was working on, pulling his goggles up onto the top of his head. "Heechul," he said. "You really can't go around just--" Then he caught sight of the strip of metal that Donghae had ruined and found himself speechless. "I'm going to kill him," he said furiously.
"Now, now, Kyuhyun," Heechul said with a smirk. "You can't just go around -- what were you going to say?"
"Fuck off," Kyuhyun said.
"Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said sternly as he came in the room. The way he was standing and the look on his face suggested that he was imitating Eeteuk. "That kind of language is not appropriate."
Heechul stretched until there was a crack as his spine popped back into place. He stood up, yawning, and said, "Well if you're going to be like that, I'm going to go." He patted Zhou Mi on the shoulder as he walked past out of the door, and Zhou Mi took his seat, placing a cup of coffee on the table in front of Kyuhyun. Kyuhyun took it gratefully and gulped half of it down so quickly that it didn't even have a chance to scald his mouth. Zhou Mi smiled, fiddling with the piece of metal that Donghae had been playing with not five minutes earlier. "Did you sleep any last night?" Zhou Mi asked, voice casual.
"No," Kyuhyun said, already going back to his work. "Came up but couldn't focus enough."
"Sleeping isn't about focusing, Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said. "It's about not focusing. You'd think you'd know that after twenty-four years."
"I have to focus on losing focus," Kyuhyun said. "My head is too full, Mi, I can't make it let go all of the time."
"Well, I don't know, Kui Xan," Zhou Mi said, wicked smile on his face; one that Kyuhyun rarely saw. "I could help you lose focus."
Kyuhyun grinned, reaching up and pulling his goggles off his face. "Come on then," he said, jumping to his feet and pulling Zhou Mi with him. "Don't offer to do things and then not follow through."
"Oh, I'll follow through alright," Zhou Mi said.
"I didn't need to hear that," called Siwon from the end of the hallway.
ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER
Kyuhyun had been called a genius since before he could even remember. By the time he was five, he was fluent in Mandarin. He wrote his own computer program at the age of seven. He tested into the only remaining university in Korea when he was eleven. When he was thirteen, he realised that the government was keeping tabs on him, in case he turned his mind towards being their enemy. He did the only thing he could think of: he cut into his own neck and pulled the micro-chip from his spine.
Even if he was a genius, he was still enough of an immature thirteen year old to not really realise the risks of what he was going to do. Luckily, it worked out for him, left him with no adverse side effects that he hadn't already been suffering from. His father had found him in his room, standing slumped against the wall, blood pouring from the incision in his neck and the chip crushed into pieces in his hand, and had panicked in the only way a father who was terrified of the government and of his own genius son could: he threw him out.
He stumbled through the streets until he came to Zhou Mi's apartment. Zhou Mi had moved to Korea as a child to avoid the last remnants of the plague which had swept across the Chinese peninsula, killing the population in their millions. His parents had died of the disease not long after, but somehow Zhou Mi had avoided catching it, and had come out of the other side of the quarantine procedure both an orphan and a ward of Kyuhyun's father, a doctor at the hospital he'd been staying at. Kyuhyun's father set him up with an apartment and arranged for him to go to a nearby school; nothing as good as Kyuhyun had, but maybe still better than he would have had.
Kyuhyun turned up on Zhou Mi's doorstep covered in blood and almost completely out of it. "Kui Xian," Zhou Mi gasped, pulling him into the apartment and shutting the door with a bang. "What happened? Did someone attack you? Whose blood is that?"
"Mine," Kyuhyun said, voice quiet. "Do you have a first aid kit or something? I need to clean my neck."
"Neck?" Zhou Mi took him by the shoulders, and turned him around so he could see his neck. "Kui Xian," he said, very quietly. "What have you done?"
"I cut it out." Kyuhyun finally uncurled his fingers. The fragments of the micro-chip fell to the floor of Zhou Mi's apartment. "They were spying on me, Zhou Mi. I mean, I know they spy on everyone, but they -- I found a file on me, in the government computer files. They were keeping track of where I went, who I spoke to, what I did, everything. I wasn't my own person. I couldn't take that, Mi."
"So you just cut it out?"
"They're not allowed to know," Kyuhyun said feverishly. "It's my life, I should control what happens in it. They're not allowed to know, Mi."
"Okay," soothed Zhou Mi. Looking back later, Kyuhyun could see how scared he was by what Kyuhyun had done. At the time, though, he just took Kyuhyun into his tiny bathroom and sat him down on the closed toilet seat and cleaned the ugly wounds on the back of his neck and stuck a bandage over them. Really, he should have had stitches, but whenever Zhou Mi anxiously said that he should go to hospital, Kyuhyun had brushed his fears away; if he went there, they'd realise what he'd done, and either arrest him or put another chip in. "You see," he told Zhou Mi, slurring his words as Zhou Mi guided him to the single bed, "I can't let them know about me."
They lived in fear, hours trickling into days, days feeding into weeks, but no one came for Kyuhyun. No one knocked asking about him, no one wanted to know what had happened to to the genius that they had been keeping tabs on. At the end of the second week, he snuck into a nearby net cafe and used the computer to hack into the government data files. It would bring the wrath of the Institution onto the cafe, but he couldn't -- or didn't -- bother with that.
He found that he had no file. Every piece of data that they'd once had on him had been wiped completely clean; there wasn't even anything with his name attached. His parents still had files; they claimed that they had one son, Cho Kyuhyun, but there was nothing in the files on who this Cho Kyuhyun was. He quickly logged off and walked back to Zhou Mi's place with his hood pulled up to hide his face from the cameras, turning over what he'd seen in his mind.
"I think," he said slowly, as he stepped into the apartment, "that I no longer exist."
Zhou Mi glanced at him. He'd been looking at Kyuhyun worriedly for two weeks now. He was talking the sudden desire to mutilate himself in order to stop the government from controlling hi as a sign of some sort of a breakdown. He looked scared and on edge constantly, but wasn't saything anything. Kyuhyun had enough of his sanity left to be grateful for that. "Of course you exist, Kui Xian," he said. "You're right here."
"I mean I don't exist for them," Kyuhyun elaborated, pulling his sweater over his head. Well, really, it was Zhou Mi's sweater, slightly too big for him. "I'm not on any of the databases."
"You hacked into their computers again?"
"Yes. I think that by destroying my chip, I've destroyed their information too. Something like that. It's going to be something like that. I could -- I need to work out how to do this safely."
He spent a month working on his project. He had an ability to focus his mind almost completely on a task, to the expense of food and sleep. Zhou Mi managed to keep him alive throughout it, and when Kyuhyun finally sat back in his chair, smelling of burnt metal, and pushed his sweaty hair from his face and said, "It's finished," Zhou Mi asked, "What is?"
Kyuhyun held up a small metal box, attached to some sort of leather strap. "It should -- providing it works correctly, it'll shut off impulses coming from the brain for a matter of seconds, just long enough for me to cut into the back of the neck and remove the chip, without interfering with whatever is going on at the time."
"You would shut off the brain?" Zhou Mi looked unconvinced. "Won't that kill you?"
"Probably," Kyuhyun admitted. "I haven't been able to test it out on a human. I did on a rat. It sends an impulse of its own, bringing the brain back into control. It worked on the rat."
"Kui Xian, where did you get a rat from?"
"The street?"
"You brought a rat into my apartment? Urgh, now I have to clean everything."
"I let it go again," Kyuhyun said, unbothered. "Look, Mi, don't you realise what I've done here? We can take the chips out, without hurting anyone. We can set people free from the constant scrutiny of the government, of the Institution. We could achieve so much, if only we weren't so scared of what they could do to us!"
"Okay," said Zhou Mi. Kyuhyun stared at him, confused. "Okay," Zhou Mi repeated. "Test it out on me. Take mine out."
"What?" Kyuhyun's ego deflated. That wasn't what he wanted to do at all. "No, Mi, we'll find someone else to test it on, I don't know--"
"No." Zhou Mi took it from his hands, turning it over, inspecting it. "I want my chip out, Kui Xian. I want to be able to--" He broke off, putting the machine back down, and smiled at Kyuhyun; not his usual smile, sad in a way that made Kyuhyun's breath catch. "We should be able to do what we like."
Kyuhyun nodded like he trusted what he was about to do, and the next day he strapped the machine onto the top of Zhou Mi's arm and turned it on. The procedure went fine, without any problems or external damage. After testing that everything worked as it should have done, and the chip had been crushed beneath Kyuhyun's shoe, Zhou Mi turned and kissed Kyuhyun for the first time, without fear that the government would be able to see and punish them for their "unnatural" desires.
It wasn't until later that they realised that it hadn't gone as well as they'd originally thought.
CURRENT DAY
Heechul was swinging his chair in circles, getting increasingly dizzier with each spin, when Hankyung came into the room and stopped the chair. He rubbed his hands over Heechul's neck and said, "Donghae said you wanted me."
"Yeah." Hankyung's hand got too close to Heechul's mouth and he nipped at the skin. Hankyung drew it back with a smile and took the seat next to him. "I wanted you to take a look at this."
He handed Hankyung a slip of paper, a serial number form. Hankyung looked it over, but couldn't place the number in his mind. "I don't know it. Someone you know or something?" Heechul simply shook his head and took the paper back. He picked up the mobile phone sitting on the desk next to him, and turned it on. While waiting for it to load up, Hankyung tried to take it off him. "Heechul," he said, almost patiently as Heechul avoided his hands. "Come on. Give me the phone. There are other ways, you know?"
"No." Heechul punched the number into the phone and turned the screen in front of him on. An office flickered into view; a woman with long hair and a modest suit. As the click of the phone going through, the woman froze, hand reaching out for a piece of paper on her desk. "Stand up," Heechul said, and the woman got to her feet stiffly. "Open the window." She forced the window open, and when Heechul gave his next instruction, the coldness in his voice made Hankyung almost flinch. "Throw yourself out."
Hankyung scrambled to get the phone from him -- he was never comfortable with anyone killing, particularly Heechul; he didn't think it was something to be done in cold blood -- but it was too late. The woman had climbed onto the window sill and flung herself out of the window. Hankyung couldn't see how high up the building the window was, but if he knew Heechul, he wouldn't have left any chance of survival. Heechul hung up the phone.
"She'll come to, flying through the air and know she had no chance of survival," he said vindictively. "Just like all those people she ordered to be killed. Just like Zhi."
Hankyung's hand closed around Heechul's wrist like a vice. "Zhi? You knew him?"
"I shared a room with him, Hankyung."
"I...never knew."
"You never asked." Heechul pulled his wrist from Hankyung's hand and pulled his chair a little bit closer, reaching out his hand without looking away from Hankyung's face and switching off the screen showing the now empty office. "You never spoke about him, you never asked if I'd actually known him. He told me about you; well he used your Chinese name."
"It's been ten years, Heechul," Hankyung said, trying to pull away and stand up. Heechul took his hands and pulled him back down. "Why are you bringing this up now?"
"It's taken me this long to track her down. You never wanted to talk about him, you never asked me, so I just did it. I wanted revenge for him, Hankyung. He was a friend. I'd only known him for a couple of weeks, but he was nice. He didn't try to take advantage of the pretty rich boy like all my past cell mates had. He talked about you all the time, you know."
"What happened to him?" Hankyung asked, head bowed.
"She -- that woman that I just killed -- she came into the room with four guards. The thing about spending time in that place is that you get used to the pain and the beatings; I blocked my mind to what was being done to me and focused on what she was doing. I'd never seen her before. I heard as they beat me that they hadn't been able to get in touch with the Chinese government, and that they had no need for more mouths to feed. I didn't realise what they meant. I could hear a struggle, but then they forced my head into the toilet and I couldn't breathe, I thought they were going to kill me. In the brief moments where they brought me back up, I heard choking."
"What did they do?" Hankyung sounded choked, and he had wound his arms around Heechul's waist, pulling him onto his lap. Heechul was speaking against his collar.
"I think they strangled him. They didn't like leaving blood behind to clear up, and I didn't hear any gunshots or the like. It was just silent, so silent, when they let me back up. They just left me there, with a fucking dead body! And I couldn't move, I was so tired. I would have just lain there forever if you hadn't come soon afterwards."
"How late was I?"
"I don't know," Heechul admitted. "Time was irrelevant there."
Hankyung pushed him away, pushed him to his feet and said, "Heechul -- you know, right? I don't want to scare you, but I just--" Heechul was staring at him blankly. Hankyung groaned, rubbed his hand over his face, and then grabbed Heechul's shoulders. "Fuck it," he said, and kissed him.
For Heechul, it felt like everything had suddenly fallen into place. All the years of living in fear that one day Hankyung would turn around and no longer be there, no longer be the person who made him feel like life was worth living, suddenly dissipated into nothing; Hankyung was right there, always there. Hankyung's hand pulled his chin up, as Heechul's hands threaded through his hair, pulling just a little, just enough to make Hankyung hiss.
"Come on," he said, taking Heechul's hand and pulling him from the room and up two flights of stairs to his room. He closed the door after them, hand pausing against the frame. Heechul kissed the back of his neck. "Heechul, I know what you -- I get what you went through, and I don't want to--"
"It's been ten years," Heechul said. He laughed, because it should have been funny, but both of them knew that Heechul wasn't over what he'd gone through in that place. He'd probably never get over that, but he wasn't going to let that stop him from getting this. "You remember how I told you once that I was beyond saving? Sometimes, when I'm with you, Hankyung, I don't feel so...wrong."
Hankyung burst into laughter. "That was so freaking corny," he said, turning around and nipping at Heechul's bottom lip, hands fiddling with the bottom button of Heechul's shirt. Heechul hid his smile by sucking at the base of Hankyung's throat.
"Well," he said, hands skirting around Hankyung's waist. "Maybe feeling wrong won't be so bad this time."
"Of course they are," he muttered, the silver flare from the solder making him look ill. "They're always acting weird. It's because they're actually somewhat sane and functional."
"Weird for them," Donghae clarified. "Secretive. Siwon won't tell me anything."
"Maybe," Kyuhyun suggested, "they just don't want everyone knowing their business."
Donghae frowned. "That's strange."
"Like I said," Kyuhyun said absently. "Somewhat sane."
"I'm bored," Donghae said, playing finger football with the small balls of solder that were lying around.
"Where's Eunhyuk?"
"He's with that whore. He stole some chocolate from Ryeowook, he figures that should do him good for a week or something."
"He should just marry her," Kyuhyun said, with a roll of his eyes. He was joking, of course. Marriage stopped being viable for people of their status generations ago.
"He would do," Donghae said, "if she even gave a shit about him."
Heechul walked into the room, looking far more awake and aware than he had the entire day before. He hadn't surfaced until Ryeowook had called that dinner was ready, and had left halfway through to throw up (Ryeowook had not been impressed). Today, however, he seemed relatively normal; his hair was looking perfect, if that was any sign. "Oh, good, Donghae, I found you," he said. "I've got a job for you."
"Yeah?" Donghae was playing with a piece of scrap metal, a long wire of copper that he was twisting into knots. Kyuhyun hadn't noticed yet, but once he did, he'd be annoyed. Heechul pulled it out of Donghae's hands and lay it on the table. He placed a photo of a woman in Donghae's hands.
"I need you to find something on this woman," he said. "I've been trying to find her serial number for weeks now. I've searched her office and her house, but it's not there. All I can think is that she's carrying it on her person. I need you to get it off her."
"With force or with magic?" Donghae asked, wiggling his fingers in Heechul's face. Heechul smiled.
"With whatever you want," he said, wrapping his arms around Donghae's shoulders. "Just make sure you get it."
"Sure, hyung," Donghae said, snuggling into the hug. Heechul was a bony son of a bitch, but Donghae would never say no to a hug. There was something about not remembering your childhood that made you rather partial to needless affection as you got older. "When do you want it by?"
"As soon as you can possibly get it."
"I'll go now!" Donghae shot upright and raced from the room. Heechul watched him go with a fond expression.
"Always so eager to please," he said.
Kyuhyun sighed and lay down what he was working on, pulling his goggles up onto the top of his head. "Heechul," he said. "You really can't go around just--" Then he caught sight of the strip of metal that Donghae had ruined and found himself speechless. "I'm going to kill him," he said furiously.
"Now, now, Kyuhyun," Heechul said with a smirk. "You can't just go around -- what were you going to say?"
"Fuck off," Kyuhyun said.
"Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said sternly as he came in the room. The way he was standing and the look on his face suggested that he was imitating Eeteuk. "That kind of language is not appropriate."
Heechul stretched until there was a crack as his spine popped back into place. He stood up, yawning, and said, "Well if you're going to be like that, I'm going to go." He patted Zhou Mi on the shoulder as he walked past out of the door, and Zhou Mi took his seat, placing a cup of coffee on the table in front of Kyuhyun. Kyuhyun took it gratefully and gulped half of it down so quickly that it didn't even have a chance to scald his mouth. Zhou Mi smiled, fiddling with the piece of metal that Donghae had been playing with not five minutes earlier. "Did you sleep any last night?" Zhou Mi asked, voice casual.
"No," Kyuhyun said, already going back to his work. "Came up but couldn't focus enough."
"Sleeping isn't about focusing, Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said. "It's about not focusing. You'd think you'd know that after twenty-four years."
"I have to focus on losing focus," Kyuhyun said. "My head is too full, Mi, I can't make it let go all of the time."
"Well, I don't know, Kui Xan," Zhou Mi said, wicked smile on his face; one that Kyuhyun rarely saw. "I could help you lose focus."
Kyuhyun grinned, reaching up and pulling his goggles off his face. "Come on then," he said, jumping to his feet and pulling Zhou Mi with him. "Don't offer to do things and then not follow through."
"Oh, I'll follow through alright," Zhou Mi said.
"I didn't need to hear that," called Siwon from the end of the hallway.
ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER
Kyuhyun had been called a genius since before he could even remember. By the time he was five, he was fluent in Mandarin. He wrote his own computer program at the age of seven. He tested into the only remaining university in Korea when he was eleven. When he was thirteen, he realised that the government was keeping tabs on him, in case he turned his mind towards being their enemy. He did the only thing he could think of: he cut into his own neck and pulled the micro-chip from his spine.
Even if he was a genius, he was still enough of an immature thirteen year old to not really realise the risks of what he was going to do. Luckily, it worked out for him, left him with no adverse side effects that he hadn't already been suffering from. His father had found him in his room, standing slumped against the wall, blood pouring from the incision in his neck and the chip crushed into pieces in his hand, and had panicked in the only way a father who was terrified of the government and of his own genius son could: he threw him out.
He stumbled through the streets until he came to Zhou Mi's apartment. Zhou Mi had moved to Korea as a child to avoid the last remnants of the plague which had swept across the Chinese peninsula, killing the population in their millions. His parents had died of the disease not long after, but somehow Zhou Mi had avoided catching it, and had come out of the other side of the quarantine procedure both an orphan and a ward of Kyuhyun's father, a doctor at the hospital he'd been staying at. Kyuhyun's father set him up with an apartment and arranged for him to go to a nearby school; nothing as good as Kyuhyun had, but maybe still better than he would have had.
Kyuhyun turned up on Zhou Mi's doorstep covered in blood and almost completely out of it. "Kui Xian," Zhou Mi gasped, pulling him into the apartment and shutting the door with a bang. "What happened? Did someone attack you? Whose blood is that?"
"Mine," Kyuhyun said, voice quiet. "Do you have a first aid kit or something? I need to clean my neck."
"Neck?" Zhou Mi took him by the shoulders, and turned him around so he could see his neck. "Kui Xian," he said, very quietly. "What have you done?"
"I cut it out." Kyuhyun finally uncurled his fingers. The fragments of the micro-chip fell to the floor of Zhou Mi's apartment. "They were spying on me, Zhou Mi. I mean, I know they spy on everyone, but they -- I found a file on me, in the government computer files. They were keeping track of where I went, who I spoke to, what I did, everything. I wasn't my own person. I couldn't take that, Mi."
"So you just cut it out?"
"They're not allowed to know," Kyuhyun said feverishly. "It's my life, I should control what happens in it. They're not allowed to know, Mi."
"Okay," soothed Zhou Mi. Looking back later, Kyuhyun could see how scared he was by what Kyuhyun had done. At the time, though, he just took Kyuhyun into his tiny bathroom and sat him down on the closed toilet seat and cleaned the ugly wounds on the back of his neck and stuck a bandage over them. Really, he should have had stitches, but whenever Zhou Mi anxiously said that he should go to hospital, Kyuhyun had brushed his fears away; if he went there, they'd realise what he'd done, and either arrest him or put another chip in. "You see," he told Zhou Mi, slurring his words as Zhou Mi guided him to the single bed, "I can't let them know about me."
They lived in fear, hours trickling into days, days feeding into weeks, but no one came for Kyuhyun. No one knocked asking about him, no one wanted to know what had happened to to the genius that they had been keeping tabs on. At the end of the second week, he snuck into a nearby net cafe and used the computer to hack into the government data files. It would bring the wrath of the Institution onto the cafe, but he couldn't -- or didn't -- bother with that.
He found that he had no file. Every piece of data that they'd once had on him had been wiped completely clean; there wasn't even anything with his name attached. His parents still had files; they claimed that they had one son, Cho Kyuhyun, but there was nothing in the files on who this Cho Kyuhyun was. He quickly logged off and walked back to Zhou Mi's place with his hood pulled up to hide his face from the cameras, turning over what he'd seen in his mind.
"I think," he said slowly, as he stepped into the apartment, "that I no longer exist."
Zhou Mi glanced at him. He'd been looking at Kyuhyun worriedly for two weeks now. He was talking the sudden desire to mutilate himself in order to stop the government from controlling hi as a sign of some sort of a breakdown. He looked scared and on edge constantly, but wasn't saything anything. Kyuhyun had enough of his sanity left to be grateful for that. "Of course you exist, Kui Xian," he said. "You're right here."
"I mean I don't exist for them," Kyuhyun elaborated, pulling his sweater over his head. Well, really, it was Zhou Mi's sweater, slightly too big for him. "I'm not on any of the databases."
"You hacked into their computers again?"
"Yes. I think that by destroying my chip, I've destroyed their information too. Something like that. It's going to be something like that. I could -- I need to work out how to do this safely."
He spent a month working on his project. He had an ability to focus his mind almost completely on a task, to the expense of food and sleep. Zhou Mi managed to keep him alive throughout it, and when Kyuhyun finally sat back in his chair, smelling of burnt metal, and pushed his sweaty hair from his face and said, "It's finished," Zhou Mi asked, "What is?"
Kyuhyun held up a small metal box, attached to some sort of leather strap. "It should -- providing it works correctly, it'll shut off impulses coming from the brain for a matter of seconds, just long enough for me to cut into the back of the neck and remove the chip, without interfering with whatever is going on at the time."
"You would shut off the brain?" Zhou Mi looked unconvinced. "Won't that kill you?"
"Probably," Kyuhyun admitted. "I haven't been able to test it out on a human. I did on a rat. It sends an impulse of its own, bringing the brain back into control. It worked on the rat."
"Kui Xian, where did you get a rat from?"
"The street?"
"You brought a rat into my apartment? Urgh, now I have to clean everything."
"I let it go again," Kyuhyun said, unbothered. "Look, Mi, don't you realise what I've done here? We can take the chips out, without hurting anyone. We can set people free from the constant scrutiny of the government, of the Institution. We could achieve so much, if only we weren't so scared of what they could do to us!"
"Okay," said Zhou Mi. Kyuhyun stared at him, confused. "Okay," Zhou Mi repeated. "Test it out on me. Take mine out."
"What?" Kyuhyun's ego deflated. That wasn't what he wanted to do at all. "No, Mi, we'll find someone else to test it on, I don't know--"
"No." Zhou Mi took it from his hands, turning it over, inspecting it. "I want my chip out, Kui Xian. I want to be able to--" He broke off, putting the machine back down, and smiled at Kyuhyun; not his usual smile, sad in a way that made Kyuhyun's breath catch. "We should be able to do what we like."
Kyuhyun nodded like he trusted what he was about to do, and the next day he strapped the machine onto the top of Zhou Mi's arm and turned it on. The procedure went fine, without any problems or external damage. After testing that everything worked as it should have done, and the chip had been crushed beneath Kyuhyun's shoe, Zhou Mi turned and kissed Kyuhyun for the first time, without fear that the government would be able to see and punish them for their "unnatural" desires.
It wasn't until later that they realised that it hadn't gone as well as they'd originally thought.
CURRENT DAY
Heechul was swinging his chair in circles, getting increasingly dizzier with each spin, when Hankyung came into the room and stopped the chair. He rubbed his hands over Heechul's neck and said, "Donghae said you wanted me."
"Yeah." Hankyung's hand got too close to Heechul's mouth and he nipped at the skin. Hankyung drew it back with a smile and took the seat next to him. "I wanted you to take a look at this."
He handed Hankyung a slip of paper, a serial number form. Hankyung looked it over, but couldn't place the number in his mind. "I don't know it. Someone you know or something?" Heechul simply shook his head and took the paper back. He picked up the mobile phone sitting on the desk next to him, and turned it on. While waiting for it to load up, Hankyung tried to take it off him. "Heechul," he said, almost patiently as Heechul avoided his hands. "Come on. Give me the phone. There are other ways, you know?"
"No." Heechul punched the number into the phone and turned the screen in front of him on. An office flickered into view; a woman with long hair and a modest suit. As the click of the phone going through, the woman froze, hand reaching out for a piece of paper on her desk. "Stand up," Heechul said, and the woman got to her feet stiffly. "Open the window." She forced the window open, and when Heechul gave his next instruction, the coldness in his voice made Hankyung almost flinch. "Throw yourself out."
Hankyung scrambled to get the phone from him -- he was never comfortable with anyone killing, particularly Heechul; he didn't think it was something to be done in cold blood -- but it was too late. The woman had climbed onto the window sill and flung herself out of the window. Hankyung couldn't see how high up the building the window was, but if he knew Heechul, he wouldn't have left any chance of survival. Heechul hung up the phone.
"She'll come to, flying through the air and know she had no chance of survival," he said vindictively. "Just like all those people she ordered to be killed. Just like Zhi."
Hankyung's hand closed around Heechul's wrist like a vice. "Zhi? You knew him?"
"I shared a room with him, Hankyung."
"I...never knew."
"You never asked." Heechul pulled his wrist from Hankyung's hand and pulled his chair a little bit closer, reaching out his hand without looking away from Hankyung's face and switching off the screen showing the now empty office. "You never spoke about him, you never asked if I'd actually known him. He told me about you; well he used your Chinese name."
"It's been ten years, Heechul," Hankyung said, trying to pull away and stand up. Heechul took his hands and pulled him back down. "Why are you bringing this up now?"
"It's taken me this long to track her down. You never wanted to talk about him, you never asked me, so I just did it. I wanted revenge for him, Hankyung. He was a friend. I'd only known him for a couple of weeks, but he was nice. He didn't try to take advantage of the pretty rich boy like all my past cell mates had. He talked about you all the time, you know."
"What happened to him?" Hankyung asked, head bowed.
"She -- that woman that I just killed -- she came into the room with four guards. The thing about spending time in that place is that you get used to the pain and the beatings; I blocked my mind to what was being done to me and focused on what she was doing. I'd never seen her before. I heard as they beat me that they hadn't been able to get in touch with the Chinese government, and that they had no need for more mouths to feed. I didn't realise what they meant. I could hear a struggle, but then they forced my head into the toilet and I couldn't breathe, I thought they were going to kill me. In the brief moments where they brought me back up, I heard choking."
"What did they do?" Hankyung sounded choked, and he had wound his arms around Heechul's waist, pulling him onto his lap. Heechul was speaking against his collar.
"I think they strangled him. They didn't like leaving blood behind to clear up, and I didn't hear any gunshots or the like. It was just silent, so silent, when they let me back up. They just left me there, with a fucking dead body! And I couldn't move, I was so tired. I would have just lain there forever if you hadn't come soon afterwards."
"How late was I?"
"I don't know," Heechul admitted. "Time was irrelevant there."
Hankyung pushed him away, pushed him to his feet and said, "Heechul -- you know, right? I don't want to scare you, but I just--" Heechul was staring at him blankly. Hankyung groaned, rubbed his hand over his face, and then grabbed Heechul's shoulders. "Fuck it," he said, and kissed him.
For Heechul, it felt like everything had suddenly fallen into place. All the years of living in fear that one day Hankyung would turn around and no longer be there, no longer be the person who made him feel like life was worth living, suddenly dissipated into nothing; Hankyung was right there, always there. Hankyung's hand pulled his chin up, as Heechul's hands threaded through his hair, pulling just a little, just enough to make Hankyung hiss.
"Come on," he said, taking Heechul's hand and pulling him from the room and up two flights of stairs to his room. He closed the door after them, hand pausing against the frame. Heechul kissed the back of his neck. "Heechul, I know what you -- I get what you went through, and I don't want to--"
"It's been ten years," Heechul said. He laughed, because it should have been funny, but both of them knew that Heechul wasn't over what he'd gone through in that place. He'd probably never get over that, but he wasn't going to let that stop him from getting this. "You remember how I told you once that I was beyond saving? Sometimes, when I'm with you, Hankyung, I don't feel so...wrong."
Hankyung burst into laughter. "That was so freaking corny," he said, turning around and nipping at Heechul's bottom lip, hands fiddling with the bottom button of Heechul's shirt. Heechul hid his smile by sucking at the base of Hankyung's throat.
"Well," he said, hands skirting around Hankyung's waist. "Maybe feeling wrong won't be so bad this time."
..............................................
Siwon and Sungmin had decided to name the girl Kaechan, and in the two weeks since they'd left her in the orphanage, she'd grown thinner, smiled less, and lay restless in Siwon's arms, struggling and whining. The thing about the orphanages was that there weren't enough people to look after the amount of children that were dumped on the doorstep. The other children tried to help out as best they could, but they were just kids, and the things they knew about looking after babies could fit on the head of a pin. They gathered around their legs, thinking that they had food which they could give. Sungmin handed out sweets from a bag that he'd bought at the market, keeping track of faces to make sure that no one got more than their fair share.
They were novelties, not just among the children but among the people who worked there. They at least knew who Siwon and Sungmin were, and where they came from; sometimes it was like they were the royalty of the street. They helped feed and clothe the babies, as the women flirted with them. Sungmin felt sorry for them, deep in his heart. It was like they thought that if they were charming, then one of Siwon or Sungmin would decide to make them his woman, and take them away from the grotty orphanage where they had to deal with unwanted, ungrateful children. Still, even that pity didn't stop him from glaring at one girl who would not stop touching Siwon's chest.
Siwon touched his little finger against Kaechan's cheek and watched as her mouth opened, reaching out for a source of food that wasn't there. Sungmin handed over a bottle, and Siwon began feeding her. "We can't leave her here," he said, sighing. "She's wasting away, look at her."
Sungmin was bouncing another baby, slightly older, on his knee. He kept giggling, then looking surprised at the noise coming out of his mouth. "What can we do, Siwon? We can't take her back with us. We don't exist, Siwon. You can't give the rights of guardianship to people who don't legally exist."
"Surely that doesn't matter?" The baby was sucking hungrily. "They won't care about legality here. We could just take her, and all they'd care about would be that it would be one less mouth to feed, one less crying baby to look after."
"Where do you want to take her?" Sungmin asked, trying to keep his voice calm so that he wouldn't scare the boy on his knee. "Back to the house? Try explaining that to Kyuhyun. Oh yeah, we know you're trying to run some sort of secret project here, overthrowing the Institution or whatever, but we just want to raise a little girl, don't worry about us."
There was a pause, and then Siwon blurted out, "We could leave."
Sungmin stared at him, still for so long that the baby on his knee started to whine for movement. "Leave? What do you mean, leave?"
"The house." Kaechan had finished her bottle; Siwon had her held against his shoulder, patting her back. "We could run away and take her with us. Find somewhere else to live. It's not like anyone could find us, we're unchipped."
"You want us to...leave our friends? They're like our family, Siwon."
"I know." Siwon bit his bottom lip, looking down at the floor. "I don't want to but we can't leave her here. We can't let her live like this."
Sungmin looked around at the children squabbling over the remaining sweets, hair lank and long around their skinny faces, and sighed. "No," he agreed. "We can't.
The market hadn't been very productive today; none of his usual contacts had had very much for him, so he'd left with a bit more self-raising flour, some ingredients for dinner that night, and some new headphones for Yehsung, like he'd asked. Well, he said new. They were probably fourth hand, but what Yehsung didn't know couldn't hurt him. They looked good as new, anyway. Kind of. Ryeowook was hoping that he was so happy about being able to listen to music again that he wouldn't much care.
The alleyways weren't the nicest place to walk down, but they were hidden from the view of most of the cameras, and Ryeowook knew the streets like the back of his hand. Living like this for six years hadn't left him completely defenseless. He may not have been as tough as Sungmin, and he may not have looked like he could defend himself like Kangin, but he could hold his own in a tight spot.
That was why, when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, he didn't panic. When an arm shot out and grabbed his and pulled him to the side of the alley, he didn't lose his mind. Even when his head was slammed against the brick wall, he didn't make a noise, though he felt the blood well up and spill over from a cut on his forehead. A knife pressed against his throat as he was pulled to the floor. A body, heavy and -- he wrinkled his nose -- smelly, pinned him down as he heard the fumbling of a belt behind him. Just like he'd known it would, the knife was pulled back as the man struggled to get his pants off, and it wasn't hard then to flick the concealed knife from his own sleeve down into his hand.
There was a brief fight, Ryeowook struggling like an eel and the man holding on for dear life, but it resolved itself soon enough; the man slumped back against the wall with a blade in his stomach, and Ryeowook clambering to his feet, gathering up his belongings and running from the alley as quickly as possible. He didn't want to know if he'd killed his attacker, and he was scared that if he knew that he hadn't, he'd want to go back for more.
He didn't stop until he'd slammed through the front door of the house and slid down the wall, trying to catch his breath. Blood was now dripping against his clothes, but he had things he needed to put away, things in his bag that he had to check weren't damaged, so he stumbled along to the kitchen, where Eunhyuk and Yehsung were discussing a break-in they were going to conduct that night. Yehsung looked up to smile at him as he came in, then the smile on his face faded as he took in his head wound.
"What happened?" he asked, getting to his feet. Eunhyuk was staring, mouth gaping open. Ryeowook touched his fingers to his forehead; maybe it looked worse than he realised. He felt a little dizzy. Yehsung took his hands from his face and began inspecting his head. "Ryeowook, who did this to you?"
"A guy," Ryeowook said. Now the adreneline was wearing off, his head was beginning to pound with pain. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. "He -- stopped me, in an alley. Tried to -- he slammed me against a wall."
Yehsung looked so angry that he could have shot a puppy in cold blood. He held up some fingers. "Ryeowook, how many fingers am I holding up?"
Ryeowook squinted. "Four?"
"Shit," Yehsung said, bringing his hand back down. "Shit, fuck, motherfucking hell. Hyuk, you're going to have to get someone else to go with you tonight. He's got some sort of concussion."
"Okay," Eunhyuk said. He looked terrified. Ryeowook closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. Nope, there was still two Eunhyuks.
"Hyung," he said to Yehsung. "I need to -- stuff, in my bag. It needs to be put away. Can you let me--"
"Shit, Ryeowook," Yehsung said, snatching his bag off him. "Eunhyuk will put it away, okay?" He handed it to Eunhyuk, who almost dropped it. "Come on, come with me. We're going to get you fixed up, okay?"
"I'm fine," Ryeowook said, slurring a little. He felt very tired all of a sudden. "I just need to sleep for a little bit, that's all." He closed his eyes.
"No," Yehsung's voice sounded panicked. "No, Wookie, open your eyes." His hand slammed across Ryeowook's cheek. Ryeowook's eyes shot open, and for a brief second his senses were his again.
"You hit me!" he said, shocked.
"I'm sorry," Yehsung said. "But you can't sleep, Ryeowook. You cannot go to sleep. Promise me that you won't sleep."
"I promise," Ryeowook said in a wavering voice. Yehsung was scaring him now.
"Fine." Yehsung pulled him from the room, and along to the stairs down to the surgery. "Come on, we need to get this sorted."
Heechul woke up alone in Hankyung's bed. The other side had long gone cold, but Heechul pulled the covers over his head and curled up, trying to conserve warmth. He dozed for another hour or so before eventually resurfacing, hair all over the place. He reached over the side of the bed and managed to find his pants by just blinding throwing his hand around, but couldn't locate his shirt. There was a moment where he contemplated his options, before he jumped out of the bed and threw open Hankyung's wardrobe.
When Hankyung came back to his room half an hour later, Heechul was reading the book that Hankyung had stolen from his last week, wearing one of Hankyung's t-shirts. "You look ridiculous," he said, closing the door. "Who said you could go into my wardrobe, anyway?"
"I can't find my shirt," Heechul said blithely. It was kind of true. He had found it, but then he'd stuffed it under Hankyung's bed to give him a better excuse to wear something of Hankyung's. Hankyung lay down on the bed beside him, and Heechul tucked his head under his shoulder, eyes on the pages in front of him, but mind on last night.
"Are you okay?" Hankyung asked. He sounded worried. He probably thought Heechul was regretting the night before.
"I am," Heechul said. "I am good. Great. Positively astounding."
That still didn't reassure Hankyung. "Are you sure? You're not--"
"I am regretting last night very much," Heechul said solemnly. "That's why I'm lounging in your bed, wearing your clothes."
"Okay," Hankyung said with a laugh. "I've got something I need to do with Siwon, we need some stuff from the market. Do you want anything?"
"Paper?" Heechul threw his book onto the floor. He'd read it five times already. "I need some ink, too. I feel like writing."
"You've used up all the paper I got you last time?" Hankyung asked. "That cost me a lot, you know."
"I need some more." Heechul turned over, so that he was half lying on Hankyung, head on his chest. "I'll pay you back, you know. Think of last night as a down payment."
Hankyung smiled, and went to kiss his forehead, just like he always did, before pausing and kissing his mouth. Heechul hummed, fingers curling around Hankyung's bicep. There was a knock at the door. "Mhrm," Hankyung said, eyes closed, but it opened anyway, and Siwon stood there, mouth hanging open.
"Oh," he said. "Sorry, I didn't realise that you, er, were, you know."
Heechul pulled a pillow from underneath his head and flung it at the door. It barely got over the end of the bed. Hankyung pulled his hands from his collar and tried to get off the bed, but Heechul kept pulling him back down to kiss him. Laughing, Hankyung managed to get free and made a bid for the door before Heechul could stop him. Heechul sat up and whined. "I'll see you tonight," Hankyung said, waving his hand. Heechul groaned and lay back down.
After Kyuhyun had snapped that he wasn't some sort of freak show at the circus -- "What's a circus?" Henry had asked innocently, which hadn't made things any better -- Henry had left him alone and gone to see what Kibum was doing. He was interested in the tiny details that were needed to make something work in a big way. He also hoped that by watching them, seeing what they did and what they worked on, he'd be able to pick something up that would help him in the future.
All that was really happening, though, was that he was getting more and more confused. It was partly because he understood very little of what Kibum was working with, and partly because Donghae would run in every half hour, upset Kibum's work, distract him from whatever he was doing with an inane comment, then run back out, and Kibum would have to try to work out where he'd left off, which wasn't always easy after Donghae had been in the vicinity. Even Henry, who was very fond of Donghae and used to him after sharing a room for a few weeks, was kind of annoyed by it, yet Kibum always seemed to smile after he'd sent Donghae packing with some sharp words.
"Look," Kibum said in English, holding out his circuit board. "Kyuhyun's working on the other half. If this works, it'll trip out locking systems. Entire buildings will lie open to anyone. It's being kind of impossible, though. One section proved too difficult, so Kyuhyun has it." The scowl on Kibum's face suggested that this didn't sit well with him. Henry had already picked up on Kibum's proud nature. "He's busy with something else though, so god only knows when this will get finished."
"What's he working on?" Henry asked. Kibum shrugged.
"He won't tell anyone."
"Not even you?"
"Not even Zhou Mi."
"So this thing," Henry said, "which systems will it work on?"
Kibum enjoyed what he did so much that he happily told Henry everything that his future machine would do. Henry listened intently, then let Kibum work in silence for a bit, mind mulling over what he'd been told. That thing, that unfinished mass of wires in Kibum's hands, could do so much. If it was finished, Henry could take it, use it for himself. They'd have the blueprints, they'd be able to make another one, whereas he -- he needed one of his own to do what he needed to do.
He was startled out of his thoughts by Donghae suddenly flinging the door open. Kibum seemed like he'd been expecting it, or at least, he didn't jump like Henry did. "Come on, Henry," Donghae said cheerfully. "We're going to go get some fresh air."
"We are?" Henry asked doubtfully, glancing at the board in Kibum's hands. Donghae nodded, and held out his hands.
"Come on," he said, like Henry was a dog. "Come on, Henry." Henry sighed, rolling his eyes, and got to his feet. He might as well get whatever Donghae had planned over with.
"Nice hair, by the way," Kibum said, as Henry got to the door. He looked back; Kibum was grinning at him. "Is that one of Sungmin's creations?"
Henry fingered the ends of his hair, now rather shorter than it had been. "Uh, yeah. Do you know he got the hair wax? He gave me a tub."
"Now that," Kibum said, turning back to his work, "is an eternal mystery."
"Mystery, mystery, ohh," Donghae sang. Henry started blankly at him. "It's a song," he explained. "I've got a CD! Remind me to play it for you."
"What's a CD?" Henry asked.
Eunhyuk stopped by the operations room to see if there was anyone there who could come out with him that night. Kyuhyun hadn't paid any attention to him, Zhou Mi was asleep, and Eeteuk just asked, "Wasn't Yehsung going with you?"
"Ryeowook got attacked coming back from the market." Now that, Kyuhyun paid attention to.
"Who?" he asked. "Someone we should know about?"
"No, looks like it was just some pervert. Ryeowook dealt with it, from what we made out, he was all in once piece apart from a head wound." He winced. "There was a lot of blood."
"Did Yehsung take him down to the surgery room?" Eeteuk asked, business-like as usual. Eunhyuk nodded, swinging back on his chair.
"He said Ryeowook had some sort of concussion. He held up two fingers and Ryeowook said there were four. He looked really weird, though that might have just been all the blood."
"Yehsung will fix him up," Eeteuk said, with a glance at Kyuhyun, then back at Eunhyuk. "Want me to come with you?"
Eunhyuk grinned. "No offence, hyung, but I need someone who can defend me in a tight spot, you know? Someone who'll take out guards while I'm picking locks."
"Don't call me a wimp," Eeteuk said. "My abs are bigger than yours."
"That's probably not a hard thing," Kyuhyun said dryly.
"Take Hankyung," Eeteuk suggested. "He doesn't have anything on tonight. Kangin is...doing something, and Siwon and Sungmin are doing something else."
"In other words, you don't know where Siwon and Sungmin are, and you don't want Kangin getting into a fight tonight."
"I'd rather he never got into any fights, ever."
Eunhyuk shrugged. "It's okay, I don't want to take Kangin-hyung anyway. He's likely to wander off and start beating a couple of people up when my back is turned." Eeteuk was blushing; it never failed to shock Eunhyuk how much Eeteuk blamed himself for Kangin's shortcomings. It wasn't like he could do anything about it. "Do you know where Hankyung-hyung is?"
"No idea," Eeteuk said. "Probably in his room. If he isn't, go ask Heechul, he's bound to know."
"Great," Eunhyuk said.
Hankyung wasn't in his room, though there was signs of life having just left. The bed was unmade, covers piled into the middle; the window was open, curtains billowing in the breeze; there was a button-up shirt on the floor under the bed, which Eunhyuk could have sworn he'd seen on Heechul the day before. He picked it up, checking the size, and grinned. That was definitely Heechul's. Now what was Heechul's shirt doing on Hankyung's bedroom floor?
He climbed the stairs to the top floor where Heechul's attic room was, and knocked on his door, but didn't get a reply. He pushed it open just a little, spotted Heechul, and pushed it further open. He was lying on his room with his headphones in, listening to his iPod. Of course, when the music player devices had turned up at the market, he'd made sure that he'd been able to get the best one. He was staying blankly at the ceiling, and gave no sense that he'd even noticed that Eunhyuk was in the room, never mind when he asked, "Hyung?"
Sighing, Eunhyuk came into the room and walked right up to the bed, and pulled one of Heechul's headphones out. "Hyung," he said, holding up the shirt. Heechul's head turned to look at him. "What was this doing in Hankyung-hyung's room?"
Heechul didn't answer for the longest time, long enough for Eunhyuk to become uncomfortable. He just kept looking blankly. "Hyung," he said, worried that he'd done something wrong. "Are you okay?"
Heechul said, in a weird voice, "I'm fine," and then stood up, bent under the bed and came back up with a length of metal piping. Eunhyuk took a step backwards. Something definitely wasn't right here; he and Heechul might not have been best friends, but that didn't mean that Eunhyuk didn't know about his mood swings and unpredictable temper. He'd been on the recieving end too many times to count.
"Hyung," he said, backing away until he hit the dresser by Heechul's bed. The hair products on it rattled. "Hyung, what's wrong? I'm sorry if you didn't want me to come in, but I--"
The metal bar in Heechul's hands suddenly whistled through the air and slammed against Eunhyuk's arm with far more force than Heechul had ever shown himself capable of. Pain shot through Eunhyuk's body as the bone in his arm broke, and he fell to the floor, cradling it with his other arm against his chest. "Hyung," he shouted, looking up at Heechul, who was just -- blank. "What the fuck?"
Heechul didn't answer, just lifting it into the air again and bringing it down against Eunhyuk's back. He fell to the floor against his broken arm, and lay there, unable to move, as Heechul continued beating him with the metal pipe. He passed out not long after he felt blood at the back of his throat.
It was Sungmin who found him, looking for Heechul. Eunhyuk woke up to find Sungmin staring at him in horror. His entire body was in pain, every nerve screaming in anger. He groaned, one of his eyes swollen shut. "Hyuk," Sungmin said, and he, even he was covered in blood. "Hyuk, who did this?"
He tried to help Eunhyuk over onto his back, but the pain was too much; just before he blacked out again, he had the presence of mind to grab Sungmin's collar and rasp, "Heechul. Heechul did it."
They were novelties, not just among the children but among the people who worked there. They at least knew who Siwon and Sungmin were, and where they came from; sometimes it was like they were the royalty of the street. They helped feed and clothe the babies, as the women flirted with them. Sungmin felt sorry for them, deep in his heart. It was like they thought that if they were charming, then one of Siwon or Sungmin would decide to make them his woman, and take them away from the grotty orphanage where they had to deal with unwanted, ungrateful children. Still, even that pity didn't stop him from glaring at one girl who would not stop touching Siwon's chest.
Siwon touched his little finger against Kaechan's cheek and watched as her mouth opened, reaching out for a source of food that wasn't there. Sungmin handed over a bottle, and Siwon began feeding her. "We can't leave her here," he said, sighing. "She's wasting away, look at her."
Sungmin was bouncing another baby, slightly older, on his knee. He kept giggling, then looking surprised at the noise coming out of his mouth. "What can we do, Siwon? We can't take her back with us. We don't exist, Siwon. You can't give the rights of guardianship to people who don't legally exist."
"Surely that doesn't matter?" The baby was sucking hungrily. "They won't care about legality here. We could just take her, and all they'd care about would be that it would be one less mouth to feed, one less crying baby to look after."
"Where do you want to take her?" Sungmin asked, trying to keep his voice calm so that he wouldn't scare the boy on his knee. "Back to the house? Try explaining that to Kyuhyun. Oh yeah, we know you're trying to run some sort of secret project here, overthrowing the Institution or whatever, but we just want to raise a little girl, don't worry about us."
There was a pause, and then Siwon blurted out, "We could leave."
Sungmin stared at him, still for so long that the baby on his knee started to whine for movement. "Leave? What do you mean, leave?"
"The house." Kaechan had finished her bottle; Siwon had her held against his shoulder, patting her back. "We could run away and take her with us. Find somewhere else to live. It's not like anyone could find us, we're unchipped."
"You want us to...leave our friends? They're like our family, Siwon."
"I know." Siwon bit his bottom lip, looking down at the floor. "I don't want to but we can't leave her here. We can't let her live like this."
Sungmin looked around at the children squabbling over the remaining sweets, hair lank and long around their skinny faces, and sighed. "No," he agreed. "We can't.
The market hadn't been very productive today; none of his usual contacts had had very much for him, so he'd left with a bit more self-raising flour, some ingredients for dinner that night, and some new headphones for Yehsung, like he'd asked. Well, he said new. They were probably fourth hand, but what Yehsung didn't know couldn't hurt him. They looked good as new, anyway. Kind of. Ryeowook was hoping that he was so happy about being able to listen to music again that he wouldn't much care.
The alleyways weren't the nicest place to walk down, but they were hidden from the view of most of the cameras, and Ryeowook knew the streets like the back of his hand. Living like this for six years hadn't left him completely defenseless. He may not have been as tough as Sungmin, and he may not have looked like he could defend himself like Kangin, but he could hold his own in a tight spot.
That was why, when he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, he didn't panic. When an arm shot out and grabbed his and pulled him to the side of the alley, he didn't lose his mind. Even when his head was slammed against the brick wall, he didn't make a noise, though he felt the blood well up and spill over from a cut on his forehead. A knife pressed against his throat as he was pulled to the floor. A body, heavy and -- he wrinkled his nose -- smelly, pinned him down as he heard the fumbling of a belt behind him. Just like he'd known it would, the knife was pulled back as the man struggled to get his pants off, and it wasn't hard then to flick the concealed knife from his own sleeve down into his hand.
There was a brief fight, Ryeowook struggling like an eel and the man holding on for dear life, but it resolved itself soon enough; the man slumped back against the wall with a blade in his stomach, and Ryeowook clambering to his feet, gathering up his belongings and running from the alley as quickly as possible. He didn't want to know if he'd killed his attacker, and he was scared that if he knew that he hadn't, he'd want to go back for more.
He didn't stop until he'd slammed through the front door of the house and slid down the wall, trying to catch his breath. Blood was now dripping against his clothes, but he had things he needed to put away, things in his bag that he had to check weren't damaged, so he stumbled along to the kitchen, where Eunhyuk and Yehsung were discussing a break-in they were going to conduct that night. Yehsung looked up to smile at him as he came in, then the smile on his face faded as he took in his head wound.
"What happened?" he asked, getting to his feet. Eunhyuk was staring, mouth gaping open. Ryeowook touched his fingers to his forehead; maybe it looked worse than he realised. He felt a little dizzy. Yehsung took his hands from his face and began inspecting his head. "Ryeowook, who did this to you?"
"A guy," Ryeowook said. Now the adreneline was wearing off, his head was beginning to pound with pain. He was having trouble focusing his eyes. "He -- stopped me, in an alley. Tried to -- he slammed me against a wall."
Yehsung looked so angry that he could have shot a puppy in cold blood. He held up some fingers. "Ryeowook, how many fingers am I holding up?"
Ryeowook squinted. "Four?"
"Shit," Yehsung said, bringing his hand back down. "Shit, fuck, motherfucking hell. Hyuk, you're going to have to get someone else to go with you tonight. He's got some sort of concussion."
"Okay," Eunhyuk said. He looked terrified. Ryeowook closed his eyes for a long moment, then opened them again. Nope, there was still two Eunhyuks.
"Hyung," he said to Yehsung. "I need to -- stuff, in my bag. It needs to be put away. Can you let me--"
"Shit, Ryeowook," Yehsung said, snatching his bag off him. "Eunhyuk will put it away, okay?" He handed it to Eunhyuk, who almost dropped it. "Come on, come with me. We're going to get you fixed up, okay?"
"I'm fine," Ryeowook said, slurring a little. He felt very tired all of a sudden. "I just need to sleep for a little bit, that's all." He closed his eyes.
"No," Yehsung's voice sounded panicked. "No, Wookie, open your eyes." His hand slammed across Ryeowook's cheek. Ryeowook's eyes shot open, and for a brief second his senses were his again.
"You hit me!" he said, shocked.
"I'm sorry," Yehsung said. "But you can't sleep, Ryeowook. You cannot go to sleep. Promise me that you won't sleep."
"I promise," Ryeowook said in a wavering voice. Yehsung was scaring him now.
"Fine." Yehsung pulled him from the room, and along to the stairs down to the surgery. "Come on, we need to get this sorted."
Heechul woke up alone in Hankyung's bed. The other side had long gone cold, but Heechul pulled the covers over his head and curled up, trying to conserve warmth. He dozed for another hour or so before eventually resurfacing, hair all over the place. He reached over the side of the bed and managed to find his pants by just blinding throwing his hand around, but couldn't locate his shirt. There was a moment where he contemplated his options, before he jumped out of the bed and threw open Hankyung's wardrobe.
When Hankyung came back to his room half an hour later, Heechul was reading the book that Hankyung had stolen from his last week, wearing one of Hankyung's t-shirts. "You look ridiculous," he said, closing the door. "Who said you could go into my wardrobe, anyway?"
"I can't find my shirt," Heechul said blithely. It was kind of true. He had found it, but then he'd stuffed it under Hankyung's bed to give him a better excuse to wear something of Hankyung's. Hankyung lay down on the bed beside him, and Heechul tucked his head under his shoulder, eyes on the pages in front of him, but mind on last night.
"Are you okay?" Hankyung asked. He sounded worried. He probably thought Heechul was regretting the night before.
"I am," Heechul said. "I am good. Great. Positively astounding."
That still didn't reassure Hankyung. "Are you sure? You're not--"
"I am regretting last night very much," Heechul said solemnly. "That's why I'm lounging in your bed, wearing your clothes."
"Okay," Hankyung said with a laugh. "I've got something I need to do with Siwon, we need some stuff from the market. Do you want anything?"
"Paper?" Heechul threw his book onto the floor. He'd read it five times already. "I need some ink, too. I feel like writing."
"You've used up all the paper I got you last time?" Hankyung asked. "That cost me a lot, you know."
"I need some more." Heechul turned over, so that he was half lying on Hankyung, head on his chest. "I'll pay you back, you know. Think of last night as a down payment."
Hankyung smiled, and went to kiss his forehead, just like he always did, before pausing and kissing his mouth. Heechul hummed, fingers curling around Hankyung's bicep. There was a knock at the door. "Mhrm," Hankyung said, eyes closed, but it opened anyway, and Siwon stood there, mouth hanging open.
"Oh," he said. "Sorry, I didn't realise that you, er, were, you know."
Heechul pulled a pillow from underneath his head and flung it at the door. It barely got over the end of the bed. Hankyung pulled his hands from his collar and tried to get off the bed, but Heechul kept pulling him back down to kiss him. Laughing, Hankyung managed to get free and made a bid for the door before Heechul could stop him. Heechul sat up and whined. "I'll see you tonight," Hankyung said, waving his hand. Heechul groaned and lay back down.
After Kyuhyun had snapped that he wasn't some sort of freak show at the circus -- "What's a circus?" Henry had asked innocently, which hadn't made things any better -- Henry had left him alone and gone to see what Kibum was doing. He was interested in the tiny details that were needed to make something work in a big way. He also hoped that by watching them, seeing what they did and what they worked on, he'd be able to pick something up that would help him in the future.
All that was really happening, though, was that he was getting more and more confused. It was partly because he understood very little of what Kibum was working with, and partly because Donghae would run in every half hour, upset Kibum's work, distract him from whatever he was doing with an inane comment, then run back out, and Kibum would have to try to work out where he'd left off, which wasn't always easy after Donghae had been in the vicinity. Even Henry, who was very fond of Donghae and used to him after sharing a room for a few weeks, was kind of annoyed by it, yet Kibum always seemed to smile after he'd sent Donghae packing with some sharp words.
"Look," Kibum said in English, holding out his circuit board. "Kyuhyun's working on the other half. If this works, it'll trip out locking systems. Entire buildings will lie open to anyone. It's being kind of impossible, though. One section proved too difficult, so Kyuhyun has it." The scowl on Kibum's face suggested that this didn't sit well with him. Henry had already picked up on Kibum's proud nature. "He's busy with something else though, so god only knows when this will get finished."
"What's he working on?" Henry asked. Kibum shrugged.
"He won't tell anyone."
"Not even you?"
"Not even Zhou Mi."
"So this thing," Henry said, "which systems will it work on?"
Kibum enjoyed what he did so much that he happily told Henry everything that his future machine would do. Henry listened intently, then let Kibum work in silence for a bit, mind mulling over what he'd been told. That thing, that unfinished mass of wires in Kibum's hands, could do so much. If it was finished, Henry could take it, use it for himself. They'd have the blueprints, they'd be able to make another one, whereas he -- he needed one of his own to do what he needed to do.
He was startled out of his thoughts by Donghae suddenly flinging the door open. Kibum seemed like he'd been expecting it, or at least, he didn't jump like Henry did. "Come on, Henry," Donghae said cheerfully. "We're going to go get some fresh air."
"We are?" Henry asked doubtfully, glancing at the board in Kibum's hands. Donghae nodded, and held out his hands.
"Come on," he said, like Henry was a dog. "Come on, Henry." Henry sighed, rolling his eyes, and got to his feet. He might as well get whatever Donghae had planned over with.
"Nice hair, by the way," Kibum said, as Henry got to the door. He looked back; Kibum was grinning at him. "Is that one of Sungmin's creations?"
Henry fingered the ends of his hair, now rather shorter than it had been. "Uh, yeah. Do you know he got the hair wax? He gave me a tub."
"Now that," Kibum said, turning back to his work, "is an eternal mystery."
"Mystery, mystery, ohh," Donghae sang. Henry started blankly at him. "It's a song," he explained. "I've got a CD! Remind me to play it for you."
"What's a CD?" Henry asked.
Eunhyuk stopped by the operations room to see if there was anyone there who could come out with him that night. Kyuhyun hadn't paid any attention to him, Zhou Mi was asleep, and Eeteuk just asked, "Wasn't Yehsung going with you?"
"Ryeowook got attacked coming back from the market." Now that, Kyuhyun paid attention to.
"Who?" he asked. "Someone we should know about?"
"No, looks like it was just some pervert. Ryeowook dealt with it, from what we made out, he was all in once piece apart from a head wound." He winced. "There was a lot of blood."
"Did Yehsung take him down to the surgery room?" Eeteuk asked, business-like as usual. Eunhyuk nodded, swinging back on his chair.
"He said Ryeowook had some sort of concussion. He held up two fingers and Ryeowook said there were four. He looked really weird, though that might have just been all the blood."
"Yehsung will fix him up," Eeteuk said, with a glance at Kyuhyun, then back at Eunhyuk. "Want me to come with you?"
Eunhyuk grinned. "No offence, hyung, but I need someone who can defend me in a tight spot, you know? Someone who'll take out guards while I'm picking locks."
"Don't call me a wimp," Eeteuk said. "My abs are bigger than yours."
"That's probably not a hard thing," Kyuhyun said dryly.
"Take Hankyung," Eeteuk suggested. "He doesn't have anything on tonight. Kangin is...doing something, and Siwon and Sungmin are doing something else."
"In other words, you don't know where Siwon and Sungmin are, and you don't want Kangin getting into a fight tonight."
"I'd rather he never got into any fights, ever."
Eunhyuk shrugged. "It's okay, I don't want to take Kangin-hyung anyway. He's likely to wander off and start beating a couple of people up when my back is turned." Eeteuk was blushing; it never failed to shock Eunhyuk how much Eeteuk blamed himself for Kangin's shortcomings. It wasn't like he could do anything about it. "Do you know where Hankyung-hyung is?"
"No idea," Eeteuk said. "Probably in his room. If he isn't, go ask Heechul, he's bound to know."
"Great," Eunhyuk said.
Hankyung wasn't in his room, though there was signs of life having just left. The bed was unmade, covers piled into the middle; the window was open, curtains billowing in the breeze; there was a button-up shirt on the floor under the bed, which Eunhyuk could have sworn he'd seen on Heechul the day before. He picked it up, checking the size, and grinned. That was definitely Heechul's. Now what was Heechul's shirt doing on Hankyung's bedroom floor?
He climbed the stairs to the top floor where Heechul's attic room was, and knocked on his door, but didn't get a reply. He pushed it open just a little, spotted Heechul, and pushed it further open. He was lying on his room with his headphones in, listening to his iPod. Of course, when the music player devices had turned up at the market, he'd made sure that he'd been able to get the best one. He was staying blankly at the ceiling, and gave no sense that he'd even noticed that Eunhyuk was in the room, never mind when he asked, "Hyung?"
Sighing, Eunhyuk came into the room and walked right up to the bed, and pulled one of Heechul's headphones out. "Hyung," he said, holding up the shirt. Heechul's head turned to look at him. "What was this doing in Hankyung-hyung's room?"
Heechul didn't answer for the longest time, long enough for Eunhyuk to become uncomfortable. He just kept looking blankly. "Hyung," he said, worried that he'd done something wrong. "Are you okay?"
Heechul said, in a weird voice, "I'm fine," and then stood up, bent under the bed and came back up with a length of metal piping. Eunhyuk took a step backwards. Something definitely wasn't right here; he and Heechul might not have been best friends, but that didn't mean that Eunhyuk didn't know about his mood swings and unpredictable temper. He'd been on the recieving end too many times to count.
"Hyung," he said, backing away until he hit the dresser by Heechul's bed. The hair products on it rattled. "Hyung, what's wrong? I'm sorry if you didn't want me to come in, but I--"
The metal bar in Heechul's hands suddenly whistled through the air and slammed against Eunhyuk's arm with far more force than Heechul had ever shown himself capable of. Pain shot through Eunhyuk's body as the bone in his arm broke, and he fell to the floor, cradling it with his other arm against his chest. "Hyung," he shouted, looking up at Heechul, who was just -- blank. "What the fuck?"
Heechul didn't answer, just lifting it into the air again and bringing it down against Eunhyuk's back. He fell to the floor against his broken arm, and lay there, unable to move, as Heechul continued beating him with the metal pipe. He passed out not long after he felt blood at the back of his throat.
It was Sungmin who found him, looking for Heechul. Eunhyuk woke up to find Sungmin staring at him in horror. His entire body was in pain, every nerve screaming in anger. He groaned, one of his eyes swollen shut. "Hyuk," Sungmin said, and he, even he was covered in blood. "Hyuk, who did this?"
He tried to help Eunhyuk over onto his back, but the pain was too much; just before he blacked out again, he had the presence of mind to grab Sungmin's collar and rasp, "Heechul. Heechul did it."
................................................
"No," Hankyung said. "Eunhyuk's got it wrong. Heechul is unable to predict sometimes, but this? He's not capable of something like this."
It was rare to see so many people in the operations room at one time, although there were a few obvious absentees. Yehsung was down in the surgery, looking at Eunhyuk, trying to patch him up as best as he could with his limited resources. Siwon had carried Zhou Mi up to his bedroom, so that they could have more room to discuss what had happened. And Heechul. Heechul was missing too.
"He said Heechul," Sungmin said quietly. "He said Heechul did it. I know it's hard to believe, but Eunhyuk wouldn't have said that if it wasn't true, even if his mind was messed up."
Hankyung strode across the room and grabbed Sungmin by the collar. "No," he snarled, face right up against Sungmin's. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"Hyung," Siwon said plaintively, trying to pull him away. "Hyung, you can't -- we can't fight. We need to work out what's happened, this isn't the time for arguing."
"I don't want it to be true either, Hankyung," Sungmin said, voice still quietly.
After a moment, Hankyung released him and threw himself into a chair, focusing on controlling his breathing. He couldn't afford to let his anger get the best of him. He saw a couple of people glancing at him nervously, like he was about to explode. He lay his head against the table. "It's not true," he murmured. "It can't be true. I know him. I know him, he wouldn't beat Eunhyuk up."
"Well, clearly he would," Kyuhyun said, voice as blank as ever. "Why is he missing, Hankyung? Where has he gone? Why would he be missing if he wasn't guilty?"
Hankyung didn't answer. Donghae, perched on one of the counters, said, "No, but see, I agree with Hankyung-hyung. I saw what Eunhyuk was like, and Eunhyuk is my best friend, and it makes me angry that something like this could happen to him but come on, this is Heechul-hyung we're talking about!"
"He doesn't like getting his hands dirty," Shindong said. "If he was going to hurt someone, he'd get someone else to do it."
"It's possible that that's what Eunhyuk meant," Kyuhyun pointed out. "Heechul might have gotten someone else to do it."
"You seriously believe that Heechul beat Eunhyuk up?" Eeteuk asked. "Seriously, Kyuhyun?" Kyuhyun looked at him, looking tired and stressed and no, he didn't believe it, that much was obvious from his eyes, but there was confusion in his expression too, and after a second his mouth tightened into a grim line and he merely shrugged. Eeteuk looked around at Kangin, who had his head in his hands. "Come on, Kangin, you've known Heechul the longest. Do you think he could do this?"
Kangin didn't move for a long while, before he whispered, "I don't know." Eeteuk wanted to shake him, remind him that he did know, because he knew Heechul, but the thing was, Eeteuk wasn't so sure either. He loved Heechul, but it was like he'd said before; Heechul was, at best, mentally unstable. No one had known when he would snap, or even if he would snap. Much as he didn't want to believe it, it was easy enough to chalk this up to Heechul's mind going.
Hankyung stood up so suddenly that he knocked the chair he'd been sitting on backwards. "I'm going to go find him," he said abrubtly, before striding out of the room. Ryeowook, a large piece of bandage held to his forehead above his eye by surgical tape, flinched as he slammed the door shut behind him. Sungmin stretched out a hand behind him and took Ryeowook's hand. He squeezed it, comforting. Ryeowook didn't like overly loud noises at the best of times.
Siwon cleared his throat, loud in the silence left behind by Hankyung. "I think we should try to find Heechul-hyung too," he said. He had a hand around Sungmin's wrist, holding so tight that he was pinching the skin between his fingers, just a little. Sungmin hadn't complained because it was stopping him from feeling like this was just some sort of nightmare. "If he's innocent, then finding him should clear it up. If he's not, if he really has, then we'll--"
No one knew what they'd do if Heechul really had been the one to beat Eunhyuk to within an inch of his life. Heechul's room was covered with blood, the weapon of his choice, a metal bar, lying on his bed. The evidence didn't look good, but none of them really wanted to think that Heechul -- one of their own -- could have done something like this.
In the end, Heechul proved impossible to find. With ten of them (Ryeowook and Kyuhyun stayed behind in case Heechul returned of his own accord) out searching the streets, they should have come across something to do with Heechul somewhere, but no one had seen him at the market, and no one had seen him at any of the bars that he usually haunted if he needed to forget. In a last fit of desperation, Kangin even convinced Eeteuk that they should search the whorehouses; they hadn't seen anyone matching Heechul's description, though they did succeed in freaking Eeteuk out.
Later, when they were all back in the operations room, when it was only Hankyung still out searching, Kangin had relayed this and Siwon had shook his head. "He wouldn't be there," he said.
"We searched the male brothels too," Kangin said, with some semblance of reassurance.
"No," Siwon said, shaking his head again. "You don't understand. He and Hankyung-hyung slept together last night, I caught them this morning."
This new information caused the room to laspe into silence again. In other circumstances, maybe they would have joked about it, made a couple of crude comments; maybe Ryeowook would have murmured that maybe Heechul could begin to heal now, and maybe Kangin would have nudged his arm and told him how sentimental it was. None of those things happened. Instead, Eeteuk said, after a long pause, "Do you think that tipped him over the edge?"
"He seemed...fine this morning," Siwon said hesitantly. "Happy, almost. Not like he was going to go on a rampage or anything like that."
Kyuhyun sighed, stretching his arms above his head. "Until he returns, or until Eunhyuk wakes up enough to give us a full recount of what happened, there's nothing we can do." His voice was flat and cold. "I'm going to bed."
He didn't miss the angry looks some of them gave him as he left the room, and he certainly didn't miss the scared look from Ryeowook, the disapproving look from Sungmin, or the judging stare from Donghae, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He was too tired, too frayed at the seams. He felt like he'd aged at least ten years that moment that Sungmin had burst into the surgery where Kyuhyun was talking to Ryeowook about the man who had attacked him while Yehsung cleared up, holding a body in his arms, a body so bloody and broken that Kyuhyun hadn't known who it even was. He was too tired to deal with the fact that it apparently been Heechul who had done it. He just wanted to crawl into bed and feel Zhou Mi's warm form beside him.
Only he found that he couldn't sleep. His eyes stung and his limbs felt heavy with it, but he couldn't switch off. Every time he closed his eyes he'd see the bubble of blood by the corner of Eunhyuk's mouth and he'd spring them open again to stop the image from becoming ingrained to his eyelids. It was stupid and bizarre: he'd seen plently of beaten people; had seen plenty of dead bodies; heard people choking on their own blood; heard them screaming as knives sliced through flesh and muscle; heard the crack of gunshots and then the sickening sound of metal ripping through a body. But Eunhyuk, lying prone in Sungmin's arms, was the thing that was sticking to him. Heechul beating, crazy Heechul, crazy Heechul who Kyuhyun had never been able to help, another failure to be chalked up on the blackboard of Kyuhyun's life, another Zhou Mi, and for a moment, he thought "Maybe I did it when I took his chip out."
"Kui Xian?" Zhou Mi's arm stretched across, groping for him in the darkness, and eventually he found Kyuhyun's hand. He lay his other hand across Kyuhyun's forehead. "You're burning up," he said. "Are you feeling okay? Do you want me to get Yehsung?" Kyuhyun shook his head, something that Zhou Mi obviously couldn't see. He thought he got no answer. "Kui Xian, are you asleep?" This time, Kyuhyun turned towards him, and he saw the outline of Zhou Mi's head on the pillow. "What is it, Kui Xian?"
"Something's happened," Kyuhyun said, his voice breaking.
Slowly, everyone drifted out of the operations room, either to go to bed or to go think about what had happened. Donghae made his way down to the surgery to look in on Eunhyuk, and Ryeowook was convinced to try to sleep; it had been a long day, and he needed rest after his injury. Soon, it was only Siwon and Sungmin left behind, Sungmin tapping his fingers impatiently on the table, no discernible rhythm to it. Siwon stood behind him, pushing his fingers through the hair at the back of Sungmin's neck.
"You don't really think he did it, do you?" Sungmin asked.
"I don't know what to think," Siwon said truthfully.
"Eunhyuk seemed so sure," Sungmin said doubtfully. He swallowed hard. "He said it like he thought it was the final thing he'd ever say. He was certain that it had been Heechul, but--"
"But Heechul-hyung wouldn't do it?" Siwon pulled the nearest chair over and sank down into it gratefully. "He wouldn't do it. I've known him for eight years, and he would not do something like this."
"But what if Eeteuk was right and Heechul's just lost it? What if there's been something that's just tipped him over the edge?"
"I don't believe that Heechul over the edge would result in something like this," Siwon said.
"No," Sungmin said musingly. "Heechul over the edge would result in more harm to himself than to anyone else."
Siwon smothered a yawn behind his hand, causing Sungmin to do the same. "We should sleep," Siwon said, half-heartedly. "I really wanted to wait for Hankyung, though." And Heechul, he didn't add.
"You don't know if he'll even come home tonight," Sungmin said, not unkindly. "There's no point in waiting up all night for him. I get that you want to be there for him, but he'll understand."
Yehsung was pouring some coffee into the biggest mug he'd been able to find in the kitchen when he heard Ryeowook's screaming begin from the top floor of the house. Most of the others in the building would sleep through it; it happened enough that they just trusted Yehsung to deal with it. He almost dropped his mug in his haste, and took the stairs three at a time. In the bedroom, he found Ryeowook hunched over on the bed, eyes bulging and wide with fear, one hand clamped over his mouth to smother his screams.
Yehsung knelt in front of him, stroking his hair and looking him directly in the eyes. "Ryeowook, calm down. Focus on your breathing, Ryeowook, in, out, in, out. Come on, Wookie, everything's fine, there's nothing coming to get you."
He was pulling Ryeowook towards him with each word, slowly as to not startle him. Ryeowook was dangerously close to hyperventilating, chest heaving but his breathing shallow. Desperate, Yehsung considered hitting him again, but that was just likely to make this worse. Instead, he just kept murmuring gently, soothingly, until Ryeowook sobbed out, "It's Heechul, he's coming for us, coming for me, he's, he's--"
"Quiet," Yehsung said, slightly disturbed by this turn of events in Ryeowook's subconscious. Usually his assailants were faceless; they could be anyone or anything, which made it all the more frightening. "It was just a dream, Ryeowook."
"A gun, Yehsung, he's got a gun and he's going to kill us all, just like -- just like my parents, just like my family, kill everyone!"
"He's not," Yehsung said firmly. "It was a nightmare, okay? Just a nightmare, Heechul is not coming for you and he certainly won't kill you, because we won't let him." He pulled open a drawer by the side of the bed and pulled out a strip of tablets. Popping one from the foil, he coaxed Ryeowook into opening his mouth, and he placed one of the white pills under his tongue, letting it dissolve. Slowly, Ryeowook's tears began to stop, and when he fell asleep with his head against Yehsung's chest, Yehsung sighed in relief.
Back in the surgery, the monitor that Eunhyuk was hooked up to was beeping reassuringly, and his chest was rising and falling steadily. Donghae was curled up on the desk chair next to the old denist's chair that Kyuhyun had hooked up to remove the chips on. Yehsung slung a blanket over him before sitting down on another chair. He checked the clock hanging on the wall; 3.30am. With a groan, he remembered the coffee he'd left in the kitchen.
There was a knock at the door, and Kibum stepped through, holding two cups, one slightly larger than the other. "I thought you could do with this," he said, holding out the larger one to Yehsung. "I saw the other one on the counter, but it had gone cold, so I made you a new one."
"You're a lifesaver," Yehsung said hoarsely, drinking about three quarters of the coffee in one go. Kibum looked down at his own cup then silently handed that one over too. He glanced at Donghae, then at Eunhyuk, and a frown line appeared on his forehead.
"How is he?" he asked.
"Alive," Yehsung said with a shrug. "He'll hurt like hell when he wakes up but I've got him knocked out on some morphine that I've been saving for a special occasion."
"Do you think he's lucky to still be here?"
"I think he's lucky to have been found as quickly as he was." Yehsung took another gulp of coffee. Kibum pulled a chair up and sat with his front pressed against the back. "He could only have been there half an hour at the most, from when Eeteuk saw him in the operations room to when Sungmin found him. He could have lasted another hour, tops, before he died either of shock or of blood loss."
"Lucky," Kibum echoed. He stared at Eunhyuk's bruised and swollen face for a good minute before he said, "Ryeowook woke me up."
"He had a nightmare," Yehsung said with another shrug. "They happen."
Yehsung wasn't stupid; he knew that it wasn't Ryeowook who had woken Kibum up, because judging by the Kibum's slow hand movements and the darkness under his eyes, Kibum hadn't gone to sleep yet. But if Kibum didn't want to talk about it, then Yehsung wasn't going to push the matter. He was a doctor, not a goddamned psychiatrist.
Donghae mumbled something in his sleep and his head flopped into the other side, mouth open slightly. Yehsung caught Kibum glancing at him again. He drained his cup of coffee. He dealt with only physical trauma; Kibum could deal with matters of the heart on his own time.
Hankyung arrived back late the next day. Most everyone had gone out again early in the morning to try to see if they could find Heechul. There was a strong hope that they'd find him slumped outside a bar somewhere, but no such hope came true. By now, they just wanted to find him to put their minds at rest. It was one thing for Heechul to go around beating people up; that was scary enough. It was quite another for him to completely disappear in a city covered in video cameras.
By some sort of unspoken agreement, they were all taking it in turns to wait in the operations room. Siwon was in there, flicking aimlessly through some rag-eared magazine that they'd been given as a freebie at the market two years back. Someone had completed all the puzzles, and then Donghae and Eunhyuk had drawn on the faces of all the old celebrities that none of them had ever heard of. Hankyung stumbled into the room looking decidedly worse for wear. His clothes were rumpled, and dirty in places; his shirt had been ripped, somehow. His hair was a mess and his eyes blood-shot. Siwon half-rose as he came in, but Hankyung only noticed him in order to ask, "Has he come back?"
"No." Siwon closed the pages of the magazine and stood up fully. "Hyung, have you--"
"Just come back in," Hankyung mumbled, already turning to leave. "Going back out, got to find him--"
Siwon took hold of his arm. "Hyung, you need to rest. You can't kill yourself looking for him. Just, go to sleep, and I'll go out and find him."
"No." Hankyung might have been tired, but he still had the strength to push Siwon off him. "You don't understand, Siwon, he'll be -- scared. Wherever he is, I need to find him. I need to find him."
"Well, you won't find him when you can't even see because you're so tired." Siwon took hold of him again and this time didn't let go when Hankyung struggled. "Hyung, you're going to go to bed, sleep for a bit and then you can go back out and continue looking. Don't make me get Sungmin down here."
Hankyung completely ignored Siwon's joke, clearly thinking that the situation didn't lend itself towards joking, but he did climb the stairs, stumbling here and there, causing Siwon's heart to jump to his throat every single time for fear that he'd fall back down and break his neck. Once Hankyung had disappeared along to his room, Siwon sighed and went back to the operations room. He'd been there a matter of seconds when Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi came in. Kyuhyun looked almost as tired as Hankyung, though he sat down and immediately got to work on the circuit board spread out on one of the tables. Zhou Mi sat down on a chair next to him.
"Kui Xian," he said, voice ever so quiet.
"Be quiet, Zhou Mi," Kyuhyun said, a warning in his voice that Zhou Mi ignored.
"But you--"
"Zhou Mi, I'll do it after this," Kyuhyun said, switching to Mandarin, as if he'd forgotten that Siwon could speak it. "Just leave me alone, okay? I'm busy."
Zhou Mi stared at him for a long, long time, a rare frown on his face. "Fine," he said eventually, and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Siwon glanced at Kyuhyun but Kyuhyun was steadfastly ignoring him. Not really wanting to be in the same room as him, Siwon stood up and went to the kitchen to see about some lunch. Zhou Mi was in there, playing with a cup, turning it over and over in his hands. He put it down when he saw Siwon.
Siwon sat down opposite him, kind of wanting to ask what it had all been about. He knew that if he went upstairs and told Sungmin about what he'd seen, Sungmin would come racing down and demand to know exactly what was going on, but Siwon wasn't Sungmin, and he didn't want to seem like he was prying in. Zhou Mi sighed and stood up and left again. Siwon bit his bottom lip, not knowing whether Zhou Mi had gone back into the operations room or somewhere else completely. It wasn't like he could leave the house for extended periods of time, so chances were he was somewhere in the house still. Siwon decided to leave him to it, and went to visit Eunhyuk. He felt restless and full of an energy that he couldn't get rid of.
Yehsung was still down there, asleep in his desk chair, chin hitting his chest with each slow breath. Siwon pulled up a seat next to Eunhyuk's bedside and watched as he slowly breathed in and out. His eyes were coming in black now, but it didn't seem so bad now that all the cuts on his face had been stitched or covered. He looked better now that the blood had all been washed away. Sungmin had been covered in it, shaking, and it had taken a lot for Siwon to convince him to take a shower before they went down to the emergency meeting that Kyuhyun had held. In the end, Siwon had had to help, practically dressing him, and it wasn't until they had got the operations room and seen everyone else just as confused that Sungmin had came too and taken stock of the situation.
Still, Siwon had to admit. Eunhyuk did look pretty crap.
There was a knock at the door, and Yehsung woke up with a jump, startling upright and almost falling out of his chair. Donghae stuck his head around, looking tense. "Kyuhyun wants everyone in the operations room," he said grimly. "There's been a shooting."
It was rare to see so many people in the operations room at one time, although there were a few obvious absentees. Yehsung was down in the surgery, looking at Eunhyuk, trying to patch him up as best as he could with his limited resources. Siwon had carried Zhou Mi up to his bedroom, so that they could have more room to discuss what had happened. And Heechul. Heechul was missing too.
"He said Heechul," Sungmin said quietly. "He said Heechul did it. I know it's hard to believe, but Eunhyuk wouldn't have said that if it wasn't true, even if his mind was messed up."
Hankyung strode across the room and grabbed Sungmin by the collar. "No," he snarled, face right up against Sungmin's. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"Hyung," Siwon said plaintively, trying to pull him away. "Hyung, you can't -- we can't fight. We need to work out what's happened, this isn't the time for arguing."
"I don't want it to be true either, Hankyung," Sungmin said, voice still quietly.
After a moment, Hankyung released him and threw himself into a chair, focusing on controlling his breathing. He couldn't afford to let his anger get the best of him. He saw a couple of people glancing at him nervously, like he was about to explode. He lay his head against the table. "It's not true," he murmured. "It can't be true. I know him. I know him, he wouldn't beat Eunhyuk up."
"Well, clearly he would," Kyuhyun said, voice as blank as ever. "Why is he missing, Hankyung? Where has he gone? Why would he be missing if he wasn't guilty?"
Hankyung didn't answer. Donghae, perched on one of the counters, said, "No, but see, I agree with Hankyung-hyung. I saw what Eunhyuk was like, and Eunhyuk is my best friend, and it makes me angry that something like this could happen to him but come on, this is Heechul-hyung we're talking about!"
"He doesn't like getting his hands dirty," Shindong said. "If he was going to hurt someone, he'd get someone else to do it."
"It's possible that that's what Eunhyuk meant," Kyuhyun pointed out. "Heechul might have gotten someone else to do it."
"You seriously believe that Heechul beat Eunhyuk up?" Eeteuk asked. "Seriously, Kyuhyun?" Kyuhyun looked at him, looking tired and stressed and no, he didn't believe it, that much was obvious from his eyes, but there was confusion in his expression too, and after a second his mouth tightened into a grim line and he merely shrugged. Eeteuk looked around at Kangin, who had his head in his hands. "Come on, Kangin, you've known Heechul the longest. Do you think he could do this?"
Kangin didn't move for a long while, before he whispered, "I don't know." Eeteuk wanted to shake him, remind him that he did know, because he knew Heechul, but the thing was, Eeteuk wasn't so sure either. He loved Heechul, but it was like he'd said before; Heechul was, at best, mentally unstable. No one had known when he would snap, or even if he would snap. Much as he didn't want to believe it, it was easy enough to chalk this up to Heechul's mind going.
Hankyung stood up so suddenly that he knocked the chair he'd been sitting on backwards. "I'm going to go find him," he said abrubtly, before striding out of the room. Ryeowook, a large piece of bandage held to his forehead above his eye by surgical tape, flinched as he slammed the door shut behind him. Sungmin stretched out a hand behind him and took Ryeowook's hand. He squeezed it, comforting. Ryeowook didn't like overly loud noises at the best of times.
Siwon cleared his throat, loud in the silence left behind by Hankyung. "I think we should try to find Heechul-hyung too," he said. He had a hand around Sungmin's wrist, holding so tight that he was pinching the skin between his fingers, just a little. Sungmin hadn't complained because it was stopping him from feeling like this was just some sort of nightmare. "If he's innocent, then finding him should clear it up. If he's not, if he really has, then we'll--"
No one knew what they'd do if Heechul really had been the one to beat Eunhyuk to within an inch of his life. Heechul's room was covered with blood, the weapon of his choice, a metal bar, lying on his bed. The evidence didn't look good, but none of them really wanted to think that Heechul -- one of their own -- could have done something like this.
In the end, Heechul proved impossible to find. With ten of them (Ryeowook and Kyuhyun stayed behind in case Heechul returned of his own accord) out searching the streets, they should have come across something to do with Heechul somewhere, but no one had seen him at the market, and no one had seen him at any of the bars that he usually haunted if he needed to forget. In a last fit of desperation, Kangin even convinced Eeteuk that they should search the whorehouses; they hadn't seen anyone matching Heechul's description, though they did succeed in freaking Eeteuk out.
Later, when they were all back in the operations room, when it was only Hankyung still out searching, Kangin had relayed this and Siwon had shook his head. "He wouldn't be there," he said.
"We searched the male brothels too," Kangin said, with some semblance of reassurance.
"No," Siwon said, shaking his head again. "You don't understand. He and Hankyung-hyung slept together last night, I caught them this morning."
This new information caused the room to laspe into silence again. In other circumstances, maybe they would have joked about it, made a couple of crude comments; maybe Ryeowook would have murmured that maybe Heechul could begin to heal now, and maybe Kangin would have nudged his arm and told him how sentimental it was. None of those things happened. Instead, Eeteuk said, after a long pause, "Do you think that tipped him over the edge?"
"He seemed...fine this morning," Siwon said hesitantly. "Happy, almost. Not like he was going to go on a rampage or anything like that."
Kyuhyun sighed, stretching his arms above his head. "Until he returns, or until Eunhyuk wakes up enough to give us a full recount of what happened, there's nothing we can do." His voice was flat and cold. "I'm going to bed."
He didn't miss the angry looks some of them gave him as he left the room, and he certainly didn't miss the scared look from Ryeowook, the disapproving look from Sungmin, or the judging stare from Donghae, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He was too tired, too frayed at the seams. He felt like he'd aged at least ten years that moment that Sungmin had burst into the surgery where Kyuhyun was talking to Ryeowook about the man who had attacked him while Yehsung cleared up, holding a body in his arms, a body so bloody and broken that Kyuhyun hadn't known who it even was. He was too tired to deal with the fact that it apparently been Heechul who had done it. He just wanted to crawl into bed and feel Zhou Mi's warm form beside him.
Only he found that he couldn't sleep. His eyes stung and his limbs felt heavy with it, but he couldn't switch off. Every time he closed his eyes he'd see the bubble of blood by the corner of Eunhyuk's mouth and he'd spring them open again to stop the image from becoming ingrained to his eyelids. It was stupid and bizarre: he'd seen plently of beaten people; had seen plenty of dead bodies; heard people choking on their own blood; heard them screaming as knives sliced through flesh and muscle; heard the crack of gunshots and then the sickening sound of metal ripping through a body. But Eunhyuk, lying prone in Sungmin's arms, was the thing that was sticking to him. Heechul beating, crazy Heechul, crazy Heechul who Kyuhyun had never been able to help, another failure to be chalked up on the blackboard of Kyuhyun's life, another Zhou Mi, and for a moment, he thought "Maybe I did it when I took his chip out."
"Kui Xian?" Zhou Mi's arm stretched across, groping for him in the darkness, and eventually he found Kyuhyun's hand. He lay his other hand across Kyuhyun's forehead. "You're burning up," he said. "Are you feeling okay? Do you want me to get Yehsung?" Kyuhyun shook his head, something that Zhou Mi obviously couldn't see. He thought he got no answer. "Kui Xian, are you asleep?" This time, Kyuhyun turned towards him, and he saw the outline of Zhou Mi's head on the pillow. "What is it, Kui Xian?"
"Something's happened," Kyuhyun said, his voice breaking.
Slowly, everyone drifted out of the operations room, either to go to bed or to go think about what had happened. Donghae made his way down to the surgery to look in on Eunhyuk, and Ryeowook was convinced to try to sleep; it had been a long day, and he needed rest after his injury. Soon, it was only Siwon and Sungmin left behind, Sungmin tapping his fingers impatiently on the table, no discernible rhythm to it. Siwon stood behind him, pushing his fingers through the hair at the back of Sungmin's neck.
"You don't really think he did it, do you?" Sungmin asked.
"I don't know what to think," Siwon said truthfully.
"Eunhyuk seemed so sure," Sungmin said doubtfully. He swallowed hard. "He said it like he thought it was the final thing he'd ever say. He was certain that it had been Heechul, but--"
"But Heechul-hyung wouldn't do it?" Siwon pulled the nearest chair over and sank down into it gratefully. "He wouldn't do it. I've known him for eight years, and he would not do something like this."
"But what if Eeteuk was right and Heechul's just lost it? What if there's been something that's just tipped him over the edge?"
"I don't believe that Heechul over the edge would result in something like this," Siwon said.
"No," Sungmin said musingly. "Heechul over the edge would result in more harm to himself than to anyone else."
Siwon smothered a yawn behind his hand, causing Sungmin to do the same. "We should sleep," Siwon said, half-heartedly. "I really wanted to wait for Hankyung, though." And Heechul, he didn't add.
"You don't know if he'll even come home tonight," Sungmin said, not unkindly. "There's no point in waiting up all night for him. I get that you want to be there for him, but he'll understand."
Yehsung was pouring some coffee into the biggest mug he'd been able to find in the kitchen when he heard Ryeowook's screaming begin from the top floor of the house. Most of the others in the building would sleep through it; it happened enough that they just trusted Yehsung to deal with it. He almost dropped his mug in his haste, and took the stairs three at a time. In the bedroom, he found Ryeowook hunched over on the bed, eyes bulging and wide with fear, one hand clamped over his mouth to smother his screams.
Yehsung knelt in front of him, stroking his hair and looking him directly in the eyes. "Ryeowook, calm down. Focus on your breathing, Ryeowook, in, out, in, out. Come on, Wookie, everything's fine, there's nothing coming to get you."
He was pulling Ryeowook towards him with each word, slowly as to not startle him. Ryeowook was dangerously close to hyperventilating, chest heaving but his breathing shallow. Desperate, Yehsung considered hitting him again, but that was just likely to make this worse. Instead, he just kept murmuring gently, soothingly, until Ryeowook sobbed out, "It's Heechul, he's coming for us, coming for me, he's, he's--"
"Quiet," Yehsung said, slightly disturbed by this turn of events in Ryeowook's subconscious. Usually his assailants were faceless; they could be anyone or anything, which made it all the more frightening. "It was just a dream, Ryeowook."
"A gun, Yehsung, he's got a gun and he's going to kill us all, just like -- just like my parents, just like my family, kill everyone!"
"He's not," Yehsung said firmly. "It was a nightmare, okay? Just a nightmare, Heechul is not coming for you and he certainly won't kill you, because we won't let him." He pulled open a drawer by the side of the bed and pulled out a strip of tablets. Popping one from the foil, he coaxed Ryeowook into opening his mouth, and he placed one of the white pills under his tongue, letting it dissolve. Slowly, Ryeowook's tears began to stop, and when he fell asleep with his head against Yehsung's chest, Yehsung sighed in relief.
Back in the surgery, the monitor that Eunhyuk was hooked up to was beeping reassuringly, and his chest was rising and falling steadily. Donghae was curled up on the desk chair next to the old denist's chair that Kyuhyun had hooked up to remove the chips on. Yehsung slung a blanket over him before sitting down on another chair. He checked the clock hanging on the wall; 3.30am. With a groan, he remembered the coffee he'd left in the kitchen.
There was a knock at the door, and Kibum stepped through, holding two cups, one slightly larger than the other. "I thought you could do with this," he said, holding out the larger one to Yehsung. "I saw the other one on the counter, but it had gone cold, so I made you a new one."
"You're a lifesaver," Yehsung said hoarsely, drinking about three quarters of the coffee in one go. Kibum looked down at his own cup then silently handed that one over too. He glanced at Donghae, then at Eunhyuk, and a frown line appeared on his forehead.
"How is he?" he asked.
"Alive," Yehsung said with a shrug. "He'll hurt like hell when he wakes up but I've got him knocked out on some morphine that I've been saving for a special occasion."
"Do you think he's lucky to still be here?"
"I think he's lucky to have been found as quickly as he was." Yehsung took another gulp of coffee. Kibum pulled a chair up and sat with his front pressed against the back. "He could only have been there half an hour at the most, from when Eeteuk saw him in the operations room to when Sungmin found him. He could have lasted another hour, tops, before he died either of shock or of blood loss."
"Lucky," Kibum echoed. He stared at Eunhyuk's bruised and swollen face for a good minute before he said, "Ryeowook woke me up."
"He had a nightmare," Yehsung said with another shrug. "They happen."
Yehsung wasn't stupid; he knew that it wasn't Ryeowook who had woken Kibum up, because judging by the Kibum's slow hand movements and the darkness under his eyes, Kibum hadn't gone to sleep yet. But if Kibum didn't want to talk about it, then Yehsung wasn't going to push the matter. He was a doctor, not a goddamned psychiatrist.
Donghae mumbled something in his sleep and his head flopped into the other side, mouth open slightly. Yehsung caught Kibum glancing at him again. He drained his cup of coffee. He dealt with only physical trauma; Kibum could deal with matters of the heart on his own time.
Hankyung arrived back late the next day. Most everyone had gone out again early in the morning to try to see if they could find Heechul. There was a strong hope that they'd find him slumped outside a bar somewhere, but no such hope came true. By now, they just wanted to find him to put their minds at rest. It was one thing for Heechul to go around beating people up; that was scary enough. It was quite another for him to completely disappear in a city covered in video cameras.
By some sort of unspoken agreement, they were all taking it in turns to wait in the operations room. Siwon was in there, flicking aimlessly through some rag-eared magazine that they'd been given as a freebie at the market two years back. Someone had completed all the puzzles, and then Donghae and Eunhyuk had drawn on the faces of all the old celebrities that none of them had ever heard of. Hankyung stumbled into the room looking decidedly worse for wear. His clothes were rumpled, and dirty in places; his shirt had been ripped, somehow. His hair was a mess and his eyes blood-shot. Siwon half-rose as he came in, but Hankyung only noticed him in order to ask, "Has he come back?"
"No." Siwon closed the pages of the magazine and stood up fully. "Hyung, have you--"
"Just come back in," Hankyung mumbled, already turning to leave. "Going back out, got to find him--"
Siwon took hold of his arm. "Hyung, you need to rest. You can't kill yourself looking for him. Just, go to sleep, and I'll go out and find him."
"No." Hankyung might have been tired, but he still had the strength to push Siwon off him. "You don't understand, Siwon, he'll be -- scared. Wherever he is, I need to find him. I need to find him."
"Well, you won't find him when you can't even see because you're so tired." Siwon took hold of him again and this time didn't let go when Hankyung struggled. "Hyung, you're going to go to bed, sleep for a bit and then you can go back out and continue looking. Don't make me get Sungmin down here."
Hankyung completely ignored Siwon's joke, clearly thinking that the situation didn't lend itself towards joking, but he did climb the stairs, stumbling here and there, causing Siwon's heart to jump to his throat every single time for fear that he'd fall back down and break his neck. Once Hankyung had disappeared along to his room, Siwon sighed and went back to the operations room. He'd been there a matter of seconds when Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi came in. Kyuhyun looked almost as tired as Hankyung, though he sat down and immediately got to work on the circuit board spread out on one of the tables. Zhou Mi sat down on a chair next to him.
"Kui Xian," he said, voice ever so quiet.
"Be quiet, Zhou Mi," Kyuhyun said, a warning in his voice that Zhou Mi ignored.
"But you--"
"Zhou Mi, I'll do it after this," Kyuhyun said, switching to Mandarin, as if he'd forgotten that Siwon could speak it. "Just leave me alone, okay? I'm busy."
Zhou Mi stared at him for a long, long time, a rare frown on his face. "Fine," he said eventually, and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Siwon glanced at Kyuhyun but Kyuhyun was steadfastly ignoring him. Not really wanting to be in the same room as him, Siwon stood up and went to the kitchen to see about some lunch. Zhou Mi was in there, playing with a cup, turning it over and over in his hands. He put it down when he saw Siwon.
Siwon sat down opposite him, kind of wanting to ask what it had all been about. He knew that if he went upstairs and told Sungmin about what he'd seen, Sungmin would come racing down and demand to know exactly what was going on, but Siwon wasn't Sungmin, and he didn't want to seem like he was prying in. Zhou Mi sighed and stood up and left again. Siwon bit his bottom lip, not knowing whether Zhou Mi had gone back into the operations room or somewhere else completely. It wasn't like he could leave the house for extended periods of time, so chances were he was somewhere in the house still. Siwon decided to leave him to it, and went to visit Eunhyuk. He felt restless and full of an energy that he couldn't get rid of.
Yehsung was still down there, asleep in his desk chair, chin hitting his chest with each slow breath. Siwon pulled up a seat next to Eunhyuk's bedside and watched as he slowly breathed in and out. His eyes were coming in black now, but it didn't seem so bad now that all the cuts on his face had been stitched or covered. He looked better now that the blood had all been washed away. Sungmin had been covered in it, shaking, and it had taken a lot for Siwon to convince him to take a shower before they went down to the emergency meeting that Kyuhyun had held. In the end, Siwon had had to help, practically dressing him, and it wasn't until they had got the operations room and seen everyone else just as confused that Sungmin had came too and taken stock of the situation.
Still, Siwon had to admit. Eunhyuk did look pretty crap.
There was a knock at the door, and Yehsung woke up with a jump, startling upright and almost falling out of his chair. Donghae stuck his head around, looking tense. "Kyuhyun wants everyone in the operations room," he said grimly. "There's been a shooting."
.........................................
"It was one of our informants," Shindong explained, voice flat. "I went to see if he'd seen Heechul, but he was dead when I got there. He'd been shot, twice, blood on the floor where he'd obviously tried to crawl away when the first one didn't kill him." He dug in his pocket, and brought something out, enclosed in his fist. "I found this beside him."
He flung it on the table; a small button, last seen on -- "Hankyung," Eeteuk said, turning towards him. "This is from one of your shirts, isn't it?"
Hankyung picked it up, a metal button covered in a gold shine. "Yes," he murmured, and he didn't seem to notice the way that everyone was staring at him, or taking a nervous step away from him, as if he was the one responsible for the death of their informant. Henry, who had previously been sitting beside Hankyung, shifted so far away that he almost fell off the table and onto Eunhyuk's lap. "It's from my shirt. It was the one that Heechul stole, yesterday."
"Heechul stole your shirt?"
"He was wearing it when I left yesterday. He said that he couldn't find his own, so he'd raided my wardrobe." He put the button back on the table, and collapsed into a chair, head in his hands once more. "What has he done?" he whispered.
"It looked like there'd been a struggle," Shindong said. "Maybe it got pulled off?"
"He killed him," Ryeowook said shakily. "It's like I dreamed. He's coming for us, Yehsung." Yehsung wrapped an arm around Ryeowook's shoulders but didn't say anything; he was staring at the floor thoughtfully.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Kyuhyun said. "Donghae, Kangin, go check on our other informants." With tense nods, they left the room. Sungmin got to his feet and began pacing up and down, drawing an irritated look from Kibum. Eventually Siwon reached out and grabbed his hand and pulled him back over to the table; it had begun to irritate him too.
"Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said, quietly and in Mandarin. "Now will you try?"
"No," Kyuhyun said, a little harshly. "Don't you see, Zhou Mi? There's nothing to look for. He's just gone crazy or something. What could there be to look for?"
"Weird behaviour," Zhou Mi said, clearly grasping at straws. "Just anything that seems a little bit off."
"Weird behaviour and Heechul go hand in hand, Zhou Mi," Kyuhyun said flatly. "I wouldn't know what to look for."
"You wouldn't know," Zhou Mi said, very, very quietly, "or you don't want to?"
Even those who couldn't understand realised that something was suddenly very tense between Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi. Ryeowook curled a little into Yehsung, and Sungmin took a step closer to Siwon. Siwon caught Henry looking at him, confused and curious, as if Siwon could know what the strange conversation had meant. Siwon didn't have a clue, but he knew that it had something to do with Heechul.
"What do you want, Zhou Mi?" he asked. Zhou Mi tried to say something, but it was Kyuhyun who got in first.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. It's not happening, okay? So everyone just fucking forget about it before I fucking do something about it."
Once more, Zhou Mi slammed out of the room. Yehsung untangled himself from Ryeowook and stood up. He looked tired and twice as stressed as the rest of them. "I have to go see to Eunhyuk," he said. "If Donghae and Kangin bring in anyone injured, then you know where I am."
"You think someone else will be brought in?" Shindong asked, like he was commenting on the weather or something.
"I have no idea," Yehsung shrugged. "I don't know what to think anymore."
No one was brought to Yehsung over the next few hours because there was no one that they could save. The tramp who lived by the river; shot in the head. The two guys who lived in an apartment three streets away; stabbed ten times in total. The whore who dealt with important clients; hung from her ceiling fan. As the day passed and the death tally totted up, the atmosphere in the operations room became more and more black, more anticipatory, until Donghae came in just after five, looking like he was going to cry.
"I found this," he said, and he dropped something on the table. They were all expecting another button, something insignificant, but no -- it was a necklace, a thin silver chain with the Chinese symbol for "hee" hanging as a pendant. Heechul had paid good money (in the form of digital radio parts) at the market to get it made six years earlier and he was fiercely proud of it. There was no way he'd just leave it lying around anywhere.
"Where did you find it?" Kyuhyun asked sharply. Hankyung picked it over with a blank look on his face, turning it over with his hands. It was splashed with blood.
"Chan-ang, you know, the guy who owns that drug house, he's been killed. Stabbed, like a gazillion times. There was blood on the fucking ceiling, Kyuhyun. He had that in his hand."
"Wait," Kangin said, jumping to his feet. "Wait, that's impossible. I just saw Chan-ang half an hour ago, I swear. He said that he hadn't seen Heechul but he'd keep an eye out. There's only one way into the street that his place is on, and it's a long fucking road. I'd have seen Heechul come in -- or Donghae would have seen him come out. It's just not physically possible."
"You think someone is framing him?" Donghae asked eagerly.
"There's a back entrance," Kibum said reluctantly. He clearly didn't want to believe it either, but felt the need to tell the truth. "I know because of, well."
"Heechul wouldn't leave this behind," Hankyung said firmly, holding up the necklace by the chain. "There's no way, it was his most prized possession."
"He probably didn't even realise it was gone," Kyuhyun said. "There must have been a struggle, Chan-ang goes down, grabs the necklace from Heechul's neck, Heechul legs it -- maybe he hears Donghae coming, or maybe someone else interrupts, or maybe he just wants to be away, and leaves the vital clue behind."
"You're wrong," Hankyung said furiously. "He wouldn't have left it behind."
"No one else has a necklace like it," Kyuhyun said. "It's a one of a kind."
"Then someone has taken it from him and is framing him," Hankyung said. "Heechul couldn't have killed all these people, not without being seen by someone, and no one has seen him."
"He could have a hood on," said Kyuhyun, and his voice was so blank. "He could be avoiding people. He could be--"
"He could be a lot of things," Eeteuk said, interrupting what he could see was going to end up a fierce, potentially dangerous, argument. "We won't know until we find him, so that needs to be the priority right now."
"If he's going after our people, then they'll be good places to start," Shindong said. "We simply keep guard outside and wait for him to come to us."
Kyuhyun sent them all off to do whatever they thought was necessary, and climbed the stairs to his room, finding Zhou Mi slumped outside the door asleep. "Couldn't even manage to get in the room, huh?" Kyuhyun asked, more to himself than anything, the flare of guilt rising up once more. Grunting, he heaved Zhou Mi into the room and then collapsed on the bed, Zhou Mi's back against the frame. Kyuhyun stroked through his hair.
"You've always got to try and make a good guy out of me," he said, as Zhou Mi turned to the touch in his sleep.
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
It was the gunshots which woke Ryeowook up. For a second, he thought they were outside, which was terrifying enough. He might not have lived in a particularly nice area, but indiscriminate gunshots weren't something Ryeowook experienced on a regular basis. Then he heard shouting, his mother screaming, and he realised that no; it was coming from inside the house. His father's yell for someone to run was cut off by another bang.
The door flew open and Ryeowook almost screamed himself, but it was just his older sister, hair loose around her face and nightdress bloody. She slammed the bedroom door shut behind her and sobbed out, "Ryeowook, get under the bed."
"What's going on?" Ryeowook asked, already with his feet on the floor. "What's happening?"
"The Institution is here," she said, and jerked forward as someone on the other side tried to force the door open. She just managed to hold it. "Get under the bed and don't move until it's safe."
He'd just rolled under when whoever was outside forced their way into the room. His sister began screaming, screaming screaming screaming, but the man just laughed at her. Ryeowook, hidden under the bed with no way of seeing, could only hear noises; his sister's screams fading into hysterical sobs, a man grunting, the bed springs above him squeaking. Then he heard something being dragged from the room, the bare feet of his sister, blood trickling down her legs, scraping along the floor before his eyes. He clamped his hands over his mouth to stop any noise from escaping; it was something he became good at over the years.
Then, there was silence.
He thought it was safe. Carefully, he rolled out from under the bed and climbed to his feet. Slow tip-toe steps to his bedroom door; his mother's body lying in a pool of blood in the hallway made him scream in horror and a mad in one of the other rooms suddenly appeared, gun held up to his chest. Ryeowook didn't wait for anything to happen, he simply ran. The gunshot rang out, but the bullet ended up in the wall to his left as he took the stairs down to the front door three at a time.
The shouts of his assailants touched only upon the very edge of his consciousness; he was aware of shouting but not of words. To listen would only have slowed him down, and he knew that he couldn't afford to be slowed down. He wasn't fast, he wasn't good at sports, and he'd suffered from a mild form of asthma as a child. To think about what was behind him was to slow his legs, and so he ran for his life, terrified that there'd be someone in front of him. No one was. He burst out of his house onto a deserted street, the street he had lived on for most of his life, the lone street light flickering pathetically.
As he turned to flee, the man who had first shot at him came out of the house too, reaching out to grab his arm, or perhaps the collar of his pyjama top; Ryeowook felt the faint brush of his fingertips as his hand closed around thin air, and then Ryeowook was off.
The man chased him for a white, he knew that much, but when the man stopped, Ryeowook didn't realise. He just kept running until he was totally and helplessly lost. His legs ached, his chest and throat burned and in his mind all he could see was his mother's body, his sister's legs being dragged past. They were dead, he knew. They were all dead, and he didn't know why they were dead, or who had killed them. He didn't know where he was, or why he was still alive. When he ran into someone and his fleeing was cut short, he grew so hysterical that he no longer knew who he was.
"Hey," said the man he'd run into, a large man with a shaved head and a black t-shirt. "Watch where you're going." He cracked his knuckles threateningly, which finally shot Ryeowook's nerves to hell. He collapsed to the floor, practically screaming, and the antagonistic look in the man's eyes faded into a wary sort of fear. "Hey," he said, voice softer. "Hey, I was only -- stop screaming, I'm not going to hurt you, don't worry. Has something happened? Are you hurt? Do you need my help?"
"They've killed everyone," Ryeowook sobbed. "They're all dead, all of them."
"All of who?" asked the man, but Ryeowook was crying too hard to answer. After a brief pause, the man tried to pick him up, and Ryeowook was screaming them, absolutely terrified, struggling this way and that. "Hey, hey, hey!" the man said, letting go of him. "I said I wasn't going to hurt you. Just quiet down a bit, okay? You're going to bring the Gees." Ryeowook's voice grew louder. "Jeez," the man said and, with the back of his hand, knocked Ryeowook out.
Ryeowook woke up on a hard bed in a strange room that smelled like a mix of burning metal, spilled blood and disinfectant. There was a pain on the side of his head, and when he opened his eyes there was a dull light above him, a strip of fluorescent lighting that didn't seem to be working all that well. A couple of men stood by his side; one of them was the man that Ryeowook had run into, the other he didn't recognise. He was the one talking when Ryeowook woke up.
"I'm just saying, you didn't have to use so much force."
The man with the shaved head rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "I don't know my own strength, you know that. Plus, look at him. He's a skinny twerp. He just wouldn't stopscreaming."
Another voice, whose owner Ryeowook couldn't see spoke up. "First port of call would have been to find out what he was screaming about, not knock him out."
"I tried to find out. He wouldn't stop screaming long enough to tell me."
That was when Ryeowook remembered just what he'd been screaming about, and he resurfaced completely with a gasp, jumping upright so fast that his head jerked forward and for a second it felt like his head had been detached from his spine. The man that he hadn't recognised was suddenly by his side, gripping his arm. "My family--" was all Ryeowook managed to get out before a syringe was injected into his arm, needle sliding in without any hindrance. When he pulled away, the man was smiling reassuringly at him, and a strange calm descended on him, washing over him like a wave on the beach. He breathed in deeply.
He was pushed back down on the bed, and he lay there as the man lay a hand against his forehead, and then inspected something on the side of his head. "You took a nasty bump," he said. "No thanks to this guy over here." He thumbed over his shoulder at the man with the shaved head, who smiled nervously.
"Hey kid," he said.
"Can you tell me your name?"
"Ryeowook." Ryeowook could feel him doing something to the side of his head, something that was hard to place, but eventually he thought there might be a bandage there or something.
"Do you have a second name?"
"Kim."
"Oh, me too." The man's smile was genuine. "And Kangin, too, though he doesn't like to talk about his real name. Not Kyuhyun, though."
Ryeowook's gaze was limited to the ceiling, so quite who Kangin and Kyuhyun were supposed to be, he didn't know, but he figured they must be the names of the two other people in the room, the one who had knocked him out and the one whose voice he'd only heard. He didn't say anything, anyway, and eventually the man stepped back. "I'm Yehsung. Do you want to tell me what happened to you?"
CURRENT DAY
Waking up was like forcing his way to the surface of a pit of quagmire, but eventually Eunhyuk fought his way out and opened his eyes. The ache in his bones permeated all the way down to the marrow and he tried to groan but found his throat too dry. He must have made some noise because Yehsung appeared in the edge of his vision, holding a glass of water. "Here," he said, voice serious, holding the edge of the glass to Eunhyuk's mouth. He sipped it gratefully, Yehsung pulling it away before Eunhyuk really felt like he'd had enough. "You don't want to make yourself sick," he said.
"Where," Eunhyuk started, before falling back down onto the bed. He knew where he was, there was no point in asking that question. "How long was I out?"
"A couple of days," Yehsung said. "I thought it was best, to give your body a chance of recovery. I wasn't sure if there'd been any internal damage."
"Did you get him?"
The question was quiet, but hopeful. Yehsung was glad that he'd turned away so that his back was to Eunhyuk when he said, "Heechul hasn't been found."
"What do you mean?"
Yehsung turned back around, hearing the panic in Eunhyuk's voice. "Careful," he warned. "Calm down, you'll hurt yourself some more. There have been...developments. Heechul is missing."
After Yehsung had give a brief explanation of what had occurred since Eunhyuk had been unconscious, he rang up on the intercom to the operations room to see if Kyuhyun was around. He wasn't there, but Siwon said he'd go get him, and in the short wait, Sungmin brought some coffee down for Yehsung. He hugged Eunhyuk gently, not commenting on the black eyes, swollen face or stitches. Yehsung had done his best, but Eunhyuk was going to look rough for at least a month. "Glad you're okay," Sungmin murmured.
"I don't feel okay," Eunhyuk said, somewhat sullenly. "Yehsung-hyung says that you haven't found Heechul yet."
"No, we haven't," Kyuhyun said from the doorway. His hair was messed up, jeans obviously pulled on in haste; he'd been asleep when Siwon had come to him, but now he looked awake and aware. "It's been complicated. I need you to tell us what happened, Eunhyuk."
Eunhyuk gave his side of the story of what had happened the day Heechul had attacked him with a baseball bat. "He was just so blank," he said, voice growing hoarser; it wasn't good to use it so much after just waking up. "There was no emotion in his face, he didn't make a sound, he was just hitting me over and over."
"He didn't say anything? No reason for why he did it?"
"Nothing." The part of Eunhyuk's face that they could see under the bandages turned red. "I mean, I was teasing him a little, I'd found his shirt in Hankyung-hyung's room when I'd gone in there, but I didn't think he'd react like that."
"I don't think any of us would," Kyuhyun said with a sigh. "We were entertaining a notion that he'd just flipped out but the spate of killings, all of our informants being hunted down like that, it's making me wonder."
"Wonder what?" Sungmin was biting the skin around his thumb. Siwon reached out and took it away from his mouth.
"Wonder if maybe, he's working for the Institution."
There was a long silence, everyone stunned, before Sungmin said, "That's crazy, Kyuhyun. Completely crazy."
"Is it?" Kyuhyun shrugged. "I don't know what's crazy and what's not anymore. It's one of us picking off those people, though, there's no doubt about it. Either one of us is killing them, or one of us has told the Institution all the names. Either way, it's one of us, and Heechul is the only one who isn't accounted for."
"Heechul hates the Institution," Sungmin protested. "He's spent ten years killing--"
"People who work at the detention center," Kyuhyun interrupted wearily. "Not people involved in the Institution."
"It's the same thing, Kyuhyun," Sungmin said, ready to spit nails. "Don't try to damn him on technicalities. He's been here ten years, you know what that place did to him. He would never--"
"He beat me up!" Eunhyuk's voice broke as he shouted, and it was enough to cut through the tension. "Or don't you believe that either?"
"No," Sungmin said quietly, looking pleadingly at Eunhyuk. "I believe you, Eunhyuk, but I just...don't see how Heechul-hyung is capable of this."
"Okay, you know what?" Yehsung grabbed Sungmin by the shoulders and began pushing him gently from the room. "Eunhyuk needs rest, and I mean to see that he gets some before Donghae hears that he's awake. All of you go do something else. Kyuhyun, go to bed. You're coming up with theories on a lack of sleep and that will never end well."
In the kitchen, Siwon made them some lunch, which Sungmin picked ineffectively at. By the time Siwon had finished, Sungmin was still stirring his ramen with his chopsticks, noodles going cold. Siwon watched him for a minute or so, watching the line of his wrist, before he said, "Hyung." The use of the honorific made Sungmin look up, a guilty look in his face. "Did you eat anything yesterday?"
There was a long, long pause before Sungmin lowered his eyes and murmured, "No."
"And you didn't eat anything most of the day beforehand, did you?" Sungmin didn't answer. "You have to eat something, Sungmin. Starving yourself is not going to make this all go away."
"I know."
"Please eat." Siwon was willing to feed Sungmin by hand if it meant that the ramen was actually eaten, and Sungmin knew that Siwon was willing to do whatever it took. It took him a while, but eventually he ate half of the ramen before he said that it was too cold. Siwon nodded and took it away, using the excuse of washing the dishes to bring a mask over the worry on his face. Sungmin slipped his hands into the back pockets of Siwon's pants and lay his head against his back.
"You--" he began to say, but was interrupted by a loud bang out in the hallway, coming from the front door. Before Siwon could even pull his hands from the sink, Sungmin was pulling open the kitchen door, his gun in his hand. Siwon grabbed a towel and hurriedly washed off the very excess of water, just enough so that he wouldn't drop his own gun, but as he was drawing it, he heard Sungmin call his name, voice almost panic-stricken. Siwon ran into the door frame in his haste getting out of the room.
Jonghyun was there. He, like Sungmin, was leaning over something on the floor -- someone, Siwon corrected himself, seeing a pair of legs clad in leather. Jonghyun was crying. That was Siwon's first clue. He was shirtless, and that was Siwon's second. Sungmin looked around at him, and in a brief flash Siwon saw Key's face, pale and sweaty, and Sungmin's hands holding a balled up piece of material to Key's side. There was blood on it. There was blood on the floor.
"Oh god," he murmured.
"Go get Yehsung," Sungmin said, and yes, his voice was definitely panic-stricken, and Jonghyun was crying, and there was blood on Sungmin's hands and -- Siwon swallowed back his nausea, and got Yehsung.
He flung it on the table; a small button, last seen on -- "Hankyung," Eeteuk said, turning towards him. "This is from one of your shirts, isn't it?"
Hankyung picked it up, a metal button covered in a gold shine. "Yes," he murmured, and he didn't seem to notice the way that everyone was staring at him, or taking a nervous step away from him, as if he was the one responsible for the death of their informant. Henry, who had previously been sitting beside Hankyung, shifted so far away that he almost fell off the table and onto Eunhyuk's lap. "It's from my shirt. It was the one that Heechul stole, yesterday."
"Heechul stole your shirt?"
"He was wearing it when I left yesterday. He said that he couldn't find his own, so he'd raided my wardrobe." He put the button back on the table, and collapsed into a chair, head in his hands once more. "What has he done?" he whispered.
"It looked like there'd been a struggle," Shindong said. "Maybe it got pulled off?"
"He killed him," Ryeowook said shakily. "It's like I dreamed. He's coming for us, Yehsung." Yehsung wrapped an arm around Ryeowook's shoulders but didn't say anything; he was staring at the floor thoughtfully.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Kyuhyun said. "Donghae, Kangin, go check on our other informants." With tense nods, they left the room. Sungmin got to his feet and began pacing up and down, drawing an irritated look from Kibum. Eventually Siwon reached out and grabbed his hand and pulled him back over to the table; it had begun to irritate him too.
"Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said, quietly and in Mandarin. "Now will you try?"
"No," Kyuhyun said, a little harshly. "Don't you see, Zhou Mi? There's nothing to look for. He's just gone crazy or something. What could there be to look for?"
"Weird behaviour," Zhou Mi said, clearly grasping at straws. "Just anything that seems a little bit off."
"Weird behaviour and Heechul go hand in hand, Zhou Mi," Kyuhyun said flatly. "I wouldn't know what to look for."
"You wouldn't know," Zhou Mi said, very, very quietly, "or you don't want to?"
Even those who couldn't understand realised that something was suddenly very tense between Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi. Ryeowook curled a little into Yehsung, and Sungmin took a step closer to Siwon. Siwon caught Henry looking at him, confused and curious, as if Siwon could know what the strange conversation had meant. Siwon didn't have a clue, but he knew that it had something to do with Heechul.
"What do you want, Zhou Mi?" he asked. Zhou Mi tried to say something, but it was Kyuhyun who got in first.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. It's not happening, okay? So everyone just fucking forget about it before I fucking do something about it."
Once more, Zhou Mi slammed out of the room. Yehsung untangled himself from Ryeowook and stood up. He looked tired and twice as stressed as the rest of them. "I have to go see to Eunhyuk," he said. "If Donghae and Kangin bring in anyone injured, then you know where I am."
"You think someone else will be brought in?" Shindong asked, like he was commenting on the weather or something.
"I have no idea," Yehsung shrugged. "I don't know what to think anymore."
No one was brought to Yehsung over the next few hours because there was no one that they could save. The tramp who lived by the river; shot in the head. The two guys who lived in an apartment three streets away; stabbed ten times in total. The whore who dealt with important clients; hung from her ceiling fan. As the day passed and the death tally totted up, the atmosphere in the operations room became more and more black, more anticipatory, until Donghae came in just after five, looking like he was going to cry.
"I found this," he said, and he dropped something on the table. They were all expecting another button, something insignificant, but no -- it was a necklace, a thin silver chain with the Chinese symbol for "hee" hanging as a pendant. Heechul had paid good money (in the form of digital radio parts) at the market to get it made six years earlier and he was fiercely proud of it. There was no way he'd just leave it lying around anywhere.
"Where did you find it?" Kyuhyun asked sharply. Hankyung picked it over with a blank look on his face, turning it over with his hands. It was splashed with blood.
"Chan-ang, you know, the guy who owns that drug house, he's been killed. Stabbed, like a gazillion times. There was blood on the fucking ceiling, Kyuhyun. He had that in his hand."
"Wait," Kangin said, jumping to his feet. "Wait, that's impossible. I just saw Chan-ang half an hour ago, I swear. He said that he hadn't seen Heechul but he'd keep an eye out. There's only one way into the street that his place is on, and it's a long fucking road. I'd have seen Heechul come in -- or Donghae would have seen him come out. It's just not physically possible."
"You think someone is framing him?" Donghae asked eagerly.
"There's a back entrance," Kibum said reluctantly. He clearly didn't want to believe it either, but felt the need to tell the truth. "I know because of, well."
"Heechul wouldn't leave this behind," Hankyung said firmly, holding up the necklace by the chain. "There's no way, it was his most prized possession."
"He probably didn't even realise it was gone," Kyuhyun said. "There must have been a struggle, Chan-ang goes down, grabs the necklace from Heechul's neck, Heechul legs it -- maybe he hears Donghae coming, or maybe someone else interrupts, or maybe he just wants to be away, and leaves the vital clue behind."
"You're wrong," Hankyung said furiously. "He wouldn't have left it behind."
"No one else has a necklace like it," Kyuhyun said. "It's a one of a kind."
"Then someone has taken it from him and is framing him," Hankyung said. "Heechul couldn't have killed all these people, not without being seen by someone, and no one has seen him."
"He could have a hood on," said Kyuhyun, and his voice was so blank. "He could be avoiding people. He could be--"
"He could be a lot of things," Eeteuk said, interrupting what he could see was going to end up a fierce, potentially dangerous, argument. "We won't know until we find him, so that needs to be the priority right now."
"If he's going after our people, then they'll be good places to start," Shindong said. "We simply keep guard outside and wait for him to come to us."
Kyuhyun sent them all off to do whatever they thought was necessary, and climbed the stairs to his room, finding Zhou Mi slumped outside the door asleep. "Couldn't even manage to get in the room, huh?" Kyuhyun asked, more to himself than anything, the flare of guilt rising up once more. Grunting, he heaved Zhou Mi into the room and then collapsed on the bed, Zhou Mi's back against the frame. Kyuhyun stroked through his hair.
"You've always got to try and make a good guy out of me," he said, as Zhou Mi turned to the touch in his sleep.
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
It was the gunshots which woke Ryeowook up. For a second, he thought they were outside, which was terrifying enough. He might not have lived in a particularly nice area, but indiscriminate gunshots weren't something Ryeowook experienced on a regular basis. Then he heard shouting, his mother screaming, and he realised that no; it was coming from inside the house. His father's yell for someone to run was cut off by another bang.
The door flew open and Ryeowook almost screamed himself, but it was just his older sister, hair loose around her face and nightdress bloody. She slammed the bedroom door shut behind her and sobbed out, "Ryeowook, get under the bed."
"What's going on?" Ryeowook asked, already with his feet on the floor. "What's happening?"
"The Institution is here," she said, and jerked forward as someone on the other side tried to force the door open. She just managed to hold it. "Get under the bed and don't move until it's safe."
He'd just rolled under when whoever was outside forced their way into the room. His sister began screaming, screaming screaming screaming, but the man just laughed at her. Ryeowook, hidden under the bed with no way of seeing, could only hear noises; his sister's screams fading into hysterical sobs, a man grunting, the bed springs above him squeaking. Then he heard something being dragged from the room, the bare feet of his sister, blood trickling down her legs, scraping along the floor before his eyes. He clamped his hands over his mouth to stop any noise from escaping; it was something he became good at over the years.
Then, there was silence.
He thought it was safe. Carefully, he rolled out from under the bed and climbed to his feet. Slow tip-toe steps to his bedroom door; his mother's body lying in a pool of blood in the hallway made him scream in horror and a mad in one of the other rooms suddenly appeared, gun held up to his chest. Ryeowook didn't wait for anything to happen, he simply ran. The gunshot rang out, but the bullet ended up in the wall to his left as he took the stairs down to the front door three at a time.
The shouts of his assailants touched only upon the very edge of his consciousness; he was aware of shouting but not of words. To listen would only have slowed him down, and he knew that he couldn't afford to be slowed down. He wasn't fast, he wasn't good at sports, and he'd suffered from a mild form of asthma as a child. To think about what was behind him was to slow his legs, and so he ran for his life, terrified that there'd be someone in front of him. No one was. He burst out of his house onto a deserted street, the street he had lived on for most of his life, the lone street light flickering pathetically.
As he turned to flee, the man who had first shot at him came out of the house too, reaching out to grab his arm, or perhaps the collar of his pyjama top; Ryeowook felt the faint brush of his fingertips as his hand closed around thin air, and then Ryeowook was off.
The man chased him for a white, he knew that much, but when the man stopped, Ryeowook didn't realise. He just kept running until he was totally and helplessly lost. His legs ached, his chest and throat burned and in his mind all he could see was his mother's body, his sister's legs being dragged past. They were dead, he knew. They were all dead, and he didn't know why they were dead, or who had killed them. He didn't know where he was, or why he was still alive. When he ran into someone and his fleeing was cut short, he grew so hysterical that he no longer knew who he was.
"Hey," said the man he'd run into, a large man with a shaved head and a black t-shirt. "Watch where you're going." He cracked his knuckles threateningly, which finally shot Ryeowook's nerves to hell. He collapsed to the floor, practically screaming, and the antagonistic look in the man's eyes faded into a wary sort of fear. "Hey," he said, voice softer. "Hey, I was only -- stop screaming, I'm not going to hurt you, don't worry. Has something happened? Are you hurt? Do you need my help?"
"They've killed everyone," Ryeowook sobbed. "They're all dead, all of them."
"All of who?" asked the man, but Ryeowook was crying too hard to answer. After a brief pause, the man tried to pick him up, and Ryeowook was screaming them, absolutely terrified, struggling this way and that. "Hey, hey, hey!" the man said, letting go of him. "I said I wasn't going to hurt you. Just quiet down a bit, okay? You're going to bring the Gees." Ryeowook's voice grew louder. "Jeez," the man said and, with the back of his hand, knocked Ryeowook out.
Ryeowook woke up on a hard bed in a strange room that smelled like a mix of burning metal, spilled blood and disinfectant. There was a pain on the side of his head, and when he opened his eyes there was a dull light above him, a strip of fluorescent lighting that didn't seem to be working all that well. A couple of men stood by his side; one of them was the man that Ryeowook had run into, the other he didn't recognise. He was the one talking when Ryeowook woke up.
"I'm just saying, you didn't have to use so much force."
The man with the shaved head rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "I don't know my own strength, you know that. Plus, look at him. He's a skinny twerp. He just wouldn't stopscreaming."
Another voice, whose owner Ryeowook couldn't see spoke up. "First port of call would have been to find out what he was screaming about, not knock him out."
"I tried to find out. He wouldn't stop screaming long enough to tell me."
That was when Ryeowook remembered just what he'd been screaming about, and he resurfaced completely with a gasp, jumping upright so fast that his head jerked forward and for a second it felt like his head had been detached from his spine. The man that he hadn't recognised was suddenly by his side, gripping his arm. "My family--" was all Ryeowook managed to get out before a syringe was injected into his arm, needle sliding in without any hindrance. When he pulled away, the man was smiling reassuringly at him, and a strange calm descended on him, washing over him like a wave on the beach. He breathed in deeply.
He was pushed back down on the bed, and he lay there as the man lay a hand against his forehead, and then inspected something on the side of his head. "You took a nasty bump," he said. "No thanks to this guy over here." He thumbed over his shoulder at the man with the shaved head, who smiled nervously.
"Hey kid," he said.
"Can you tell me your name?"
"Ryeowook." Ryeowook could feel him doing something to the side of his head, something that was hard to place, but eventually he thought there might be a bandage there or something.
"Do you have a second name?"
"Kim."
"Oh, me too." The man's smile was genuine. "And Kangin, too, though he doesn't like to talk about his real name. Not Kyuhyun, though."
Ryeowook's gaze was limited to the ceiling, so quite who Kangin and Kyuhyun were supposed to be, he didn't know, but he figured they must be the names of the two other people in the room, the one who had knocked him out and the one whose voice he'd only heard. He didn't say anything, anyway, and eventually the man stepped back. "I'm Yehsung. Do you want to tell me what happened to you?"
CURRENT DAY
Waking up was like forcing his way to the surface of a pit of quagmire, but eventually Eunhyuk fought his way out and opened his eyes. The ache in his bones permeated all the way down to the marrow and he tried to groan but found his throat too dry. He must have made some noise because Yehsung appeared in the edge of his vision, holding a glass of water. "Here," he said, voice serious, holding the edge of the glass to Eunhyuk's mouth. He sipped it gratefully, Yehsung pulling it away before Eunhyuk really felt like he'd had enough. "You don't want to make yourself sick," he said.
"Where," Eunhyuk started, before falling back down onto the bed. He knew where he was, there was no point in asking that question. "How long was I out?"
"A couple of days," Yehsung said. "I thought it was best, to give your body a chance of recovery. I wasn't sure if there'd been any internal damage."
"Did you get him?"
The question was quiet, but hopeful. Yehsung was glad that he'd turned away so that his back was to Eunhyuk when he said, "Heechul hasn't been found."
"What do you mean?"
Yehsung turned back around, hearing the panic in Eunhyuk's voice. "Careful," he warned. "Calm down, you'll hurt yourself some more. There have been...developments. Heechul is missing."
After Yehsung had give a brief explanation of what had occurred since Eunhyuk had been unconscious, he rang up on the intercom to the operations room to see if Kyuhyun was around. He wasn't there, but Siwon said he'd go get him, and in the short wait, Sungmin brought some coffee down for Yehsung. He hugged Eunhyuk gently, not commenting on the black eyes, swollen face or stitches. Yehsung had done his best, but Eunhyuk was going to look rough for at least a month. "Glad you're okay," Sungmin murmured.
"I don't feel okay," Eunhyuk said, somewhat sullenly. "Yehsung-hyung says that you haven't found Heechul yet."
"No, we haven't," Kyuhyun said from the doorway. His hair was messed up, jeans obviously pulled on in haste; he'd been asleep when Siwon had come to him, but now he looked awake and aware. "It's been complicated. I need you to tell us what happened, Eunhyuk."
Eunhyuk gave his side of the story of what had happened the day Heechul had attacked him with a baseball bat. "He was just so blank," he said, voice growing hoarser; it wasn't good to use it so much after just waking up. "There was no emotion in his face, he didn't make a sound, he was just hitting me over and over."
"He didn't say anything? No reason for why he did it?"
"Nothing." The part of Eunhyuk's face that they could see under the bandages turned red. "I mean, I was teasing him a little, I'd found his shirt in Hankyung-hyung's room when I'd gone in there, but I didn't think he'd react like that."
"I don't think any of us would," Kyuhyun said with a sigh. "We were entertaining a notion that he'd just flipped out but the spate of killings, all of our informants being hunted down like that, it's making me wonder."
"Wonder what?" Sungmin was biting the skin around his thumb. Siwon reached out and took it away from his mouth.
"Wonder if maybe, he's working for the Institution."
There was a long silence, everyone stunned, before Sungmin said, "That's crazy, Kyuhyun. Completely crazy."
"Is it?" Kyuhyun shrugged. "I don't know what's crazy and what's not anymore. It's one of us picking off those people, though, there's no doubt about it. Either one of us is killing them, or one of us has told the Institution all the names. Either way, it's one of us, and Heechul is the only one who isn't accounted for."
"Heechul hates the Institution," Sungmin protested. "He's spent ten years killing--"
"People who work at the detention center," Kyuhyun interrupted wearily. "Not people involved in the Institution."
"It's the same thing, Kyuhyun," Sungmin said, ready to spit nails. "Don't try to damn him on technicalities. He's been here ten years, you know what that place did to him. He would never--"
"He beat me up!" Eunhyuk's voice broke as he shouted, and it was enough to cut through the tension. "Or don't you believe that either?"
"No," Sungmin said quietly, looking pleadingly at Eunhyuk. "I believe you, Eunhyuk, but I just...don't see how Heechul-hyung is capable of this."
"Okay, you know what?" Yehsung grabbed Sungmin by the shoulders and began pushing him gently from the room. "Eunhyuk needs rest, and I mean to see that he gets some before Donghae hears that he's awake. All of you go do something else. Kyuhyun, go to bed. You're coming up with theories on a lack of sleep and that will never end well."
In the kitchen, Siwon made them some lunch, which Sungmin picked ineffectively at. By the time Siwon had finished, Sungmin was still stirring his ramen with his chopsticks, noodles going cold. Siwon watched him for a minute or so, watching the line of his wrist, before he said, "Hyung." The use of the honorific made Sungmin look up, a guilty look in his face. "Did you eat anything yesterday?"
There was a long, long pause before Sungmin lowered his eyes and murmured, "No."
"And you didn't eat anything most of the day beforehand, did you?" Sungmin didn't answer. "You have to eat something, Sungmin. Starving yourself is not going to make this all go away."
"I know."
"Please eat." Siwon was willing to feed Sungmin by hand if it meant that the ramen was actually eaten, and Sungmin knew that Siwon was willing to do whatever it took. It took him a while, but eventually he ate half of the ramen before he said that it was too cold. Siwon nodded and took it away, using the excuse of washing the dishes to bring a mask over the worry on his face. Sungmin slipped his hands into the back pockets of Siwon's pants and lay his head against his back.
"You--" he began to say, but was interrupted by a loud bang out in the hallway, coming from the front door. Before Siwon could even pull his hands from the sink, Sungmin was pulling open the kitchen door, his gun in his hand. Siwon grabbed a towel and hurriedly washed off the very excess of water, just enough so that he wouldn't drop his own gun, but as he was drawing it, he heard Sungmin call his name, voice almost panic-stricken. Siwon ran into the door frame in his haste getting out of the room.
Jonghyun was there. He, like Sungmin, was leaning over something on the floor -- someone, Siwon corrected himself, seeing a pair of legs clad in leather. Jonghyun was crying. That was Siwon's first clue. He was shirtless, and that was Siwon's second. Sungmin looked around at him, and in a brief flash Siwon saw Key's face, pale and sweaty, and Sungmin's hands holding a balled up piece of material to Key's side. There was blood on it. There was blood on the floor.
"Oh god," he murmured.
"Go get Yehsung," Sungmin said, and yes, his voice was definitely panic-stricken, and Jonghyun was crying, and there was blood on Sungmin's hands and -- Siwon swallowed back his nausea, and got Yehsung.
................................................
Yehsung slapped Jonghyun cleanly across the cheek once and barked out "What's his blood type?"
"B," Jonghyun said with a tearful gasp, choking a little, and then Yehsung pulled Key into his arms and made him way quickly, yet calmly, to the entrance to the stairs down to the surgery. Jonghyun made to follow him, but Sungmin grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back. Even when Jonghyun struggled, Sungmin didn't let go. It was bad enough that Jonghyun was here, seeing their house with his chipped brain, but to let Jonghyun down to a room as important as the surgery, where they removed the chips, that would be unthinkable without running it past Kyuhyun first.
"Jonghyun." Sungmin didn't want to slap him again, but he would do it if Jonghyun didn't stop struggling. "Jonghyun, you need to let Yehsung do what he needs to do, and you need to come with me so you can tell us exactly what's happened."
Jonghyun was covered in blood and not all of it seemed like Key's. There were a couple of nasty gashes on his forehead and his bicep which were only just beginning to clot over. Sungmin pushed him into a chair and then got a washcloth. He wiped at Jonghyun's face and Jonghyun grabbed his wrist. "Will he be okay?" he rapsed. "I brought him here because I thought he'd be okay."
"Yehsung is working on him," Sungmin said, a little unnerved. "He'll be doing the best he can. Calm down, you're going to have a panic attack."
"Are you hurt anywhere else?" Siwon asked, leaning over Jonghyun and looking at the wound on his forehead. It was jagged around the edges, like he'd fallen into something, and kind of dirty. It could wait; Yehsung had more important things to bother with. "Jonghyun?"
"No," Jonghyun said. His eyes were trained on the door now, as if he thought he could escape once Siwon and Sungmin looked away. "I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt at all."
"You are, Jonghyun, you've hurt your arm."
"It doesn't hurt."
Siwon looked helplessly at Sungmin, who looked pretty helpless himself. He shrugged, and sat down, turning a seat so that it faced Jonghyun. "Who did it?" he started by asking. Siwon was suddenly terrified of the answer, and began to hope that Jonghyun would prove too hysterical to answer. For a minute it seemed like that was the case, until Sungmin reached across, shook Jonghyun by the shoulder and repeated his question.
"Heechul." Jonghyun was shaking, his teeth chattering; it gave him a slight stutter. "Heechul-hyung did it."
"Dear god," Siwon said, then bit his tongue, reminding himself that those kind of habits, that kind of language, could lead nowhere good. He saw how Sungmin glanced at him, slightly nervous and apprehensive, but Siwon just said, "How do you know it was him, Jonghyun?"
"Saw his face. Didn't have a hood on, even though he was outside. We were trying to get away from the market, we'd heard about people being killed and we kind of figured that we'd be next. Didn't want to be in our usual place, you know? Doesn't matter, since he found us anyway. He just appeared out of nowhere and started shooting. We -- I, I grabbed Key's hand and we started running and he chased us, still shooting. I thought, it was lucky nothing had hit us!"
He sunk his head into his hands, shoulders shaking with sobs, and Sungmin lay a comforting hand on his back. "I guess we know who has been killing all the others now, don't we," he said to Siwon.
"I didn't think..." Siwon trailed off. None of them would have thought that Heechul would be capable of this. Sure, he was always willing to kill the people who had hurt him, but what had any of their informants possibly done to piss him off? Heechul had always been fond of Jonghyun, and at least tolerated Key for Jonghyun's sake; why would he therefore try to kill either of them? And why, why would he try to kill Eunhyuk, because that surely had been his aim in beating him to the extent he had. He angrily rubbed at his hair. "I think I'm going crazy," he said. Sungmin tried to smile comfortingly at him, but Siwon could see the fear in his eyes; he wasn't the only one who was slowly losing his grasp on what was reality.
Siwon retrieved Kyuhyun from his bed, and while he complained about it once more, he stopped when Siwon tersely told him why. Zhou Mi stirred when Kyuhyun got out of the bed but otherwise didn't wake up, and Kyuhyun glanced back at him, pressing his lips into a white line. Sungmin had made a cup of very hot coffee for Jonghyun and Siwon handed him a new t-shirt. It was one of his own, so it was far too big for the smaller Jonghyun, but it was at least better than the blood soaked one lying in the hallway.
Jonghyun relayed his tale once more for Kyuhyun, though the addition of clean clothing and a warm drink ensured that he was able to get further through it than he had been able to earlier; he told Kyuhyun about hiding down an alley for a minute or so, until Key had pulled on Jonghyun's arm and showed him the bullet wound in his side. "He'd already lost so much blood running like that, I don't even know when it happened. It was like one minute he was fine, the next he was collapsed in my--" He broke off again, shuddering as he lay his head back on his arms in the table.
"Do you know why he tried to kill you?" Kyuhyun asked, shaking Jonghyun just a little. "Anything you've done that might annoy him?" Jonghyun, unable to talk, just shook his head wildly. Kyuhyun sat back, rubbing his temples. "Jonghyun, you know, right? You can't stay here."
"What? But Key--"
"While Key is here, you can stay. As soon as he...leaves, you too will have to leave." Kyuhyun narrowed his eyes at him. "While I don't usually mind that most of our people know where we are, actually coming here is dangerous for us. You could bring the Institution directly on us."
"Take my chip out."
Jonghyun's eyes had a wet sheen to them, but they were clear, and his voice was firm and steady. He looked very much like someone who would not take no for an answer. Sungmin looked at Kyuhyun and found him just watching Jonghyun coolly. They were sizing each other up. Kyuhyun eventually said, "No."
"Why not? Haven't I proven that I--"
"That's not why. I'm not doing it anymore."
Jonghyun could only gape at him, so it was Sungmin who asked the question. "Why not?"
"It causes more harm than anything else," Kyuhyun said shortly, with an air of that being that. "If you need me, I'll be in the operations room. Send Hankyung to me if and when he comes back."
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
Donghae was the one who first found Sungmin. Looking at them now, it would have been impossible to believe that Donghae had once been able to lift Sungmin into his arms and carry him without even breaking a sweat. Hard to reconcile the Sungmin now with the skin-and-bones he'd been back then, stick limbs deposited in a bundle onto the bed in the surgery. No one said anything about it; they were all too used to Donghae bringing home street rats to look after, and so they'd all just waited a while for the saline drip that Yehsung put into his arm to begin working.
Sungmin's experience on waking up had been slightly different. Someone's face was pushed into his own and he was saying, very loudly, "Do you think he'd have starved to death?"
Sungmin would have yelped if he had been able to find the energy. Instead, he just blinked slowly, and someone out of earshot said, "Probably, give or take a couple of days. Now get away from him, you'll give him a heart attack if he wakes up like that."
"He's already awake," said the boy cheerfully, stepping away. The bright light that had been lighting up the back of his head like a halo suddenly flared into Sungmin's eyes, semi-blinding him for a minute, so he missed when the next man stepped forward and into the light. He began shining a light into Sungmin's eyes, tracking his movements.
"Could you tell me your name?" he asked, voice kind. Sungmin didn't answer immediately. "Your name? Age?"
"Sungmin," Sungmin said eventually. His mouth was dry, voice hoarse. "I'm nineteen."
There was a very long pause, as the man who'd replaced the first one looked over his shoulder and lay his torch down on the table next to the bed that Sungmin was lying on. "How long have you been on the streets, Sungmin?" he asked, voice a lot quieter now.
"I ran away from home," Sungmin whispered.
"Yes," said the man. "But when?"
"Two nights ago. I think."
"And where did you live?"
Sungmin gave his address in the nicer part of the city and watched as the man's eyebrows rose once more. For the first time, Sungmin realised that he actually wasn't in a hospital. They'd know all this stuff in a hospital, would have been able to find him on the database. He tried to struggle upright but he was too hungry, too exhausted. "Sungmin, my name is Yehsung. There is no need to worry, you're in a safe place. Now what I want you to do is tell me how, if you're from such good family, why we found you slumped in the street looking like you hadn't eaten in months."
There had been a long explanation that Sungmin hadn't been comfortable giving out that day, but which had come out in dribs and drabs over the next few weeks. Eeteuk and Heechul had understood, a little, what it was like to be expected to take over from your father, to have every single decision of your life made for you: no way of deciding where you went to school, what you studied, who your friends were, or even who the people you fell in love with. In lieu of actively making decisions, Sungmin had made the passive decision of simply not eating. He controlled every single pound he put on or, as was usually the case, lost. That kind of control was addictive, and it was hard to give up even after his chip had been removed and he'd been given his life back.
They'd all tried to help, in their way, and if Heechul had been a little too harsh, and Kangin a little too flippant, and Eeteuk a little too smothering, Sungmin had eventually come to realise that they were just trying to help. To begin with, he'd thought they were trying to take his control away from him again, and Sungmin had hated that, lashed out against that. It wasn't until Heechul bluntly told him that "Yehsung said you'll die going on like this. If you do, can I have your clothes?" that Sungmin realised that he needed to sort himself out.
The recovery took a couple of years. Once his energy began to creep back to normal levels, he was able to take up the martial arts training that he'd forgotten about in the face of his disorder. It wasn't until Siwon arrived, young and angry and confused, that Sungmin really began to get better. In Siwon, he found a kindred spirit, another person whose life had been controlled from birth until the moment he ran away. Trying to help the younger boy stopped Sungmin from paying that much attention to what he was putting in his mouth. Food was in no short supply after Ryeowook realised that cooking helped him escape from his own past.
Maybe the thing that had kept them all together this long was that they were all running from their pasts.
CURRENT TIME
Yehsung's clothes were covered in blood for the second time in three days, and the thing about blood was that it was remarkably difficult to get out of fabrics, especially when cleaning products were hard to get hold of. He pulled his shirt off and threw it into the corner of the room, the usual place that he considered the "laundry basket". No doubt Ryeowook would remove it later, to do with it as he saw fit. Yehsung wouldn't be surprised if he never saw it again. Ryeowook would probably burn it. For now though, Yehsung needed to sleep.
Flopping face down onto the bed, he was asleep within moments, three nights of little rest finally catching up to him. When he woke later, when the sun was decidedly lower in the sky, Ryeowook was lying on the bed next to him, awake and just staring at him. "Have something on my face?" Yehsung slurred, brain still mostly out of it. Ryeowook shook his head, wriggling to let Yehsung wind an arm under his shoulders.
"You were talking in your sleep," Ryeowook said. "I was trying to work out what it was."
"Probably nothing." With his free arm, Yehsung stretched as best as he could. "What time is it?"
"Seven."
Yehsung stifled a yawn and then sat up. "I guess I'd better get back to my patient, then."
Ryeowook suddenly hugged him from behind. "Do you think Heechul really has betrayed us?" he asked, in a small voice. Yehsung reached around and patted his cheek.
"Who knows?" he said. "All I know is that I have to look after whoever comes here, and you need to make sure that everyone is fed. Why worry about the workings of Heechul's mind, or anyone's mind? We just need to do what we need to do."
He could sense that Ryeowook wasn't happy with that, but Ryeowook was the type of person to get involved in things that didn't affect him simply because they were likely to affect someone else. As far as Yehsung was concerned, he was tasked with keeping people alive and that was all he needed to do. If Heechul wanted to go running around shooting people, then so be it. The only reason Yehsung would get involved to make him stop was if his own workload seemed to be getting a bit too much.
And if Heechul tried to shoot Ryeowook. Then Yehsung would get involved.
He thought about it as he checked Key's vital signs down in the surgery. Ryeowook's dream, where Heechul was coming after them, played on his mind. He knew it was just a dream, Ryeowook's subconscious playing on his fears, mixing his old nightmares of being chased with the new unknown information that they had been given on Heechul. Kyuhyun, who had been looking after Key while Yehsung had caught some rest, sat quietly in a chair, chewing on the skin on his thumb. He had a thoughtful look on his face, one which Yehsung didn't want to interrupt.
Key was fine for now, though not exactly out of the woods. He'd lost a lot of blood and Yehsung hadn't had many reserves of it; hard to store. They'd just have to see how he managed through the night. In any case, Yehsung didn't want Jonghyun down here, and he got the feeling that Kyuhyun had already seen that he wouldn't. The thing was -- Yehsung bit his lip, knowing that he couldn't have been the only one to come to this conclusion, but the thing was, if he was right then Ryeowook was in danger, and that was the only thing Yehsung would get involved for.
"You realise, right?" he said, voice pitched low, but it still seemed loud in the dimly lit room. "It's almost as though it's a straight line leading directly to us."
"But he started with one of us," Kyuhyun said. The ease with which he picked up on what Yehsung was trying to say suggested that he'd been thinking along the same lines. "Why didn't he just continue with us?"
"Maybe he got scared."
"Heechul doesn't get scared." Kyuhyun yawned, and stretched, looking tense and stiff. "You think he's gone crazy?"
"I'm not a psychiatrist, Kyuhyun."
"Come on, Yehsung. You'd know the warning signs better than us."
Yehsung sighed, shrugged and glanced at Eunhyuk, asleep in the bed next to Key. "He showed no signs of madness before," he said. "His erratic behaviour that had been obvious even when I arrived here was practically gone. He still had some bouts of paranoia, he still showed a few symptoms of major depression, but no. I wouldn't have said that he was losing his mind. To be honest, he seemed to be gaining it."
"So the question is, what's happened?"
"Do you still think that he's sold us out to the Institution?"
"God, Yehsung, I have no idea what to believe. To be honest, Heechul would the last one I would have accused of working with them, but then I would never have thought that Heechul would go on a killing spree like this."
Yehsung was silent for a long time, before he said, "I'm going to go tell Jonghyun that Key...well, that he's stable for now."
"He's got a cut on his arm," Kyuhyun said, chewing on his thumb again. "You need to take a look at it."
Yehsung climbed the stairs out of the surgery grumbling about how he had to do every thing around there and that they could do with getting another person with a medical degree because soon he would die of being over-worked. He was still muttering when he walked into the kitchen and put a first aid kit down on the table. Siwon had disappeared, to be replaced by Henry, who had been doing a good job of distracting Jonghyun. Sungmin didn't appear to be up to the task; he looked pale and drawn, and Yehsung made a note to talk to him later. Once Jonghyun saw Yehsung, the spell was broken.
"How is he? Is he awake? Can I see him?"
"He's stable for now," Yehsung said. He opened the box and pulled out some anti-sceptic and bandages. He took Jonghyun's arm and pulled it towards him, looking at the cut carefully. "He's not awake, and no, you cannot see him."
Jonghyun tried to pull his arm back but Yehsung held it tight. "Why? Why can't I see him?"
"I, and Kyuhyun agrees with me, don't want you seeing more of the house than this room, and possibly one of the bedrooms. There is no way you're getting down into the surgery." Then, before Jonghyun could interrupt, Yehsung asked Sungmin, "Where's Siwon?"
"He's gone looking for Hankyung," Sungmin said quietly. "Kyuhyun wants him for some reason."
"Ah," Yehsung said. "Eating alright?" he added casually.
"Yes," Sungmin said, voice a lot more forceful that it had been. Yehsung saw Henry glance at him, a little surprised. It was possible he didn't know what Sungmin's past had been. That wasn't surprising. He hadn't been there that long, certainly not long enough to know what each of them were bringing to the table, what each of them carried on their backs as baggage. After all, no one other than Kyuhyun really knew why Henry was here. You just had to trust, even if the person you were trusted turned around and battered you over the head with a metal pipe.
"Tomorrow I'm going to move Eunhyuk from the surgery," Yehsung said, finishing wrapping the bandages around Jonghyun's arm. "It'll need to be done delicately, so would you be able to give me a hand, Sungmin?"
"Yeah," Sungmin said, voice back to the previous softness.
"What's wrong with Eunhyuk-hyung?" Jonghyun asked. His skin was clammy, and he was stuttering, just a little. Yehsung hoped that some sleep would help with the shock, but for now he began searching in some cupboards; he knew that Ryeowook had some hot chocolate hidden in some cranny somewhere that he probably wouldn't mind sharing with Jonghyun. Yehsung left Sungmin to answer.
"He was attacked."
"By Heechul?"
"Yes," Sungmin said after a pause. "We think so."
"Then why aren't you trying to find him?"
"What do you think we're trying to do?" Yehsung asked heavily. "He's completely off the radar, Jonghyun. We know he's responsible for the deaths of, we don't even know, at least ten people? But we can't find him. It's like he's invisible."
"He shot Key, and he beat up Eunhyuk-hyung, and he's killed more." Jonghyun's face was alight with both fear and anger. "What kind of a monster is he?"
"We don't know," Yehsung sad with a sigh. "We just don't know."
They all looked to the door as the front door slammed shut out in the hallway. After the events of the past couple of days, even Henry reached for his gun. There was the sounds of footsteps, then the kitchen door swung open. Donghae stumbled in, hair thick with something; he shook his head and ashes fell to the floor. There was a burn on his face, pink and shiny. "Jesus Christ, what happened?" Yehsung asked, rising to his feet.
"The market is on fire," Donghae said tersely. "Lit up, burning, kaput.
"The fuck are you--"
"The market has been set alight," Donghae repeated. "I was down there, with Siwon, I saw it go up."
"Siwon?" The panic spread across Sungmin's face as he rose to his feet. Donghae waved him back down.
"We thought Yehsung would be in the surgery. He's gone down there."
"Is he hurt?" Yehsung and Sungmin asked at the same time.
"Bit singed around the edges?" Donghae was going for casual but it just came across as unsure. "We were trying to get people out and the fire kind of crept up on us." Sungmin jumped up and raced from the room to find out how bad Siwon's burns were. Yehsung decided to deal with Donghae as he could see him.
Jonghyun was looking horror struck. "But -- that's where we lived! That's where we all lived, what about Onew, and Minho, and fuck, Taemin? What's happened with Taemin? Key will--" Then he remembered that Key was hooked up to a machine monitering his heart beat and groaned. Donghae seemed to notice him for the first.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, confused. "We got the others out, but we were looking for you and Key when we got burnt."
Yehsung sighed as Jonghyun began to tell Donghae exactly how he had come to be in the house, soaking bandages in cold water. It was proving to be a very long week.
"B," Jonghyun said with a tearful gasp, choking a little, and then Yehsung pulled Key into his arms and made him way quickly, yet calmly, to the entrance to the stairs down to the surgery. Jonghyun made to follow him, but Sungmin grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him back. Even when Jonghyun struggled, Sungmin didn't let go. It was bad enough that Jonghyun was here, seeing their house with his chipped brain, but to let Jonghyun down to a room as important as the surgery, where they removed the chips, that would be unthinkable without running it past Kyuhyun first.
"Jonghyun." Sungmin didn't want to slap him again, but he would do it if Jonghyun didn't stop struggling. "Jonghyun, you need to let Yehsung do what he needs to do, and you need to come with me so you can tell us exactly what's happened."
Jonghyun was covered in blood and not all of it seemed like Key's. There were a couple of nasty gashes on his forehead and his bicep which were only just beginning to clot over. Sungmin pushed him into a chair and then got a washcloth. He wiped at Jonghyun's face and Jonghyun grabbed his wrist. "Will he be okay?" he rapsed. "I brought him here because I thought he'd be okay."
"Yehsung is working on him," Sungmin said, a little unnerved. "He'll be doing the best he can. Calm down, you're going to have a panic attack."
"Are you hurt anywhere else?" Siwon asked, leaning over Jonghyun and looking at the wound on his forehead. It was jagged around the edges, like he'd fallen into something, and kind of dirty. It could wait; Yehsung had more important things to bother with. "Jonghyun?"
"No," Jonghyun said. His eyes were trained on the door now, as if he thought he could escape once Siwon and Sungmin looked away. "I'm not hurt. I'm not hurt at all."
"You are, Jonghyun, you've hurt your arm."
"It doesn't hurt."
Siwon looked helplessly at Sungmin, who looked pretty helpless himself. He shrugged, and sat down, turning a seat so that it faced Jonghyun. "Who did it?" he started by asking. Siwon was suddenly terrified of the answer, and began to hope that Jonghyun would prove too hysterical to answer. For a minute it seemed like that was the case, until Sungmin reached across, shook Jonghyun by the shoulder and repeated his question.
"Heechul." Jonghyun was shaking, his teeth chattering; it gave him a slight stutter. "Heechul-hyung did it."
"Dear god," Siwon said, then bit his tongue, reminding himself that those kind of habits, that kind of language, could lead nowhere good. He saw how Sungmin glanced at him, slightly nervous and apprehensive, but Siwon just said, "How do you know it was him, Jonghyun?"
"Saw his face. Didn't have a hood on, even though he was outside. We were trying to get away from the market, we'd heard about people being killed and we kind of figured that we'd be next. Didn't want to be in our usual place, you know? Doesn't matter, since he found us anyway. He just appeared out of nowhere and started shooting. We -- I, I grabbed Key's hand and we started running and he chased us, still shooting. I thought, it was lucky nothing had hit us!"
He sunk his head into his hands, shoulders shaking with sobs, and Sungmin lay a comforting hand on his back. "I guess we know who has been killing all the others now, don't we," he said to Siwon.
"I didn't think..." Siwon trailed off. None of them would have thought that Heechul would be capable of this. Sure, he was always willing to kill the people who had hurt him, but what had any of their informants possibly done to piss him off? Heechul had always been fond of Jonghyun, and at least tolerated Key for Jonghyun's sake; why would he therefore try to kill either of them? And why, why would he try to kill Eunhyuk, because that surely had been his aim in beating him to the extent he had. He angrily rubbed at his hair. "I think I'm going crazy," he said. Sungmin tried to smile comfortingly at him, but Siwon could see the fear in his eyes; he wasn't the only one who was slowly losing his grasp on what was reality.
Siwon retrieved Kyuhyun from his bed, and while he complained about it once more, he stopped when Siwon tersely told him why. Zhou Mi stirred when Kyuhyun got out of the bed but otherwise didn't wake up, and Kyuhyun glanced back at him, pressing his lips into a white line. Sungmin had made a cup of very hot coffee for Jonghyun and Siwon handed him a new t-shirt. It was one of his own, so it was far too big for the smaller Jonghyun, but it was at least better than the blood soaked one lying in the hallway.
Jonghyun relayed his tale once more for Kyuhyun, though the addition of clean clothing and a warm drink ensured that he was able to get further through it than he had been able to earlier; he told Kyuhyun about hiding down an alley for a minute or so, until Key had pulled on Jonghyun's arm and showed him the bullet wound in his side. "He'd already lost so much blood running like that, I don't even know when it happened. It was like one minute he was fine, the next he was collapsed in my--" He broke off again, shuddering as he lay his head back on his arms in the table.
"Do you know why he tried to kill you?" Kyuhyun asked, shaking Jonghyun just a little. "Anything you've done that might annoy him?" Jonghyun, unable to talk, just shook his head wildly. Kyuhyun sat back, rubbing his temples. "Jonghyun, you know, right? You can't stay here."
"What? But Key--"
"While Key is here, you can stay. As soon as he...leaves, you too will have to leave." Kyuhyun narrowed his eyes at him. "While I don't usually mind that most of our people know where we are, actually coming here is dangerous for us. You could bring the Institution directly on us."
"Take my chip out."
Jonghyun's eyes had a wet sheen to them, but they were clear, and his voice was firm and steady. He looked very much like someone who would not take no for an answer. Sungmin looked at Kyuhyun and found him just watching Jonghyun coolly. They were sizing each other up. Kyuhyun eventually said, "No."
"Why not? Haven't I proven that I--"
"That's not why. I'm not doing it anymore."
Jonghyun could only gape at him, so it was Sungmin who asked the question. "Why not?"
"It causes more harm than anything else," Kyuhyun said shortly, with an air of that being that. "If you need me, I'll be in the operations room. Send Hankyung to me if and when he comes back."
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
Donghae was the one who first found Sungmin. Looking at them now, it would have been impossible to believe that Donghae had once been able to lift Sungmin into his arms and carry him without even breaking a sweat. Hard to reconcile the Sungmin now with the skin-and-bones he'd been back then, stick limbs deposited in a bundle onto the bed in the surgery. No one said anything about it; they were all too used to Donghae bringing home street rats to look after, and so they'd all just waited a while for the saline drip that Yehsung put into his arm to begin working.
Sungmin's experience on waking up had been slightly different. Someone's face was pushed into his own and he was saying, very loudly, "Do you think he'd have starved to death?"
Sungmin would have yelped if he had been able to find the energy. Instead, he just blinked slowly, and someone out of earshot said, "Probably, give or take a couple of days. Now get away from him, you'll give him a heart attack if he wakes up like that."
"He's already awake," said the boy cheerfully, stepping away. The bright light that had been lighting up the back of his head like a halo suddenly flared into Sungmin's eyes, semi-blinding him for a minute, so he missed when the next man stepped forward and into the light. He began shining a light into Sungmin's eyes, tracking his movements.
"Could you tell me your name?" he asked, voice kind. Sungmin didn't answer immediately. "Your name? Age?"
"Sungmin," Sungmin said eventually. His mouth was dry, voice hoarse. "I'm nineteen."
There was a very long pause, as the man who'd replaced the first one looked over his shoulder and lay his torch down on the table next to the bed that Sungmin was lying on. "How long have you been on the streets, Sungmin?" he asked, voice a lot quieter now.
"I ran away from home," Sungmin whispered.
"Yes," said the man. "But when?"
"Two nights ago. I think."
"And where did you live?"
Sungmin gave his address in the nicer part of the city and watched as the man's eyebrows rose once more. For the first time, Sungmin realised that he actually wasn't in a hospital. They'd know all this stuff in a hospital, would have been able to find him on the database. He tried to struggle upright but he was too hungry, too exhausted. "Sungmin, my name is Yehsung. There is no need to worry, you're in a safe place. Now what I want you to do is tell me how, if you're from such good family, why we found you slumped in the street looking like you hadn't eaten in months."
There had been a long explanation that Sungmin hadn't been comfortable giving out that day, but which had come out in dribs and drabs over the next few weeks. Eeteuk and Heechul had understood, a little, what it was like to be expected to take over from your father, to have every single decision of your life made for you: no way of deciding where you went to school, what you studied, who your friends were, or even who the people you fell in love with. In lieu of actively making decisions, Sungmin had made the passive decision of simply not eating. He controlled every single pound he put on or, as was usually the case, lost. That kind of control was addictive, and it was hard to give up even after his chip had been removed and he'd been given his life back.
They'd all tried to help, in their way, and if Heechul had been a little too harsh, and Kangin a little too flippant, and Eeteuk a little too smothering, Sungmin had eventually come to realise that they were just trying to help. To begin with, he'd thought they were trying to take his control away from him again, and Sungmin had hated that, lashed out against that. It wasn't until Heechul bluntly told him that "Yehsung said you'll die going on like this. If you do, can I have your clothes?" that Sungmin realised that he needed to sort himself out.
The recovery took a couple of years. Once his energy began to creep back to normal levels, he was able to take up the martial arts training that he'd forgotten about in the face of his disorder. It wasn't until Siwon arrived, young and angry and confused, that Sungmin really began to get better. In Siwon, he found a kindred spirit, another person whose life had been controlled from birth until the moment he ran away. Trying to help the younger boy stopped Sungmin from paying that much attention to what he was putting in his mouth. Food was in no short supply after Ryeowook realised that cooking helped him escape from his own past.
Maybe the thing that had kept them all together this long was that they were all running from their pasts.
CURRENT TIME
Yehsung's clothes were covered in blood for the second time in three days, and the thing about blood was that it was remarkably difficult to get out of fabrics, especially when cleaning products were hard to get hold of. He pulled his shirt off and threw it into the corner of the room, the usual place that he considered the "laundry basket". No doubt Ryeowook would remove it later, to do with it as he saw fit. Yehsung wouldn't be surprised if he never saw it again. Ryeowook would probably burn it. For now though, Yehsung needed to sleep.
Flopping face down onto the bed, he was asleep within moments, three nights of little rest finally catching up to him. When he woke later, when the sun was decidedly lower in the sky, Ryeowook was lying on the bed next to him, awake and just staring at him. "Have something on my face?" Yehsung slurred, brain still mostly out of it. Ryeowook shook his head, wriggling to let Yehsung wind an arm under his shoulders.
"You were talking in your sleep," Ryeowook said. "I was trying to work out what it was."
"Probably nothing." With his free arm, Yehsung stretched as best as he could. "What time is it?"
"Seven."
Yehsung stifled a yawn and then sat up. "I guess I'd better get back to my patient, then."
Ryeowook suddenly hugged him from behind. "Do you think Heechul really has betrayed us?" he asked, in a small voice. Yehsung reached around and patted his cheek.
"Who knows?" he said. "All I know is that I have to look after whoever comes here, and you need to make sure that everyone is fed. Why worry about the workings of Heechul's mind, or anyone's mind? We just need to do what we need to do."
He could sense that Ryeowook wasn't happy with that, but Ryeowook was the type of person to get involved in things that didn't affect him simply because they were likely to affect someone else. As far as Yehsung was concerned, he was tasked with keeping people alive and that was all he needed to do. If Heechul wanted to go running around shooting people, then so be it. The only reason Yehsung would get involved to make him stop was if his own workload seemed to be getting a bit too much.
And if Heechul tried to shoot Ryeowook. Then Yehsung would get involved.
He thought about it as he checked Key's vital signs down in the surgery. Ryeowook's dream, where Heechul was coming after them, played on his mind. He knew it was just a dream, Ryeowook's subconscious playing on his fears, mixing his old nightmares of being chased with the new unknown information that they had been given on Heechul. Kyuhyun, who had been looking after Key while Yehsung had caught some rest, sat quietly in a chair, chewing on the skin on his thumb. He had a thoughtful look on his face, one which Yehsung didn't want to interrupt.
Key was fine for now, though not exactly out of the woods. He'd lost a lot of blood and Yehsung hadn't had many reserves of it; hard to store. They'd just have to see how he managed through the night. In any case, Yehsung didn't want Jonghyun down here, and he got the feeling that Kyuhyun had already seen that he wouldn't. The thing was -- Yehsung bit his lip, knowing that he couldn't have been the only one to come to this conclusion, but the thing was, if he was right then Ryeowook was in danger, and that was the only thing Yehsung would get involved for.
"You realise, right?" he said, voice pitched low, but it still seemed loud in the dimly lit room. "It's almost as though it's a straight line leading directly to us."
"But he started with one of us," Kyuhyun said. The ease with which he picked up on what Yehsung was trying to say suggested that he'd been thinking along the same lines. "Why didn't he just continue with us?"
"Maybe he got scared."
"Heechul doesn't get scared." Kyuhyun yawned, and stretched, looking tense and stiff. "You think he's gone crazy?"
"I'm not a psychiatrist, Kyuhyun."
"Come on, Yehsung. You'd know the warning signs better than us."
Yehsung sighed, shrugged and glanced at Eunhyuk, asleep in the bed next to Key. "He showed no signs of madness before," he said. "His erratic behaviour that had been obvious even when I arrived here was practically gone. He still had some bouts of paranoia, he still showed a few symptoms of major depression, but no. I wouldn't have said that he was losing his mind. To be honest, he seemed to be gaining it."
"So the question is, what's happened?"
"Do you still think that he's sold us out to the Institution?"
"God, Yehsung, I have no idea what to believe. To be honest, Heechul would the last one I would have accused of working with them, but then I would never have thought that Heechul would go on a killing spree like this."
Yehsung was silent for a long time, before he said, "I'm going to go tell Jonghyun that Key...well, that he's stable for now."
"He's got a cut on his arm," Kyuhyun said, chewing on his thumb again. "You need to take a look at it."
Yehsung climbed the stairs out of the surgery grumbling about how he had to do every thing around there and that they could do with getting another person with a medical degree because soon he would die of being over-worked. He was still muttering when he walked into the kitchen and put a first aid kit down on the table. Siwon had disappeared, to be replaced by Henry, who had been doing a good job of distracting Jonghyun. Sungmin didn't appear to be up to the task; he looked pale and drawn, and Yehsung made a note to talk to him later. Once Jonghyun saw Yehsung, the spell was broken.
"How is he? Is he awake? Can I see him?"
"He's stable for now," Yehsung said. He opened the box and pulled out some anti-sceptic and bandages. He took Jonghyun's arm and pulled it towards him, looking at the cut carefully. "He's not awake, and no, you cannot see him."
Jonghyun tried to pull his arm back but Yehsung held it tight. "Why? Why can't I see him?"
"I, and Kyuhyun agrees with me, don't want you seeing more of the house than this room, and possibly one of the bedrooms. There is no way you're getting down into the surgery." Then, before Jonghyun could interrupt, Yehsung asked Sungmin, "Where's Siwon?"
"He's gone looking for Hankyung," Sungmin said quietly. "Kyuhyun wants him for some reason."
"Ah," Yehsung said. "Eating alright?" he added casually.
"Yes," Sungmin said, voice a lot more forceful that it had been. Yehsung saw Henry glance at him, a little surprised. It was possible he didn't know what Sungmin's past had been. That wasn't surprising. He hadn't been there that long, certainly not long enough to know what each of them were bringing to the table, what each of them carried on their backs as baggage. After all, no one other than Kyuhyun really knew why Henry was here. You just had to trust, even if the person you were trusted turned around and battered you over the head with a metal pipe.
"Tomorrow I'm going to move Eunhyuk from the surgery," Yehsung said, finishing wrapping the bandages around Jonghyun's arm. "It'll need to be done delicately, so would you be able to give me a hand, Sungmin?"
"Yeah," Sungmin said, voice back to the previous softness.
"What's wrong with Eunhyuk-hyung?" Jonghyun asked. His skin was clammy, and he was stuttering, just a little. Yehsung hoped that some sleep would help with the shock, but for now he began searching in some cupboards; he knew that Ryeowook had some hot chocolate hidden in some cranny somewhere that he probably wouldn't mind sharing with Jonghyun. Yehsung left Sungmin to answer.
"He was attacked."
"By Heechul?"
"Yes," Sungmin said after a pause. "We think so."
"Then why aren't you trying to find him?"
"What do you think we're trying to do?" Yehsung asked heavily. "He's completely off the radar, Jonghyun. We know he's responsible for the deaths of, we don't even know, at least ten people? But we can't find him. It's like he's invisible."
"He shot Key, and he beat up Eunhyuk-hyung, and he's killed more." Jonghyun's face was alight with both fear and anger. "What kind of a monster is he?"
"We don't know," Yehsung sad with a sigh. "We just don't know."
They all looked to the door as the front door slammed shut out in the hallway. After the events of the past couple of days, even Henry reached for his gun. There was the sounds of footsteps, then the kitchen door swung open. Donghae stumbled in, hair thick with something; he shook his head and ashes fell to the floor. There was a burn on his face, pink and shiny. "Jesus Christ, what happened?" Yehsung asked, rising to his feet.
"The market is on fire," Donghae said tersely. "Lit up, burning, kaput.
"The fuck are you--"
"The market has been set alight," Donghae repeated. "I was down there, with Siwon, I saw it go up."
"Siwon?" The panic spread across Sungmin's face as he rose to his feet. Donghae waved him back down.
"We thought Yehsung would be in the surgery. He's gone down there."
"Is he hurt?" Yehsung and Sungmin asked at the same time.
"Bit singed around the edges?" Donghae was going for casual but it just came across as unsure. "We were trying to get people out and the fire kind of crept up on us." Sungmin jumped up and raced from the room to find out how bad Siwon's burns were. Yehsung decided to deal with Donghae as he could see him.
Jonghyun was looking horror struck. "But -- that's where we lived! That's where we all lived, what about Onew, and Minho, and fuck, Taemin? What's happened with Taemin? Key will--" Then he remembered that Key was hooked up to a machine monitering his heart beat and groaned. Donghae seemed to notice him for the first.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, confused. "We got the others out, but we were looking for you and Key when we got burnt."
Yehsung sighed as Jonghyun began to tell Donghae exactly how he had come to be in the house, soaking bandages in cold water. It was proving to be a very long week.
...............................................
It was late at night before the fire in the market had died down enough for them to actually enter. No fire engines came to help; it was down to the people who had once lived there, with their help, to put the blaze out. The air was still murky with smoke, and on Yehsung's orders they kept low to the floor with damp towels over their faces. Everyone had returned to the house but Hankyung, and obviously Heechul. Most of those who had managed to escape the fire were scattered around the city, tending to the wounded or mourning the dead, of which there were many. With so many wooden tables packed close together, it was no surprise that the fire had spread so quickly, but once you added in the stalls selling alcohol or fuel, it was no surprise that, as they worked their way through, there were so many dead bodies.
Once out in the fresh air again, Shindong said, "If Hankyung-hyung was down there, we'd have no way of knowing. All of the bodies are too badly burnt to even make out any features."
Donghae was dragging someone out by their feet, towel wrapped around his face and tied at the back so that his hands were free. He caught Kangin gagging at the smell and said, pulling the towel down so that he could speak, "We can't leave them all down there, it wouldn't be right."
"If you want to touch dead bodies, that's your call," Kangin said, looking green.
"You touch dead bodies all the time," Eeteuk said disapprovingly, though he didn't look overly impressed at the idea either.
"Yeah, but they aren't usually black," Kangin said. The body, apparently that of a woman, lay on the ground between them, like train wreck that no one could look away from, before Siwon sighed and joined Donghae in trying to get as many of the bodies out of market place.
Eventually, when they had about twenty lying on the ground, Eeteuk said weakly, "We can't get them all out, there are far, far too many."
"But these were our friends," Donghae protested. "We can't leave them to just rot."
"It's not like we can walk around with hundreds of dead bodies," Shindong said. "We're better off leaving them to the people who lived in the market in the first place."
"But what if one of these was Hankyung-hyung," Siwon said, so quietly he was almost whispering. Sungmin, who had been silent throughout it all, turned to him and cupped his face with his hands, but couldn't find the words to say what he wanted to say. In the end he just put his arms around his sides and hugged him. The silence amongst them all seemed to stretch into eternity, before a phone rang.
Scrambling in his pocket, Donghae almost dropped it when he managed to find it. "Yeah?" He mouthed Kyuhyun at them, then said out loud, "What? Oh, okay. Uh, yeah. Lots. Lots and lots, we got about twenty -- hmm? Yes, yes, fine." Hanging up, he winced. "He's not happy about us getting the bodies out. Said it was unnecessary."
"Unnecessary for him, maybe," Sungmin said darkly. "He's different, somehow. This thing with Heechul has made him so cold."
"He's always been cold," Eeteuk said sadly. "It's what happens when you're revered as a genius. It makes people hard to know."
Kyuhyun's mood had been getting worse and worse throughout the day. He was running on a severe lack of sleep, and too many things seemed to be happening at once. First Heechul going crazy, then Jonghyun and Key managing to find the house, then the market being set on fire; he hadn't calculated for any of those things. He hadn't needed to, since his plans were always foolproof, his situation always secure, his men always loyal. That was all he asked for when agreeing to take out the chip that kept you fettered to the Institution: loyalty. You could choose to do what you wanted in your own time, but if Kyuhyun needed you, then all else was dropped. His word had been law.
He was therefore, to put it mildly, irritable when he sat in the kitchen and asked Jonghyun, "How the hell do you know where our headquarters is?"
Jonghyun's smile was tense in his white face. In addition to worrying about Key, he now wasn't sure how many of his friends had been killed in a fire. "You come to me because you want building plans," he said. "I'm the best in the business, able to get in any building without anyone even realising that someone was there. I'm one of your most trusted agents. You're askingme how I know where you live?"
Kyuhyun felt like shaking him. "That information has been held in your head this entire time," he said through gritted teeth. "What if you made a mistake and came to their attention?"
"I wouldn't have come here unless it was an emergency, hyung." Jonghyun's expression was earnest. "I just -- Key was dying, and I didn't know where else to go."
Kyuhyun yelled in frustration and banged his fist off the kitchen table. Zhou Mi, who had been asleep with his head buried in his arms, jumped and startled awake. "Kui Xian?" he mumbled, reaching out and snagging his sleeve. "There's smoke on the horizon."
"I know," Kyuhyun said, not really paying that much attention. His brain was racing, trying to work out just how they were supposed to fix this. The chain of events led to only one place, and that was back to the building that they were in right then. Heechul was slowly picking off all their sources of information. If he was finished with the market, what else remained for him to go against? He had no proof that it was Heechul who had started the fire in the market; it could easily have been an accident, and he had no eye-witnesses as of yet who could tell him what had happened, but his gut instinct told him. Heechul had done it.
The problem, therefore, lay in when they would be attacked. He had no doubt left in his mind that they would be. Maybe Heechul would attack on his own, or maybe he would have help, but an attack would come. He could no longer bend his brain over when or why Heechul had betrayed them, it was simply that he had, and Kyuhyun hated simply reacting to events.
There was too much equipment for them to ever be able to evacuate. Eunhyuk could possibly be moved, but it was unlikely that Key would be stable enough for it any time soon. All the computers, the chair for taking out the chips, the one that he had spent so many years perfecting; they would have to leave them behind if they tried to vacate the building. He was at a loss: if they stayed where they were, it was a waiting game until someone, an unknown force, descended on them, but if they left, they would be left as blind as babies, cut off from their only remaining sources of intelligence.
Leaving Jonghyun and the once more sleeping Zhou Mi with Ryeowook, who had come down to start making some food for those who felt up to eating it, Kyuhyun left the kitchen and headed for the operations room. The headache just starting across his forehead and along his temples threatened to become painful if he did not sleep soon, but time, he knew, was beginning to run out. He needed to get a hold of what was happening before his sanity snapped like a rubber band stretched too tightly.
Still, he lost track of what he was doing once he'd sat down in the operations room, and the next thing he knew Kyuhyun was shaking him, so he had probably fallen asleep. Donghae's face was drawn, though there was something burning in his eyes, something a little like excitement. "Kyuhyun," he hissed. "Kyuhyun, wake up."
"I'm awake," Kyuhyun said, slurring pushing Donghae away. He wondered how long he had been out, and why no one had woken him before then. "What time is it?"
"I don't know, sometime after five," Donghae said. "That's not important. Listen, Kyuhyun -- I saw Heechul."
That made Kyuhyun sit up straighter, forcing his brain into being awake. "Really?" He was half lifting out of his seat at the same time that Donghae was sinking into his. "Where?"
"Outside of the..." Donghae looked like he didn't want to say where, and when he added, "Market," Kyuhyun realised why. It wasn't proof by any stretch of the imagination, but after all the things that they knew Heechul had done, even just being near the market after it had gone up in flames was enough to plant the seeds of doubt. "He was standing a couple of streets away. He looked lost, like he didn't know where he was. I called his name, and he looked at me, right at me. It was him, Kyuhyun."
"What happened then?" Kyuhyun half-expected to be told that Heechul had shot at Donghae, which was so strange that it was almost comical.
"There were men, everywhere. They pulled him into a van, black, tinted windows, it just suddenly appeared."
"Did you follow it?"
"I tried," Donghae said with a sigh. "It was going too fast. But the thing is, Kyuhyun, I didn't need to follow it. I know where it was going."
"Where?" asked a voice from the doorway. "Looking over, they saw Hankyung standing there, looking a little worse for wear, eyes tired and the start of stubble around his chin. "Where did they take him, Donghae?"
The happy expression on Donghae's face at seeing that in the end, Hankyung hadn't been killed in the fire in the market, faded into apprehension. "Uh," he said, avoiding Hankyung's eyes, "that is, I mean, I could be mistaken--"
"Where?" Hankyung and Kyuhyun both asked at the same time. Donghae winced.
"It was one of the vans that they use at the detention center," he said with another sigh. "I think they were taking him to the detention center."
There was a minute where they processed this information, before Hankyung turned abruptly on his heel and looked like he was about to run out on them. "Hyung!" Kyuhyun snapped. Hankyung stopped. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to get him back," Hankyung said, his back to them.
"How? You're going to break into the detention center all by yourself?"
"I did it once before."
"Luck was on your side back then. There was already a break out going on. There's no way of getting in there, especially not when you look like you're about to collapse any minute now."
Hankyung turned around again, eyes blazing. "Well, what do you want me to do, Kyuhyun? Leave him there? I can't do that, you know it's like his own personal hell, and now they've got him back there again--"
"Haven't you thought," Kyuhyun interrupted quietly, "that maybe Heechul is there because he willingly agreed to work for them?"
"Kyuhyun--" Donghae cried out disapprovingly, but Hankyung beat him to the punch, literally. Kyuhyun whipped his head around from the side, blood from where he had bit his lip filling his mouth, only to be jerked forward as Hankyung grabbed his collar and pulled him bodily out of his chair. This was Hankyung when he lost his temper, Hankyung at his most dangerous. It wasn't a sight that people usually saw, and it wasn't a sight that many on the receiving end lived to tell about.
"You god damned son of a bitch," Hankyung spat. "You know, almost as much as I do, what the people in that place did to him. You don't even know how many scars it's left, but I do. I've fucking seen them. They aren't just on his body, either, they run far deeper than that. And you're trying to tell me that's he working for the place that almost destroyed him? I thought you were supposed to be a fucking genius!"
Kyuhyun wasn't answering, eyes full of defiant bravado, but in reality he was just terrified. In the back of his mind, a little voice pointed out that he’d been pushing for this. Donghae was trying to pull Hankyung away but it was almost impossible to move him when he was like this; Donghae wouldn't be able to manage it through his strength alone.
"Don't you have any compassion?" Hankyung yelled; he was practically strangling Kyuhyun now. "Any soul in that body of yours? Nothing that makes you able to see beyond the fucking computer screen at the people that you deal with? Just jumping to a conclusion without even thinking about who you're talking about, what kind of a machine are you? Do you even feel? Is there even any guilt, do you even feel any guilt over what you did to Zhou Mi?"
It was the taboo subject, the lid blown off the thing that no one ever spoke about, and Kyuhyun found just enough breath to choke out, "Every fucking day."
Hankyung's hands uncurled and Kyuhyun fell back on his chair, gasping for air. Hankyung flung Donghae away and kicked a chair so hard that one of the legs snapped clean off as it skidded across the room. The quiet that was filled only with heavy breathing on all their parts was broken when Hankyung said, his back to them once more, "I'm going to go find him. Don't try to stop me."
Donghae was avoiding his eyes as he tried to make sure that Kyuhyun was alright. Kyuhyun pushed his hands away, and held his head in his own, bent over the table. "I want to be left alone," he muttered, feeling Donghae shift beside him. "Just, go away hyung."
He half-expected Donghae to protest or take offence at his tone, but he didn't and Kyuhyun heard the door shut quietly as he left the room. He didn't think that he'd fall asleep again. His throat was too sore for that, and his mind full of thoughts that he couldn't ignore. No one spoke about what he had done to Zhou Mi. No one, least of all Zhou Mi, had ever blamed him for what went wrong in those early stages. Sometimes, it just seemed like that was what Zhou Mi was., that he had always been like that. Zhou Mi, who couldn't be awake for more than ten hours before the hallucinations started. Zhou Mi who could fall asleep in any position, who had almost fallen out of the window once when he snapped into sleep. Zhou Mi whose problems had all been caused by Kyuhyun.
Was it love that had stopped Zhou Mi for blaming Kyuhyun for how he had damaged part of him? Sometimes Kyuhyun got the feeling that Zhou Mi would have forgiven anyone for it, no matter their place in his heart. It felt like love that stopped Kyuhyun from ever forgiving himself, for being a stupid kid masquerading as a genius, but it was certainly fear that stopped him from ever talking about it. He felt like if he spoke about it out loud, something would change. Zhou Mi would realise how little Kyuhyun was worth. Zhou Mi wouldn't be so forgiving.
"Kui Xian?"
The sound of the door opening, and Zhou Mi's tentative voice, had Kyuhyun wiping furiously at his eyes, a futile attempt at hiding his tears. "Oh Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said, and then he tried to wrap his arms around Kyuhyun's shoulders. Kyuhyun pushed him off desperately; he couldn't handle that, right then. Zhou Mi just stared at him solemnly. "Donghae told me about the fight," he said. "He said that Hankyung had asked--"
"Don't," said Kyuhyun, grabbing Zhou Mi's arms. "Don't say anything about it. It's all my fault, and you're not allowed to talk about it."
"Kui Xian, it wasn't your fault. I don't blame you."
"That thing that you asked me to do," he said, pulling Zhou Mi to him. "I'll do it." It was the only thing that he could think of that would make the guilt go away right now. Zhou Mi smiled, and sometimes it felt like the only thing that got Kyuhyun up in the morning was that smile.
"Thank you," Zhou Mi said.
"Hankyung-hyung is back."
Siwon was sitting on the bed, applying some sort of cream to the burns on his arms. He glanced up at Sungmin standing in the doorway, still and solemn. "Thank God," Siwon murmured, and that was all it took, two words. Sungmin, Siwon realised, was angry. He hadn't been angry before Siwon had said that. He'd been worried, and scared, and tired, but now he was angry.
"Why do you keep saying things like that?" Sungmin said. Siwon forced himself to keep rubbing the cream on his arm, then wrapping a bandage around it. "Ever since hyung went, you've been -- saying things like that."
"I don't mean anything by it," Siwon said, standing up to grab his shirt from the dresser. "Just a habit."
"A habit that you broke out of. I don't like it, Siwon."
"Well, I don't mean to do it." Siwon smiled at him, reassuring. "Where's Hankyung-hyung?"
"In his room, he doesn't want to be disturbed." Sungmin was standing fully in the doorway now, filling it so that there was no way Siwon could get out without physically moving him. "He had a fight with Kyuhyun. Siwon, don't--"
When he didn't continue, Siwon said, "Really, I don't mean anything by it. They're just figures of speech, Sungmin."
"Every time you say them, I feel you get further from me, and I can't -- not now, Siwon. Not after everything."
"You're overreacting," Siwon told him, looking down at him but avoiding his eyes.
"Am I?" Sungmin reached up and made him look at him. "Because I remember what you were like back then, Siwon, even if you don't. So angry, so frustrated, and you avoided looking at me then too."
Siwon sighed and closed his eyes, and when he opened them he smiled at Sungmin, looking him directly in the eyes. "I'd been taught that desiring another man went against scripture," he said, teasing just a little. "No wonder I couldn't look at you." Sungmin just stayed quiet; he didn't even like Siwon teasing about it. "Fine, fine, I get it. I'll watch what I say."
Now Sungmin was the one avoiding his eyes. "Watch what you think," he muttered, trying to push past into the bedroom. Quick as a flash, Siwon trapped him between the door frame and his body, pressing him so hard that he knew it must have been painful. "Ow, Siwon," Sungmin whined, struggling, but even with Sungmin's superior skill, he was pretty much cornered. "It's right in my back."
"You think I would ever go back to how I was then?" Siwon asked, voice incredulous. "That way of thinking, that way of living, you think I'd go back to that?"
"I don't know what to think anymore," Sungmin cried, still trying to push Siwon away. "Heechul-hyung is running around killing people, Hankyung-hyung is lashing out at Kyuhyun, and you're -- you're talking about God again!"
"I'm not talking about it," Siwon insisted. "I don't -- they're just phrases, Sungmin. They slipped out. I'm not going to be like I was back then, Sungmin. I would never, ever--"
"Okay," said Sungmin, the fight going out of him. "Okay, I know, I didn't mean to get so angry about it. I just worried about it."
"Well, we've all got things to be worried about." Siwon cupped the back of Sungmin's head and kissed him, softly at first, but then Sungmin grabbed his collar and wrenched him forward. When Siwon eventually managed to pull back, Sungmin had his eyes closed.
"You're being smug, aren't you," he said. "Wipe that smug smile off your face." Siwon tried to do so, but didn't try that hard. Instead, he focused his attention on unbuttoning Sungmin's shirt while touching as much skin as he possibly could.
The tiny cameras that Kyuhyun had set up all over the house were only known to him and Zhou Mi. He'd done it when they'd first moved into the place, just before anyone else turned up wanting their chips removed. Back then, it had just been because Kyuhyun was still very paranoid and he disliked the idea of the huge house being unknown to him. Then it became a way of keeping an eye on new recruits, just in case they weren't who they said they were. Now, however, it was proving useful in it's own way.
Trawling through hours and hours of footage was one of the most boring tasks he'd ever set his mind to, and he yearned to be allowed to work on his new device before everything that he'd known for eleven years somehow came crashing down around him. The only thing that stopped him from simply giving up was because Zhou Mi was asleep on the floor by his feet, like some sort of cat, his fingers curled around Kyuhyun's ankle.
So far, Kyuhyun hadn't been able to see anything strange on any of the tapes. He skipped past anything that might cause his brain to shut down -- he'd looked down when Zhou Mi made a noise, and then looked up to find Yehsung and Ryeowook kissing in the kitchen -- and anything that he didn't already know, like Siwon and Sungmin's fledging plans to run away. He'd been too caught up in his work, and then what had happened with Heechul, to do anything about it, and now he felt almost as though it was the only option left open to any of them: run away before the Institution could catch up to them.
It frustrated him, knowing that he'd managed eleven years on the run without even coming close to being found out, and now the broken teen who had looked even younger than Kyuhyun when they'd first met could be the one who destroyed all he'd built up. He wouldn't have thought it would be Heechul who did it. All the evidence was against it: Heechul's sense of loyalty, his love for the people that he'd met there, his respect for Kyuhyun, but most of all, it was like Hankyung had said -- Heechul hated the Institution. That place had spent three years breaking almost every single part of him. Why would he go back to it?
He groaned his frustration, pushing his hair back from his eyes. The tape he was watching was from a couple of weeks back, two days after Heechul and Hankyung had had their argument. He was eating breakfast in the kitchen. Heechul's hair, the faded blonde that had given Sungmin, resident stylist, some trouble to perfect, was falling forward over his face; he always did wear it too long. Kyuhyun gave himself a mental shake. He was thinking like Heechul had died or something. Heechul glanced up, then leaned back in his chair, apparently looking at someone in the hallway. He shouted something, smirked, then sat normally again.
Then his hand reached up, and scratched at the back of his neck. Kyuhyun frowned, rewound the tape, and watched again. "Wait a minute," he breathed, and sped the tape on, until another moment that he could remember, just a few hours later, where Heechul was talking to Ryeowook, maybe bugging him for food, and he was --
"Hey," Kyuhyun hissed, shaking his foot. Zhou Mi woke up, blinking up at him. "Look at this." He pointed at the screen. Zhou Mi sat up, looking like he was about to fall asleep again, and dutifully looked at the screen. Kyuhyun pressed play. "Look at what he's doing."
"He's scratching his neck," Zhou Mi said in a slur, and slumped to the side and fell asleep again, head against Kyuhyun's thigh.
"Yeah," Kyuhyun said, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. "Exactly."
Once out in the fresh air again, Shindong said, "If Hankyung-hyung was down there, we'd have no way of knowing. All of the bodies are too badly burnt to even make out any features."
Donghae was dragging someone out by their feet, towel wrapped around his face and tied at the back so that his hands were free. He caught Kangin gagging at the smell and said, pulling the towel down so that he could speak, "We can't leave them all down there, it wouldn't be right."
"If you want to touch dead bodies, that's your call," Kangin said, looking green.
"You touch dead bodies all the time," Eeteuk said disapprovingly, though he didn't look overly impressed at the idea either.
"Yeah, but they aren't usually black," Kangin said. The body, apparently that of a woman, lay on the ground between them, like train wreck that no one could look away from, before Siwon sighed and joined Donghae in trying to get as many of the bodies out of market place.
Eventually, when they had about twenty lying on the ground, Eeteuk said weakly, "We can't get them all out, there are far, far too many."
"But these were our friends," Donghae protested. "We can't leave them to just rot."
"It's not like we can walk around with hundreds of dead bodies," Shindong said. "We're better off leaving them to the people who lived in the market in the first place."
"But what if one of these was Hankyung-hyung," Siwon said, so quietly he was almost whispering. Sungmin, who had been silent throughout it all, turned to him and cupped his face with his hands, but couldn't find the words to say what he wanted to say. In the end he just put his arms around his sides and hugged him. The silence amongst them all seemed to stretch into eternity, before a phone rang.
Scrambling in his pocket, Donghae almost dropped it when he managed to find it. "Yeah?" He mouthed Kyuhyun at them, then said out loud, "What? Oh, okay. Uh, yeah. Lots. Lots and lots, we got about twenty -- hmm? Yes, yes, fine." Hanging up, he winced. "He's not happy about us getting the bodies out. Said it was unnecessary."
"Unnecessary for him, maybe," Sungmin said darkly. "He's different, somehow. This thing with Heechul has made him so cold."
"He's always been cold," Eeteuk said sadly. "It's what happens when you're revered as a genius. It makes people hard to know."
Kyuhyun's mood had been getting worse and worse throughout the day. He was running on a severe lack of sleep, and too many things seemed to be happening at once. First Heechul going crazy, then Jonghyun and Key managing to find the house, then the market being set on fire; he hadn't calculated for any of those things. He hadn't needed to, since his plans were always foolproof, his situation always secure, his men always loyal. That was all he asked for when agreeing to take out the chip that kept you fettered to the Institution: loyalty. You could choose to do what you wanted in your own time, but if Kyuhyun needed you, then all else was dropped. His word had been law.
He was therefore, to put it mildly, irritable when he sat in the kitchen and asked Jonghyun, "How the hell do you know where our headquarters is?"
Jonghyun's smile was tense in his white face. In addition to worrying about Key, he now wasn't sure how many of his friends had been killed in a fire. "You come to me because you want building plans," he said. "I'm the best in the business, able to get in any building without anyone even realising that someone was there. I'm one of your most trusted agents. You're askingme how I know where you live?"
Kyuhyun felt like shaking him. "That information has been held in your head this entire time," he said through gritted teeth. "What if you made a mistake and came to their attention?"
"I wouldn't have come here unless it was an emergency, hyung." Jonghyun's expression was earnest. "I just -- Key was dying, and I didn't know where else to go."
Kyuhyun yelled in frustration and banged his fist off the kitchen table. Zhou Mi, who had been asleep with his head buried in his arms, jumped and startled awake. "Kui Xian?" he mumbled, reaching out and snagging his sleeve. "There's smoke on the horizon."
"I know," Kyuhyun said, not really paying that much attention. His brain was racing, trying to work out just how they were supposed to fix this. The chain of events led to only one place, and that was back to the building that they were in right then. Heechul was slowly picking off all their sources of information. If he was finished with the market, what else remained for him to go against? He had no proof that it was Heechul who had started the fire in the market; it could easily have been an accident, and he had no eye-witnesses as of yet who could tell him what had happened, but his gut instinct told him. Heechul had done it.
The problem, therefore, lay in when they would be attacked. He had no doubt left in his mind that they would be. Maybe Heechul would attack on his own, or maybe he would have help, but an attack would come. He could no longer bend his brain over when or why Heechul had betrayed them, it was simply that he had, and Kyuhyun hated simply reacting to events.
There was too much equipment for them to ever be able to evacuate. Eunhyuk could possibly be moved, but it was unlikely that Key would be stable enough for it any time soon. All the computers, the chair for taking out the chips, the one that he had spent so many years perfecting; they would have to leave them behind if they tried to vacate the building. He was at a loss: if they stayed where they were, it was a waiting game until someone, an unknown force, descended on them, but if they left, they would be left as blind as babies, cut off from their only remaining sources of intelligence.
Leaving Jonghyun and the once more sleeping Zhou Mi with Ryeowook, who had come down to start making some food for those who felt up to eating it, Kyuhyun left the kitchen and headed for the operations room. The headache just starting across his forehead and along his temples threatened to become painful if he did not sleep soon, but time, he knew, was beginning to run out. He needed to get a hold of what was happening before his sanity snapped like a rubber band stretched too tightly.
Still, he lost track of what he was doing once he'd sat down in the operations room, and the next thing he knew Kyuhyun was shaking him, so he had probably fallen asleep. Donghae's face was drawn, though there was something burning in his eyes, something a little like excitement. "Kyuhyun," he hissed. "Kyuhyun, wake up."
"I'm awake," Kyuhyun said, slurring pushing Donghae away. He wondered how long he had been out, and why no one had woken him before then. "What time is it?"
"I don't know, sometime after five," Donghae said. "That's not important. Listen, Kyuhyun -- I saw Heechul."
That made Kyuhyun sit up straighter, forcing his brain into being awake. "Really?" He was half lifting out of his seat at the same time that Donghae was sinking into his. "Where?"
"Outside of the..." Donghae looked like he didn't want to say where, and when he added, "Market," Kyuhyun realised why. It wasn't proof by any stretch of the imagination, but after all the things that they knew Heechul had done, even just being near the market after it had gone up in flames was enough to plant the seeds of doubt. "He was standing a couple of streets away. He looked lost, like he didn't know where he was. I called his name, and he looked at me, right at me. It was him, Kyuhyun."
"What happened then?" Kyuhyun half-expected to be told that Heechul had shot at Donghae, which was so strange that it was almost comical.
"There were men, everywhere. They pulled him into a van, black, tinted windows, it just suddenly appeared."
"Did you follow it?"
"I tried," Donghae said with a sigh. "It was going too fast. But the thing is, Kyuhyun, I didn't need to follow it. I know where it was going."
"Where?" asked a voice from the doorway. "Looking over, they saw Hankyung standing there, looking a little worse for wear, eyes tired and the start of stubble around his chin. "Where did they take him, Donghae?"
The happy expression on Donghae's face at seeing that in the end, Hankyung hadn't been killed in the fire in the market, faded into apprehension. "Uh," he said, avoiding Hankyung's eyes, "that is, I mean, I could be mistaken--"
"Where?" Hankyung and Kyuhyun both asked at the same time. Donghae winced.
"It was one of the vans that they use at the detention center," he said with another sigh. "I think they were taking him to the detention center."
There was a minute where they processed this information, before Hankyung turned abruptly on his heel and looked like he was about to run out on them. "Hyung!" Kyuhyun snapped. Hankyung stopped. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to get him back," Hankyung said, his back to them.
"How? You're going to break into the detention center all by yourself?"
"I did it once before."
"Luck was on your side back then. There was already a break out going on. There's no way of getting in there, especially not when you look like you're about to collapse any minute now."
Hankyung turned around again, eyes blazing. "Well, what do you want me to do, Kyuhyun? Leave him there? I can't do that, you know it's like his own personal hell, and now they've got him back there again--"
"Haven't you thought," Kyuhyun interrupted quietly, "that maybe Heechul is there because he willingly agreed to work for them?"
"Kyuhyun--" Donghae cried out disapprovingly, but Hankyung beat him to the punch, literally. Kyuhyun whipped his head around from the side, blood from where he had bit his lip filling his mouth, only to be jerked forward as Hankyung grabbed his collar and pulled him bodily out of his chair. This was Hankyung when he lost his temper, Hankyung at his most dangerous. It wasn't a sight that people usually saw, and it wasn't a sight that many on the receiving end lived to tell about.
"You god damned son of a bitch," Hankyung spat. "You know, almost as much as I do, what the people in that place did to him. You don't even know how many scars it's left, but I do. I've fucking seen them. They aren't just on his body, either, they run far deeper than that. And you're trying to tell me that's he working for the place that almost destroyed him? I thought you were supposed to be a fucking genius!"
Kyuhyun wasn't answering, eyes full of defiant bravado, but in reality he was just terrified. In the back of his mind, a little voice pointed out that he’d been pushing for this. Donghae was trying to pull Hankyung away but it was almost impossible to move him when he was like this; Donghae wouldn't be able to manage it through his strength alone.
"Don't you have any compassion?" Hankyung yelled; he was practically strangling Kyuhyun now. "Any soul in that body of yours? Nothing that makes you able to see beyond the fucking computer screen at the people that you deal with? Just jumping to a conclusion without even thinking about who you're talking about, what kind of a machine are you? Do you even feel? Is there even any guilt, do you even feel any guilt over what you did to Zhou Mi?"
It was the taboo subject, the lid blown off the thing that no one ever spoke about, and Kyuhyun found just enough breath to choke out, "Every fucking day."
Hankyung's hands uncurled and Kyuhyun fell back on his chair, gasping for air. Hankyung flung Donghae away and kicked a chair so hard that one of the legs snapped clean off as it skidded across the room. The quiet that was filled only with heavy breathing on all their parts was broken when Hankyung said, his back to them once more, "I'm going to go find him. Don't try to stop me."
Donghae was avoiding his eyes as he tried to make sure that Kyuhyun was alright. Kyuhyun pushed his hands away, and held his head in his own, bent over the table. "I want to be left alone," he muttered, feeling Donghae shift beside him. "Just, go away hyung."
He half-expected Donghae to protest or take offence at his tone, but he didn't and Kyuhyun heard the door shut quietly as he left the room. He didn't think that he'd fall asleep again. His throat was too sore for that, and his mind full of thoughts that he couldn't ignore. No one spoke about what he had done to Zhou Mi. No one, least of all Zhou Mi, had ever blamed him for what went wrong in those early stages. Sometimes, it just seemed like that was what Zhou Mi was., that he had always been like that. Zhou Mi, who couldn't be awake for more than ten hours before the hallucinations started. Zhou Mi who could fall asleep in any position, who had almost fallen out of the window once when he snapped into sleep. Zhou Mi whose problems had all been caused by Kyuhyun.
Was it love that had stopped Zhou Mi for blaming Kyuhyun for how he had damaged part of him? Sometimes Kyuhyun got the feeling that Zhou Mi would have forgiven anyone for it, no matter their place in his heart. It felt like love that stopped Kyuhyun from ever forgiving himself, for being a stupid kid masquerading as a genius, but it was certainly fear that stopped him from ever talking about it. He felt like if he spoke about it out loud, something would change. Zhou Mi would realise how little Kyuhyun was worth. Zhou Mi wouldn't be so forgiving.
"Kui Xian?"
The sound of the door opening, and Zhou Mi's tentative voice, had Kyuhyun wiping furiously at his eyes, a futile attempt at hiding his tears. "Oh Kui Xian," Zhou Mi said, and then he tried to wrap his arms around Kyuhyun's shoulders. Kyuhyun pushed him off desperately; he couldn't handle that, right then. Zhou Mi just stared at him solemnly. "Donghae told me about the fight," he said. "He said that Hankyung had asked--"
"Don't," said Kyuhyun, grabbing Zhou Mi's arms. "Don't say anything about it. It's all my fault, and you're not allowed to talk about it."
"Kui Xian, it wasn't your fault. I don't blame you."
"That thing that you asked me to do," he said, pulling Zhou Mi to him. "I'll do it." It was the only thing that he could think of that would make the guilt go away right now. Zhou Mi smiled, and sometimes it felt like the only thing that got Kyuhyun up in the morning was that smile.
"Thank you," Zhou Mi said.
"Hankyung-hyung is back."
Siwon was sitting on the bed, applying some sort of cream to the burns on his arms. He glanced up at Sungmin standing in the doorway, still and solemn. "Thank God," Siwon murmured, and that was all it took, two words. Sungmin, Siwon realised, was angry. He hadn't been angry before Siwon had said that. He'd been worried, and scared, and tired, but now he was angry.
"Why do you keep saying things like that?" Sungmin said. Siwon forced himself to keep rubbing the cream on his arm, then wrapping a bandage around it. "Ever since hyung went, you've been -- saying things like that."
"I don't mean anything by it," Siwon said, standing up to grab his shirt from the dresser. "Just a habit."
"A habit that you broke out of. I don't like it, Siwon."
"Well, I don't mean to do it." Siwon smiled at him, reassuring. "Where's Hankyung-hyung?"
"In his room, he doesn't want to be disturbed." Sungmin was standing fully in the doorway now, filling it so that there was no way Siwon could get out without physically moving him. "He had a fight with Kyuhyun. Siwon, don't--"
When he didn't continue, Siwon said, "Really, I don't mean anything by it. They're just figures of speech, Sungmin."
"Every time you say them, I feel you get further from me, and I can't -- not now, Siwon. Not after everything."
"You're overreacting," Siwon told him, looking down at him but avoiding his eyes.
"Am I?" Sungmin reached up and made him look at him. "Because I remember what you were like back then, Siwon, even if you don't. So angry, so frustrated, and you avoided looking at me then too."
Siwon sighed and closed his eyes, and when he opened them he smiled at Sungmin, looking him directly in the eyes. "I'd been taught that desiring another man went against scripture," he said, teasing just a little. "No wonder I couldn't look at you." Sungmin just stayed quiet; he didn't even like Siwon teasing about it. "Fine, fine, I get it. I'll watch what I say."
Now Sungmin was the one avoiding his eyes. "Watch what you think," he muttered, trying to push past into the bedroom. Quick as a flash, Siwon trapped him between the door frame and his body, pressing him so hard that he knew it must have been painful. "Ow, Siwon," Sungmin whined, struggling, but even with Sungmin's superior skill, he was pretty much cornered. "It's right in my back."
"You think I would ever go back to how I was then?" Siwon asked, voice incredulous. "That way of thinking, that way of living, you think I'd go back to that?"
"I don't know what to think anymore," Sungmin cried, still trying to push Siwon away. "Heechul-hyung is running around killing people, Hankyung-hyung is lashing out at Kyuhyun, and you're -- you're talking about God again!"
"I'm not talking about it," Siwon insisted. "I don't -- they're just phrases, Sungmin. They slipped out. I'm not going to be like I was back then, Sungmin. I would never, ever--"
"Okay," said Sungmin, the fight going out of him. "Okay, I know, I didn't mean to get so angry about it. I just worried about it."
"Well, we've all got things to be worried about." Siwon cupped the back of Sungmin's head and kissed him, softly at first, but then Sungmin grabbed his collar and wrenched him forward. When Siwon eventually managed to pull back, Sungmin had his eyes closed.
"You're being smug, aren't you," he said. "Wipe that smug smile off your face." Siwon tried to do so, but didn't try that hard. Instead, he focused his attention on unbuttoning Sungmin's shirt while touching as much skin as he possibly could.
The tiny cameras that Kyuhyun had set up all over the house were only known to him and Zhou Mi. He'd done it when they'd first moved into the place, just before anyone else turned up wanting their chips removed. Back then, it had just been because Kyuhyun was still very paranoid and he disliked the idea of the huge house being unknown to him. Then it became a way of keeping an eye on new recruits, just in case they weren't who they said they were. Now, however, it was proving useful in it's own way.
Trawling through hours and hours of footage was one of the most boring tasks he'd ever set his mind to, and he yearned to be allowed to work on his new device before everything that he'd known for eleven years somehow came crashing down around him. The only thing that stopped him from simply giving up was because Zhou Mi was asleep on the floor by his feet, like some sort of cat, his fingers curled around Kyuhyun's ankle.
So far, Kyuhyun hadn't been able to see anything strange on any of the tapes. He skipped past anything that might cause his brain to shut down -- he'd looked down when Zhou Mi made a noise, and then looked up to find Yehsung and Ryeowook kissing in the kitchen -- and anything that he didn't already know, like Siwon and Sungmin's fledging plans to run away. He'd been too caught up in his work, and then what had happened with Heechul, to do anything about it, and now he felt almost as though it was the only option left open to any of them: run away before the Institution could catch up to them.
It frustrated him, knowing that he'd managed eleven years on the run without even coming close to being found out, and now the broken teen who had looked even younger than Kyuhyun when they'd first met could be the one who destroyed all he'd built up. He wouldn't have thought it would be Heechul who did it. All the evidence was against it: Heechul's sense of loyalty, his love for the people that he'd met there, his respect for Kyuhyun, but most of all, it was like Hankyung had said -- Heechul hated the Institution. That place had spent three years breaking almost every single part of him. Why would he go back to it?
He groaned his frustration, pushing his hair back from his eyes. The tape he was watching was from a couple of weeks back, two days after Heechul and Hankyung had had their argument. He was eating breakfast in the kitchen. Heechul's hair, the faded blonde that had given Sungmin, resident stylist, some trouble to perfect, was falling forward over his face; he always did wear it too long. Kyuhyun gave himself a mental shake. He was thinking like Heechul had died or something. Heechul glanced up, then leaned back in his chair, apparently looking at someone in the hallway. He shouted something, smirked, then sat normally again.
Then his hand reached up, and scratched at the back of his neck. Kyuhyun frowned, rewound the tape, and watched again. "Wait a minute," he breathed, and sped the tape on, until another moment that he could remember, just a few hours later, where Heechul was talking to Ryeowook, maybe bugging him for food, and he was --
"Hey," Kyuhyun hissed, shaking his foot. Zhou Mi woke up, blinking up at him. "Look at this." He pointed at the screen. Zhou Mi sat up, looking like he was about to fall asleep again, and dutifully looked at the screen. Kyuhyun pressed play. "Look at what he's doing."
"He's scratching his neck," Zhou Mi said in a slur, and slumped to the side and fell asleep again, head against Kyuhyun's thigh.
"Yeah," Kyuhyun said, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips. "Exactly."
..............................
SIX YEARS EARLIER
Siwon was the only one out of them all who had never had a micro chip in the first place. He was born in a place that was supposedly outside of the control of the Institution, though Kyuhyun had taken the time to hack into the accounts and found that the leader of the cult that Siwon had once belonged to took a substantial amount of money from the Institution, presumably to keep his people in check. The Church of Christ the Saviour was situated in a compound two hours outside of Seoul, walled in all four sides. Most of the food was grown within the walls, supplies brought once a month in a secure truck, and no one was allowed outside of the walls.
Siwon was brought up to believe that the world outside of the compound was immoral, dirty, and broken. There was nothing good left in the world outside of the walls, and he shouldn't feel any need to think about it. Only inside could they be perfect; only as part of the Church could they possibly get into Heaven and be with God. When he was young, the thought of the world outside terrified him. The horror stories of sexual deviance, of child cruelty, of starvation and poverty, terrified more than any horror story of monsters under his bed.
Their leader was a charismatic man in his late fifties. He preached goodness, cleanliness, purity of thought and body, and, most of all, obedience. His word was law, truth, absolute gospel -- he was, in Siwon's eyes, the image of God. When Siwon thought about God -- and Siwon thought of God a lot of the time, since half of the day was taken up with Bible readings -- Siwon thought of their leader. Just like God, the leader had the ability to change the world around him, manipulate the lives of people without a second thought. Marriages were arranged and enacted without necessarily consulting the people who were being married. Punishments were doled out for the slightest infraction. When Siwon was young, the leader was all-seeing and all-powerful.
Growing older changed that. Someone once suggested that maybe Siwon was clever enough to avoid being brainwashed, but that wasn't it. Your level of intelligence had nothing to do with it, when you were taught from birth to grave to fear God and to follow your leader's words to the very punctuation. He believed it, most of it. It was more likely that he was simply enough of a stupid teenager to begin to rebel, to begin to look at things in his own way. God, he still feared. God was still a concept that his brain was occupied with. What Siwon no longer believed was that the world outside was something dirty and broken. The world outside, he knew, in his stupid teenage way, wasn't anything like what he was told it was.
The idea of a world outside in which he was able to do what he wanted, be the person that he wanted to be, and be with the person that he wanted to be with, grew to almost an obsession. He spent the time that he was supposed to spend praying thinking about ways in which he could escape the compound. The vans that brought the supplies each month were his best bet, if he could somehow get into one and hide in the space of time that they stayed inside the walls. They came and left at unpredictable times, presumably designed to stop anyone from being able to make any serious plans, like the ones he was making.
For a long time, his plans were merely that he would go out, see the world, then somehow find his way back inside. He entertained notions of being welcomed back with open arms, and he'd prepared a persona, someone who truly regretted his decision to run away. The world outside was still scary to him. For the most part, he didn't really want to truly leave the only home he had ever known, even if he didn't believe that the leader was the closest thing to God, and even if his parents disliked him as the product of an arranged matrimony.
That changed sometime after his seventeenth birthday. He was caught "doing acts of sexual immorality" with another boy who lived in the compound. It hadn't even been that Siwon particularly liked him, simply that he was young, and curious, and it was forbidden. What had seemed strange ended up feeling right -- up until the moment they were caught. They were both whipped in front of a crowd of spectators, an example to anyone else who chose to deviate from the accepted norm. Finding himself increasingly isolated and alienated, Siwon threw himself into his plans of escape. The tipping point came when he was told he was going to be married to a girl one week later, a girl who was two years younger than him. He didn't want a bride, and he wanted a fifteen year old one even less so. Even if his punishment had taught him that it was wrong to desire a man, his own instincts told him that marrying a woman was not something he'd be able to just live with.
Climbing into the back of the van proved the easiest part of the expedition, since it was abandoned for a few minutes while paperwork was filled out. Siwon had secret suspicions that it was also during these few minutes that the Institution checked up on how things were going inside the compound. Once inside, he crammed his body inside a crate and somehow managed to get the lid back on.
It took him five minutes of the van moving to realise that the crate was just a touch too small and that he was more uncomfortable than he could ever remember being in his entire life. It was another ten minutes before he realised that holy shit, he'd just escaped from a place that was supposed to be impossible to escape from.
An hour and a half later, still inside the cramped, hot crate, he no longer cared for escaping, and kind of just wished he'd stayed where he'd been.
By the time the crate he was in was lifted from the van, he was almost delirious, so that when he was put on the ground and the lid lifted off -- since that supposedly empty crate wasdamn heavy -- he blindly hit out at the person trying to yank him out, and managed to catch him right and knocked him out cold. Unable to think, he simply climbed out, his whole body screaming in frustration, limbs and joints cracking back into place.
When the shouts began, he ran. He knew that they wouldn't be happy about finding a stowaway, but now that he was free, he wasn't going back, no matter what they tried to do. They were shouting something about how he didn't have a chip, and at the time, that had made no sense to him. In this situation, not knowing where he was worked to his advantage; he may have been totally lost but so were the people chasing him. It therefore didn't take long for him to lose his pursuers, though when he stopped, doubled over, hungry and thirsty and tired, he found himself standing in front of a doorway, in which a woman with a baby in her lap called out to him, holding out her hands for something. Once the ringing in his ears stopped, he realised that she was begging him for money.
Looking at her closely, he realised that she wasn't as old as he'd first taken her to be. She was young, perhaps only a few years older than him, though her face and body had been ravaged by time. The baby in her arms was probably her own. Maybe she'd been a prostitute. The sight of her made him want to throw up. When she reached forward to grab his leg, he kicked out at her and caught her with a glancing blow across her cheek. She cowered back, now fearful of the boy in the tailored suit and leather boots. He was disgusted with her, with the immorality that he judged her to have indulged in, and turned and walked away.
She would always play on his mind later, after he stopped being an angry, bitter teenage boy who had come to find that the world outside of the compound was exactly like he'd been taught to believe -- or almost exactly like. The huge houses, the rich, they walked the paths metaphorically paved with gold. The likes of Siwon, the runaways, the outcasts and the poor, life was a struggle to survive for them. The week that he spent sleeping in doorways and begging for money, just like that woman that he'd treated so hideously on his first day outside, was proof enough of that.
He was woken in the middle of the night by torchlight being shone on his face. A man hunkered down in front of him, murmuring something that Siwon couldn't understand, something in another language. Then he turned, shining his light at a man standing a few feet behind him, looking at something on the other side of the street. "Hey, I think I've found him," he said, hissing almost, now in accented Korean.
Siwon hadn't yet grown used enough to the Gees, the Institution's private police force, to feel scared of being singled out by people, but there was one thing he knew that he didn't like, and that was flashlights being shone into his eyes. Still half-asleep, he lashed out with a hand, knocking the light from the man's hands, and began to climb to his feet, presumably to run away, though at the time he wasn't really aware of his own actions.
The next thing he knew, he was on his front on the floor, a heavy weight pinning him to the ground, cheek pressed against cold, slightly damp paving slabs. He couldn't really see anything, and no amount of struggling was getting rid of the person perched on him. He was too weak from lack of food, and his assailant was, he could tell, stronger than him even in full health. A pair of legs bent down just in his peripheral vision, and a voice said, "Hyung, take it easy. He's just scared."
The person on his back muttered something in that other language, then said, "Yeah, but he hit me, Donghae."
"You shone a torch in his eyes."
Siwon's arms were pulled behind his back, wrists fastened together by ice cold metal. The argument that started up between the people attacking him about whether the guy who had knocked him down had used excessive force was muffled when a thick black bag was pulled over his head, and he was jerked to his feet, a little too roughly. The sudden shift in equilibrium was enough to make his head swim, and for his legs to buckle beneath him. The last thing he heard before he fainted was someone yelping, "Oh shit."
When he next opened his eyes, he was lying on a strange bed, staring up at a ceiling that had once been painted white but which was now decidedly patchy in a lot of places. He sat up and felt something tug at his arm; looking down, he saw that there was a needle inserted just below the inside of his elbow. He reached down to pull it out, but a hand grabbed hold of his wrist and stopped him.
"It's there to help you," said the man who had been sitting by the side of the bed, someone that Siwon hadn't noticed earlier. His grip was weak, but Siwon didn't try to shake him off, mainly because there were another two people in the room who would probably try to stop him if he tried to get out of the room somehow. They were sitting on a lounge chair against the opposite wall.
"It's just a saline drip," said the one with light blonde hair lazily. The other had a hand in his hair, stroking gently.
"You're Choi Siwon, right?" said the third man, and Siwon recognised his voice as the one who had knocked him down in the street. He nodded his head once. The man smiled. "Great! I knew I'd found you."
The man who had stopped Siwon from removing the needle was pouring out a glass of water, and spooning some sort of soup into a dish. His sleeves had pulled up, revealing wrists that looked almost as though the bones were just one wrong move from piercing through the skin. The clothes he wore were black, baggy and shapeless, but when he turned to offer the soup to Siwon, the shirt slipped. His collarbone stood out painfully. Siwon didn't know where to look: the man next to him hurt his eyes with how thin he was, but the two on the other side of the room were scaring him for another reason.
"Aren't you afraid you'll go to Hell?" he asked, voice hoarse. The blonde man stared at him, eyes shrewd and thoughtful.
"Hell?" he asked. "What's Hell?"
"A place of eternal suffering," Siwon said promptly, almost like this was a Sunday school lesson. "You go there if you've sinned, and you--"
The blonde man laughed, interrupting Siwon, though there was no humour in the laugh. The two other men had gone a little tense, especially the one who still had his hand threaded through the blonde man's hair. "If Hell is a place of eternal suffering," the blonde man said, "that surely we're already in hell?"
CURRENT TIME
There was someone in his room. He couldn't tell if it was friend or foe in the darkness, but after what had happened with Heechul, Kibum kind of thought that they were both one and the same. His legs were tangled in the bed sheets, and it would be too obvious if he suddenly jumped up. Kibum's hand was reaching, slowly, for the gun that was down the side of his bed when the person tripped over something on the floor with a curse and Kibum realised that it was just Donghae.
Sighing and relaxing, Kibum sat up, switched the light on and asked, "Hyung, what are you doing?" Donghae straightened up. Apparently he'd tripped on one of Kibum's circuit boards that were strewn across the room. He was wearing a white tank and pale blue jogging bottoms, with a hole in the knee. One of his pillows was clutched to his chest. He looked like a kid coming to his parents after a bad dream, and to stop himself from thinking too hard about how fucking adorable he looked, Kibum said flatly, "I hope you haven't broken that."
"I don't think so," Donghae said. He tried to flatten his hair down with one hand. "Uh."
"What do you want?" Kibum watched him expectantly. Donghae shifted from foot to foot.
"Look," he blurted out. "You're not as good as hugging as Heechul-hyung, but he's not here."
"...Okay," said Kibum. He didn't know whether he needed to be offended or not.
"He's not here," Donghae repeated, looking at his feet. "And Siwon is, obviously, sleeping in the same bed as Sungmin, and Kyuhyun is working on something and won't want to be disturbed, and Henry wasn't in our room either, and Eunhyuk--"
"Eunhyuk is in the hospital. Are you trying to tell me that I'm your last choice for what you have a bad dream and need to be close to someone?" Kibum was definitely offended now, and more than a little pissed off. He hated being jealous about something that he didn't have a right to be jealous about. Sleeping with Donghae, unfortunately, didn't give him any right to comment on who Donghae went to for comfort.
Donghae looked up, straight into Kibum's eyes, then back at the floor. "No," he muttered. "But you're the last one I'd want to disturb for it."
Kibum moved over on the bed, leaving a space open for Donghae to lie down on if he wanted. Donghae hesitated for so long that Kibum began to think he wasn't going to take him up on the offer, but eventually he lay down, the pillow he'd been holding against the back of his head. There was an awkward, tense silence, then Donghae turned, and latched onto Kibum like a leech, one leg slung over Kibum's hips, head buried in the hollow between Kibum's neck and shoulder.
"Hyung, are you okay?" Kibum asked. He wasn't complaining about the turn of events, but it was odd, to say the least.
"I saw Heechul-hyung," Donghae said, almost immediately, as if he'd been bursting to tell Kibum but was waiting for him to ask. "Kyuhyun told me to not say anything but, shit, Kibum, I saw him and--"
"What?" Kibum's hand was against Donghae's waist, and he was shaking, hard.
"I think he's in serious trouble, Kibum."
Kyuhyun was swinging his desk chair back and forth, looking happier than anyone had seen him in quite a while. In fact, it was the happiest Henry had ever seen him, and the effect was a little disconcerting. Such obvious happiness had the effect of merely pissing Hankyung off even more, so he was sitting in the corner, looking like he didn't want to be there at all. Only Zhou Mi had managed to convince him to stay, telling him that Kyuhyun really did have news that would change everything. Zhou Mi seemed pretty happy too, though it was hard to tell with Zhou Mi, since he was pretty happy usually. Most of them were giving Hankyung a wide berth; Siwon, sitting a few feet away from him, kept glancing over as if he knew that he should be trying to calm him down, but he clearly didn't want to get involved.
Yehsung and Sungmin had helped Eunhyuk into the operations room to hear whatever Kyuhyun had to say -- Yehsung hadn't wanted to move him so early in the day, but Kyuhyun had insisted. Yehsung also hadn't wanted to leave Key alone, but Kyuhyun had said that Yehsung needed to be present, so there he was, sitting on a counter, an alarm in his pocket that was connected to the machines down in the surgery, just in case something went wrong. He kept glancing at it as if worried that the noise wouldn't go off loud enough for him to notice.
"Right," Kyuhyun said, the excitement badly disguised in his voice. "I'm going to show you some video clips. I just want you to tell me what you think the recurring theme in them all are."
He spun around in his chair and clicked something on the computer screen. A compilation of video clips started playing; as one, they all leaned in to get a closer look. Footage, Sungmin guessed, from the past few weeks, all of Heechul. They had been taken in rather weird places; one shot was clearly from above his bed, Heechul reading a book, lying on his front. The next was in the kitchen, Heechul talking to someone out of shot. Another was from Yehsung and Ryeowook's bedroom, Heechul rummaging through their wardrobe.
"I wondered where my shirt had gone," Yehsung murmured.
"Kyuhyun," Ryeowook said, apparently not as bothered about the mystery of the missing shirt as Yehsung was. "Why is there footage of our bedroom."
"I've got a couple of cameras in there," Kyuhyun said casually. "In all the rooms, in fact."
"Uh," said Kibum. "Wait, what?"
"Standard protocol," Kyuhyun said. "Anyway, that's not important. What's important is: did anyone notice what he did in every single clip I showed you?"
"He scratched his neck," Hankyung said. The others all glanced at each other; they'd been too bothered by the fact that there were apparently cameras in their bedrooms to think about what they'd seen Heechul doing.
"Exactly!" Kyuhyun, about to say more, reached out and stopped Zhou Mi, who had just fallen asleep, from falling off his chair onto the floor. Once he was secure, head on the table, Kyuhyun had calmed down enough that his voice was no longer tight with excitement. "He was scratching his neck. Now, these were taken from footage filmed--"
"Two weeks ago," Hankyung interrupted. "Right? Just after we argued."
"Yeah," said Kyuhyun. Apparently he was no long angry about the words that Hankyung had thrown at him during their own argument. He was grinning at Hankyung, and that, coupled with the dark shadows under his eyes, made him look rather mad. "After he disappeared for a night, remember? You said you'd found him outside of a bar."
"Unconscious," Hankyung said. "I assumed he'd collapsed."
"No blood? Nothing missing?"
"Not that I can remember."
"This is all fascinating," Shindong interrupted, "but are you going to explain what it's supposed to mean?"
"Look," said Kyuhyun, sitting back down and lifting one knee up, resting it against the table, "none of us remember what happened when we got the chips put in, and I doubt most of you remember what happened when I took them out. Henry, though, it's only been a couple of months. How did it feel when I took your chip out?"
"Um." Henry shifted uncomfortably as every gaze turned towards him. "Like a space in my mind had been opened up?"
"No, no," Kyuhyun said impatiently. "I mean, physically, what did you feel?"
"It was...itchy," Henry trailed off as he realised what Kyuhyun was getting at. "Really itchy. I kept scratching at it, even though it wasn't like there was anything there any more. I wouldn't even realise I was doing it."
"Wait," Shindong said. "Are you telling me that--"
"Heechul goes missing," Kyuhyun interrupted. "Goes to a bar, gets drunk, we don't know because none of us were even there. All we know is that we found him outside a bar, cold out. We bring him home, where he spends the next couple of days scratching the back of his neck, exactly like we all did when we got our chips taken out. Two weeks later, bam. He apparently goes crazy, beats one of us up, kills at least, oh, I don't know, a hundred people? And oh, he's apparently is working for the Institution, which he's always hated more than any of us."
"You think he's been re-chipped?" asked Eunhyuk, sounding unsure.
"I'm about as sure as I could be," Kyuhyun said with a shrug, "without, you know, having seen him being re-chipped in the first place."
"And that's the reason he attacked me?"
"I presume so. He's possibly being controlled."
"But we're the only ones who know how to do that," Eeteuk pointed out.
"If someone's been watching us through him, they'll have probably seen how we do it, and we able to copy what we did."
"Oh." All eyes turned to Hankyung. "Yeah, he killed someone using the phones, the night of, uh, the night before he attacked Eunhyuk."
"It could be just coincidence, or it may be that they used our own information against us. Why they'd have picked Heechul, I don't know. I don't know their final game plan, why they're doing this, what they hope to achieve. But I don't think it could be said that Heechul has betrayed us. I think he's being controlled by the Institution."
There was deadly silence after that, which he looked like he hadn't really been expecting. It was broken only by Yehsung's alarm suddenly blaring out, shocking them all almost out of their skin. He fumbled for it, looking at the reading on the front. "Shit," he said, making to jump down from the counter.
"What's happening?" Ryeowook asked, voice high with fear.
"It means that the heart monitor is no longer recognising a heart beat," Yehsung shouted, already in the hallway and sprinting down to the door to the surgery.
There was a pause, then Kyuhyun, Siwon and Sungmin were following, Kyuhyun kicking over his chair in his haste. The sound of it woke Zhou Mi up for just a second. Blearily, he tried to stand, and only managed to knock Henry, on his way to the door, over. No one else managed to follow Yehsung to the surgery as they were busy trying to deal with a sleeping Zhou Mi sprawled across the floor, and Henry's nosebleed from where he'd hit the ground.
Down in the surgery, it turned out that the heart monitors weren't picking up a signal because they were no longer monitoring anything; Key had pulled any and all probes away from his body. When they got there, he was staggering out of bed, one hand pressed to the bandaged wound on his side.
"Key-ah," Yehsung said, exasperated that all his work was about to go to waste. "You're going to hurt yourself. Please, just lie back down."
In answer, Key picked up a scalpel that was lying on a nearby bench, and turned, wildly thrashing at Yehsung. It missed Yehsung's face by an inch as he jumped back, falling over a box of syringes on the floor. Sungmin moved forward hesitantly, but Yehsung threw out a hand. "No," he said. "If you try to restrain him, you might hurt him even more."
Key was hunched over now, and kept screwing his eyes up in pain, only to open them, looking around in case they tried to come near him. Siwon too took a step forward and Key jabbed at him. "Key, we aren't going to hurt you," he said, confused.
"What do you expect?" Kyuhyun said from the door. "Heechul's the one who hurt him in the first place." He turned, and left the room before anyone could ask him anything else. Those left behind continued trying to reason with Key, who seemed deaf to their pleas, still lashing out at them if they tried to near.
When Kyuhyun came back, Key was half on the floor, head lowered, though they could see his knuckles were white where they still gripped the scalpel. Behind Kyuhyun came Jonghyun, who took one look at the scene, and his face darkened. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded, pushing past Kyuhyun.
Key looked up, raising his scalpel like he didn't know what was going on. Jonghyun wrapped his fingers around Key's, and pulled the weapon from his grasp. "You're going to kill yourself behaving like that," he said. "Why the fuck did you get out of bed?"
Key's hand movements were minimal, but Jonghyun apparently caught every one of them. Sighing, he pulled Key gently to his feet, and helped him back to the bed. "He thought you were trying to kill him like Heechul-hyung," he said. Key lay on the bed, looking pissed off, frustrated, but mostly just pale.
"We'd guessed," Yehsung said dryly.
"Do you have any more painkillers? Or even just some water? He's thirsty."
Once both things were found and administered, Yehsung pulled Kyuhyun to the side. "What the fuck are you doing?" he hissed, watching Jonghyun say something directly into Key's ear, who closed his eyes, smiling faintly. "I thought we agreed that he wouldn't come down here."
"It doesn't matter," Kyuhyun said. "If Heechul really is under the control of the Institution, they'll already know all about this stuff."
"What if they don't? I don't think he came down here after he was supposedly re-chipped."
Kyuhyun shrugged. "Doesn't matter, we're not going to be here for long."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, start thinking of ways to move all this stuff. We're evacuating tomorrow morning."
Siwon was the only one out of them all who had never had a micro chip in the first place. He was born in a place that was supposedly outside of the control of the Institution, though Kyuhyun had taken the time to hack into the accounts and found that the leader of the cult that Siwon had once belonged to took a substantial amount of money from the Institution, presumably to keep his people in check. The Church of Christ the Saviour was situated in a compound two hours outside of Seoul, walled in all four sides. Most of the food was grown within the walls, supplies brought once a month in a secure truck, and no one was allowed outside of the walls.
Siwon was brought up to believe that the world outside of the compound was immoral, dirty, and broken. There was nothing good left in the world outside of the walls, and he shouldn't feel any need to think about it. Only inside could they be perfect; only as part of the Church could they possibly get into Heaven and be with God. When he was young, the thought of the world outside terrified him. The horror stories of sexual deviance, of child cruelty, of starvation and poverty, terrified more than any horror story of monsters under his bed.
Their leader was a charismatic man in his late fifties. He preached goodness, cleanliness, purity of thought and body, and, most of all, obedience. His word was law, truth, absolute gospel -- he was, in Siwon's eyes, the image of God. When Siwon thought about God -- and Siwon thought of God a lot of the time, since half of the day was taken up with Bible readings -- Siwon thought of their leader. Just like God, the leader had the ability to change the world around him, manipulate the lives of people without a second thought. Marriages were arranged and enacted without necessarily consulting the people who were being married. Punishments were doled out for the slightest infraction. When Siwon was young, the leader was all-seeing and all-powerful.
Growing older changed that. Someone once suggested that maybe Siwon was clever enough to avoid being brainwashed, but that wasn't it. Your level of intelligence had nothing to do with it, when you were taught from birth to grave to fear God and to follow your leader's words to the very punctuation. He believed it, most of it. It was more likely that he was simply enough of a stupid teenager to begin to rebel, to begin to look at things in his own way. God, he still feared. God was still a concept that his brain was occupied with. What Siwon no longer believed was that the world outside was something dirty and broken. The world outside, he knew, in his stupid teenage way, wasn't anything like what he was told it was.
The idea of a world outside in which he was able to do what he wanted, be the person that he wanted to be, and be with the person that he wanted to be with, grew to almost an obsession. He spent the time that he was supposed to spend praying thinking about ways in which he could escape the compound. The vans that brought the supplies each month were his best bet, if he could somehow get into one and hide in the space of time that they stayed inside the walls. They came and left at unpredictable times, presumably designed to stop anyone from being able to make any serious plans, like the ones he was making.
For a long time, his plans were merely that he would go out, see the world, then somehow find his way back inside. He entertained notions of being welcomed back with open arms, and he'd prepared a persona, someone who truly regretted his decision to run away. The world outside was still scary to him. For the most part, he didn't really want to truly leave the only home he had ever known, even if he didn't believe that the leader was the closest thing to God, and even if his parents disliked him as the product of an arranged matrimony.
That changed sometime after his seventeenth birthday. He was caught "doing acts of sexual immorality" with another boy who lived in the compound. It hadn't even been that Siwon particularly liked him, simply that he was young, and curious, and it was forbidden. What had seemed strange ended up feeling right -- up until the moment they were caught. They were both whipped in front of a crowd of spectators, an example to anyone else who chose to deviate from the accepted norm. Finding himself increasingly isolated and alienated, Siwon threw himself into his plans of escape. The tipping point came when he was told he was going to be married to a girl one week later, a girl who was two years younger than him. He didn't want a bride, and he wanted a fifteen year old one even less so. Even if his punishment had taught him that it was wrong to desire a man, his own instincts told him that marrying a woman was not something he'd be able to just live with.
Climbing into the back of the van proved the easiest part of the expedition, since it was abandoned for a few minutes while paperwork was filled out. Siwon had secret suspicions that it was also during these few minutes that the Institution checked up on how things were going inside the compound. Once inside, he crammed his body inside a crate and somehow managed to get the lid back on.
It took him five minutes of the van moving to realise that the crate was just a touch too small and that he was more uncomfortable than he could ever remember being in his entire life. It was another ten minutes before he realised that holy shit, he'd just escaped from a place that was supposed to be impossible to escape from.
An hour and a half later, still inside the cramped, hot crate, he no longer cared for escaping, and kind of just wished he'd stayed where he'd been.
By the time the crate he was in was lifted from the van, he was almost delirious, so that when he was put on the ground and the lid lifted off -- since that supposedly empty crate wasdamn heavy -- he blindly hit out at the person trying to yank him out, and managed to catch him right and knocked him out cold. Unable to think, he simply climbed out, his whole body screaming in frustration, limbs and joints cracking back into place.
When the shouts began, he ran. He knew that they wouldn't be happy about finding a stowaway, but now that he was free, he wasn't going back, no matter what they tried to do. They were shouting something about how he didn't have a chip, and at the time, that had made no sense to him. In this situation, not knowing where he was worked to his advantage; he may have been totally lost but so were the people chasing him. It therefore didn't take long for him to lose his pursuers, though when he stopped, doubled over, hungry and thirsty and tired, he found himself standing in front of a doorway, in which a woman with a baby in her lap called out to him, holding out her hands for something. Once the ringing in his ears stopped, he realised that she was begging him for money.
Looking at her closely, he realised that she wasn't as old as he'd first taken her to be. She was young, perhaps only a few years older than him, though her face and body had been ravaged by time. The baby in her arms was probably her own. Maybe she'd been a prostitute. The sight of her made him want to throw up. When she reached forward to grab his leg, he kicked out at her and caught her with a glancing blow across her cheek. She cowered back, now fearful of the boy in the tailored suit and leather boots. He was disgusted with her, with the immorality that he judged her to have indulged in, and turned and walked away.
She would always play on his mind later, after he stopped being an angry, bitter teenage boy who had come to find that the world outside of the compound was exactly like he'd been taught to believe -- or almost exactly like. The huge houses, the rich, they walked the paths metaphorically paved with gold. The likes of Siwon, the runaways, the outcasts and the poor, life was a struggle to survive for them. The week that he spent sleeping in doorways and begging for money, just like that woman that he'd treated so hideously on his first day outside, was proof enough of that.
He was woken in the middle of the night by torchlight being shone on his face. A man hunkered down in front of him, murmuring something that Siwon couldn't understand, something in another language. Then he turned, shining his light at a man standing a few feet behind him, looking at something on the other side of the street. "Hey, I think I've found him," he said, hissing almost, now in accented Korean.
Siwon hadn't yet grown used enough to the Gees, the Institution's private police force, to feel scared of being singled out by people, but there was one thing he knew that he didn't like, and that was flashlights being shone into his eyes. Still half-asleep, he lashed out with a hand, knocking the light from the man's hands, and began to climb to his feet, presumably to run away, though at the time he wasn't really aware of his own actions.
The next thing he knew, he was on his front on the floor, a heavy weight pinning him to the ground, cheek pressed against cold, slightly damp paving slabs. He couldn't really see anything, and no amount of struggling was getting rid of the person perched on him. He was too weak from lack of food, and his assailant was, he could tell, stronger than him even in full health. A pair of legs bent down just in his peripheral vision, and a voice said, "Hyung, take it easy. He's just scared."
The person on his back muttered something in that other language, then said, "Yeah, but he hit me, Donghae."
"You shone a torch in his eyes."
Siwon's arms were pulled behind his back, wrists fastened together by ice cold metal. The argument that started up between the people attacking him about whether the guy who had knocked him down had used excessive force was muffled when a thick black bag was pulled over his head, and he was jerked to his feet, a little too roughly. The sudden shift in equilibrium was enough to make his head swim, and for his legs to buckle beneath him. The last thing he heard before he fainted was someone yelping, "Oh shit."
When he next opened his eyes, he was lying on a strange bed, staring up at a ceiling that had once been painted white but which was now decidedly patchy in a lot of places. He sat up and felt something tug at his arm; looking down, he saw that there was a needle inserted just below the inside of his elbow. He reached down to pull it out, but a hand grabbed hold of his wrist and stopped him.
"It's there to help you," said the man who had been sitting by the side of the bed, someone that Siwon hadn't noticed earlier. His grip was weak, but Siwon didn't try to shake him off, mainly because there were another two people in the room who would probably try to stop him if he tried to get out of the room somehow. They were sitting on a lounge chair against the opposite wall.
"It's just a saline drip," said the one with light blonde hair lazily. The other had a hand in his hair, stroking gently.
"You're Choi Siwon, right?" said the third man, and Siwon recognised his voice as the one who had knocked him down in the street. He nodded his head once. The man smiled. "Great! I knew I'd found you."
The man who had stopped Siwon from removing the needle was pouring out a glass of water, and spooning some sort of soup into a dish. His sleeves had pulled up, revealing wrists that looked almost as though the bones were just one wrong move from piercing through the skin. The clothes he wore were black, baggy and shapeless, but when he turned to offer the soup to Siwon, the shirt slipped. His collarbone stood out painfully. Siwon didn't know where to look: the man next to him hurt his eyes with how thin he was, but the two on the other side of the room were scaring him for another reason.
"Aren't you afraid you'll go to Hell?" he asked, voice hoarse. The blonde man stared at him, eyes shrewd and thoughtful.
"Hell?" he asked. "What's Hell?"
"A place of eternal suffering," Siwon said promptly, almost like this was a Sunday school lesson. "You go there if you've sinned, and you--"
The blonde man laughed, interrupting Siwon, though there was no humour in the laugh. The two other men had gone a little tense, especially the one who still had his hand threaded through the blonde man's hair. "If Hell is a place of eternal suffering," the blonde man said, "that surely we're already in hell?"
CURRENT TIME
There was someone in his room. He couldn't tell if it was friend or foe in the darkness, but after what had happened with Heechul, Kibum kind of thought that they were both one and the same. His legs were tangled in the bed sheets, and it would be too obvious if he suddenly jumped up. Kibum's hand was reaching, slowly, for the gun that was down the side of his bed when the person tripped over something on the floor with a curse and Kibum realised that it was just Donghae.
Sighing and relaxing, Kibum sat up, switched the light on and asked, "Hyung, what are you doing?" Donghae straightened up. Apparently he'd tripped on one of Kibum's circuit boards that were strewn across the room. He was wearing a white tank and pale blue jogging bottoms, with a hole in the knee. One of his pillows was clutched to his chest. He looked like a kid coming to his parents after a bad dream, and to stop himself from thinking too hard about how fucking adorable he looked, Kibum said flatly, "I hope you haven't broken that."
"I don't think so," Donghae said. He tried to flatten his hair down with one hand. "Uh."
"What do you want?" Kibum watched him expectantly. Donghae shifted from foot to foot.
"Look," he blurted out. "You're not as good as hugging as Heechul-hyung, but he's not here."
"...Okay," said Kibum. He didn't know whether he needed to be offended or not.
"He's not here," Donghae repeated, looking at his feet. "And Siwon is, obviously, sleeping in the same bed as Sungmin, and Kyuhyun is working on something and won't want to be disturbed, and Henry wasn't in our room either, and Eunhyuk--"
"Eunhyuk is in the hospital. Are you trying to tell me that I'm your last choice for what you have a bad dream and need to be close to someone?" Kibum was definitely offended now, and more than a little pissed off. He hated being jealous about something that he didn't have a right to be jealous about. Sleeping with Donghae, unfortunately, didn't give him any right to comment on who Donghae went to for comfort.
Donghae looked up, straight into Kibum's eyes, then back at the floor. "No," he muttered. "But you're the last one I'd want to disturb for it."
Kibum moved over on the bed, leaving a space open for Donghae to lie down on if he wanted. Donghae hesitated for so long that Kibum began to think he wasn't going to take him up on the offer, but eventually he lay down, the pillow he'd been holding against the back of his head. There was an awkward, tense silence, then Donghae turned, and latched onto Kibum like a leech, one leg slung over Kibum's hips, head buried in the hollow between Kibum's neck and shoulder.
"Hyung, are you okay?" Kibum asked. He wasn't complaining about the turn of events, but it was odd, to say the least.
"I saw Heechul-hyung," Donghae said, almost immediately, as if he'd been bursting to tell Kibum but was waiting for him to ask. "Kyuhyun told me to not say anything but, shit, Kibum, I saw him and--"
"What?" Kibum's hand was against Donghae's waist, and he was shaking, hard.
"I think he's in serious trouble, Kibum."
Kyuhyun was swinging his desk chair back and forth, looking happier than anyone had seen him in quite a while. In fact, it was the happiest Henry had ever seen him, and the effect was a little disconcerting. Such obvious happiness had the effect of merely pissing Hankyung off even more, so he was sitting in the corner, looking like he didn't want to be there at all. Only Zhou Mi had managed to convince him to stay, telling him that Kyuhyun really did have news that would change everything. Zhou Mi seemed pretty happy too, though it was hard to tell with Zhou Mi, since he was pretty happy usually. Most of them were giving Hankyung a wide berth; Siwon, sitting a few feet away from him, kept glancing over as if he knew that he should be trying to calm him down, but he clearly didn't want to get involved.
Yehsung and Sungmin had helped Eunhyuk into the operations room to hear whatever Kyuhyun had to say -- Yehsung hadn't wanted to move him so early in the day, but Kyuhyun had insisted. Yehsung also hadn't wanted to leave Key alone, but Kyuhyun had said that Yehsung needed to be present, so there he was, sitting on a counter, an alarm in his pocket that was connected to the machines down in the surgery, just in case something went wrong. He kept glancing at it as if worried that the noise wouldn't go off loud enough for him to notice.
"Right," Kyuhyun said, the excitement badly disguised in his voice. "I'm going to show you some video clips. I just want you to tell me what you think the recurring theme in them all are."
He spun around in his chair and clicked something on the computer screen. A compilation of video clips started playing; as one, they all leaned in to get a closer look. Footage, Sungmin guessed, from the past few weeks, all of Heechul. They had been taken in rather weird places; one shot was clearly from above his bed, Heechul reading a book, lying on his front. The next was in the kitchen, Heechul talking to someone out of shot. Another was from Yehsung and Ryeowook's bedroom, Heechul rummaging through their wardrobe.
"I wondered where my shirt had gone," Yehsung murmured.
"Kyuhyun," Ryeowook said, apparently not as bothered about the mystery of the missing shirt as Yehsung was. "Why is there footage of our bedroom."
"I've got a couple of cameras in there," Kyuhyun said casually. "In all the rooms, in fact."
"Uh," said Kibum. "Wait, what?"
"Standard protocol," Kyuhyun said. "Anyway, that's not important. What's important is: did anyone notice what he did in every single clip I showed you?"
"He scratched his neck," Hankyung said. The others all glanced at each other; they'd been too bothered by the fact that there were apparently cameras in their bedrooms to think about what they'd seen Heechul doing.
"Exactly!" Kyuhyun, about to say more, reached out and stopped Zhou Mi, who had just fallen asleep, from falling off his chair onto the floor. Once he was secure, head on the table, Kyuhyun had calmed down enough that his voice was no longer tight with excitement. "He was scratching his neck. Now, these were taken from footage filmed--"
"Two weeks ago," Hankyung interrupted. "Right? Just after we argued."
"Yeah," said Kyuhyun. Apparently he was no long angry about the words that Hankyung had thrown at him during their own argument. He was grinning at Hankyung, and that, coupled with the dark shadows under his eyes, made him look rather mad. "After he disappeared for a night, remember? You said you'd found him outside of a bar."
"Unconscious," Hankyung said. "I assumed he'd collapsed."
"No blood? Nothing missing?"
"Not that I can remember."
"This is all fascinating," Shindong interrupted, "but are you going to explain what it's supposed to mean?"
"Look," said Kyuhyun, sitting back down and lifting one knee up, resting it against the table, "none of us remember what happened when we got the chips put in, and I doubt most of you remember what happened when I took them out. Henry, though, it's only been a couple of months. How did it feel when I took your chip out?"
"Um." Henry shifted uncomfortably as every gaze turned towards him. "Like a space in my mind had been opened up?"
"No, no," Kyuhyun said impatiently. "I mean, physically, what did you feel?"
"It was...itchy," Henry trailed off as he realised what Kyuhyun was getting at. "Really itchy. I kept scratching at it, even though it wasn't like there was anything there any more. I wouldn't even realise I was doing it."
"Wait," Shindong said. "Are you telling me that--"
"Heechul goes missing," Kyuhyun interrupted. "Goes to a bar, gets drunk, we don't know because none of us were even there. All we know is that we found him outside a bar, cold out. We bring him home, where he spends the next couple of days scratching the back of his neck, exactly like we all did when we got our chips taken out. Two weeks later, bam. He apparently goes crazy, beats one of us up, kills at least, oh, I don't know, a hundred people? And oh, he's apparently is working for the Institution, which he's always hated more than any of us."
"You think he's been re-chipped?" asked Eunhyuk, sounding unsure.
"I'm about as sure as I could be," Kyuhyun said with a shrug, "without, you know, having seen him being re-chipped in the first place."
"And that's the reason he attacked me?"
"I presume so. He's possibly being controlled."
"But we're the only ones who know how to do that," Eeteuk pointed out.
"If someone's been watching us through him, they'll have probably seen how we do it, and we able to copy what we did."
"Oh." All eyes turned to Hankyung. "Yeah, he killed someone using the phones, the night of, uh, the night before he attacked Eunhyuk."
"It could be just coincidence, or it may be that they used our own information against us. Why they'd have picked Heechul, I don't know. I don't know their final game plan, why they're doing this, what they hope to achieve. But I don't think it could be said that Heechul has betrayed us. I think he's being controlled by the Institution."
There was deadly silence after that, which he looked like he hadn't really been expecting. It was broken only by Yehsung's alarm suddenly blaring out, shocking them all almost out of their skin. He fumbled for it, looking at the reading on the front. "Shit," he said, making to jump down from the counter.
"What's happening?" Ryeowook asked, voice high with fear.
"It means that the heart monitor is no longer recognising a heart beat," Yehsung shouted, already in the hallway and sprinting down to the door to the surgery.
There was a pause, then Kyuhyun, Siwon and Sungmin were following, Kyuhyun kicking over his chair in his haste. The sound of it woke Zhou Mi up for just a second. Blearily, he tried to stand, and only managed to knock Henry, on his way to the door, over. No one else managed to follow Yehsung to the surgery as they were busy trying to deal with a sleeping Zhou Mi sprawled across the floor, and Henry's nosebleed from where he'd hit the ground.
Down in the surgery, it turned out that the heart monitors weren't picking up a signal because they were no longer monitoring anything; Key had pulled any and all probes away from his body. When they got there, he was staggering out of bed, one hand pressed to the bandaged wound on his side.
"Key-ah," Yehsung said, exasperated that all his work was about to go to waste. "You're going to hurt yourself. Please, just lie back down."
In answer, Key picked up a scalpel that was lying on a nearby bench, and turned, wildly thrashing at Yehsung. It missed Yehsung's face by an inch as he jumped back, falling over a box of syringes on the floor. Sungmin moved forward hesitantly, but Yehsung threw out a hand. "No," he said. "If you try to restrain him, you might hurt him even more."
Key was hunched over now, and kept screwing his eyes up in pain, only to open them, looking around in case they tried to come near him. Siwon too took a step forward and Key jabbed at him. "Key, we aren't going to hurt you," he said, confused.
"What do you expect?" Kyuhyun said from the door. "Heechul's the one who hurt him in the first place." He turned, and left the room before anyone could ask him anything else. Those left behind continued trying to reason with Key, who seemed deaf to their pleas, still lashing out at them if they tried to near.
When Kyuhyun came back, Key was half on the floor, head lowered, though they could see his knuckles were white where they still gripped the scalpel. Behind Kyuhyun came Jonghyun, who took one look at the scene, and his face darkened. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded, pushing past Kyuhyun.
Key looked up, raising his scalpel like he didn't know what was going on. Jonghyun wrapped his fingers around Key's, and pulled the weapon from his grasp. "You're going to kill yourself behaving like that," he said. "Why the fuck did you get out of bed?"
Key's hand movements were minimal, but Jonghyun apparently caught every one of them. Sighing, he pulled Key gently to his feet, and helped him back to the bed. "He thought you were trying to kill him like Heechul-hyung," he said. Key lay on the bed, looking pissed off, frustrated, but mostly just pale.
"We'd guessed," Yehsung said dryly.
"Do you have any more painkillers? Or even just some water? He's thirsty."
Once both things were found and administered, Yehsung pulled Kyuhyun to the side. "What the fuck are you doing?" he hissed, watching Jonghyun say something directly into Key's ear, who closed his eyes, smiling faintly. "I thought we agreed that he wouldn't come down here."
"It doesn't matter," Kyuhyun said. "If Heechul really is under the control of the Institution, they'll already know all about this stuff."
"What if they don't? I don't think he came down here after he was supposedly re-chipped."
Kyuhyun shrugged. "Doesn't matter, we're not going to be here for long."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, start thinking of ways to move all this stuff. We're evacuating tomorrow morning."
..............................
The detention center lay on the very outskirts of the city, with only a few streets leading to the gates. From the outside, it was merely four huge walls, grey and imposing, and ten years had done some damage to Hankyung's memory of what it was like inside. The surrounding area, the land around the place, was just scrubs, dry grass and dead trees. It had been lit on fire to stop anything from growing there, and so there would never be anywhere to hide in that direction. In the winter, snow fell thick around the area, white stretching on as far as the eye could see.
It had been early spring last time Hankyung had conducted a stakeout like this, and in the summer, as it was now, it was hot, and almost unbearable. The buildings provided no shade, and there was far more security than he remembered there being. It was too difficult to move around. In the end, he kicked in the door of a house, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Then, opening a window, he swung himself out and onto the roof.
It still wasn't high enough to see over the walls, though he could see the watch tower well enough. Guards patrolled the gates, walking back and forth, checking the ID of anyone attempting to drive inside. Most of the vehicles entering the compound were vans, probably bringing new inmates. A couple of vans pulled out, and he thought he knew where they were heading: the crematorium, to burn the bodies of all those that had died during their tenure.
What he did remember of the center was that it had been split into three blocks, and that he had only seen one of them. Heechul could have been being held anywhere. It was a sprawling structure. Even if he mananged to get in, he would not be as lucky as last time. He doubted Heechul was being held in a normal cell.
The sun was burning the back of his neck. He shielded his eyes from it and noticed some movement in the darkness of the alley below him. Shying back, in case it was a guard, he focused his attention there. After a couple of minutes, he realised that it was actually Henry, standing at the mouth of the alley and looking out into the streets.
A cold horror came over Hankyung -- Henry had been the last to arrive, hadn't he, and he'd been asking after the detention center too much, had got on the wrong side of Heechul just before Heechul had apparently been chipped. He shuffled over to the fire escape and dropped down, falling to his knees to soften the noise of his impact.
Henry didn't turn around even as Hankyung sneaked up on him, too pre-occupied with whatever was happening on the street. Hankyung's hand clamped around Henry's mouth, knife held to his throat, before Henry even realised that someone was behind him. He pulled him back further into the alley and pushed him against the wall. "Ge--" Henry gasped, but Hankyung just pressed the tip of his knife a little harder.
"Was it you?" he hissed. "What happened with Heechul, was it you?"
"No, I--"
"What are you doing here? Why are you so bothered about this place?"
"I was just--"
A drop of blood welled up on Henry's neck. "The truth, Henry," snarled Hankyung.
"That girl, the girl in the picture that you saw -- she's in there!"
After a pause, Hankyung moved the knife away. He couldn't remember the name of the girl, but he remembered how confused he had been about the way Henry had spoken about her, a little sad, like she'd died, although Henry had never said so.
"She was supposed to be deported to China, but the judge changed his mind. He sent her here, saying that once her behaviour was corrected, she'd be allowed home. They were all happy that she hadn't been sent to die in the plague, but I...you hear stories, don't you? I didn't want to just abandon her."
"So you came to Korea to try to save her?" Hankyung sheathed his knife back in his boot and ran a hand through his hair, wincing when he felt how sweaty it was. "You must have known how hard that would be. What did she do, anyway?"
Henry hesitated before he said, "There was this other girl at our high school. Amber wasn't very good with being told what to do. They were just kind of drawn together. When they were found out, everything just got blown out of proportion. Normally it would just be a month or two of hard labour, but this girl, her father was a Governor of our region. He made sure that Amber was really punished."
"You expected to just walk into this place and get her out?" Hankyung wasn't judgemental. He'd been Henry's age when he'd imagined that he'd be able to do the same thing with Zhi. Henry shrugged.
"I didn't think it would be quite this hard," he admitted.
"You--" But Hankyung was interrupted by the phone in his pocket vibrating. He was so used to it being Heechul that he half-expected it to be him, but it wasn't, it was Shindong, wondering where he was.
"We need to load the chair into the back of a van," he said, "not to mention all the other shit we have to do as soon as possible. Kyuhyun is breathing down the back of our necks. Where the hell are you?"
"Out," said Hankyung shortly. He could practically hear Shindong rolling his eyes.
"No shit. Get back here."
Hankyung pocketed his phone, before fixing Henry with a stern look. "Okay," he said, "I get what you're in Korea for. I understand how you feel. But you can't do it alone, Henry. So, I'll make a deal with you. You back me up when I need it, and I'll help you with your problem."
Henry nodded, face still white, his hands still shaking when he reached up to touch where Hankyung's knife had cut him. "Back you up when?"
Hankyung's smile was grim. "I'm going to suggest that we break into the detention center."
The evacuation was going as well as could be expected. In some ways, their homestead had been built up around the technology that Kyuhyun had developed, and most of it simply could not be moved. All the computer systems that he'd built from old parts would have to be abandoned, along with most of the things in the surgery that Yehsung had fashioned into a working order over the years.
Kyuhyun had grimly plugged the plugs on the computers being left behind, after moving most of the data to a box of memory sticks that he held in his hands as he oversaw the transportation of the chair he used for taking out the chips, his brow pressed into a scowl with each footstep that those holding it took. Everyone, even those carrying it, expected a mistake to occur. Someone would trip, or slip; there'd be an argument; it would prove too heavy; and with such a mistake would come the expected fall and ten years of work would be destroyed just like that.
Sungmin, helping, thought that it was no wonder Kyuhyun was snapping out orders like the very best army general.
The chair was moved without any mistakes, however -- though there was one very tense moment where Siwon bumped into the edge of a table and almost lost his grip -- and was deposited into the back of a van that Kangin had 'relieved' from the ownership of a goods company out in the manufacturing district. Also in the back of the van were a few computers, a camp bed, and a generator.
"Are you planning on living in there?" Kangin asked, mostly just as a joke, but Kyuhyun nodded solemnly.
"Welcome to the new headquarters," he said.
"You're kidding me," Yehsung said flatly.
"Oh, not you," Kyuhyun reassured. "You can set up camp wherever you want, so long as you tell me. But this is where I'll be conducting...business."
"Looks pretty skeezy to me," commented Donghae.
"It's the best I can do, okay? Taking over a building will seem too obvious, but no one will notice a van like this parked in their street, will they?"
"Right, so, you're in a van. What about the rest of us?" Yehsung leaned against the side of the van, shielding his eyes from the sun. The others had all accepted that they had to leave easily, but Yehsung, who had spent eight years developing the surgery into his own place, was being pretty resistant. His equipment, much like Kyuhyun's, was going to be difficult to move.
"Spread out," said Kyuhyun. "We need to separate to make it as hard as possible for anyone to find us. Yehsung, you need to let us know where you are so that we know where to go in a hurry. Zhou Mi and I will be parked on the corner of Myun-yang street."
"Where the hell are we supposed to go, Kyuhyun?" Eeteuk, sitting on the kerb in Kangin's shade, was looking at him partly like he thought Kyuhyun was going crazy. "We're all here because we don't have anywhere else to go, aren't we?"
"You don't have to go to someone, or even anywhere in particular. Just find a place to spend the night, report to me in the morning."
"And it's not going to seem odd to have a bunch of people climbing into a van each morning?"
Kyuhyun snapped, then. "Look," he said, bitterly angry. "I'm making this shit up as I go along, okay? I know, I'm Cho Kyu-fucking-hyun, I've got all the fucking answers, but guess what. Not this time. I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm just trying to get us all away from this building before they send Heechul after us."
Silence greeted his outburst, before Shindong said, "Jeez, fine. Calm down. Anyone would think you'd been getting the third degree or something." Kyuhyun didn't smile, but the angry line of his shoulders slumped a little.
Sungmin stood up, dusting the knees of his jeans. "You'll just have to keep moving," he said to Kyuhyun. "When we come to you each morning, you'll have to let us know where you'll be the next day so we can come find you there. Otherwise you'll attract attention."
Kyuhyun didn't say anything, simply closed the doors to the van. Ryeowook was tapping his nails against the sides, an erratic rhythm, which made Yehsung eventually snap, "Could you stop that?" Ryeowook did so, looking both shocked and guilty. Yehsung shook his head at him in apology. He was trying to think of somewhere in the city where he could set up a new headquarters of his own without attracting too much attention. The last thing he wanted was normal people turning up wanting his help.
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Yehsung's family was fairly well off. His mother, despite being a Catholic before such religions were banned, had been a one-time wealthy heiress, whose fortune had been somewhat diminished by her father paying off officials to stop his family being prosecuted for their religious beliefs. His father had made some money trading in stocks, stocks that Yehsung hadn't really wanted to ask about, and so together, they had enough money to send him to the only university left in the country.
Although he didn't make as much of a deal about it as Kyuhyun and Kibum (and wasn't made as much of a deal of), Yehsung was probably just as clever as them, albiet in different ways. While they focused on technology -- smart, in a society where technology was used against its citizens -- he was far more interested in medicine. He passed the medical school exam top of his class and continued to excell in his studies throughout his tenure there. He was promised, at one point, a job working for the Institution himself.
He wasn't like Kyuhyun, who feared being watched, or Heechul, who rebelled against authority. Yehsung simply wanted to get through life as easily as possible without having to worry about getting on the wrong side of the law. A job working for the Institution interested him just as much as a job anywhere else. Besides, he told himself, walking out of the gates of the university the afternoon after the offer had been made, he was only two years into his degree. He still had another two before he really needed to think of employment.
His house was only a few streets from the university, but he usually made a detour just to stop things from getting boring. In his section of town, the backstreets were safe enough to walk down, usually well lit and littered with tiny shops. He stopped off at a bookshop and bought a book on gene research. He began reading it as he walked along, and his nose was so far in it that he accidently took a left turn instead of a right one, and found himself lost in a section of town decidedly different to his own.
He'd gone from looking normal, like everyone else around him, to being obviously wealthy. The looks he was getting from the people around him made him feel uncomfortable, and definitely at risk. He had no way of defending himself. Holding his bag closer, he looked around to try to find a way back, but didn't want to just take any street in case he found himself even more lost.
Someone raced from a side street and slammed into him, knocking them both to the ground. Cursing under his breath, the man on top of him pushed away and sat up. He muttered an apology without even really looking at Yehsung. He was already climbing to his feet when Yehsung said, "Wait, wait -- Kim Heechul?"
He stiffened, then the next thing Yehsung knew, a gun was under his chin. "It depends on who's asking," Heechul said, far too quietly.
"It's me," Yehsung said, as calmly as he could manage without his heart thumping in his throat. "Kim Jongwoon, we used to play together."
Heechul looked at him closely, then slowly took the gun away. "Oh," he said dispassionately.
Yehsung stared at him. His hair was much longer that it had ever been when he was a kid, falling almost to his shoulders. His hands shook a little as he stowed his gun back away. His eyes never seemed to settle on one thing for more than a second, and he certainly would not look Yehsung in the eye. "Man," Yehsung said. "I thought you were dead."
"I am," Heechul reassured him. "You're just seeing a ghost, albiet one that knocked you to the ground. Don't tell anyone you saw me. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a medical emergency that I--"
"I'm at med school," Yehsung said, almost before he really knew what he was going to say. "Could I help?"
Heechul's vision focused just to the right of his eyes for a second, then flicked away again. "Kyuhyun's going to kill me, but yeah, you probably could. That's how desperate I am."
Heechul led him down the street that he'd hurtled from, and then ducked through a curtain hanging over a doorway. A boy lay on a pallet of straw, completely still. He was pale, and when Yehsung touched him, his skin was clammy. He juddered as Yehsung watched him, breathing shallow.
Despite never actually having dealt with a medical emergency, Yehsung's mind snapped into character. "What happened?"
"He had some sort of a fit. We came in here to get out of the sun and next thing I know he's having a fucking seisure, practically foaming at the mouth."
"Does he have an allergies that you know of?" Yehsung asked, moving the boy into the recovery position. He was a little worried that another seisure could result in him swallowing his tongue.
"The fuck am I supposed to know?"
Yehsung glanced over at him. It had been, what, over five years since he'd last seen Kim Heechul? All Yehsung had known was that after all the outrage over Heechul's behaviour, eventually he'd had to be committed to the detention center, simply for his own good. By that stage, they were no longer friends, and Yehsung only really knew Heechul from the various dinner parties that they sometimes found themselves both in attendence.
Back then, Heechul had been pretty snappy, very easy to anger, but still, somewhat respectable. Yehsung couldn't remember him ever swearing, and there was something else about him now, something very, very brittle. It made Yehsung feel like there was a walking time bomb next to him.
"Has he eaten anything strange?"
"I don't know, there was a stall -- shop, shop, selling chocolate, and he said he'd never had any before, so I bart -- bought a few bars."
"How many did he eat?"
"All of them." Heechul was worrying the edge of his thumb with his teeth. "About six?"
"It could be a reaction to the sudden sugar rush," Yehsung mused. "How old is he?"
"Seventeen."
Yehsung opened his backpack, pulling out a small metal case. A few days earlier there'd been a presentation on extreme allergic reactions, after one of their fellow students had tied of a previously unknown nut allergy in the cafeteria, and they'd been given a box with a syringe of adrenaline. Taking it out now, he injected it into the boy's arm.
There was a couple more minutes of silence, before the boy groaned, rolling a little from side to side. Yehsung felt his skin, found him cold, but his breathing had levelled out. "What's his name?" he asked Heechul.
"Donghae."
"Donghae, can you hear me?" Yehsung called softly, and Donghae's eyes fluttered open. He looked confused and a little panicked. His irises were wide, and when he tossed his head to the side, looking for Heechul, he seemed a little punch-drunk.
"Hyung, what happened?"
"You had a fit," Yehsung said, and Donghae's eyes snapped back to him.
"Who are you?" he asked. Heechul stepped forward, and before Yehsung had even moved, the barrell of the gun was under his chin.
"Stand up," Heechul said. Yehsung did so. "Now, we're going to leave first. You can get back to your section of town by taking three lefts and then two rights. Simple enough. You know what else is simple enough? You're not going to tell anyone that you saw me, okay? Not one word, okay. I'll know, Jongwoon. If they come for me, I'll know that you told, and I will hunt you down and kill you."
It was simple enough, and the look in his eyes let Yehsung know that he was absolutely telling the truth. It was not the Heechul that Yehsung had known. This one was close to being mad, and Yehsung wanted nothing more to do with the world that he made him like that. So he told no one.
In the end, it didn't matter. It wasn't Heechul who came for him, but the Institution, just a week later. He'd turned down their job offer. It was too early, he said. Their response to his rejection was to storm his house while he was at a friend's party, and slaughter his family.
He came home at 1AM, and walked straight into a bloodbath. His father was at the bottom of the stairs, where he'd try to flee. His mother in her bedroom, still alive when Yehsung stepped in. Her hand reached out for him. Maybe there was a certain irony in it; he was the best medical student in the university, but he couldn't stop his mother from dying in his arms as he sobbed and begged her not to go.
Just before her last breath, she pressed something into his hands; the string of rosary beads that she always wore under her clothes. She'd risked a lot through the years by wearing them. Now she left them to a son who would never be able to get the blood off the chain.
He didn't know how long he spent in the blood soaked house, or even how he found himself in the part of town from a week earlier where he'd met Heechul. He simply ducked into the room that he'd found the fitting Donghae, and curled up on the straw. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the trickle of blood from his mother's mouth, and they sprang open again. He was still lying awake as the sun rose, and was still awake much later when the curtain was lifted away from the doorway.
"Oh," said Donghae brightly. "Hello again."
CURRENT TIME
Kangin kicked the boarded up doorway. The wood was so old that it splinted with one kick, and another was all it needed to snap in half. Kangin pulled most of it away and presented the doorway, now with random jagged pieces of wood sticking from it, to Eeteuk.
"Are you sure about this?" Eeteuk asked, gingerly walking through and looking at the dust covered chairs and the doors hanging off cupboards. It was apparently the kitchen of a house that had been abandoned years ago. A child's doll lay on a counter top, missing one eye.
"Nowhever really else to go," Kangin said. "It's not any worse than that first place we ended up, remember?"
Mostly Eeteuk remembered being absolutely terrified of the hulking boy bearing over him, demanding to know what he'd been doing in the back of the Institution van. Other than that fear, he didn't really remember much about those first few days, being dragged back and forth by Kangin, who was scared that Eeteuk would be able to turn him in.
"Surprised you wanted to come with me," Kangin said, or more, shouted from another room that he'd wandered into while Eeteuk was staring unseeingly at the one-eyed doll. "You know, since I offend your sensibilities all the time."
"Someone needs to be around to make you into a decent human being," Eeteuk said primly, following Kangin's voice. "You know, remind you to not swear, remind you that your fists need not solve every problem."
"Yeah, yeah," said Kangin, pulling at a piece of wood over a window which simply refused to give. He tried for a couple of minutes, then stopped, sat down on the ground suddenly, and put his hands in his head.
"Youngwoon?" Eeteuk murmured, coming closer so he could put his hand on the back of Kangin's neck. It had taken a lot to get his real name out of Kangin, and now he shuddered when Eeteuk used it.
"It's just, thinking about him back in that place," Kangin said against his hands, and shook his head wildly. "You go through something like that with someone, it -- I mean, you get to know what things a person can take, don't you? He barely survived it once."
Eeteuk didn't say anything. Even after ten years, he'd never thanked Kangin for saving him from the detention center. In the very early days, Eeteuk resented him for it, still thinking that if only he'd gone there, his parents would have accepted him eventually. After meeting Heechul, Eeteuk knew that what had happened to him would have happened to him if he'd gone there, and back then, there was no way Eeteuk would have survived for very long.
"Kyuhyun wouldn't have told us all to report to him if we weren't going to get him out," Eeteuk said eventually.
"How?" asked Kangin. "Thinking back on how I escaped feels like a dream, like it wasn't even me doing it. It took months of planning, almost a year to pull off. I don't understand how even Kyuhyun can manage to break in."
"He'll work it out somehow."
"Don't tell me things that you don't believe."
Kangin's hand fastened around the top of Eeteuk's arm like a vice. Eeteuk didn't pull away because he really didn't believe it. It was simply that he couldn't bear to think that, after all the uncertainty of Heechul's motives, he could be beyond their reach now.
"Hankyung wouldn't leave him there," he muttered, looking across the room at the fireplace, now empty.
"I don't want to leave him there," Kangin said. "All of us; I think now, more than ever, we'd walk on water to get him back."
There was silence for a long moment, then Kangin's lips pressed softly against Eeteuk's jaw. Eeteuk jumped back, skin burning, and heart going at a thousand miles an hour. "What are you--"
"I wouldn't leave you there," said Kangin quietly. His eyes, stone cold sober, and not buring with antagonism for once, were clear and solemn. "I stopped you going there once and I'd get you back."
"Everyone would do--"
"No," interrupted Kangin. "I'd get you back because I think of you the same way that Hankyung thinks about Heechul."
More silence. It was probably the most quiet there had ever been between them. "Kangin," murmured Eeteuk, brushing his hair away from his face. "You can't--"
"I've tried being bolshy and forceful, hyung. I've tried powering through it, or what the fuck ever. But I think that your issues run even deeper than Heechul's, and I'm never going to get under the defences. So there we go. I love you, hyung, and even if you never accept that, even if you don't love me back, I don't care anymore."
"Don't be stupid," Eeteuk snapped, anger making him speak before he thought. "Of course I love yo--"
Almost like he'd been expecting it, a grin spread across Kangin's face, but untrue to character, he didn't say anything as Eeteuk turned around and started pulling a rug onto an old sofa. He lay back against another chair, staring out of the dirty window at the sliver of dirty building he could see opposite. A long silence passed before Eeteuk said, "As a friend."
"Considering how much shit you give me for lying, don't you think that's a little bit hypocritical?"
Eeteuk swirled around, ready to retort, but then, seeing the shadows under Kangin's eyes, he closed his mouth, opened it again, and said, "If Kyuhyun doesn't have a plan, do you?"
Kangin shrugged. "Hey, I'm not the brains of the operation. But when it comes to my oldest friend, then I'm not just going to stand back, you know? There are things you do because they appeal to your morals or whatever, and then there are things you do because there is no fucking way you're going to let someone get away with that shit."
It had been early spring last time Hankyung had conducted a stakeout like this, and in the summer, as it was now, it was hot, and almost unbearable. The buildings provided no shade, and there was far more security than he remembered there being. It was too difficult to move around. In the end, he kicked in the door of a house, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Then, opening a window, he swung himself out and onto the roof.
It still wasn't high enough to see over the walls, though he could see the watch tower well enough. Guards patrolled the gates, walking back and forth, checking the ID of anyone attempting to drive inside. Most of the vehicles entering the compound were vans, probably bringing new inmates. A couple of vans pulled out, and he thought he knew where they were heading: the crematorium, to burn the bodies of all those that had died during their tenure.
What he did remember of the center was that it had been split into three blocks, and that he had only seen one of them. Heechul could have been being held anywhere. It was a sprawling structure. Even if he mananged to get in, he would not be as lucky as last time. He doubted Heechul was being held in a normal cell.
The sun was burning the back of his neck. He shielded his eyes from it and noticed some movement in the darkness of the alley below him. Shying back, in case it was a guard, he focused his attention there. After a couple of minutes, he realised that it was actually Henry, standing at the mouth of the alley and looking out into the streets.
A cold horror came over Hankyung -- Henry had been the last to arrive, hadn't he, and he'd been asking after the detention center too much, had got on the wrong side of Heechul just before Heechul had apparently been chipped. He shuffled over to the fire escape and dropped down, falling to his knees to soften the noise of his impact.
Henry didn't turn around even as Hankyung sneaked up on him, too pre-occupied with whatever was happening on the street. Hankyung's hand clamped around Henry's mouth, knife held to his throat, before Henry even realised that someone was behind him. He pulled him back further into the alley and pushed him against the wall. "Ge--" Henry gasped, but Hankyung just pressed the tip of his knife a little harder.
"Was it you?" he hissed. "What happened with Heechul, was it you?"
"No, I--"
"What are you doing here? Why are you so bothered about this place?"
"I was just--"
A drop of blood welled up on Henry's neck. "The truth, Henry," snarled Hankyung.
"That girl, the girl in the picture that you saw -- she's in there!"
After a pause, Hankyung moved the knife away. He couldn't remember the name of the girl, but he remembered how confused he had been about the way Henry had spoken about her, a little sad, like she'd died, although Henry had never said so.
"She was supposed to be deported to China, but the judge changed his mind. He sent her here, saying that once her behaviour was corrected, she'd be allowed home. They were all happy that she hadn't been sent to die in the plague, but I...you hear stories, don't you? I didn't want to just abandon her."
"So you came to Korea to try to save her?" Hankyung sheathed his knife back in his boot and ran a hand through his hair, wincing when he felt how sweaty it was. "You must have known how hard that would be. What did she do, anyway?"
Henry hesitated before he said, "There was this other girl at our high school. Amber wasn't very good with being told what to do. They were just kind of drawn together. When they were found out, everything just got blown out of proportion. Normally it would just be a month or two of hard labour, but this girl, her father was a Governor of our region. He made sure that Amber was really punished."
"You expected to just walk into this place and get her out?" Hankyung wasn't judgemental. He'd been Henry's age when he'd imagined that he'd be able to do the same thing with Zhi. Henry shrugged.
"I didn't think it would be quite this hard," he admitted.
"You--" But Hankyung was interrupted by the phone in his pocket vibrating. He was so used to it being Heechul that he half-expected it to be him, but it wasn't, it was Shindong, wondering where he was.
"We need to load the chair into the back of a van," he said, "not to mention all the other shit we have to do as soon as possible. Kyuhyun is breathing down the back of our necks. Where the hell are you?"
"Out," said Hankyung shortly. He could practically hear Shindong rolling his eyes.
"No shit. Get back here."
Hankyung pocketed his phone, before fixing Henry with a stern look. "Okay," he said, "I get what you're in Korea for. I understand how you feel. But you can't do it alone, Henry. So, I'll make a deal with you. You back me up when I need it, and I'll help you with your problem."
Henry nodded, face still white, his hands still shaking when he reached up to touch where Hankyung's knife had cut him. "Back you up when?"
Hankyung's smile was grim. "I'm going to suggest that we break into the detention center."
The evacuation was going as well as could be expected. In some ways, their homestead had been built up around the technology that Kyuhyun had developed, and most of it simply could not be moved. All the computer systems that he'd built from old parts would have to be abandoned, along with most of the things in the surgery that Yehsung had fashioned into a working order over the years.
Kyuhyun had grimly plugged the plugs on the computers being left behind, after moving most of the data to a box of memory sticks that he held in his hands as he oversaw the transportation of the chair he used for taking out the chips, his brow pressed into a scowl with each footstep that those holding it took. Everyone, even those carrying it, expected a mistake to occur. Someone would trip, or slip; there'd be an argument; it would prove too heavy; and with such a mistake would come the expected fall and ten years of work would be destroyed just like that.
Sungmin, helping, thought that it was no wonder Kyuhyun was snapping out orders like the very best army general.
The chair was moved without any mistakes, however -- though there was one very tense moment where Siwon bumped into the edge of a table and almost lost his grip -- and was deposited into the back of a van that Kangin had 'relieved' from the ownership of a goods company out in the manufacturing district. Also in the back of the van were a few computers, a camp bed, and a generator.
"Are you planning on living in there?" Kangin asked, mostly just as a joke, but Kyuhyun nodded solemnly.
"Welcome to the new headquarters," he said.
"You're kidding me," Yehsung said flatly.
"Oh, not you," Kyuhyun reassured. "You can set up camp wherever you want, so long as you tell me. But this is where I'll be conducting...business."
"Looks pretty skeezy to me," commented Donghae.
"It's the best I can do, okay? Taking over a building will seem too obvious, but no one will notice a van like this parked in their street, will they?"
"Right, so, you're in a van. What about the rest of us?" Yehsung leaned against the side of the van, shielding his eyes from the sun. The others had all accepted that they had to leave easily, but Yehsung, who had spent eight years developing the surgery into his own place, was being pretty resistant. His equipment, much like Kyuhyun's, was going to be difficult to move.
"Spread out," said Kyuhyun. "We need to separate to make it as hard as possible for anyone to find us. Yehsung, you need to let us know where you are so that we know where to go in a hurry. Zhou Mi and I will be parked on the corner of Myun-yang street."
"Where the hell are we supposed to go, Kyuhyun?" Eeteuk, sitting on the kerb in Kangin's shade, was looking at him partly like he thought Kyuhyun was going crazy. "We're all here because we don't have anywhere else to go, aren't we?"
"You don't have to go to someone, or even anywhere in particular. Just find a place to spend the night, report to me in the morning."
"And it's not going to seem odd to have a bunch of people climbing into a van each morning?"
Kyuhyun snapped, then. "Look," he said, bitterly angry. "I'm making this shit up as I go along, okay? I know, I'm Cho Kyu-fucking-hyun, I've got all the fucking answers, but guess what. Not this time. I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm just trying to get us all away from this building before they send Heechul after us."
Silence greeted his outburst, before Shindong said, "Jeez, fine. Calm down. Anyone would think you'd been getting the third degree or something." Kyuhyun didn't smile, but the angry line of his shoulders slumped a little.
Sungmin stood up, dusting the knees of his jeans. "You'll just have to keep moving," he said to Kyuhyun. "When we come to you each morning, you'll have to let us know where you'll be the next day so we can come find you there. Otherwise you'll attract attention."
Kyuhyun didn't say anything, simply closed the doors to the van. Ryeowook was tapping his nails against the sides, an erratic rhythm, which made Yehsung eventually snap, "Could you stop that?" Ryeowook did so, looking both shocked and guilty. Yehsung shook his head at him in apology. He was trying to think of somewhere in the city where he could set up a new headquarters of his own without attracting too much attention. The last thing he wanted was normal people turning up wanting his help.
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Yehsung's family was fairly well off. His mother, despite being a Catholic before such religions were banned, had been a one-time wealthy heiress, whose fortune had been somewhat diminished by her father paying off officials to stop his family being prosecuted for their religious beliefs. His father had made some money trading in stocks, stocks that Yehsung hadn't really wanted to ask about, and so together, they had enough money to send him to the only university left in the country.
Although he didn't make as much of a deal about it as Kyuhyun and Kibum (and wasn't made as much of a deal of), Yehsung was probably just as clever as them, albiet in different ways. While they focused on technology -- smart, in a society where technology was used against its citizens -- he was far more interested in medicine. He passed the medical school exam top of his class and continued to excell in his studies throughout his tenure there. He was promised, at one point, a job working for the Institution himself.
He wasn't like Kyuhyun, who feared being watched, or Heechul, who rebelled against authority. Yehsung simply wanted to get through life as easily as possible without having to worry about getting on the wrong side of the law. A job working for the Institution interested him just as much as a job anywhere else. Besides, he told himself, walking out of the gates of the university the afternoon after the offer had been made, he was only two years into his degree. He still had another two before he really needed to think of employment.
His house was only a few streets from the university, but he usually made a detour just to stop things from getting boring. In his section of town, the backstreets were safe enough to walk down, usually well lit and littered with tiny shops. He stopped off at a bookshop and bought a book on gene research. He began reading it as he walked along, and his nose was so far in it that he accidently took a left turn instead of a right one, and found himself lost in a section of town decidedly different to his own.
He'd gone from looking normal, like everyone else around him, to being obviously wealthy. The looks he was getting from the people around him made him feel uncomfortable, and definitely at risk. He had no way of defending himself. Holding his bag closer, he looked around to try to find a way back, but didn't want to just take any street in case he found himself even more lost.
Someone raced from a side street and slammed into him, knocking them both to the ground. Cursing under his breath, the man on top of him pushed away and sat up. He muttered an apology without even really looking at Yehsung. He was already climbing to his feet when Yehsung said, "Wait, wait -- Kim Heechul?"
He stiffened, then the next thing Yehsung knew, a gun was under his chin. "It depends on who's asking," Heechul said, far too quietly.
"It's me," Yehsung said, as calmly as he could manage without his heart thumping in his throat. "Kim Jongwoon, we used to play together."
Heechul looked at him closely, then slowly took the gun away. "Oh," he said dispassionately.
Yehsung stared at him. His hair was much longer that it had ever been when he was a kid, falling almost to his shoulders. His hands shook a little as he stowed his gun back away. His eyes never seemed to settle on one thing for more than a second, and he certainly would not look Yehsung in the eye. "Man," Yehsung said. "I thought you were dead."
"I am," Heechul reassured him. "You're just seeing a ghost, albiet one that knocked you to the ground. Don't tell anyone you saw me. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a medical emergency that I--"
"I'm at med school," Yehsung said, almost before he really knew what he was going to say. "Could I help?"
Heechul's vision focused just to the right of his eyes for a second, then flicked away again. "Kyuhyun's going to kill me, but yeah, you probably could. That's how desperate I am."
Heechul led him down the street that he'd hurtled from, and then ducked through a curtain hanging over a doorway. A boy lay on a pallet of straw, completely still. He was pale, and when Yehsung touched him, his skin was clammy. He juddered as Yehsung watched him, breathing shallow.
Despite never actually having dealt with a medical emergency, Yehsung's mind snapped into character. "What happened?"
"He had some sort of a fit. We came in here to get out of the sun and next thing I know he's having a fucking seisure, practically foaming at the mouth."
"Does he have an allergies that you know of?" Yehsung asked, moving the boy into the recovery position. He was a little worried that another seisure could result in him swallowing his tongue.
"The fuck am I supposed to know?"
Yehsung glanced over at him. It had been, what, over five years since he'd last seen Kim Heechul? All Yehsung had known was that after all the outrage over Heechul's behaviour, eventually he'd had to be committed to the detention center, simply for his own good. By that stage, they were no longer friends, and Yehsung only really knew Heechul from the various dinner parties that they sometimes found themselves both in attendence.
Back then, Heechul had been pretty snappy, very easy to anger, but still, somewhat respectable. Yehsung couldn't remember him ever swearing, and there was something else about him now, something very, very brittle. It made Yehsung feel like there was a walking time bomb next to him.
"Has he eaten anything strange?"
"I don't know, there was a stall -- shop, shop, selling chocolate, and he said he'd never had any before, so I bart -- bought a few bars."
"How many did he eat?"
"All of them." Heechul was worrying the edge of his thumb with his teeth. "About six?"
"It could be a reaction to the sudden sugar rush," Yehsung mused. "How old is he?"
"Seventeen."
Yehsung opened his backpack, pulling out a small metal case. A few days earlier there'd been a presentation on extreme allergic reactions, after one of their fellow students had tied of a previously unknown nut allergy in the cafeteria, and they'd been given a box with a syringe of adrenaline. Taking it out now, he injected it into the boy's arm.
There was a couple more minutes of silence, before the boy groaned, rolling a little from side to side. Yehsung felt his skin, found him cold, but his breathing had levelled out. "What's his name?" he asked Heechul.
"Donghae."
"Donghae, can you hear me?" Yehsung called softly, and Donghae's eyes fluttered open. He looked confused and a little panicked. His irises were wide, and when he tossed his head to the side, looking for Heechul, he seemed a little punch-drunk.
"Hyung, what happened?"
"You had a fit," Yehsung said, and Donghae's eyes snapped back to him.
"Who are you?" he asked. Heechul stepped forward, and before Yehsung had even moved, the barrell of the gun was under his chin.
"Stand up," Heechul said. Yehsung did so. "Now, we're going to leave first. You can get back to your section of town by taking three lefts and then two rights. Simple enough. You know what else is simple enough? You're not going to tell anyone that you saw me, okay? Not one word, okay. I'll know, Jongwoon. If they come for me, I'll know that you told, and I will hunt you down and kill you."
It was simple enough, and the look in his eyes let Yehsung know that he was absolutely telling the truth. It was not the Heechul that Yehsung had known. This one was close to being mad, and Yehsung wanted nothing more to do with the world that he made him like that. So he told no one.
In the end, it didn't matter. It wasn't Heechul who came for him, but the Institution, just a week later. He'd turned down their job offer. It was too early, he said. Their response to his rejection was to storm his house while he was at a friend's party, and slaughter his family.
He came home at 1AM, and walked straight into a bloodbath. His father was at the bottom of the stairs, where he'd try to flee. His mother in her bedroom, still alive when Yehsung stepped in. Her hand reached out for him. Maybe there was a certain irony in it; he was the best medical student in the university, but he couldn't stop his mother from dying in his arms as he sobbed and begged her not to go.
Just before her last breath, she pressed something into his hands; the string of rosary beads that she always wore under her clothes. She'd risked a lot through the years by wearing them. Now she left them to a son who would never be able to get the blood off the chain.
He didn't know how long he spent in the blood soaked house, or even how he found himself in the part of town from a week earlier where he'd met Heechul. He simply ducked into the room that he'd found the fitting Donghae, and curled up on the straw. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the trickle of blood from his mother's mouth, and they sprang open again. He was still lying awake as the sun rose, and was still awake much later when the curtain was lifted away from the doorway.
"Oh," said Donghae brightly. "Hello again."
CURRENT TIME
Kangin kicked the boarded up doorway. The wood was so old that it splinted with one kick, and another was all it needed to snap in half. Kangin pulled most of it away and presented the doorway, now with random jagged pieces of wood sticking from it, to Eeteuk.
"Are you sure about this?" Eeteuk asked, gingerly walking through and looking at the dust covered chairs and the doors hanging off cupboards. It was apparently the kitchen of a house that had been abandoned years ago. A child's doll lay on a counter top, missing one eye.
"Nowhever really else to go," Kangin said. "It's not any worse than that first place we ended up, remember?"
Mostly Eeteuk remembered being absolutely terrified of the hulking boy bearing over him, demanding to know what he'd been doing in the back of the Institution van. Other than that fear, he didn't really remember much about those first few days, being dragged back and forth by Kangin, who was scared that Eeteuk would be able to turn him in.
"Surprised you wanted to come with me," Kangin said, or more, shouted from another room that he'd wandered into while Eeteuk was staring unseeingly at the one-eyed doll. "You know, since I offend your sensibilities all the time."
"Someone needs to be around to make you into a decent human being," Eeteuk said primly, following Kangin's voice. "You know, remind you to not swear, remind you that your fists need not solve every problem."
"Yeah, yeah," said Kangin, pulling at a piece of wood over a window which simply refused to give. He tried for a couple of minutes, then stopped, sat down on the ground suddenly, and put his hands in his head.
"Youngwoon?" Eeteuk murmured, coming closer so he could put his hand on the back of Kangin's neck. It had taken a lot to get his real name out of Kangin, and now he shuddered when Eeteuk used it.
"It's just, thinking about him back in that place," Kangin said against his hands, and shook his head wildly. "You go through something like that with someone, it -- I mean, you get to know what things a person can take, don't you? He barely survived it once."
Eeteuk didn't say anything. Even after ten years, he'd never thanked Kangin for saving him from the detention center. In the very early days, Eeteuk resented him for it, still thinking that if only he'd gone there, his parents would have accepted him eventually. After meeting Heechul, Eeteuk knew that what had happened to him would have happened to him if he'd gone there, and back then, there was no way Eeteuk would have survived for very long.
"Kyuhyun wouldn't have told us all to report to him if we weren't going to get him out," Eeteuk said eventually.
"How?" asked Kangin. "Thinking back on how I escaped feels like a dream, like it wasn't even me doing it. It took months of planning, almost a year to pull off. I don't understand how even Kyuhyun can manage to break in."
"He'll work it out somehow."
"Don't tell me things that you don't believe."
Kangin's hand fastened around the top of Eeteuk's arm like a vice. Eeteuk didn't pull away because he really didn't believe it. It was simply that he couldn't bear to think that, after all the uncertainty of Heechul's motives, he could be beyond their reach now.
"Hankyung wouldn't leave him there," he muttered, looking across the room at the fireplace, now empty.
"I don't want to leave him there," Kangin said. "All of us; I think now, more than ever, we'd walk on water to get him back."
There was silence for a long moment, then Kangin's lips pressed softly against Eeteuk's jaw. Eeteuk jumped back, skin burning, and heart going at a thousand miles an hour. "What are you--"
"I wouldn't leave you there," said Kangin quietly. His eyes, stone cold sober, and not buring with antagonism for once, were clear and solemn. "I stopped you going there once and I'd get you back."
"Everyone would do--"
"No," interrupted Kangin. "I'd get you back because I think of you the same way that Hankyung thinks about Heechul."
More silence. It was probably the most quiet there had ever been between them. "Kangin," murmured Eeteuk, brushing his hair away from his face. "You can't--"
"I've tried being bolshy and forceful, hyung. I've tried powering through it, or what the fuck ever. But I think that your issues run even deeper than Heechul's, and I'm never going to get under the defences. So there we go. I love you, hyung, and even if you never accept that, even if you don't love me back, I don't care anymore."
"Don't be stupid," Eeteuk snapped, anger making him speak before he thought. "Of course I love yo--"
Almost like he'd been expecting it, a grin spread across Kangin's face, but untrue to character, he didn't say anything as Eeteuk turned around and started pulling a rug onto an old sofa. He lay back against another chair, staring out of the dirty window at the sliver of dirty building he could see opposite. A long silence passed before Eeteuk said, "As a friend."
"Considering how much shit you give me for lying, don't you think that's a little bit hypocritical?"
Eeteuk swirled around, ready to retort, but then, seeing the shadows under Kangin's eyes, he closed his mouth, opened it again, and said, "If Kyuhyun doesn't have a plan, do you?"
Kangin shrugged. "Hey, I'm not the brains of the operation. But when it comes to my oldest friend, then I'm not just going to stand back, you know? There are things you do because they appeal to your morals or whatever, and then there are things you do because there is no fucking way you're going to let someone get away with that shit."
..........................................
Sungmin and Siwon had made their way back to the orphanage after Kyuhyun had dismissed them for the day. It seemed like they'd both gone there without even really thinking or talking about it, some sort of subconscious agreement, but in reality, Siwon had merely followed Sungmin's footsteps, placing all his trust in him for that short space of time. It was easier to do that than try to think for himself.
The women at the orphanage were not so happy to see them this time around. No doubt they had heard rumours too. Neither of them were particularly good catches now that one of their old friends was on a murderous rampage. Still, they said yes when Siwon asked if they could spend a couple of nights there, arranging for them to have their own room at the back of the building. There was not so much a bed as a collection of throws on the ground, but it would do until they found somewhere more permanent -- if they managed to do so.
Siwon sat Kaechan in his lap, letting her play with his fingers, as he watched Sungmin at the window. He was frowning, like something about the view bothered him, index finger tapping the wood. They sat in silence for a good ten minutes, Sungmin lost in thought, Kaechan beginning to struggle on Siwon's lap, restless and possibly hungry. She stuck one of his fingers in her mouth. Wincing, he pulled it out and got to his feet. "I'm going to see if they've got any milk ready," he said.
"He's going to try to rescue him," Sungmin said suddenly.
Siwon stopped, Kaechan reaching up for his hair, hands just coming short of it. "Who, Hankyung-hyung?"
"No." Sungmin shook his head, turning to face Siwon. The frown had fallen away, but he still looked worried and thoughtful. "Kyuhyun."
"You really think so?" Siwon was doubtful; Kyuhyun might have proven that Heechul was simply being controlled, but he had definitely seemed more bothered by the prospect of being attacked than going for any heroic rescue.
"I have an inkling. I think he's got some sort of a complex about these kind of things. You know. Like he's so guilty about what he did to Zhou Mi that he'll try, no matter how roundabout his methods are, to help other people."
"But that's good, surely." Siwon shifted Kaechan onto his other hip, where it was harder for her to reach his hair. She settled against his shoulder, toothless gums chewing his collar. "Wanting to rescue Heechul-hyung is a good thing."
"Is it?" Sungmin caught the expression on his face, and threw his hands up, as if Siwon was about to physically attack him. "No, no, it is. But I'm worried about it all. There must be something that we don't understand yet. Why did they choose Heechul? Why have they chosen to do it now? There must be something that we're missing, and it's bugging me that we don't know."
"Can you ever really know what those people are thinking?"
"But this seems deliberate, somehow. Heechul has history with that place. It's not that they just randomly chose one of us. It's not the same as if they took me, or, I don't know, Kibum. It's the person most likely to be affected by being back there. The person that we were most likely to doubt because of his mental state."
"Why wouldn't it be the same if they took you?" Siwon said blankly.
Sungmin smiled, and shook his head. "Go feed her. I'm just talking in circles, and you're focusing on the wrong thing."
"You'll never be the wrong thing."
A roll of the eyes. "Seriously, go feed her before either one of us starts to cry."
Siwon smiled, and left the room, heading to the kitchen to see how much milk he could find. It was somewhat of a hard-find at the best of times, and now that the market was gone, heaven only knew where people would get it.
Bouncing Kaechan in his arms as he walked, he wondered idly what would happen to her if they were killed trying to rescue Heechul.
"You do realise that it was actually idiotic, right?" Shindong asked, cutting the engine to the van and twisting in his seat. "Not just because of what Sungmin pointed out. I mean, neither of you can drive. What the hell were you expecting to do?"
Kyuhyun groaned, knees pulled up to his chest on the desk chair, face hidden. He waved a couple of fingers in Shindong's direction. Zhou Mi muttered something in his sleep and turned over. "I had you," Kyuhyun said in a muffled voice. "I knew you could drive us places."
"Only because I realised what an idiot you were being. Come on, Kyuhyun. Starting thinking."
"Who are you, my mother?" Kyuhyun looked up, some dark on his face, which cleared quickly, leaving behind only dark shadows under his eyes.
"You're too tired to think straight, Kyuhyun."
"What the hell am I supposed to do about it though?"
"Sleep?" Shindong flicked his finger against Kyuhyun's forehead, not giving a damn about the swat at his side as he slid past Kyuhyun's chair to start messing with the futon that they had rolled up back there. He stretched it out -- there was now not much floor space at all, if any -- and then with a flourish he billowed out the sheets and caught Zhou Mi straight across the face. He batted at it, and then sat bolt-upright.
"Kui Xian?" he asked frantically, apparently lost as to where he'd found himself. Kyuhyun stretched across and took his hand. Zhou Mi's eyes searched his face. "I thought you'd gone," he said soberly.
"No, still here," Kyuhyun said. He didn't comment on Zhou Mi's strange reaction, so Shindong didn't say anything. "I'm going to have a nap though, so you should go back to sleep."
"Wazzafray," Zhou Mi said, and slumped back onto the bed, already asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Rolling his eyes at Shindong, Kyuhyun crawled onto the futon. "Just an hour," he said, already most of the way asleep.
"Promise," said Shindong, crossing his fingers behind his back.
Now that Kyuhyun was sleeping, he settled into the desk chair, keeping one eye on the monitor showing the area around the van, while searching through the television channels until he came to the official news broadcast.
The fire from the market wasn't something that even the privileged over in the nice section of time had been able to ignore, but the news was simply stating that a fire had broken out in an abandoned building. There, the newsreader seemed to say, with her solemn smile and demure suit, you don't need to worry about that anymore.
And over in the warm, well-lit houses in their straight streets lined with trees and greenery, people nodded, reassured. They didn't need to worry about it. It didn't concern them. Who cares if something caught fire in the places that they don't go into? So then they switched the television off and -- shit, Shindong remembered it so well -- the children do their homework, and the parents talked about their days.
Of course, not everyone had the patriarchal father. Many of them did, of course; you could spot them by their wives. Always the mousy ones, who hovered behind their husbands no matter what. You could even tell from their kids, sometimes. The boys were always self-assured, the girls never lifted their eyes from the floor.
He was so lost in his thoughts about a past that he usually tried to keep far from his mind that he missed the knock on the door of the van, and nearly shot Yehsung in the head when the door opened. "Jesus Christ!" Yehsung yelped, diving out of range of the gun that Shindong was pointing at him. "I knocked!"
"Sorry, sorry." Shindong put his gun down on the table, one hand over his racing heart. "I didn't hear."
Yehsung clambered in, tip-toeing around Kyuhyun's body on the floor. "How long as he been out?" he asked, looking down at it. Zhou Mi's arm had slipped off the bed and was smushed against Kyuhyun's face, but he hadn't woken up.
"About twenty minutes. He said to only leave him for an hour, but I think I might mistime it and leave him until tomorrow morning."
"If he complains, tell him that the resident doctor ordered it." Yehsung took the seat next to him, their knees pressed together. "Kind of cramped in here, huh?"
"I hadn't really noticed."
Yehsung grinned, turning his head a little so he could half-see the television. "Watching the news?"
"In a manner of speaking. It's on, so I guess I'm watching."
"Anything to do with Heechul?"
"Only the fire, but they came up with a bullshit excuse for that. No one who watches these things is going to bother with that."
They sat in silence for a while, Yehsung watching the television. Eventually he said, "I found a place to stay."
Shindong, arms stretched above his head, said, "Oh, really?"
"Yeah, it's this little...room, I guess. It's just off the old library, you know?" Shindong nodded. They knew it was a library because a sign on the outside said it was. The inside had been completely gutted, all the books either destroyed in the purges or burned for warmth by various people, and now it was the home of a collection of the homeless. "Down an alley. It's got this curtain stretched over the front. Donghae and Heechul--" He stopped, gave a tight smile. "Yeah, it's there."
"Ryeowook with you?"
"Yeah." Yehsung reached out and switched the television off. It was showing some sort of game show, probably an old re-run from back when things like that were still made, with all of the actual funny parts cut out. "The library is where a lot of the people from the market are migrating to. Minho, Taemin and Onew ended up there, and Key's badgering to join them."
"If Heechul goes after either of them again, then other people will get caught up in the crossfire."
"Yeah, that's what I tried to tell him. Jonghyun won't allow it anyway. Key's still in too much pain to be on the move. I don't have enough painkillers to help him that much though." He searched through his pockets and pulled out a packet of tablets. "Sleeping pills," he said to Shindong's curious look. "For if Kyuhyun says that he absolutely is unable to sleep. We can't have him running on no sleep, not now."
"Why?" asked Shindong, as if he didn't know why. "What are we doing now?"
Yehsung gave him a blank, despairing look. "Don't act innocent with me. You know as well as I do that we're going after Heechul."
"I had an idea," Shindong said with a shrug. "You know. That we would be. Seeing as we all love him. God only knows why when he insists on taking my car for rides around the city."
"And when he keeps stealing all the sleeping pills I reserve for Ryeowook," Yehsung said. "I don't get it either but there we are." He stretched, and stood up. "I should get back. I just wanted you to let people know where I am."
"Fine. We'll still be here tomorrow, at least."
"Great," called Yehsung, already swinging himself out of the van. Zhou Mi's eyes fluttered but he didn't open them. Yehsung closed the door behind him and started back to where he'd set up his temporary surgery. There was no electricity in the room, and no way of heating it up, but the place held important memories for him, and he hadn't been able to think of anywhere else to go. Ryeowook seemed to think that choosing a place to set up was his privilege, and so hadn't suggested anywhere of his own.
When Yehsung pushed back the curtain of the new surgery, Ryeowook was asleep, piled under a selection of blankets. Key was also asleep, but lying between Jonghyun's legs, who was eating some sort of snack. He held it out to Yehsung. A large, dry biscuit of some kind, that looked pretty unappetizing. "Want some?" he asked cheerfully.
"Pass," said Yehsung. He pulled a blanket further up on Ryeowook, then sank down next to him. "Where did you get that?"
"Went to see Taemin," Jonghyun shrugged. He saw that Yehsung was about to interrupt. "Don't worry, I didn't tell him where we're staying. Key was just bugging me to find out if they were okay, so I went to meet them. He gave me it."
"They're okay? They don't need treatment?"
"No, they're fine."
"Good. How was Key while I was away?"
"He complained of some pain, but it hadn't been that long since he'd taken some other pills, so we held off and eventually it seemed to pass."
"Great."
Silence stretched on, the only sound the noise of Jonghyun's snack crunching. There was some movement from Key, and then his hand reached up and pulled on Jonghyun's collar like a vice. He looked down at what Key signed at him, then said, "Hey, you have anything to drink?"
"Uh, sure." Yehsung reached over for the bag of things Ryeowook had packed, and pulled a bottle of water out and tossed it over to Jonghyun. He unscrewed the lid and tried to hold it to Key's mouth, who rolled his eyes and took it off him to drink from normally.
Ryeowook moved in his sleep, and one of the blankets fell off him. Yehsung took his chance, shifting all of them until he too could lie down, Ryeowook's body tucked in around him. "Jonghyun," he said. Jonghyun looked up, the last part of his snack sticking out of his mouth. Yehsung fought down a smile. "Listen, Ryeowook has a tendency to, well, sometimes he gets nightmares, and sometimes he can scream. If he wakes you up, don't worry about it."
Jonghyun cracked a smile that was completely devoid of humour, a strange look on his face. He was usually always in good humour. "Hyung, we lived in the market. You guys never saw what could happen down there at night. Screaming, at least, is something we learnt to sleep through."
Slightly disturbed by this news, Yehsung just nodded, and lay down, turning on his side and pulling the blankets in around him. Ryeowook mumbled, and shifted so that his head somehow found itself under Yehsung's chin. Before he fell asleep, Yehsung cracked open an eye and found Jonghyun signing something with over-the-top hand movements, Key's mouth stretched into a wide grin, and Yehsung really, really hoped that soon they'd be that carefree again.
SIX YEARS EARLIER
He stumbled through the streets, dripping blood onto the pavement. A couple of beggars lurched forward at him, then saw the knife he still held in his hands, and shied back again. It wasn't as though Shindong was threatening them with it, but they knew better than to attack someone with a ready weapon. He looked like enough of a threat anyway, coated in blood and spilling some of his own to boot.
He didn't know where he was. His panic had carried him there, his brain imagining the screech of Institution sirens with every footsteps. He told himself that they wouldn't come after him, and it was probably true; what interest would they have with the son of a family that lived on the margins, someone who had no reason to come to their attention, even if said son had just killed his father.
He could still feel the sting of the blows against his body as he tried to put as much distance between him and the house he'd lived in. The knife that he still clung to had made some marks on his own body before he'd used it for his own ends, but he was too scared to stop and take stock of them.
He didn't notice, either, how the street lamps faded off, as beggars became more and more frequent. Average his family may have been, but they still lived in a manner different to this. His family had courted the interests of the upper families, his mother always trying to make their family more than what they were.
It was her that he could hear ringing in his ears now, tripping his way unthinkingly into the darkest part of the city. Her screams. Her despair. It hadn't started with her, though she had been shouting at the beginning to. It had started with his sister, only fourteen, screaming and screaming as their father lashed out in a drunken rage. How many times had they been in that situation? Jinhee screaming, his mother shouting for him to stop, Shindong trying to restrain him.
But knives? They'd never featured in the situations that occurred almost every night. Just how far gone had his father been when he'd snatched the blade up off the kitchen table? And how blindly had Donghee leapt in front of it to shield his sister, trying to grab the weapon before it could do any damage?
And how, how had it then ended up in his own hands, plunging over and over again into his father's body? That had been when his mother had started screaming.
He wasn't watching where he was going, and caught the shoulder of a young man walking in the opposite direction. It was glancing at best, but the man fell backwards onto the floor, looking stunned. Shindong wouldn't have noticed it if the man next to him hadn't immediately yanked the back of his collar, while demanding, "What the fuck are you doing, fatso?"
Shindong panicked. He turned, flinging out the arm with the knife. If it had been a real attacker, he wouldn't have done that well; the man, with a shaved head and a tattoo on his neck, simply grabbed his wrist and practically crushed it to make Shindong drop it. Feeling confused, and lost, and completely vulnerable, Shindong sank down to the floor alongside the man he had knocked there.
The man still standing bent down and picked the knife up, tucking it away somewhere. "Weirdo," he muttered, and held a hand out for the other man to take. He took it gratefully, but while the other one tried to stalk away, he stayed still, looking down at Shindong. "Come on, Sungmin, we don't have time for this."
"No, hyung--" The other man leaned over to look Shindong in the eyes. He was very thin, cheeks almost hollow. "Are you okay?" he asked in a voice that was soft and nonthreatening. "Is any of that blood yours?"
The older one made a despairing noise. "You're too nice, Sungmin. The guy knocked you down and tried to stab me. And look at him," -- seeing the way Shindong was struggling to form words -- "he can't even talk."
Sungmin straightened up. "Do you always have to be such a brute?" he wanted to know.
"Yah, who do you think you are, Eeteuk-hyung?" The unnamed man rubbed a hand at the side of his head, then addressed Shindong. "Hey, you're not hurt, are you?" Shindong still didn't say anything. "See, he's not. Let's go."
"I think I killed someone," Shindong blurted out.
"Uh, that's nice."
"Kangin-hyung, you seriously -- Are you okay? Do you need any help?"
Shindong could, now that he'd stopped, feel the pain of various injuries, the cuts and bruises that the night have given him. He didn't know the people in front of him at all, but then he didn't know where he was, or what he was supposed to do now. He didn't know if his dad would survive or not, and either way, he couldn't, and didn't want to, go back home. Swallowing his pride and his fears, he said, "Yeah. I need some help."
CURRENT DAY
"Ooof," said Eunhyuk, as Donghae tried to lower him into a chair and only managed to drop him. Wincing, he reached behind him and pulled out an empty glass bottle. He put it down on the floor, and glanced at Kibum who was standing in the doorway. He was simply staring, blank.
It took Kibum another couple of minutes before he was able to step into the room. Donghae was flitting around the place, moving most of the furniture to the walls, clearing a large space in the middle of the room. Clouds of dust drifted into the air, making Eunhyuk cough, a pained expression on his face as he clutched at his ribs. When Kibum eventually did step inside, Donghae turned to give him a wide smile.
"Eunhyuk can sleep down here," he said. "There are rooms upstairs, right?"
"Yes," Kibum said slowly. "Though I'll have to clean them."
"I'll help!" Donghae said. His cheerful nature usually reassured Kibum; it was like Kibum didn't need to speak when Donghae was willing to do all the talking, but today, back in this house, Kibum didn't think he could handle it. Part of him was pissed off that they were intruding like this, even while he knew that he'd offered the place as a shelter.
He hadn't made the climb up the stairs in three years, and the stairs creaked a lot more than he remembered. The paintings that hung on the walls were crooked, and one of them, a blown up photograph of his mother, lay on the floor. He picked it up and lay it back against the wall. Donghae didn't say anything.
There were three rooms on the first floor, and Donghae attempted to enter the first one on his left, which had been boarded up at one point. Kibum reached out a hand and gripped his forearm, almost too hard. "No," he said.
"Oh." Donghae took a step back, and swept his hair from his face. "Is that where..."
"Yes." Kibum averted his gaze from the open doorway. He knew what would be in there anyway; empty syringes, half-eaten meals that would be rotting by now, a mess of clothes and blankets that he'd thrown around in his pain at the withdrawals. He let go of Donghae's arm and walked forward an amount.
He stopped in front of a room whose door was closed. It had been his mother's room. What had happened to her body? She surely wasn't still here, the smell of it would fill the entire house. Maybe someone had come and taken her away, some kind neighbour, or maybe even just looters. But still, he was too scared to open it in case she was still in there, a decomposing mess.
"We'll avoid this room too," he said, and walked down to the end of the hallway where there was the spare bedroom that had once belonged to his brother before he'd been killed. There was a double bed in there, a cupboard that he opened to reveal clothes practically covered in moths. He slammed it shut again and there was a screeching noise as Donghae shoved open the window behind him.
"Only this room?" he asked. "Both of us in the same bed?"
"It's not like we haven't shared a bed, hyung," Kibum said. He felt exhausted being back in this place, and so flopped down backwards onto the bed. The springs creaked, one of them digging into his back. They sure as hell weren't going to be comfortable here.
"I know that, but I didn't know if you'd want--"
Sometimes Kibum really hated the ways that they found to keep fooling the other one into thinking that what they had wasn't serious. This stuttering, faltering, half-hearted way of never quite saying what they wanted to say; it made Kibum angry and stressed and, most of all, it hurt, when he knew that he was more in love than he'd ever been before in his life.
"Kibum, are you okay with us being here?"
Kibum opened his eyes, hands behind his head, to look at Donghae leaning against the window frame. "I asked you to come, didn't I?"
"I know but you don't seem happy about it. I don't want to intrude, and I'm sure Eunhyuk doesn't either."
Kibum shrugged. "It's not you being here that I'm not happy about. It's being here full stop."
"Then why are we?"
Kibum closed his eyes again. "Because I couldn't think of anywhere else to go, of course."
A shout from Eunhyuk below drew Donghae's attention, and he left the room without saying anything else. Kibum got the feeling that his flippant attitude had annoyed Donghae a little, but so long as he stopped asking questions, he didn't care.
The truth was that there was a reason they were back at the house that he'd grown up in. He'd been surprised to see that it hadn't been occupied by anyone, not even some of the homeless, but then maybe the taint of death still hung around it. What had happened there was probably still too fresh in people's minds. It had only been three years, after all.
He had demons that he needed to face, and he knew that by coming here, he would be forced to look them in the eyes. He had no doubt that some of the others would be doing the same thing, and he wondered if they'd do better than him. He didn't think he was capable of going into the room that he'd been locked in three years earlier. There would be too many reminders of the mistakes he'd made in the past, and possibly, too much temptation. There was a reason he never did any business with the drug dens.
Sighing, he rolled on his side, looking at the dusty window. Sharing a bed with Donghae. Maybe it wouldn't come to that. Maybe Donghae would choose to sleep downstairs with Eunhyuk. A thought like that should have raised some jealousy, but instead it made him feel relieved. There would be no pressure, then. He wouldn't have to awkwardly re-categorise their relationship like he had done the last time Donghae had crawled into his bed when they hadn't even had sex. It seemed to bring a level of normalcy to their relationship that he didn't think Donghae would be willing to follow up on.
The women at the orphanage were not so happy to see them this time around. No doubt they had heard rumours too. Neither of them were particularly good catches now that one of their old friends was on a murderous rampage. Still, they said yes when Siwon asked if they could spend a couple of nights there, arranging for them to have their own room at the back of the building. There was not so much a bed as a collection of throws on the ground, but it would do until they found somewhere more permanent -- if they managed to do so.
Siwon sat Kaechan in his lap, letting her play with his fingers, as he watched Sungmin at the window. He was frowning, like something about the view bothered him, index finger tapping the wood. They sat in silence for a good ten minutes, Sungmin lost in thought, Kaechan beginning to struggle on Siwon's lap, restless and possibly hungry. She stuck one of his fingers in her mouth. Wincing, he pulled it out and got to his feet. "I'm going to see if they've got any milk ready," he said.
"He's going to try to rescue him," Sungmin said suddenly.
Siwon stopped, Kaechan reaching up for his hair, hands just coming short of it. "Who, Hankyung-hyung?"
"No." Sungmin shook his head, turning to face Siwon. The frown had fallen away, but he still looked worried and thoughtful. "Kyuhyun."
"You really think so?" Siwon was doubtful; Kyuhyun might have proven that Heechul was simply being controlled, but he had definitely seemed more bothered by the prospect of being attacked than going for any heroic rescue.
"I have an inkling. I think he's got some sort of a complex about these kind of things. You know. Like he's so guilty about what he did to Zhou Mi that he'll try, no matter how roundabout his methods are, to help other people."
"But that's good, surely." Siwon shifted Kaechan onto his other hip, where it was harder for her to reach his hair. She settled against his shoulder, toothless gums chewing his collar. "Wanting to rescue Heechul-hyung is a good thing."
"Is it?" Sungmin caught the expression on his face, and threw his hands up, as if Siwon was about to physically attack him. "No, no, it is. But I'm worried about it all. There must be something that we don't understand yet. Why did they choose Heechul? Why have they chosen to do it now? There must be something that we're missing, and it's bugging me that we don't know."
"Can you ever really know what those people are thinking?"
"But this seems deliberate, somehow. Heechul has history with that place. It's not that they just randomly chose one of us. It's not the same as if they took me, or, I don't know, Kibum. It's the person most likely to be affected by being back there. The person that we were most likely to doubt because of his mental state."
"Why wouldn't it be the same if they took you?" Siwon said blankly.
Sungmin smiled, and shook his head. "Go feed her. I'm just talking in circles, and you're focusing on the wrong thing."
"You'll never be the wrong thing."
A roll of the eyes. "Seriously, go feed her before either one of us starts to cry."
Siwon smiled, and left the room, heading to the kitchen to see how much milk he could find. It was somewhat of a hard-find at the best of times, and now that the market was gone, heaven only knew where people would get it.
Bouncing Kaechan in his arms as he walked, he wondered idly what would happen to her if they were killed trying to rescue Heechul.
"You do realise that it was actually idiotic, right?" Shindong asked, cutting the engine to the van and twisting in his seat. "Not just because of what Sungmin pointed out. I mean, neither of you can drive. What the hell were you expecting to do?"
Kyuhyun groaned, knees pulled up to his chest on the desk chair, face hidden. He waved a couple of fingers in Shindong's direction. Zhou Mi muttered something in his sleep and turned over. "I had you," Kyuhyun said in a muffled voice. "I knew you could drive us places."
"Only because I realised what an idiot you were being. Come on, Kyuhyun. Starting thinking."
"Who are you, my mother?" Kyuhyun looked up, some dark on his face, which cleared quickly, leaving behind only dark shadows under his eyes.
"You're too tired to think straight, Kyuhyun."
"What the hell am I supposed to do about it though?"
"Sleep?" Shindong flicked his finger against Kyuhyun's forehead, not giving a damn about the swat at his side as he slid past Kyuhyun's chair to start messing with the futon that they had rolled up back there. He stretched it out -- there was now not much floor space at all, if any -- and then with a flourish he billowed out the sheets and caught Zhou Mi straight across the face. He batted at it, and then sat bolt-upright.
"Kui Xian?" he asked frantically, apparently lost as to where he'd found himself. Kyuhyun stretched across and took his hand. Zhou Mi's eyes searched his face. "I thought you'd gone," he said soberly.
"No, still here," Kyuhyun said. He didn't comment on Zhou Mi's strange reaction, so Shindong didn't say anything. "I'm going to have a nap though, so you should go back to sleep."
"Wazzafray," Zhou Mi said, and slumped back onto the bed, already asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Rolling his eyes at Shindong, Kyuhyun crawled onto the futon. "Just an hour," he said, already most of the way asleep.
"Promise," said Shindong, crossing his fingers behind his back.
Now that Kyuhyun was sleeping, he settled into the desk chair, keeping one eye on the monitor showing the area around the van, while searching through the television channels until he came to the official news broadcast.
The fire from the market wasn't something that even the privileged over in the nice section of time had been able to ignore, but the news was simply stating that a fire had broken out in an abandoned building. There, the newsreader seemed to say, with her solemn smile and demure suit, you don't need to worry about that anymore.
And over in the warm, well-lit houses in their straight streets lined with trees and greenery, people nodded, reassured. They didn't need to worry about it. It didn't concern them. Who cares if something caught fire in the places that they don't go into? So then they switched the television off and -- shit, Shindong remembered it so well -- the children do their homework, and the parents talked about their days.
Of course, not everyone had the patriarchal father. Many of them did, of course; you could spot them by their wives. Always the mousy ones, who hovered behind their husbands no matter what. You could even tell from their kids, sometimes. The boys were always self-assured, the girls never lifted their eyes from the floor.
He was so lost in his thoughts about a past that he usually tried to keep far from his mind that he missed the knock on the door of the van, and nearly shot Yehsung in the head when the door opened. "Jesus Christ!" Yehsung yelped, diving out of range of the gun that Shindong was pointing at him. "I knocked!"
"Sorry, sorry." Shindong put his gun down on the table, one hand over his racing heart. "I didn't hear."
Yehsung clambered in, tip-toeing around Kyuhyun's body on the floor. "How long as he been out?" he asked, looking down at it. Zhou Mi's arm had slipped off the bed and was smushed against Kyuhyun's face, but he hadn't woken up.
"About twenty minutes. He said to only leave him for an hour, but I think I might mistime it and leave him until tomorrow morning."
"If he complains, tell him that the resident doctor ordered it." Yehsung took the seat next to him, their knees pressed together. "Kind of cramped in here, huh?"
"I hadn't really noticed."
Yehsung grinned, turning his head a little so he could half-see the television. "Watching the news?"
"In a manner of speaking. It's on, so I guess I'm watching."
"Anything to do with Heechul?"
"Only the fire, but they came up with a bullshit excuse for that. No one who watches these things is going to bother with that."
They sat in silence for a while, Yehsung watching the television. Eventually he said, "I found a place to stay."
Shindong, arms stretched above his head, said, "Oh, really?"
"Yeah, it's this little...room, I guess. It's just off the old library, you know?" Shindong nodded. They knew it was a library because a sign on the outside said it was. The inside had been completely gutted, all the books either destroyed in the purges or burned for warmth by various people, and now it was the home of a collection of the homeless. "Down an alley. It's got this curtain stretched over the front. Donghae and Heechul--" He stopped, gave a tight smile. "Yeah, it's there."
"Ryeowook with you?"
"Yeah." Yehsung reached out and switched the television off. It was showing some sort of game show, probably an old re-run from back when things like that were still made, with all of the actual funny parts cut out. "The library is where a lot of the people from the market are migrating to. Minho, Taemin and Onew ended up there, and Key's badgering to join them."
"If Heechul goes after either of them again, then other people will get caught up in the crossfire."
"Yeah, that's what I tried to tell him. Jonghyun won't allow it anyway. Key's still in too much pain to be on the move. I don't have enough painkillers to help him that much though." He searched through his pockets and pulled out a packet of tablets. "Sleeping pills," he said to Shindong's curious look. "For if Kyuhyun says that he absolutely is unable to sleep. We can't have him running on no sleep, not now."
"Why?" asked Shindong, as if he didn't know why. "What are we doing now?"
Yehsung gave him a blank, despairing look. "Don't act innocent with me. You know as well as I do that we're going after Heechul."
"I had an idea," Shindong said with a shrug. "You know. That we would be. Seeing as we all love him. God only knows why when he insists on taking my car for rides around the city."
"And when he keeps stealing all the sleeping pills I reserve for Ryeowook," Yehsung said. "I don't get it either but there we are." He stretched, and stood up. "I should get back. I just wanted you to let people know where I am."
"Fine. We'll still be here tomorrow, at least."
"Great," called Yehsung, already swinging himself out of the van. Zhou Mi's eyes fluttered but he didn't open them. Yehsung closed the door behind him and started back to where he'd set up his temporary surgery. There was no electricity in the room, and no way of heating it up, but the place held important memories for him, and he hadn't been able to think of anywhere else to go. Ryeowook seemed to think that choosing a place to set up was his privilege, and so hadn't suggested anywhere of his own.
When Yehsung pushed back the curtain of the new surgery, Ryeowook was asleep, piled under a selection of blankets. Key was also asleep, but lying between Jonghyun's legs, who was eating some sort of snack. He held it out to Yehsung. A large, dry biscuit of some kind, that looked pretty unappetizing. "Want some?" he asked cheerfully.
"Pass," said Yehsung. He pulled a blanket further up on Ryeowook, then sank down next to him. "Where did you get that?"
"Went to see Taemin," Jonghyun shrugged. He saw that Yehsung was about to interrupt. "Don't worry, I didn't tell him where we're staying. Key was just bugging me to find out if they were okay, so I went to meet them. He gave me it."
"They're okay? They don't need treatment?"
"No, they're fine."
"Good. How was Key while I was away?"
"He complained of some pain, but it hadn't been that long since he'd taken some other pills, so we held off and eventually it seemed to pass."
"Great."
Silence stretched on, the only sound the noise of Jonghyun's snack crunching. There was some movement from Key, and then his hand reached up and pulled on Jonghyun's collar like a vice. He looked down at what Key signed at him, then said, "Hey, you have anything to drink?"
"Uh, sure." Yehsung reached over for the bag of things Ryeowook had packed, and pulled a bottle of water out and tossed it over to Jonghyun. He unscrewed the lid and tried to hold it to Key's mouth, who rolled his eyes and took it off him to drink from normally.
Ryeowook moved in his sleep, and one of the blankets fell off him. Yehsung took his chance, shifting all of them until he too could lie down, Ryeowook's body tucked in around him. "Jonghyun," he said. Jonghyun looked up, the last part of his snack sticking out of his mouth. Yehsung fought down a smile. "Listen, Ryeowook has a tendency to, well, sometimes he gets nightmares, and sometimes he can scream. If he wakes you up, don't worry about it."
Jonghyun cracked a smile that was completely devoid of humour, a strange look on his face. He was usually always in good humour. "Hyung, we lived in the market. You guys never saw what could happen down there at night. Screaming, at least, is something we learnt to sleep through."
Slightly disturbed by this news, Yehsung just nodded, and lay down, turning on his side and pulling the blankets in around him. Ryeowook mumbled, and shifted so that his head somehow found itself under Yehsung's chin. Before he fell asleep, Yehsung cracked open an eye and found Jonghyun signing something with over-the-top hand movements, Key's mouth stretched into a wide grin, and Yehsung really, really hoped that soon they'd be that carefree again.
SIX YEARS EARLIER
He stumbled through the streets, dripping blood onto the pavement. A couple of beggars lurched forward at him, then saw the knife he still held in his hands, and shied back again. It wasn't as though Shindong was threatening them with it, but they knew better than to attack someone with a ready weapon. He looked like enough of a threat anyway, coated in blood and spilling some of his own to boot.
He didn't know where he was. His panic had carried him there, his brain imagining the screech of Institution sirens with every footsteps. He told himself that they wouldn't come after him, and it was probably true; what interest would they have with the son of a family that lived on the margins, someone who had no reason to come to their attention, even if said son had just killed his father.
He could still feel the sting of the blows against his body as he tried to put as much distance between him and the house he'd lived in. The knife that he still clung to had made some marks on his own body before he'd used it for his own ends, but he was too scared to stop and take stock of them.
He didn't notice, either, how the street lamps faded off, as beggars became more and more frequent. Average his family may have been, but they still lived in a manner different to this. His family had courted the interests of the upper families, his mother always trying to make their family more than what they were.
It was her that he could hear ringing in his ears now, tripping his way unthinkingly into the darkest part of the city. Her screams. Her despair. It hadn't started with her, though she had been shouting at the beginning to. It had started with his sister, only fourteen, screaming and screaming as their father lashed out in a drunken rage. How many times had they been in that situation? Jinhee screaming, his mother shouting for him to stop, Shindong trying to restrain him.
But knives? They'd never featured in the situations that occurred almost every night. Just how far gone had his father been when he'd snatched the blade up off the kitchen table? And how blindly had Donghee leapt in front of it to shield his sister, trying to grab the weapon before it could do any damage?
And how, how had it then ended up in his own hands, plunging over and over again into his father's body? That had been when his mother had started screaming.
He wasn't watching where he was going, and caught the shoulder of a young man walking in the opposite direction. It was glancing at best, but the man fell backwards onto the floor, looking stunned. Shindong wouldn't have noticed it if the man next to him hadn't immediately yanked the back of his collar, while demanding, "What the fuck are you doing, fatso?"
Shindong panicked. He turned, flinging out the arm with the knife. If it had been a real attacker, he wouldn't have done that well; the man, with a shaved head and a tattoo on his neck, simply grabbed his wrist and practically crushed it to make Shindong drop it. Feeling confused, and lost, and completely vulnerable, Shindong sank down to the floor alongside the man he had knocked there.
The man still standing bent down and picked the knife up, tucking it away somewhere. "Weirdo," he muttered, and held a hand out for the other man to take. He took it gratefully, but while the other one tried to stalk away, he stayed still, looking down at Shindong. "Come on, Sungmin, we don't have time for this."
"No, hyung--" The other man leaned over to look Shindong in the eyes. He was very thin, cheeks almost hollow. "Are you okay?" he asked in a voice that was soft and nonthreatening. "Is any of that blood yours?"
The older one made a despairing noise. "You're too nice, Sungmin. The guy knocked you down and tried to stab me. And look at him," -- seeing the way Shindong was struggling to form words -- "he can't even talk."
Sungmin straightened up. "Do you always have to be such a brute?" he wanted to know.
"Yah, who do you think you are, Eeteuk-hyung?" The unnamed man rubbed a hand at the side of his head, then addressed Shindong. "Hey, you're not hurt, are you?" Shindong still didn't say anything. "See, he's not. Let's go."
"I think I killed someone," Shindong blurted out.
"Uh, that's nice."
"Kangin-hyung, you seriously -- Are you okay? Do you need any help?"
Shindong could, now that he'd stopped, feel the pain of various injuries, the cuts and bruises that the night have given him. He didn't know the people in front of him at all, but then he didn't know where he was, or what he was supposed to do now. He didn't know if his dad would survive or not, and either way, he couldn't, and didn't want to, go back home. Swallowing his pride and his fears, he said, "Yeah. I need some help."
CURRENT DAY
"Ooof," said Eunhyuk, as Donghae tried to lower him into a chair and only managed to drop him. Wincing, he reached behind him and pulled out an empty glass bottle. He put it down on the floor, and glanced at Kibum who was standing in the doorway. He was simply staring, blank.
It took Kibum another couple of minutes before he was able to step into the room. Donghae was flitting around the place, moving most of the furniture to the walls, clearing a large space in the middle of the room. Clouds of dust drifted into the air, making Eunhyuk cough, a pained expression on his face as he clutched at his ribs. When Kibum eventually did step inside, Donghae turned to give him a wide smile.
"Eunhyuk can sleep down here," he said. "There are rooms upstairs, right?"
"Yes," Kibum said slowly. "Though I'll have to clean them."
"I'll help!" Donghae said. His cheerful nature usually reassured Kibum; it was like Kibum didn't need to speak when Donghae was willing to do all the talking, but today, back in this house, Kibum didn't think he could handle it. Part of him was pissed off that they were intruding like this, even while he knew that he'd offered the place as a shelter.
He hadn't made the climb up the stairs in three years, and the stairs creaked a lot more than he remembered. The paintings that hung on the walls were crooked, and one of them, a blown up photograph of his mother, lay on the floor. He picked it up and lay it back against the wall. Donghae didn't say anything.
There were three rooms on the first floor, and Donghae attempted to enter the first one on his left, which had been boarded up at one point. Kibum reached out a hand and gripped his forearm, almost too hard. "No," he said.
"Oh." Donghae took a step back, and swept his hair from his face. "Is that where..."
"Yes." Kibum averted his gaze from the open doorway. He knew what would be in there anyway; empty syringes, half-eaten meals that would be rotting by now, a mess of clothes and blankets that he'd thrown around in his pain at the withdrawals. He let go of Donghae's arm and walked forward an amount.
He stopped in front of a room whose door was closed. It had been his mother's room. What had happened to her body? She surely wasn't still here, the smell of it would fill the entire house. Maybe someone had come and taken her away, some kind neighbour, or maybe even just looters. But still, he was too scared to open it in case she was still in there, a decomposing mess.
"We'll avoid this room too," he said, and walked down to the end of the hallway where there was the spare bedroom that had once belonged to his brother before he'd been killed. There was a double bed in there, a cupboard that he opened to reveal clothes practically covered in moths. He slammed it shut again and there was a screeching noise as Donghae shoved open the window behind him.
"Only this room?" he asked. "Both of us in the same bed?"
"It's not like we haven't shared a bed, hyung," Kibum said. He felt exhausted being back in this place, and so flopped down backwards onto the bed. The springs creaked, one of them digging into his back. They sure as hell weren't going to be comfortable here.
"I know that, but I didn't know if you'd want--"
Sometimes Kibum really hated the ways that they found to keep fooling the other one into thinking that what they had wasn't serious. This stuttering, faltering, half-hearted way of never quite saying what they wanted to say; it made Kibum angry and stressed and, most of all, it hurt, when he knew that he was more in love than he'd ever been before in his life.
"Kibum, are you okay with us being here?"
Kibum opened his eyes, hands behind his head, to look at Donghae leaning against the window frame. "I asked you to come, didn't I?"
"I know but you don't seem happy about it. I don't want to intrude, and I'm sure Eunhyuk doesn't either."
Kibum shrugged. "It's not you being here that I'm not happy about. It's being here full stop."
"Then why are we?"
Kibum closed his eyes again. "Because I couldn't think of anywhere else to go, of course."
A shout from Eunhyuk below drew Donghae's attention, and he left the room without saying anything else. Kibum got the feeling that his flippant attitude had annoyed Donghae a little, but so long as he stopped asking questions, he didn't care.
The truth was that there was a reason they were back at the house that he'd grown up in. He'd been surprised to see that it hadn't been occupied by anyone, not even some of the homeless, but then maybe the taint of death still hung around it. What had happened there was probably still too fresh in people's minds. It had only been three years, after all.
He had demons that he needed to face, and he knew that by coming here, he would be forced to look them in the eyes. He had no doubt that some of the others would be doing the same thing, and he wondered if they'd do better than him. He didn't think he was capable of going into the room that he'd been locked in three years earlier. There would be too many reminders of the mistakes he'd made in the past, and possibly, too much temptation. There was a reason he never did any business with the drug dens.
Sighing, he rolled on his side, looking at the dusty window. Sharing a bed with Donghae. Maybe it wouldn't come to that. Maybe Donghae would choose to sleep downstairs with Eunhyuk. A thought like that should have raised some jealousy, but instead it made him feel relieved. There would be no pressure, then. He wouldn't have to awkwardly re-categorise their relationship like he had done the last time Donghae had crawled into his bed when they hadn't even had sex. It seemed to bring a level of normalcy to their relationship that he didn't think Donghae would be willing to follow up on.
..............................................
When Hankyung climbed into the van, turning around to help Henry in after him, Kyuhyun was already in a bad mood. A good night's sleep had helped bring him to a conclusion, but the fact that Shindong had let him sleep all night had pissed him off. It was time that they really didn't have to waste. Shindong, for his own part, didn't seem to bothered by Kyuhyun's yelling, and was just calmly playing an old game on his mobile. Zhou Mi had done his best to calm him, but now was watching the television with a bored expression on his face. Kyuhyun was angrily punching buttons on his keyboard, looking like he wanted to break the thing in half.
"You're late," he snapped at Hankyung.
"I wasn't aware we had a time set," Hankyung said, surprised. "We've come from the other side of town."
Henry sat down next to Zhou Mi. "What crawled into his underwear and died?" he muttered in Mandarin.
"I heard that," Kyuhyun said, glowering at him. Henry grinned nervously and ducked down next to Zhou Mi to watch the television, trying to be as small as humanly possible. Kyuhyun turned his glower onto Hankyung, who raised his eyebrows. "Whatever, you're here now. Sit down."
"No, seriously, what gives?" Hankyung asked, but he sat down anyway on the camp bed.
"He got a good night's sleep," Shindong called. "So he's annoyed."
"That makes no sense."
"Forget about it," said Kyuhyun. He ran a hand through his hair and tapped a button on the keyboard. A vague floor plan came up, an empty set of three boxes, the ends of the longest connected at right angles with the other two, both of equal length. "You recognise this, right?"
"Yes," Hankyung said flatly.
"The detention center. We know this much." He hit another button. A small section of the empty boxes were filled in. "Blue is ground level, red first, green second. This green box here, in the central building, this is where they keep the records, yes?"
"It was when I was there."
"We'll assume that it hasn't changed. You said that you found Heechul in this room." Kyuhyun pointed to a red square to the right of the first green one. "Can you remember anything of what the inside of the center was like?"
"It was just one long corridor, with --" Hankyung switched to Mandarin, unable to explain what he wanted to say in Korean. "Like the branches of a tree. Shorter sections branching off, that was where the cells were."
"With ID card identification?"
"Back then, at least."
"Hmm." Kyuhyun swung in his seat, inspecting the plan again. There was a large blue section in the east building, and a number of small boxes dotted around in various colours. Hankyung sighed.
"Kyuhyun, they won't be holding him in a normal cell, you know that."
"Oh, no doubt," Kyuhyun agreed. "I doubt they'll even have the same technology. There have been a large amount of upgrades in the past ten years. Now it's probably all fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, even just for the prisoners. They won't want more people escaping."
"So what does this mean?"
"It means that we have to somehow trick our way into the place, clear all their checks without any suspicion, get into the building, find the records room, see if we can locate someone whose old chip doesn't exist and whose new number we don't know, get to him, rescue him without setting off any alarms, and then get him out of there without anyone realising."
"What are you trying to say, Kyuhyun?" Hankyung asked, voice cold and tense. His hands had curled into fists against his knees.
"I'm saying it's impossible, Hankyung."
Hankyung's hand slammed down on the side of the bed. The entire van shuddered. "Kyuhyun, I don't care what you say, I'm not giving up on him. Even if I have to do it myself, I am not just going to leave him there."
"Hankyung, I didn't say that, did I?" Kyuhyun sounded a lot less angry now. Hankyung remembered that Kyuhyun had a habit of messing with people, and sighed, shoulders slumped. "I just mean that if we're going to do this, then we need to do it right under their noses."
"I don't understand what you mean," Hankyung said, frowning. Zhou Mi turned the volume of the television down and turned towards them, looking curious. Shindong paused his game.
"They might not expect us to go after him," Kyuhyun said. "There's a chance that they don't know that we've put their plan together. At the same time, I doubt that they're not anticipating that we'll attempt it. Plan for the worst case scenario, you know?"
"Kyuhyun, would you just spit it out already?"
"We attack them from the front. We go in through the front doors and let them know that we're there."
"That's suicide," Shindong said flatly. "We'll be grossly outnumbered anyway, and they'll have people on backup. They'll round us up and slaughter us."
"Not with some cleverly deployed decoys."
Hankyung's eyes narrowed. "Explain."
Kyuhyun did so, as he did to everyone else who came after Hankyung. None of them were surprised that he had a plan for rescuing Heechul. He got the feeling that they'll been relying on him to do so. A few of them interjected with ideas of their own, or questioned flaws in his plan, with the result that by the end of the day, they had, in Kyuhyun's eyes, a solid idea that could begin to be implemented the very next day.
After Sungmin, the last to arrive, had left, promising to tell Siwon about the plan, Kyuhyun's mood was decidedly up from earlier that morning. In comparison, Zhou Mi was biting his lip nervously. "Kui Xian," he said, sitting down on the bed, and staring at Kyuhyun's back, where he was blocking in a couple of other rooms, thanks to what Kangin had been able to tell him.
"Hmm?"
"Do you really think this will work?"
Kyuhyun spun his chair around to look at him. "I see no reason why it shouldn't," he said.
"There's just so many things that could go wrong. What if they realise immediately that Donghae and Siwon aren't who they say they are? What if they decide to just shoot?" He twisted his hands together, looking down at them in his lap. "What if Heechul is already dead?"
"There's no such thing as a foolproof plan, Zhou Mi. I'm reasonably confident that this is going to work. And if Heechul is already dead... I'm not even going to think like that. My awesome plan will go to waste if I thought like that."
He turned back to his screen, tapping his chin with a finger thoughtfully. His lips moved wordlessly as he highlighted a square, then clicked back off it.
"...Kui Xian?"
"Yes?"
Zhou Mi hesitated. "Nothing. I'm going to have a nap. Then I should be able to wake up for dinner."
Kyuhyun's shoulders had gone a little tense at the word 'sleep'. "Dinner," he said. "Right, food." He looked at Shindong, who sighed as his snake died.
"I'll go get something," he said.
It took another two days before the preparations for the plan were complete. Getting the uniforms had been quite difficult, but eventually Siwon had simply followed a guard home, then broke in and stole two. That was, according to Kyuhyun, nothing but an advantage, since they would then be on the lookout for people wearing the guard uniforms.
The uniform was lying across the bed that Kibum and Donghae had been sharing. He didn't really like to look at it, because it reminded him just how dangerous Donghae's task was. He'd heard the front door slam shut a little earlier, and assumed that it was Donghae coming back from debriefing with Kyuhyun.
Kibum didn't leave the room he was standing in. He'd entered it ten minutes earlier and was just standing there in the middle, looking at the furnishings that had once been so familiar to him. His bedroom. The place he had spent a large part of his childhood, and then almost all of his time as a teenage, in this room, only venturing out to buy heroin from the dealer a couple of alleys away.
It had started off simple enough, smoking cannabis because his friends were, and then because it seemed to open his mind to a level of genius that he couldn't normally seem to achieve. He was clever, and fiercely proud of it, but he didn't see himself as the best. He constantly needed to be better, and he felt better while he was high. Then it had become hard to reach that plane with just cannabis, so he'd moved on to shooting up on heroin.
From downstairs he heard Eunhyuk yell, "Bullshit!" and Donghae trying to say something over the top. As the argument continued, Kibum kicked a syringe under the broken bed and bent down to pick up a broken piece of porcelain in his hands.
He must have stood there for a while because there was a soft sound beside him, then footsteps stepping into the room. He swung around to see Donghae standing just inside the door. "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't sure whether I could come in or not."
It probably wasn't, not judging by the way Kibum's heart was pounding, but he said, "No, come in."
Donghae came in, accidently standing on some glass on the floor. It crushed beneath his feet, and he winced, lifting his foot up. "Lucky I was wearing shoes, huh."
"Yeah." Kibum managed to crack a smile. "What was Eunhyuk shouting about?"
"Kyuhyun says he can't come with us tomorrow. He says he has to stay with Yehsung in the new surgery."
"Ah." Kibum nodded, and placed the shard of porcelain on the windowsill. "Come on, we should start making some dinner."
"Kibum." Donghae reached out a hand and lay it on his arm, stopping him. "Have you ever told anyone about what happened in this room?"
It took Kibum a moment to answer. "Only Kyuhyun."
"Don't you want to tell anyone else?"
"Like you?" Kibum gave him a glare. "Don't act like you even care, you're just curious."
"No, I just think it would be--"
"Like you haven't worked it out already. The little you know of my past, the boards on the door, the glass and the fucking syringes. You already know what this room is."
"Your prison."
"She locked me up here, to make me go cold turkey or something. She got someone to fucking board up the door so I couldn't get out! And then, while I was practically dying in here, she... she died! I don't even know how! No struggle, no bodily injuries, she just died, and I was stuck in here, slowly starving, slowly going insane and--"
Donghae kissed him, a hand sliding into his hair. Kibum, tense before, instantly fell into it, the feel of Donghae's mouth against his more relaxing than any drug he'd ever tried in the past. "We found you though," Donghae murmured.
"Yeah, because you guys were looting," Kibum said. "And it was Kangin anyway, you weren't even there."
Donghae grinned, and kissed him again, softer this time. "Do you think that when we save Heechul and go back to the house, we'd be able to share your room?" Kibum gaped at him. "I don't know, I kind of like sharing a bed with you."
"You -- I --"
"I should go start on dinner!" Donghae said cheerfully, then turned to bound off down the stairs. Before he could disappear and leave Kibum gobsmacked, Kibum caught his wrist.
"Hyung," he said, suddenly serious. "If you get hurt tomorrow then I just want you to know that I -- I have always wanted to share a room with you." He groaned internally. Way to not even say what he wanted to say.
Donghae, however, was smiling. "Yeah," he said, and then winked. Kibum's grip around his wrist tightened, just a little. Did Donghae know what he was really trying to say? "I've always wanted to share with you too, Kibum." Another wink, and then Kibum let go, and as Donghae started down the stairs, shouting for Eunhyuk, Kibum stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
The next morning was almost uncomfortably hot. Sitting in the van parked a couple of streets from the one leading up to the detention center, Donghae pulled at his collar. "What the hell is this?" he grouched.
"A tie, hyung," said Siwon, endlessly exasperated.
"Well, it's choking me."
"That's what it's supposed to do," Kyuhyun said absently. He was rapping his fingers off his computer table, looking actually a little nervous. They were waiting to hear from
the others saying that they were in place, and it seemed to be taking a while for that to come. Beside him on the bed, Zhou Mi rubbed at his forehead in his sleep. He'd wanted to stay awake for the attempted rescue, but had eventually passed out half an hour ago.
"If I ran a corrupt, unstable dictatorship," Donghae said loudly, "then I would ban neckties."
"Hyung, seriously--"
"Okay, we're in place," Eeteuk's voice said from the laptop speakers, crackling and fuzzy. Not the greatest line, but Kyuhyun had had to leave a lot of his best stuff behind.
"What took you so long?" Kyuhyun asked, almost snapping.
"Sorry, but it takes a while to secretly get to a place," Eeteuk said, sounding offended. "Especially when there's eight of you."
"You know what you have to do, right?"
"Kyuhyun," said Sungmin's voice, annoyed. "We know it. You've told us all fifty times. Just hurry up before someone catches us."
"Right." Kyuhyun closed his side of the connection, and turned to Donghae and Siwon. "Right, it's time."
Donghae swallowed, and then stood up, still pulling at his necktie. Siwon followed him out of the van. The last thing Kyuhyun heard before the door slammed shut was, "How are we supposed to defend ourselves when we can't breathe?"
"You've probably just got the tie too tight," Siwon said. "Why not just undo the top couple of buttons or something?"
"Because that wouldn't look professional," Donghae said.
Siwon slid his gaze across to him, then rolled his eyes. "Sometimes you really are too much, hyung."
There was silence for about ten seconds, at best, before Donghae said, "I feel really conspicuous in these outfits. Don't you feel conspicious?"
"Yes," Siwon said. "We're almost there, be quiet."
Donghae huffed, checked his gun was secure, then dropped his arms to his sides, his stride taking on some of the arrogance that all the detention center guards seemed to walk with. It was disconcerting at best; it really didn't fit with the Donghae that Siwon knew. He tried to copy it, and saw Donghae look across at him, a frown on his face. Maybe he too managed it too well.
The identification cards that they showed at the front gate were, obviously, fake, though the names and numbers on them belonged to people who did actually work at the center. They had timed their entrance with the arrival of a new inmate, and the man at the front desk was far more bothered about that than checking that their ID cards were completely real.
They ducked into the guard tower, not saying much. There was a walk through scanner, and after a quick glance at each other, they lay their guns on the roller and Siwon stepped through.
He had no metal or weapons on him, but the machine registered something. It didn't merely beep, it screamed, sirens wailing and a light on the top flashing, and when he looked back in horror at Donghae, he saw that an error warning was flashing at the top of the machine.
The entire room had gone still and silent, staring at them. The man who had been sitting behind a computer at the machine stood up, slowly. "What," said Donghae, voice light-hearted. "Aw man, did you bust the machine?"
The accent was wrong. It was too drawling, too full of slang, and Siwon realised that Donghae had done it on purpose. He could see what Siwon couldn't see: the message on the computer screen, and his accent was a warning. Something had gone wrong, and they needed to react, quickly.
"Shit," said the guy at the computer. "You don't have a fucking chip. You're--"
Donghae, who still had his gun, reached up and shot him in the head. Blood splattered up the wall, hair and skull sticking against it. "Holy fuck," said a voice behind him, and Donghae turned as fast as he could and shot that guy in the chest. The third man, the one who had been waiting for Siwon on the other side of the machine, turned to run out, gabbling in his chest piece about intruders in the front guard room. Siwon reached out, grabbed the back of his shirt, hauled him back and knocked him out. He slumped to the floor.
Donghae was breathing heavily. The inmate that had been with the guy who was now gurgling on the blood filling his lungs was shrieking, her hand clamped to her face. Donghae locked the front door before he grabbed her and shook her. "Shh," he said, holding a finger up to her face. "I need you to be quiet. We won't hurt you."
She started babbling in Mandarin Chinese, twisting to try to get out of his grip. Donghae let her go, and she hunkered down in the corner, head hiding between her legs. "You think she understood you?" Siwon asked.
"Doubtful, even if she did understand Korean she'll not be any state of mind to listen to us now." Donghae locked the other door to the room. All the windows were set high into the walls, the doors triple-bolt locked. "How long before we have company?"
"A matter of seconds," Siwon said. He fished out his earpiece from his pocket. "Hey, Kyuhyun, we're here."
Kyuhyun's voice took a few seconds to come back to him. "Great. Any hostages you can work with?"
"One guard and a new inmate. Donghae got a little trigger happy with the other two."
"Hey," Donghae said, looking up at him from where he was relieving the dead guards of all their weapons. "You'd be dead now if I hadn't."
Siwon could hear running outside. "Tell the others that it's time."
Outside, everyone was in such a panic at the breach in the front of the center that no one paid any attention to the slight tremor that ran through the ground just before one of the head guards tried to contact the people who had taken control of the entrance tower. The explosion that caused such a tremor, therefore, went completely unnoticed, around the back wall of the center.
As they snuck through the hole that Kangin had just made, Eeteuk muttered, "I don't know if I'm impressed with your knowledge of explosives."
"They've never let me down in the past," Kangin said cheerfully. He lay a hand on Eeteuk's shoulder. "You'll be okay with Ryeowook, won't you?"
"Of course I will," Eeteuk said.
"Just, be careful, hyung."
"I should be saying the same to you," Eeteuk said, then he patted his gun one more time, to check it was still there, then lay a hand on Ryeowook's shoulder, and ran around to the left building, where the generator was held.
After checking that there was no one around, Hankyung muttered, "Come on," and led them through a side door into the largest building of the compound. A lone guard was standing in there, leaning against the wall opposite, on duty and bored out of his brains. Their sudden arrival clearly gave him a shock, but before he could do anything to raise the alarm Sungmin's elbow shattered the bones in his temple and he fell to the floor, dead.
"Overkill much?" Kibum asked. Kangin snorted.
"Whatever, pacifist," he said. "Better dead than able to drop us in it. Where's the records room?"
"Third floor," Hankyung and Kibum said at the same time.
"Up to the third floor we go," Kangin said.
They had been warned against using their guns while inside the building. The noise would carry too far and alert anyone around them that someone was there, and where they were. The stairs were a short distance from where they were, and they seemed to be going too slowly, hesitating too much, for Henry's nerves to handle. When a guard stepped out of a room to the right straight onto them, he couldn't do much more than freeze in fear as the man seemed to lift his communication device in slow motion.
Kangin reached forward and headbutted the man, who crumpled to the floor, out cold. Then he pocketed the handheld communicator and calmly looked back at them. "Okay?"
"Henry, get behind me," Hankyung said tensely. Henry stepped back, letting out a long breath that he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Shindong lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
"Don't worry," he said. "We all have moments where we don't know how to react."
"Next time just shoot," Kangin said. "Fucking hell, I might have a concussion."
"Next time don't use your head," Shindong said, absolutely apathetic to Kangin's plight. Kangin glared at him, then motioned for them to follow his lead. Sungmin walked beside him, Kibum between them and Hankyung, Henry and Shindong in turn behind him.
There was no one on the stairs as they raced up two sets to the second floor, though they could hear voices and shouting coming from the hallways that they didn't venture down. A girl screamed in agony and Henry stopped still for a long second before Shindong nudged him forward.
Two guards were standing in front of the door to the records room. It was too far down the corridor for them to reach them before they sounded the alarm, and Kibum pulled a small flat screen out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons. "This will affect the entire area," he whispered. "I can only hold it for ten seconds at the most before start looking for the source of the disturbance, and that'll bring them straight to us."
"Quick," Sungmin said. "Got it."
"Okay," said Kibum, touched the screen in a couple of places and said, "Now!"
Hankyung and Sungmin sprinted down the hallway, Hankyung's hand already drawing back. The two guards didn't have time to draw their weapons, but they did have time to slap their communicators strapped to their chest and bark, "Intruders on third floor!" It was, however, pointless. Thanks to the white noise Kibum's machine was emitting, any electronic signal was lost in space.
Hankyung took the one closest to him, who was still shouting about intruders. His fist drove into the man's groin. As he doubled over, Hankyung caught him on the jaw and snapped his head back. He fell to the floor screaming in pain, and Hankyung kicked him in the stomach while he was down, just for the hell of it.
Sungmin's target was in the process of drawing his gun when Sungmin's foot caught his wrist. The weapon went skidding across the floor, as the man threw himself forward. His fist caught Sungmin on the jaw, but Sungmin elbowed him in the diaphram, knocking all the wind out of him. While the guy was gasping for air, Sungmin's arms fastened around his neck. Hankyung opened the door to the records room, and they dragged the guards through.
No one was in there, though they couldn't be sure that no one would come. Hankyung dumped his guy in the corner, the man still whimpering in pain, but there was a brief struggle with the guy Sungmin was holding, who had recovered his air. It ended when Sungmin pressed the end of his gun to the man's head and said, "Try me, go on."
Kibum, pocketing the device he'd used to scramble the communicators, slid onto a chair in front of a computer. Then he held a hand to his ear, pressing a button on the piece he wore there. "Kyuhyun, can you hear me?"
Brief pause. "Yes, I can."
"We're in the records room now."
There was some static which Kibum assumed to be the sound of Kyuhyun sighing in relief. "Good, I wasn't sure if you'd even get that far."
"Glad to know you have so much confidence in us," Kibum said. He tapped the keyboard, and a login screen came up. "Tell me when you start to get some feedback."
He worked for a couple of minutes in silence, as Kangin paced nervously up and down the room and Hankyung sat tapping his foot impatiently. Sungmin had pushed the guy he'd been holding down onto the floor, gun trained on his face, not even looking away for a second. Eventually Hankyung said, "We've got maybe ten minutes until they find the guards we killed downstairs and someone comes looking."
"Don't rush me, hyung," Kibum said, voice brittle. "Do you even realise how much security they've got around these cameras?"
"Hey," said Sungmin, without taking his eyes off the guard he was watching. "Do you think this guy will know where Heechul is being held?"
"I don't know, let's ask him," Kangin said, coming to a stop next to them. He hunkered down in front of the guard. "You seen a guy around here? Goes by Kim Heechul. About the same height as this guy" -- he pointed at Sungmin -- "but with longish blonde hair. Seen him around?"
"No," said the man defiantely.
"Oh, really?" Kangin said, and then in one smooth movement, he reached out, took hold of the man's left wrist, pulled it towards him and broke his index finger. The man's scream of pain echoed through the room before Sungmin clamped a hand over his mouth.
"Keep it down, would you?" Kibum asked, sending them an irritated look. "This isn't easy."
"Sorry," Kangin said sarcastically. "Like it's our fault this guy has a low pain threshold."
"Kibum's right though," said Shindong. "You're going to bring everyone running."
"No, they'll just think it's one of the inmates," Hankyung said, staring coldly at the man. "Go on."
Kangin started playing with the middle finger on the left hand. "You say you don't know anything, huh?" The man shook his head, mumbling something under Sungmin's hand. Slower this time, so the man knew that the pain was coming, Kangin bent his finger back until there was a sickeningly crack. The man jerked under Sungmin's hold, shouts muffled.
"What if he doesn't know anything?" muttered Sungmin.
"No, he knows something," Kangin said. "I can see it in his eyes."
He pulled the man's arm into the hole made between his body and his elbow and, tightening his hold, began to push the man's elbow up while holding his forearm down. The man's eyes widened and he began thrashing to get out, as Kangin inched closer and closer to dislocating his elbow. Eventually, just at the snapping point, he began saying something loudly under Sungmin's hand.
"Wait, wait," Sungmin said. Kangin loosened his hold again, and Sungmin took his hand away.
"-- Jesus fucking Christ, you guys are nuts, what's it got to do with you where --"
Kangin tightened his hold.
"-- fuck fuck, okay, okay, there's some guy, a new one, they don't let the likes of me watch him, but he's being held in the basement somewhere, I really don't know where, I just know that he's there."
Kangin released him. The guy slumped down, clutching his broken fingers to his chest, making no noise but biting his lip so hard that he was drawing blood. Hankyung grabbed the guy he'd dumped in the corner, who had stopped making any noise a while earlier, and shook him. "What's your login information?" he demanded. The man didn't answer. Hankyung grabbed him by the throat. "What the fuck is it?"
The man gasped out a username and password, and Sungmin took a computer next to Kibum, entering the information. Henry sat down in front of a computer on the other side of the room, forehead supported by his hands. As Sungmin tried to locate more in depth plans of the compound than the ones he had, Kibum gave a yell of triumph.
"Right, I've got them," Kyuhyun's voice said in his ear. "Have you found out anything about Heechul?"
"He's in the basement."
"You'll never get in there," said the guy that Hankyung had half-strangled, rubbing his throat. "Do you even realise how much security there is down there? They've got every locking system known to man."
"Could someone please shut him up?" Kibum asked, and Hankyung hit him over the head with his gun. The man fell to the floor, cold out. Hankyung turned back to Kibum coolly.
"How do we get past those?" he asked.
Kibum fished around in his pocket. He lifted his hand, holding a small computer chip in his hand. "This should work," he said. "Haven't tested it before though, so I've got no idea." He inserted the chip into the computer, worked for two more minutes, then said, "Right, you've got fifteen minutes before it stops working. You need to get to Heechul before then."
"What did you do?" Shindong asked, leaning over his shoulder to look at the computer.
"It's a simple anti-lock system. Trips all electronic locks in the area, even ones that run on iris recognition technology. It's only a prototype though, so you'll have to be quick." He looked up. "Hey, Henry, remember, I told you--"
Sungmin pushed his chair back. "Right, it looks like it's in the basement of this building. We should leave now."
"Guys," Kibum said, staring at where Henry had been. "Where the hell is Henry?"
"You're late," he snapped at Hankyung.
"I wasn't aware we had a time set," Hankyung said, surprised. "We've come from the other side of town."
Henry sat down next to Zhou Mi. "What crawled into his underwear and died?" he muttered in Mandarin.
"I heard that," Kyuhyun said, glowering at him. Henry grinned nervously and ducked down next to Zhou Mi to watch the television, trying to be as small as humanly possible. Kyuhyun turned his glower onto Hankyung, who raised his eyebrows. "Whatever, you're here now. Sit down."
"No, seriously, what gives?" Hankyung asked, but he sat down anyway on the camp bed.
"He got a good night's sleep," Shindong called. "So he's annoyed."
"That makes no sense."
"Forget about it," said Kyuhyun. He ran a hand through his hair and tapped a button on the keyboard. A vague floor plan came up, an empty set of three boxes, the ends of the longest connected at right angles with the other two, both of equal length. "You recognise this, right?"
"Yes," Hankyung said flatly.
"The detention center. We know this much." He hit another button. A small section of the empty boxes were filled in. "Blue is ground level, red first, green second. This green box here, in the central building, this is where they keep the records, yes?"
"It was when I was there."
"We'll assume that it hasn't changed. You said that you found Heechul in this room." Kyuhyun pointed to a red square to the right of the first green one. "Can you remember anything of what the inside of the center was like?"
"It was just one long corridor, with --" Hankyung switched to Mandarin, unable to explain what he wanted to say in Korean. "Like the branches of a tree. Shorter sections branching off, that was where the cells were."
"With ID card identification?"
"Back then, at least."
"Hmm." Kyuhyun swung in his seat, inspecting the plan again. There was a large blue section in the east building, and a number of small boxes dotted around in various colours. Hankyung sighed.
"Kyuhyun, they won't be holding him in a normal cell, you know that."
"Oh, no doubt," Kyuhyun agreed. "I doubt they'll even have the same technology. There have been a large amount of upgrades in the past ten years. Now it's probably all fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, even just for the prisoners. They won't want more people escaping."
"So what does this mean?"
"It means that we have to somehow trick our way into the place, clear all their checks without any suspicion, get into the building, find the records room, see if we can locate someone whose old chip doesn't exist and whose new number we don't know, get to him, rescue him without setting off any alarms, and then get him out of there without anyone realising."
"What are you trying to say, Kyuhyun?" Hankyung asked, voice cold and tense. His hands had curled into fists against his knees.
"I'm saying it's impossible, Hankyung."
Hankyung's hand slammed down on the side of the bed. The entire van shuddered. "Kyuhyun, I don't care what you say, I'm not giving up on him. Even if I have to do it myself, I am not just going to leave him there."
"Hankyung, I didn't say that, did I?" Kyuhyun sounded a lot less angry now. Hankyung remembered that Kyuhyun had a habit of messing with people, and sighed, shoulders slumped. "I just mean that if we're going to do this, then we need to do it right under their noses."
"I don't understand what you mean," Hankyung said, frowning. Zhou Mi turned the volume of the television down and turned towards them, looking curious. Shindong paused his game.
"They might not expect us to go after him," Kyuhyun said. "There's a chance that they don't know that we've put their plan together. At the same time, I doubt that they're not anticipating that we'll attempt it. Plan for the worst case scenario, you know?"
"Kyuhyun, would you just spit it out already?"
"We attack them from the front. We go in through the front doors and let them know that we're there."
"That's suicide," Shindong said flatly. "We'll be grossly outnumbered anyway, and they'll have people on backup. They'll round us up and slaughter us."
"Not with some cleverly deployed decoys."
Hankyung's eyes narrowed. "Explain."
Kyuhyun did so, as he did to everyone else who came after Hankyung. None of them were surprised that he had a plan for rescuing Heechul. He got the feeling that they'll been relying on him to do so. A few of them interjected with ideas of their own, or questioned flaws in his plan, with the result that by the end of the day, they had, in Kyuhyun's eyes, a solid idea that could begin to be implemented the very next day.
After Sungmin, the last to arrive, had left, promising to tell Siwon about the plan, Kyuhyun's mood was decidedly up from earlier that morning. In comparison, Zhou Mi was biting his lip nervously. "Kui Xian," he said, sitting down on the bed, and staring at Kyuhyun's back, where he was blocking in a couple of other rooms, thanks to what Kangin had been able to tell him.
"Hmm?"
"Do you really think this will work?"
Kyuhyun spun his chair around to look at him. "I see no reason why it shouldn't," he said.
"There's just so many things that could go wrong. What if they realise immediately that Donghae and Siwon aren't who they say they are? What if they decide to just shoot?" He twisted his hands together, looking down at them in his lap. "What if Heechul is already dead?"
"There's no such thing as a foolproof plan, Zhou Mi. I'm reasonably confident that this is going to work. And if Heechul is already dead... I'm not even going to think like that. My awesome plan will go to waste if I thought like that."
He turned back to his screen, tapping his chin with a finger thoughtfully. His lips moved wordlessly as he highlighted a square, then clicked back off it.
"...Kui Xian?"
"Yes?"
Zhou Mi hesitated. "Nothing. I'm going to have a nap. Then I should be able to wake up for dinner."
Kyuhyun's shoulders had gone a little tense at the word 'sleep'. "Dinner," he said. "Right, food." He looked at Shindong, who sighed as his snake died.
"I'll go get something," he said.
It took another two days before the preparations for the plan were complete. Getting the uniforms had been quite difficult, but eventually Siwon had simply followed a guard home, then broke in and stole two. That was, according to Kyuhyun, nothing but an advantage, since they would then be on the lookout for people wearing the guard uniforms.
The uniform was lying across the bed that Kibum and Donghae had been sharing. He didn't really like to look at it, because it reminded him just how dangerous Donghae's task was. He'd heard the front door slam shut a little earlier, and assumed that it was Donghae coming back from debriefing with Kyuhyun.
Kibum didn't leave the room he was standing in. He'd entered it ten minutes earlier and was just standing there in the middle, looking at the furnishings that had once been so familiar to him. His bedroom. The place he had spent a large part of his childhood, and then almost all of his time as a teenage, in this room, only venturing out to buy heroin from the dealer a couple of alleys away.
It had started off simple enough, smoking cannabis because his friends were, and then because it seemed to open his mind to a level of genius that he couldn't normally seem to achieve. He was clever, and fiercely proud of it, but he didn't see himself as the best. He constantly needed to be better, and he felt better while he was high. Then it had become hard to reach that plane with just cannabis, so he'd moved on to shooting up on heroin.
From downstairs he heard Eunhyuk yell, "Bullshit!" and Donghae trying to say something over the top. As the argument continued, Kibum kicked a syringe under the broken bed and bent down to pick up a broken piece of porcelain in his hands.
He must have stood there for a while because there was a soft sound beside him, then footsteps stepping into the room. He swung around to see Donghae standing just inside the door. "Sorry," he said. "I wasn't sure whether I could come in or not."
It probably wasn't, not judging by the way Kibum's heart was pounding, but he said, "No, come in."
Donghae came in, accidently standing on some glass on the floor. It crushed beneath his feet, and he winced, lifting his foot up. "Lucky I was wearing shoes, huh."
"Yeah." Kibum managed to crack a smile. "What was Eunhyuk shouting about?"
"Kyuhyun says he can't come with us tomorrow. He says he has to stay with Yehsung in the new surgery."
"Ah." Kibum nodded, and placed the shard of porcelain on the windowsill. "Come on, we should start making some dinner."
"Kibum." Donghae reached out a hand and lay it on his arm, stopping him. "Have you ever told anyone about what happened in this room?"
It took Kibum a moment to answer. "Only Kyuhyun."
"Don't you want to tell anyone else?"
"Like you?" Kibum gave him a glare. "Don't act like you even care, you're just curious."
"No, I just think it would be--"
"Like you haven't worked it out already. The little you know of my past, the boards on the door, the glass and the fucking syringes. You already know what this room is."
"Your prison."
"She locked me up here, to make me go cold turkey or something. She got someone to fucking board up the door so I couldn't get out! And then, while I was practically dying in here, she... she died! I don't even know how! No struggle, no bodily injuries, she just died, and I was stuck in here, slowly starving, slowly going insane and--"
Donghae kissed him, a hand sliding into his hair. Kibum, tense before, instantly fell into it, the feel of Donghae's mouth against his more relaxing than any drug he'd ever tried in the past. "We found you though," Donghae murmured.
"Yeah, because you guys were looting," Kibum said. "And it was Kangin anyway, you weren't even there."
Donghae grinned, and kissed him again, softer this time. "Do you think that when we save Heechul and go back to the house, we'd be able to share your room?" Kibum gaped at him. "I don't know, I kind of like sharing a bed with you."
"You -- I --"
"I should go start on dinner!" Donghae said cheerfully, then turned to bound off down the stairs. Before he could disappear and leave Kibum gobsmacked, Kibum caught his wrist.
"Hyung," he said, suddenly serious. "If you get hurt tomorrow then I just want you to know that I -- I have always wanted to share a room with you." He groaned internally. Way to not even say what he wanted to say.
Donghae, however, was smiling. "Yeah," he said, and then winked. Kibum's grip around his wrist tightened, just a little. Did Donghae know what he was really trying to say? "I've always wanted to share with you too, Kibum." Another wink, and then Kibum let go, and as Donghae started down the stairs, shouting for Eunhyuk, Kibum stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.
The next morning was almost uncomfortably hot. Sitting in the van parked a couple of streets from the one leading up to the detention center, Donghae pulled at his collar. "What the hell is this?" he grouched.
"A tie, hyung," said Siwon, endlessly exasperated.
"Well, it's choking me."
"That's what it's supposed to do," Kyuhyun said absently. He was rapping his fingers off his computer table, looking actually a little nervous. They were waiting to hear from
the others saying that they were in place, and it seemed to be taking a while for that to come. Beside him on the bed, Zhou Mi rubbed at his forehead in his sleep. He'd wanted to stay awake for the attempted rescue, but had eventually passed out half an hour ago.
"If I ran a corrupt, unstable dictatorship," Donghae said loudly, "then I would ban neckties."
"Hyung, seriously--"
"Okay, we're in place," Eeteuk's voice said from the laptop speakers, crackling and fuzzy. Not the greatest line, but Kyuhyun had had to leave a lot of his best stuff behind.
"What took you so long?" Kyuhyun asked, almost snapping.
"Sorry, but it takes a while to secretly get to a place," Eeteuk said, sounding offended. "Especially when there's eight of you."
"You know what you have to do, right?"
"Kyuhyun," said Sungmin's voice, annoyed. "We know it. You've told us all fifty times. Just hurry up before someone catches us."
"Right." Kyuhyun closed his side of the connection, and turned to Donghae and Siwon. "Right, it's time."
Donghae swallowed, and then stood up, still pulling at his necktie. Siwon followed him out of the van. The last thing Kyuhyun heard before the door slammed shut was, "How are we supposed to defend ourselves when we can't breathe?"
"You've probably just got the tie too tight," Siwon said. "Why not just undo the top couple of buttons or something?"
"Because that wouldn't look professional," Donghae said.
Siwon slid his gaze across to him, then rolled his eyes. "Sometimes you really are too much, hyung."
There was silence for about ten seconds, at best, before Donghae said, "I feel really conspicuous in these outfits. Don't you feel conspicious?"
"Yes," Siwon said. "We're almost there, be quiet."
Donghae huffed, checked his gun was secure, then dropped his arms to his sides, his stride taking on some of the arrogance that all the detention center guards seemed to walk with. It was disconcerting at best; it really didn't fit with the Donghae that Siwon knew. He tried to copy it, and saw Donghae look across at him, a frown on his face. Maybe he too managed it too well.
The identification cards that they showed at the front gate were, obviously, fake, though the names and numbers on them belonged to people who did actually work at the center. They had timed their entrance with the arrival of a new inmate, and the man at the front desk was far more bothered about that than checking that their ID cards were completely real.
They ducked into the guard tower, not saying much. There was a walk through scanner, and after a quick glance at each other, they lay their guns on the roller and Siwon stepped through.
He had no metal or weapons on him, but the machine registered something. It didn't merely beep, it screamed, sirens wailing and a light on the top flashing, and when he looked back in horror at Donghae, he saw that an error warning was flashing at the top of the machine.
The entire room had gone still and silent, staring at them. The man who had been sitting behind a computer at the machine stood up, slowly. "What," said Donghae, voice light-hearted. "Aw man, did you bust the machine?"
The accent was wrong. It was too drawling, too full of slang, and Siwon realised that Donghae had done it on purpose. He could see what Siwon couldn't see: the message on the computer screen, and his accent was a warning. Something had gone wrong, and they needed to react, quickly.
"Shit," said the guy at the computer. "You don't have a fucking chip. You're--"
Donghae, who still had his gun, reached up and shot him in the head. Blood splattered up the wall, hair and skull sticking against it. "Holy fuck," said a voice behind him, and Donghae turned as fast as he could and shot that guy in the chest. The third man, the one who had been waiting for Siwon on the other side of the machine, turned to run out, gabbling in his chest piece about intruders in the front guard room. Siwon reached out, grabbed the back of his shirt, hauled him back and knocked him out. He slumped to the floor.
Donghae was breathing heavily. The inmate that had been with the guy who was now gurgling on the blood filling his lungs was shrieking, her hand clamped to her face. Donghae locked the front door before he grabbed her and shook her. "Shh," he said, holding a finger up to her face. "I need you to be quiet. We won't hurt you."
She started babbling in Mandarin Chinese, twisting to try to get out of his grip. Donghae let her go, and she hunkered down in the corner, head hiding between her legs. "You think she understood you?" Siwon asked.
"Doubtful, even if she did understand Korean she'll not be any state of mind to listen to us now." Donghae locked the other door to the room. All the windows were set high into the walls, the doors triple-bolt locked. "How long before we have company?"
"A matter of seconds," Siwon said. He fished out his earpiece from his pocket. "Hey, Kyuhyun, we're here."
Kyuhyun's voice took a few seconds to come back to him. "Great. Any hostages you can work with?"
"One guard and a new inmate. Donghae got a little trigger happy with the other two."
"Hey," Donghae said, looking up at him from where he was relieving the dead guards of all their weapons. "You'd be dead now if I hadn't."
Siwon could hear running outside. "Tell the others that it's time."
Outside, everyone was in such a panic at the breach in the front of the center that no one paid any attention to the slight tremor that ran through the ground just before one of the head guards tried to contact the people who had taken control of the entrance tower. The explosion that caused such a tremor, therefore, went completely unnoticed, around the back wall of the center.
As they snuck through the hole that Kangin had just made, Eeteuk muttered, "I don't know if I'm impressed with your knowledge of explosives."
"They've never let me down in the past," Kangin said cheerfully. He lay a hand on Eeteuk's shoulder. "You'll be okay with Ryeowook, won't you?"
"Of course I will," Eeteuk said.
"Just, be careful, hyung."
"I should be saying the same to you," Eeteuk said, then he patted his gun one more time, to check it was still there, then lay a hand on Ryeowook's shoulder, and ran around to the left building, where the generator was held.
After checking that there was no one around, Hankyung muttered, "Come on," and led them through a side door into the largest building of the compound. A lone guard was standing in there, leaning against the wall opposite, on duty and bored out of his brains. Their sudden arrival clearly gave him a shock, but before he could do anything to raise the alarm Sungmin's elbow shattered the bones in his temple and he fell to the floor, dead.
"Overkill much?" Kibum asked. Kangin snorted.
"Whatever, pacifist," he said. "Better dead than able to drop us in it. Where's the records room?"
"Third floor," Hankyung and Kibum said at the same time.
"Up to the third floor we go," Kangin said.
They had been warned against using their guns while inside the building. The noise would carry too far and alert anyone around them that someone was there, and where they were. The stairs were a short distance from where they were, and they seemed to be going too slowly, hesitating too much, for Henry's nerves to handle. When a guard stepped out of a room to the right straight onto them, he couldn't do much more than freeze in fear as the man seemed to lift his communication device in slow motion.
Kangin reached forward and headbutted the man, who crumpled to the floor, out cold. Then he pocketed the handheld communicator and calmly looked back at them. "Okay?"
"Henry, get behind me," Hankyung said tensely. Henry stepped back, letting out a long breath that he hadn't realised he'd been holding. Shindong lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
"Don't worry," he said. "We all have moments where we don't know how to react."
"Next time just shoot," Kangin said. "Fucking hell, I might have a concussion."
"Next time don't use your head," Shindong said, absolutely apathetic to Kangin's plight. Kangin glared at him, then motioned for them to follow his lead. Sungmin walked beside him, Kibum between them and Hankyung, Henry and Shindong in turn behind him.
There was no one on the stairs as they raced up two sets to the second floor, though they could hear voices and shouting coming from the hallways that they didn't venture down. A girl screamed in agony and Henry stopped still for a long second before Shindong nudged him forward.
Two guards were standing in front of the door to the records room. It was too far down the corridor for them to reach them before they sounded the alarm, and Kibum pulled a small flat screen out of his pocket and pressed a few buttons. "This will affect the entire area," he whispered. "I can only hold it for ten seconds at the most before start looking for the source of the disturbance, and that'll bring them straight to us."
"Quick," Sungmin said. "Got it."
"Okay," said Kibum, touched the screen in a couple of places and said, "Now!"
Hankyung and Sungmin sprinted down the hallway, Hankyung's hand already drawing back. The two guards didn't have time to draw their weapons, but they did have time to slap their communicators strapped to their chest and bark, "Intruders on third floor!" It was, however, pointless. Thanks to the white noise Kibum's machine was emitting, any electronic signal was lost in space.
Hankyung took the one closest to him, who was still shouting about intruders. His fist drove into the man's groin. As he doubled over, Hankyung caught him on the jaw and snapped his head back. He fell to the floor screaming in pain, and Hankyung kicked him in the stomach while he was down, just for the hell of it.
Sungmin's target was in the process of drawing his gun when Sungmin's foot caught his wrist. The weapon went skidding across the floor, as the man threw himself forward. His fist caught Sungmin on the jaw, but Sungmin elbowed him in the diaphram, knocking all the wind out of him. While the guy was gasping for air, Sungmin's arms fastened around his neck. Hankyung opened the door to the records room, and they dragged the guards through.
No one was in there, though they couldn't be sure that no one would come. Hankyung dumped his guy in the corner, the man still whimpering in pain, but there was a brief struggle with the guy Sungmin was holding, who had recovered his air. It ended when Sungmin pressed the end of his gun to the man's head and said, "Try me, go on."
Kibum, pocketing the device he'd used to scramble the communicators, slid onto a chair in front of a computer. Then he held a hand to his ear, pressing a button on the piece he wore there. "Kyuhyun, can you hear me?"
Brief pause. "Yes, I can."
"We're in the records room now."
There was some static which Kibum assumed to be the sound of Kyuhyun sighing in relief. "Good, I wasn't sure if you'd even get that far."
"Glad to know you have so much confidence in us," Kibum said. He tapped the keyboard, and a login screen came up. "Tell me when you start to get some feedback."
He worked for a couple of minutes in silence, as Kangin paced nervously up and down the room and Hankyung sat tapping his foot impatiently. Sungmin had pushed the guy he'd been holding down onto the floor, gun trained on his face, not even looking away for a second. Eventually Hankyung said, "We've got maybe ten minutes until they find the guards we killed downstairs and someone comes looking."
"Don't rush me, hyung," Kibum said, voice brittle. "Do you even realise how much security they've got around these cameras?"
"Hey," said Sungmin, without taking his eyes off the guard he was watching. "Do you think this guy will know where Heechul is being held?"
"I don't know, let's ask him," Kangin said, coming to a stop next to them. He hunkered down in front of the guard. "You seen a guy around here? Goes by Kim Heechul. About the same height as this guy" -- he pointed at Sungmin -- "but with longish blonde hair. Seen him around?"
"No," said the man defiantely.
"Oh, really?" Kangin said, and then in one smooth movement, he reached out, took hold of the man's left wrist, pulled it towards him and broke his index finger. The man's scream of pain echoed through the room before Sungmin clamped a hand over his mouth.
"Keep it down, would you?" Kibum asked, sending them an irritated look. "This isn't easy."
"Sorry," Kangin said sarcastically. "Like it's our fault this guy has a low pain threshold."
"Kibum's right though," said Shindong. "You're going to bring everyone running."
"No, they'll just think it's one of the inmates," Hankyung said, staring coldly at the man. "Go on."
Kangin started playing with the middle finger on the left hand. "You say you don't know anything, huh?" The man shook his head, mumbling something under Sungmin's hand. Slower this time, so the man knew that the pain was coming, Kangin bent his finger back until there was a sickeningly crack. The man jerked under Sungmin's hold, shouts muffled.
"What if he doesn't know anything?" muttered Sungmin.
"No, he knows something," Kangin said. "I can see it in his eyes."
He pulled the man's arm into the hole made between his body and his elbow and, tightening his hold, began to push the man's elbow up while holding his forearm down. The man's eyes widened and he began thrashing to get out, as Kangin inched closer and closer to dislocating his elbow. Eventually, just at the snapping point, he began saying something loudly under Sungmin's hand.
"Wait, wait," Sungmin said. Kangin loosened his hold again, and Sungmin took his hand away.
"-- Jesus fucking Christ, you guys are nuts, what's it got to do with you where --"
Kangin tightened his hold.
"-- fuck fuck, okay, okay, there's some guy, a new one, they don't let the likes of me watch him, but he's being held in the basement somewhere, I really don't know where, I just know that he's there."
Kangin released him. The guy slumped down, clutching his broken fingers to his chest, making no noise but biting his lip so hard that he was drawing blood. Hankyung grabbed the guy he'd dumped in the corner, who had stopped making any noise a while earlier, and shook him. "What's your login information?" he demanded. The man didn't answer. Hankyung grabbed him by the throat. "What the fuck is it?"
The man gasped out a username and password, and Sungmin took a computer next to Kibum, entering the information. Henry sat down in front of a computer on the other side of the room, forehead supported by his hands. As Sungmin tried to locate more in depth plans of the compound than the ones he had, Kibum gave a yell of triumph.
"Right, I've got them," Kyuhyun's voice said in his ear. "Have you found out anything about Heechul?"
"He's in the basement."
"You'll never get in there," said the guy that Hankyung had half-strangled, rubbing his throat. "Do you even realise how much security there is down there? They've got every locking system known to man."
"Could someone please shut him up?" Kibum asked, and Hankyung hit him over the head with his gun. The man fell to the floor, cold out. Hankyung turned back to Kibum coolly.
"How do we get past those?" he asked.
Kibum fished around in his pocket. He lifted his hand, holding a small computer chip in his hand. "This should work," he said. "Haven't tested it before though, so I've got no idea." He inserted the chip into the computer, worked for two more minutes, then said, "Right, you've got fifteen minutes before it stops working. You need to get to Heechul before then."
"What did you do?" Shindong asked, leaning over his shoulder to look at the computer.
"It's a simple anti-lock system. Trips all electronic locks in the area, even ones that run on iris recognition technology. It's only a prototype though, so you'll have to be quick." He looked up. "Hey, Henry, remember, I told you--"
Sungmin pushed his chair back. "Right, it looks like it's in the basement of this building. We should leave now."
"Guys," Kibum said, staring at where Henry had been. "Where the hell is Henry?"
...................................................
"What--" Shindong looked at where Henry had been, then at the door. Hankyung was closest to it, face caught in an expression of semi-confusion. "He was just there, I didn't even hear the door."
"He didn't go past," Hankyung said. "What the hell?" He leaned out of the door, looking up and down the hallway. He mouthed something, that much Shindong saw, then pulled back in and said, "Shit, he's disappeared."
"Fucking hell, we don't have time for this," Kangin said. "If he wants to break formation and run off, then it's on his own head, okay? We have less than fifteen minutes now, let's do what we came here to do."
Shindong and Sungmin exchanged looks, then looked at Kibum, who said, "No, absolutely not. Kangin-hyung's right. We don't have time to go looking for him. We have to leave now."
Sungmin sighed. "Fine, but I'm not happy about it."
"The kid knows where the exit is," Kangin said.
"Come on," said Hankyung, waving for them to follow him out of the room. Sungmin brought up the rear, one hand on his gun at all times. Things had gone too easy until then. Henry disappearing had thrown a spanner in the works. His mind was half running away with notions of some sort of invisible sniper, picking them off one by one, but it was far more likely that Henry had left of his own accord.
To what purpose then? Was it that Henry was their betrayer, the one who had sold Heechul out? This latest turn of affairs didn't seem to point to anything other than that, but Henry had no motive, other than that one argument with Heechul a month or so back. There had been nothing secretive about Henry that Sungmin had been able to see, but then Sungmin knew very little about him.
But Hankyung -- he knew a lot about Henry. They were close; after all, hadn't Henry been staying with Hankyung while they were all in self-imposed exile? Hankyung, however, wasn't showing any signs of worry about Henry. No doubt they'd all had the same thoughts that Sungmin was having, doubting Henry, but Hankyung was showing none of that. He was intently fixed on the task ahead.
Hankyung knew something.
Sungmin was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't even notice that they'd stumbled across a guard before Hankyung had already broken the man's neck. He kicked the body aside, a disgusted look on his face, and leaned down to check on the girl that the man had been beating. Then he stood up again sharply. "She's breathing, just. She'll live. Come on."
As they passed, Kibum turned the girl into the recovery position, just for safety. Sungmin let out a shaking breath, choosing to bring up any doubts he had about Henry later, after they'd all survived this. It wasn't possible that Hankyung would still be friends with the younger boy if he had anything to do with what had happened with Heechul. It must be something else.
Not that it really mattered, however, if Henry was killed doing whatever he was currently doing.
By the time they reached the entrance to the basement, they had less than ten minutes remaining on the clock. Kibum kept checking the count down on his watch every ten seconds. There was no one guarding the door to the basement, presumably because you could only get inside that area with -- Kibum stared at the door. There were five different password systems and retina and fingerprint recognition technology.
"They're going to wish they just stuck with a good old lock and key," he said, as he easily pulled the door open. Kangin slapped him on the back.
"I was thinking that chip wasn't going to work," he said. "Nice going."
"Of course it was going to work," Kibum said, irritated, as they made their way slowly down the hallway. "Kyuhyun was the one who--"
Whatever Kyuhyun had done, they didn't know, because they were interrupted by a man in a long white lab coat walking straight in on them. He shouted out once, then Sungmin was on him, hand over his mouth and gun under his jaw. "Hi," he said sweetly. "Could you tell us where Kim Heechul is being held? Thanks."
The man said something muffled, then nodded, slowly. "Great!" said Sungmin, moving the gun to the back of the man's head. "Go on then."
The man led them through a stretch of empty hallways until they came to another nondescript door in a series of nondescript doors. The man, presumably a scientist, opened the door and motioned inside. Sungmin laughed, devoid of humour. "No, you go in first."
The man did, then Sungmin followed. He felt Hankyung close behind him. The room wasn't that big, and most of it was taken up by a chair which looked remarkably similar to the one that Kyuhyun used for taking the chips out. A thin body was strapped to the chair, leather restraints over his wrists, forearms, stomach, thighs, calves and ankles, pulled tight. A gag pulled his mouth open into a horrible grimace, and another strap lay across his eyes, blocking his sight. It didn't move an inch.
It was also wearing Heechul's clothing.
Kangin stopped dead as he came in. "Shit, is he still alive?"
"Jesus fucking Christ," Hankyung said, his voice breaking, and then the body did move, jerking suddenly, trying to twist his head from side to side, limbs pulling at the things keeping him down against the chair. "Fuck," choked Hankyung, "fuck, get him out of that thing."
Kibum kept a gun trained on the scientist who had led them there. Sungmin was at Heechul first, starting with the legs, Kangin joining on the other side. Shindong started on the right arm. Hankyung bent over Heechul's head, fingers fumbling with the buckles on the strap covering Heechul's eyes. "Chul," he murmured as his grip slipped off and he had to start again. "Heechul, it's us. Don't worry, we've come for you."
Except when he did eventually get the strap off, Heechul's eyes showed nothing but absolute fear, open wide and practically begging. Hankyung lay his forehead against his for a moment, then worked on the knot keeping the gag in place. Heechul's legs were free, Sungmin working at the one holding Heechul's stomach down, Kangin at the other arm.
The second the gag was off, Heechul took a breath like a man just saved from drowning and immediately gasped out, "It wasn't me, Hankyung. Some stupid bitch made me, they've got a fucking chip in me, they're controlling me--"
"Shh," said Hankyung. He leaned down and kissed him softly. "We know. Can you stand?"
The answer very soon turned out to be "no" because as soon as they lifted him to a sitting position to help him to his feet, he lost consciousness, slumping forward and almost off the chair. Hankyung caught him, pulling him to his chest, Heechul's legs hanging uselessly to the floor. "Shit," said Kangin in a long hiss, then he turned and punched the scientist that they'd taken hostage in the face. "You fucking bastards," he snarled, as the man reeled back, blood streaming from his nose.
"Leave it," Shindong said. "Kibum, how much time do we have?"
"Five minutes," said Kibum. "If we don't get out of the basement before then, we'll be stuck. The locks work both ways. It'll be a bottleneck so could you hurry up?"
"Here, hyung, I'll take him," said Sungmin, but Hankyung shook his head and started trying to pull Heechul onto his back, looping his arms around in neck and holding them there. Shindong lay a hand on his shoulder.
"Hankyung, you and Sungmin are our best. We need you two to get us out of here. I'll carry Heechul."
Hankyung hesitated, before putting Heechul back onto the chair, holding him up. Shindong copied Hankyung's motions until Heechul was safely on his back. Hankyung hauled the scientist up off the floor and pressed his gun to his temple. He snarled something in Chinese and everyone stared at him, including the guy whose life was in serious danger if Hankyung couldn't calm down. Hankyung took a deep breath and said, his accent stronger than ever, "Take us back to the doors. If we're too late out, then you're going to open the doors, okay?"
Except it was too late. As they began to leave the room, a man in a military uniform almost passed them shouting, "There's been a shooting on the third -- holy shit, breach in the basement, breach in the--" and then Kangin shot him in the chest.
"I guess we've been blown," he said. A few scientists stuck their heads out of doorways then retreated as Kangin waved his gun at them, then at the man dead on the floor. Sungmin rolled his eyes but didn't say anything. "Well, this can't be good."
"They'll be sending people over here right now," Kibum said. "Just keep going." Then he pulled his mouthpiece up so he could contact Kyuhyun. "We need the distraction now."
"What?" asked Kyuhyun. He'd been watching the building that Siwon and Donghae were holed up in. The men outside didn't really seem like they knew how to react to such a situation and most of them were just hanging around waiting for further orders. He'd lost sight of the others after they'd gone down into the basement and beyond the realm of his cameras.
"Kibum, it's far too early. Do you even have Heechul?"
There was a pause, an interference of static. "Yes," Kibum said eventually. "Can you hear me? Stupid fucking -- we've got him and we could really use a distraction right now."
"Right on it," said Kyuhyun, cutting that connection and opening the one he had to Eeteuk. Behind him, he almost imagined Zhou Mi doing a victory dance, hands flailing in the air, but in reality he was still asleep, curled on his side with one hand hiding his face.
"Eeteuk, can you hear me?"
"Yeah, I've got you," Eeteuk said, as loudly as he dared into his mouthpiece. Beside him, Ryeowook's head jerked up, staring up at Eeteuk from where he sat on the floor. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong, they've got Heechul. They need a distraction."
Something must have shown on Eeteuk's face, because before he'd even reacted to that verbally, Ryeowook said, "What is it? Did they find Heechul-hyung?"
Eeteuk nodded at him, then said, "We're on it," to Kyuhyun.
The generator was held in the east building, taking up most of the structure. In a world where electricity was prone to going out simply because there weren't enough resources to keep the power stations going, it made sense that the detention center had its own generator, since most of the locking systems were electronically run. If the electricity went down, they could have been looking at some sort of a mass break out, which was only partly the reason why, while the entire compound had been distracted by the two men in the entrance building, Eeteuk and Ryeowook had sneaked into the generator room and attached a not inconsiderable amount of explosive devices to anything that they thought would make a rather large bang.
Now they were back outside of the compound, at the hole that they'd first come through, and had been waiting for their signal ever since. Now that it had come, Eeteuk took a deep breath and pressed the detonator that he'd been holding as gently as a new born baby all day.
There was a pause. Then the entire east building seemed to break apart in slow motion, an explosion that was far bigger than Eeteuk had ever expected it to be. He almost lost his balance as the ground juddered under his feet, nearly falling on top of Ryeowook. He watched with something akin to horror as chunks of the building seemed to fly, and flames licked the air. He realised as he smelled petrol in the air that they'd somehow managed to get one of the fuel tanks.
"Oh my god," whispered Ryeowook.
"I guess Kangin really does know about explosives," Eeteuk said weakly. His attention was so focused on the destruction he'd just caused -- and whether any of it had hurt any of his friends -- that he didn't notice Henry ducking through the hole next to them until Henry said his name.
"Holy crap," Donghae yelped as the explosion caused him to loose his footing, falling over a chair leg and onto his ass. Their hostage guard, who had come to a few minutes earlier, took advantage of one of his captors being distracted and jumped on top of him, wrestling for the gun.
Siwon, whose attention had been drawn by the sound of the explosion, his ears ringing with how loud it had been, reacted too slowly. By the time he crossed the room, Donghae was out cold, bleeding from a head wound, and the other man had his gun. He swung it up and pointed it at Siwon's chest. Siwon stopped dead. They stared in silence at each other for a long minute, then Siwon took one step forward, testing the waters.
The man lowered his angle and shot him on the foot.
The noise that Siwon made didn't feel human, just an inarticulate yell of pain, as he fell to the ground, curling in on himself as blood filled up his shoe and then began to seep through the hole that had been ripped into it. The girl that had been sitting so quietly in the corner that they'd almost forgotten about her screamed too, which only alerted attention to her.
The guard crossed the room and grabbed her by the arm before she could try running. He hauled her to her feet and pressed the gun to her temple. Even sitting a few metres away, Siwon could see that she was shaking, and not just because she was sobbing. "Right," said the guard. "If you don't want to see this girl get her brains blown out, you're going to stay still and quiet and not move, okay? Good."
Having no desire to see anyone's brains blown out, Siwon didn't move, until the guy moved the gun from the girl's temple and pressed to Siwon's forehead. He blinked, once, as the trigger was cocked, then braced himself as the man smirked, then the girl he was holding sunk her teeth into his arm.
His arm was jerked upwards even as he let the shot go, so Siwon felt the bullet graze the top of his head. He let out a shaking breath and then, focusing his attention so that he blocked all the pain from his foot out, he used his uninjured foot to kick the legs of the guard out so that he fell onto his back on the floor, hard.
While he was still trying to catch his breath, Siwon managed to crawl on top and brought his fist back and crunched it into the man's face, again and again and again, until the man lay still, his face a blood covered mess. Only then did Siwon let himself roll off and lie on his back. He must have passed out for a couple of moments, because the next thing he knew, the girl was shaking him awake.
"Are you okay?" she was asking in Chinese. Her eyes were puffy and red, tears in streaks down her cheeks. She was covered in blood too. "Are you awake, are you okay?"
Siwon moaned and fought back a wave of nausea. "Yes," he said eventually. "I'm okay." He tipped his head to the side to try to find Donghae, but he was still unconscious. The girl started saying something else but Siwon couldn't concentrate. He held up his hand and said softly, "Slowly, slowly."
"His breathing is shallow," she said, Siwon only just able to understand her Mandarin. "I put him in the recovery position but I don't know--"
"Siwon, can you hear me?"
It took most of Siwon's remaining energy to lift his hand and press it to his ear. "Yes, Kyuhyun. I can hear you."
"We've got Heechul, they're on their way out. Ryeowook and Eeteuk set off the detonations but it's burning faster than we expected."
As if on cue, something else exploded outside, possibly one of the cars that were kept in the open drive up. The floor shook again, the girl flinched, and pain raced through Siwon's body, starting with his foot.
"It's going to be on you in a matter of minutes, Siwon. You need to get out of there now."
Siwon laughed, feeling exhausted now. "No can do, Kyuhyun. Bastard shot me in the foot. I can't walk and Donghae's out cold. I've got some girl in here with me but she can't do anything, particularly not carry both of us."
There was a long pause, then Kyuhyun said, "What do you mean, Siwon?"
"I don't mean anything. I'm just saying that there's no way we're going to be able to get out of here."
"I'll sort it, Siwon."
The connection was cut off and Siwon tipped his head back, breathing heavily. The girl hovered over him, looking like she wanted to remove his shoe. "Hey," he said, grabbing her wrist. "I need you to get out of here. This whole place is probably on fire right now. This is your last chance to escape."
She shook her head and rubbed at her wet face. "What about you and your friend?"
Siwon smiled. "Something will get sorted out," he said. He didn't believe a word of it.
Underground, the explosion felt as though it had taken place right above their heads. The ceiling shook, plaster drifting down onto their heads, and in other rooms they could hear things falling from shelves and off desks as the after shocks pulsed through. Kangin pumped a fist in the air in victory. "Yeah, I've still got it," he crowed.
"You could have brought the ceiling down on us," Kibum said, punching him in the arm. Kangin socked him back.
"You think they're going to care about what's happening down here when there's shit exploding up there?"
"They probably will give some sort of a shit," Hankyung said. He lay a hand on Heechul's shoulder and continued, "We need to get out of here now, before anyone does arrive."
That one man in military uniform seemed to be the only one down there and so getting out of the basement wasn't as difficult as they'd been anticipating. Once on the ground floor level, it became easy to see why no one was coming to see what was happening in the basement. Outside a furious fire was raging, the entire east building a mass of flames, jumping from vehicle to vehicle outside, and quickly licking its way along to the other buildings.
In addition to that, some of the inmates had clearly realised that the locking systems on their cells were, somehow, switched off, and had taken advantage of this. Word had spread and the guards now had a full scale break out on their hands. They had no time for anything happening in the top secret basement that most of them didn't even know about.
"Look at that," Kangin said, pausing at the window and looking out at the fire burning outside. There was an open window along the hall and even at that distance it was possible to smell the petrol in the air. The fire seemed to light his face up red, almost like his skin was burnt already. "It's kind of beautiful."
"Here," said Hankyung, turning away from the window and towards Shindong. "I'll take him. They aren't going to care about us."
Silently Shindong handed Heechul over. He was so still that for a moment Sungmin had a horrible thought that he'd died in the short space of time between that room and then, but then he stirred, and muttered something, and turned into Hankyung's chest. After taking a deep breath and pressing his face into Heechul's hair, Hankyung said, "Let's get the fuck out of here."
"What about Henry?"
Hankyung looked at Sungmin, then shook his head, lowering his eyes. "He'll be fine. He'll hopefully be waiting for us."
"Hankyung, what's going on?"
"I don't have time to explain, Sungmin. Just leave it for now. You'll see when we meet the others."
The break out was almost at a full scale riot by then and they were forced to use their elbows, and more, liberally to force their way through. It was hard to work out which way they were supposed to go back since they had altered their course quite dramatically by their detour to the basement. By the time they managed to find the back entrance that they had come through, the fire outside was choking the air with smoke.
Coughing as they ran, they could still hear random explosions as the fire met other cars or fuel reserves. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of shouting, the faint whine of the few fire engines that the city had in the distance. They paid it no attention and kept running until they came to the hole in the wall.
Like Hankyung had said, Henry was there. He was sitting on the ground with his arm around a girl with chin length hair. They couldn't make anything else out because she had her face hidden in his chest, his head lowered as he murmured things softly to her. He didn't even look up as Hankyung said, "You found her, then."
"He won't tell us who she is," Ryeowook said.
Kangin reached down, as if to touch the girl on the shoulder, but Henry jerked her away. She fell back a little, saw Kangin reaching down for her, and in a moment her expression changed to sheer terror, and she cried out a little, trying to pull back away. Kangin quickly retracted his hand, looking uncomfortable and freaked out, and Henry took her face in his hands.
"Amber," he said, smiling softly at her. "Amber, it's okay." Then he started speaking in English, pulling her closer towards him, until her face was in his chest again and her shaking was down to a minimum.
Eeteuk lay a hand against Heechul's cheek and said, "You got him, then."
"Yes," said Hankyung. He wasn't looking at Eeteuk, he was looking at the building that was spewing smoke into the air. "I hope that place burns to the fucking ground."
"I don't," said Ryeowook in a wavering voice. "There are still too many people left in."
There was a brief pause, then Kangin shook his head and said, "We should get back to Kyuhyun. We don't want to get caught at this stage in the game."
Sungmin nodded, and leaned down to see if Henry needed any help. Almost as if she could sense that he was near, the girl flinched and Henry gave Sungmin a look that seemed to apologise for the girl's behaviour. Sungmin asked, "Has she been in the center?"
"Yeah," said Henry, looking around at them pleadingly. "She was -- we were coming here and I couldn't bear the thought of just leaving her here, guys, she's--"
"Henry, you can explain this stuff later," Hankyung said. "We should leave."
Henry climbed to his feet, helping the girl up with him. Her legs seemed pretty unstable, so that she stumbled into him. "Do you want some help?" Shindong asked, but Henry shook his head.
"It'll be better if you don't," he said. "Thanks, though." He asked her something in English, motioning to his back as he did so, so Sungmin assumed that he was asking if she wanted to be carried. She shook her head, hair covering her face, and Henry nodded and pulled her close to him, halfway to holding her up. "Come on," he said, face determined. "Let's go."
They'd only take a few steps when Kibum said, out of the blue, "What? Oh, Kyuhyun, it's--" Then he stopped, looking confused. "Okay? Hey, guys, just wait a second." They stopped again and this time, Heechul's eyes moved, then opened.
"Hankyung?"
"Yeah." Hankyung bent his head, closing his eyes as their foreheads touched.
"What are you doing here? Where am I?"
"Don't you remember? We just rescued you."
"No, I--" Heechul frowned, closing his eyes. "I can't remember that." Hankyung didn't say anything, too busy thinking about how badly he had missed this. "Someday you won't need to come get me from whichever hell hole place I've ended up in."
"I thought life was the hell hole," Hankyung said. Heechul didn't smile at that. He just twisted his fingers in Hankyung's collar.
Behind them, the confused expression on Kibum's face had fallen away into raw fear, as he slumped back against the wall. "What," he said, lips pale, "are you trying to tell me, Kyuhyun?"
"What's wrong?" asked Shindong.
"So there's, Kyuhyun, there must be something we can do. We can't just leave them there."
"What the fuck is happening?" Kangin asked, and Eeteuk hissed at him. "Hyung, is this really the time?"
"It's Donghae," Kibum said, letting his hand fall to his side. "And Siwon too. They're...trapped."
Sungmin's mouth twitched, like he wanted to smile; like he thought that Kibum was just kidding with him. "What do you mean, trapped?"
"Siwon says that Donghae's got some sort of head wound, and Siwon's been shot in the foot," Kibum said. Sungmin pressed a hand to his mouth, shaking his head. "They haven't been able to escape from the fire. They're...trapped."
Almost like he didn't even have a second thought about it, Sungmin turned and took off in a sprint for the hole that they had just come through. Shindong reached out and grabbed his arm, yanking him back. "Sungmin, where the hell are you going?"
"I'm going to get Siwon," Sungmin said, glaring at him. "Where the hell do you think I'm going?"
"You heard what Kibum said, they're trapped."
"Kyuhyun's not always right," Sungmin said. He threw Shindong off and started running, disappearing through the gap before anyone else could do anything to stop him. Shindong cursed and ran after him.
"What's happening?" Heechul murmured, eyes closed again, seeming like he was on the verge of falling back asleep.
"Nothing," said Hankyung, trying to make his voice as calm as possible.
There was another silence, then Kibum turned and started running back as well. "Christ," said Kangin. "What do we do now?"
"We need to get Heechul back to the surgery," Eeteuk said firmly, though he kept glancing back at the fire. "That's our priority now. That's what we came for, nothing else. We have to get him checked out."
"And Henry's friend," Ryeowook said. "I don't think she's, well."
"I want her to get checked out too," Henry said. "But Siwon-hyung and Donghae-hyung--"
"They'll take care of it," Hankyung said heavily. "We should go."
Kyuhyun sighed and pillowed his head in his hands, A tension headache had started up not long ago and the conversation he'd just had with Kibum hadn't helped it at all. He should have contacted Eeteuk; he'd known how Kibum felt about Donghae. He was just glad that he hadn't had to break the news to Sungmin himself. Not that he didn't fully expect Sungmin to go running back in there like some sort of hero. This was Siwon they were talking about.
He turned in his chair and lay a hand on Zhou Mi's sleeping shoulder. "I wish you were awake," he said wistfully. "I need you to tell me when I've done the right thing. I don't have enough morals without you."
There was no reply. He hadn't been expecting one anyway. He turned back to his computers, scanning the screens in the hope of seeing someone, anyone, that he recognised. The fire was right up against the building now, but no one was paying attention to that when they were too busy trying to save their own skins.
The back door of the van banged open. His hand jumped to his gun automatically, though he thought that it was only going to be the ones who hadn't gone back for Siwon and Donghae coming back. He turned his head and saw a tall man climbing in the back of the van, a gun pointed at him. "Hello, Kyuhyun," he said.
Kyuhyun forced himself to be still and calm. "Hey, Dad."
.............................................
Under normal circumstances, Sungmin was the type of person who would stop and help people that were in trouble. He could usually afford to, since he was able to defend himself if anything turned out to be a trap, and he was kind enough to want to help. Under this particular circumstance, however, he didn't even give a second thought to the other people racing around him. Their screaming and panic didn't penetrate his thoughts. They weren't his concern.
The further into the compound they got, the more rubble they were supposed to clamber over -- and the hotter the fire got. It was spreading quickly, and there was a risk of being trapped within the walls, unable to escape, but Shindong was having a hard enough time climbing over giant pieces of the building that had been blown to smithereens and keeping Sungmin in his eye sight to really worry about it. Better to try to get Sungmin to see sense, then worry about how exactly they were supposed to get out of the place.
The building that Siwon and Donghae had been instructed to lock themselves in, and which they now found themselves trapped in, had, apparently, only just missed being crushed by falling debris. The fire was creeping ever closer, growing hotter still, and Shindong could see that Sungmin was beginning to slow in his frantic race. The air was thick with petrol fumes and smoke and when Sungmin doubled over, coughing, Shindong managed to stagger towards him.
"Sungmin, this is crazy," he shouted. "You'll just end up killing yourself."
"I can't just leave him," Sungmin shouted back, then pulled his t-shirt up so that it covered his mouth and continued onwards. Shindong sighed, pulled his neck-tie over his mouth, and then almost lost his balance as Kibum crashed into his back.
"Sorry," Kibum gasped, eyes red and streaming. "I couldn't see."
"What the hell are you doing here?" Shindong asked, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him. Kibum stared coughing, and Shindong released him, worry nudging at him. Kibum's lungs still weren't in the greatest of states; smoke and fumes like this could probably affect him more quickly than Sungmin.
"Donghae," Kibum said, taking a few steps forward. "He's in there too."
"Kibum, you should have just left it to us. If we can't save them, then it's probably useless you being here."
"I know," said Kibum, stiffening just a little. He refused to meet Shindong's eyes. "But I wanted to come anyway."
The door that they came to was, they knew, only one of two doors into the building. The fire, however, thanks to a parked car that had been left too conveniently outside of the other door, had already reached it, and was licking at that wall. Their only chance was the one that they stood in front of; the one which was covered by a large slab of concrete which had crushed a guard and blocked the door.
Sungmin tried to push at it, shouting back at Shindong when someone on the other side of the door tried to push it open, where it banged against the concrete. "Siwon--" Sungmin cried, but it wasn't him. It was the scared face of a young woman, trying desperately to get out of the building but unable to. It must have been a hostage that they'd taken.
The girl didn't seem to see them to begin with; as soon as she realised that her escape route was blocked, she turned and started shouting frantically in Chinese, practically sobbing in fear. One of her arms stretched out, grappling as if to find the source of what was keeping her trapped, and Sungmin grabbed it. Her face swung towards him, eyes begging.
He didn't know enough Chinese to help reassure her, so instead he tried to look around her body in the gap for Siwon, but couldn't see. "Siwon," he shouted, as Shindong and Kibum tried to push the concrete away. It didn't budge. "Siwon, are you there?"
"Sungmin?"
His name was barely audible, but it was there. The weakness in his voice caused panic to grip Sungmin's chest. The girl was freaking out again, talking far too fast in a language that Sungmin didn't understand, her hands gripping his like a lifeline.
"Sungmin, we need your help with this," Shindong panted. "We're not going to be able to move it unless we tip it or something."
"Siwon," Sungmin shouted through the gap. "Don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"You're crazy, hyung."
Sungmin froze for a second while peeling the girl's frightened grip off his hand. "Don't call me hyung," he shouted, trying to be playfully cross, but the smoke was making his voice too husky for that. "You know it sounds too formal."
Siwon didn't answer.
Sungmin dropped the girl's hand. She clearly didn't understand what was going on, and the expression on her face seemed to scream that she thought she was being abandoned. Sungmin gave her a tight smile, then turned his attention to the obstacle.
It took a minute for the three of them to feel comfortable about their positions, then another minute before they felt that they had the oxygen level worthy of the job. Eventually, though, Sungmin gave the countdown, and he pushed while the other two pulled, and the chunk of concrete lifted a little from the ground. "Right!" Sungmin shouted, and shoved just a bit harder, until Shindong could reach around and get his fingers under the bottom of it and yank it up so that it tipped on an edge.
When Sungmin gave a final push, it almost fell onto Kibum's foot, who had to quickly jump out of the way. He gave Sungmin a half-hearted glare, looking too tired to really give a damn. Sungmin winced in apology, just as the girl in the room burst through the door straight into his chest. He winced, then passed her over to Shindong, who took one look at her petrified face and lifted her up over one shoulder. Strangely enough, she fell still after he did that.
"Will you need my help in there?" he asked, nodding his head at the doorway, where there was no sign of movement. Sungmin shook his head as Kibum pushed past him. Shindong nodded. "I'll take her back, then come back for you."
Sungmin nodded tensely, then ducked into the room.
"I'm surprised you recognised me."
Kyuhyun shrugged, leaning casually against his desk, though his gun was still burning for use against his thigh. "You haven't changed all that much," he said. "I'm surprised you recognisedme."
His dad smiled, sitting in a chair opposite him. His gun was out; the ball was in his court. "You look the same," he said. "Taller, thinner, but it was obviously you."
"So, what?" Kyuhyun asked, feeling like this nostalgia was pretty pointless. He wanted to get to the point of why he was currently sitting across from the father that he hadn't seen for eleven years. "Why are you here?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
Kyuhyun snorted. "Oh, it is, but I'd like to believe that it's not true." There was silence, his father just staring at him expectantly. Eventually Kyuhyun sighed and gave him what he wanted. "You're working for the Institution, aren't you?"
"Not through any desire of my own," his father said, almost like he was trying to reassure him, but Kyuhyun hadn't seen him in eleven years; the level of fuck he gave about what he was doing with his life right now wasn't particularly high. "No, I was kind of forced into it, you know? Unforeseen circumstances."
"Really," Kyuhyun said flatly.
There was a shout in his ear: Eeteuk trying to get in contact with him. It was distracting, pointless. He couldn't exactly help anyone right now. He pulled his ear piece out and lay it against the desk, almost slamming it down. Then he left out one long breath and felt the apathy wash over him again. That was better than anger. He could work with apathy.
"Yes," said his father. Their voices were polite, like they were old acquaintances discussing the weather. "You see, when your genius son rips out his chip and runs off to start a terrorist group, then they tend to like to keep the family close."
"Oh," said Kyuhyun. Maybe he was supposed to feel guilty about that, but his father hadn't exactly supported Kyuhyun, so he wasn't likely to feel any sympathy for him.
"So thanks to you, I've been working for eleven years for the Institution. Luckily they had some use for me, being a doctor and all, I get to do a few experiments on political prisoners or the poor souls who get pulled into the detention center. Your mother wasn't so lucky. They shipped her off to a camp on the south coast. No contact since then. She could be dead for all I know."
To Kyuhyun's right, one of the screens had been completely covered by smoke as the fire spread into the middle building. The other camera feeds were full of people racing here and there, trying to evacuate or, as seemed to be the case with most of the guards, leaving their wards locked in their cells and saving their own skin. Kyuhyun turned away from them.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked.
His father looked gobsmacked. "An apology would be nice," he spluttered.
Kyuhyun sighed. "Look, an apology isn't going to change the past. I wasn't the one who did that, was I? I did what you told me, I got out of your house and then I did what I needed to do to survive. The Institution is the one who made your life a living hell."
"She's your mother."
"You could be talking about a stranger for all I care," Kyuhyun said. "I'm supposed to feel guilty for it? I'm sorry that it happened but it's nothing to do with me."
His dad stared at him silently for a minute. Then he said, "I always knew you were cold, but not this much of a heartless bastard."
"Yeah, I'm a heartless bastard," Kyuhyun said, shrugging. "You're the one who threw me out of the house when I was thirteen, dad, because you were too scared to look after your own son. Forgive me if I'm not overly forgiving of you."
There was a pause. Zhou Mi rolled onto his back, rubbed once at his face, then dropped his arm. Kyuhyun's father glanced quickly at him, then back at Kyuhyun. "Okay," he said. "I admit that it was the wrong decision to make."
"Whatever. If you're here to kill me, then could you get it over with? I'm not exactly the biggest fan of playing catch up, especially when there's so much to catch up on."
His dad laughed, devoid of any real humour. "Oh, I'm not here to kill you, Kyuhyun. This gun is just for my own protection. You've got some pretty dangerous friends -- but then I'm sure you know that. No, I'm just here to pass some information on."
"Well, it would be nice if you could get on with it," Kyuhyun said. "I don't really have all day for this."
"I think you'll be interested in this, though. I think you'll be very interested in this." He paused, possibly just for dramatic effect, and then said, in a rather abrupt change of subject, "I'm surprised Zhou Mi stayed with you."
"Uh." Kyuhyun glanced at Zhou Mi's sleeping face. "Well, wouldn't he stay?"
"He wasn't tied to you," his father said. "It wasn't like there was anything really keeping him as part of your little group, was there?"
Kyuhyun contemplated letting his father know exactly what had kept Zhou Mi part of the group, exactly what tied them together, but he got the feeling that his father already knew and was just trying to rile him up. Hadn't that been one of the problems when he was younger, his friendship with Zhou Mi that sometimes seemed to go too far? Besides, it was really none of his father's business. In the end, he just stayed silent.
"And then," he continued, once he realised Kyuhyun wasn't going to answer him, "there's what you did to him."
That caught Kyuhyun's attention pretty fast. "What?" he asked sharply, sending a darting look at Zhou Mi, asleep. "I didn't do anything to him."
"Kyuhyun, he's slept through this entire conversation, and you're trying to tell me that you didn't do anything to him?"
"I didn't do anything," Kyuhyun said, gathering his wits back in and shrugging. "You don't always know everything, dad."
"But I do know this, Kyuhyun. Because he told us."
There were a long few minutes of utter silence, in which nobody, not even Zhou Mi, moved. "You're lying," Kyuhyun said eventually.
"You only say that because you know that I'm not," said his father. "Zhou Mi told us, Kyuhyun. Don't you find it odd that they took one of your own when according to our databases, Kim Heechul has never actually existed? How could the Institution have tracked him down, manipulated everything he did, if we didn't have information coming from the inside."
"You expect me to believe," Kyuhyun said slowly, "that Heechul was taken, that he was forced to kill all those people...because Zhou Mi passed the information on?"
"You've been expecting loyalty from someone that you hurt deeply, Kyuhyun. You damaged him and then you expected him to just accept that and move on. You should know better than anyone else that you shouldn't trust anyone in this world. Isn't that what you've built your entire sub-human empire on?"
"No."
The word from Zhou Mi was quiet, but potent in it's desperation. He obviously hadn't been awake that long, since he was forced to struggle upright into a sitting position, lethargy in every movement. "You're twisting it," he said, his confused expression focused on Kyuhyun's father. "You're making it sound like I wanted to do it. I didn't want to do it! I wanted to do it even less than you did!"
"Then you admit it," Kyuhyun said, voice like flint to cover the sudden screaming in his ears. "You passed them information."
Zhou Mi's eyes moved to his, absolutely terrified. After a moment he said, "Yes," and then followed up immediately with, "But I didn't want to, Kui Xian! They knew where you were living, they said they would kill you if I didn't tell them what you were doing."
Kyuhyun started to laugh, shaking his head. "So just let me have a moment, I need to make sure I understand this. You, who I have trusted most of all, are the one that sold me out to the Institution, told them everything we've done, but it's okay, because it was for my sake."
"It wasn't everything," Zhou Mi said. "It was--" He cut himself off.
"How long, Zhou Mi? How fucking long?"
Zhou Mi looked on the verge of tears. "It was for two years."
Kyuhyun snatched his gun from his pocket, shot forwards and held it to his father's forehead, struggling to keep all his emotions in check. He didn't want to react badly and do something he regretted; he did not want to kill his father, no matter how angry he was at that moment in time.
"I'm asking you very politely," he said, and it was helpful, having so much practise in being cold and unfeeling, because he managed to keep all and any emotion out of his voice. "I want you to leave and never come back."
"What's wrong?" His father asked. He didn't look particularly worried by Kyuhyun's gun against his head. Maybe he didn't think Kyuhyun would do it. Maybe he just didn't care if he died. "You don't find my information interesting?"
"Seriously," ground out Kyuhyun, "just get out."
His father stood up, shaking his head. "They're coming for you, Kyuhyun. Once I leave, they'll just come for you." He paused. "You should leave."
"Your advice has been filed away. Now get out."
Turning his back, his father put his hand on the back door of the van. A quick glance over his shoulder showed Kyuhyun that he couldn't quite believe that he was getting out of the confrontation alive, which made Kyuhyun think that he hadn't wanted to get out of it alive anyway. In that case, he was glad to once more be a disappointment.
His father opened the door, stepped outside into partial light as the smoke from the detention center fire was partly blocking the sun, and then a gunshot rang out, cracking through the air like whip shots, almost simultaneously. His father choked, brought a hand up to his chest, then fell dead to the floor. Kyuhyun took an involuntary step forward. Zhou Mi gasped behind him.
Kangin ran forward, his gun still out. The first thing he did was step over the body and look into the van. "Christ, Kyuhyun, are you okay?"
"Yes," said Kyuhyun, lips slightly numb. "I'm fine."
Hankyung clambered into the van, Heechul held in his arms. He put Heechul down on a chair, muttered something in Chinese, and then started out of the van again. "I'm going to go find Siwon," he said, but stopped in his tracks when Heechul choked out his name. He closed his eyes for a moment and then went back to hug Heechul to his chest and stroke his hair.
Henry helped a girl into the van, holding her close and, for some reason, hiding her face. Kyuhyun chose not to say anything about that, instead sitting back down on his chair and staring at the screens. Sungmin, Shindong and Kibum had disappeared without a trace from his feed.
He looked at Zhou Mi. He'd fallen back asleep.
"Who the fuck was that, anyway?" Kangin asked, giving Eeteuk a boost into the back of the van and nudging the dead body out of the way.
"My dad," said Kyuhyun. He opened a drawer and started fumbling around in it, pulling out computer chips, then throwing them on the floor by his feet.
"Christ," said Kangin. "Christ, Kyuhyun, what the fuck?"
"It's fine," said Kyuhyun. In the end he pulled the drawer out and emptied it all over the floor. Ryeowook yelped. Kyuhyun noted that they were all staring at him like they thought he'd gone crazy, but he didn't care. The chip was missing. "It's okay, I don't care."
"Kyuhyun, I just fucking killed your father."
"And I said I don't care!" Kyuhyun rounded on them. "Jesus Christ, you guys, that doesn't fucking matter. I have a chip, it's important, it's blue with zero written on it, have you seen it?"
Blank faces all around. Kyuhyun sank into his chair, held his head in his hands and thought about crying.
The air inside the small guard building was choked with smoke billowing in through the open windows set high in the walls. Sungmin, his shirt pulled up over his mouth to stop himself breathing too much smoke, keeping low to the floor, managed to find his way to Siwon, lying still on the floor. Siwon was so zen that Sungmin was actually a little scared.
"I'm surprised you came here," Siwon said, then didn't say anything else because he was coughing too hard.
"Oh, don't be so stupid," Sungmin said, helping him into a sitting position. "Why wouldn't I come back for you?"
Behind him Kibum had managed to lug the still unconscious Donghae onto his back, hooking his arms over his shoulders and holding him under the legs. He ran out of the room without looking back. Sungmin pulled one of Siwon's arms over his shoulders. Siwon allowed him to do that but he said softly, "Sungmin, you can't carry me out of here."
"Who said anything about carrying your lazy ass? You can still hop, can't you?"
Siwon turned his head towards him and kissed him, lips lingering. "Get out of here, Sungmin," he whispered. "It'll be too late for both of us soon."
"Aw, come on," Sungmin said, standing up and bring Siwon mostly to his feet as he did so. "I can't leave you like this, especially not when you're wearing that uniform and all. I've got special plans for that uniform and you dying from smoke inhalation or whatever doesn't really factor in."
"It's always nice," Siwon said, managing to find some semblance of footing with his good foot, letting the other one drag behind, "to know that no matter what our situation, no matter whether we're both choking or whether I've been shot in the foot, it's always nice to know that I can always rely on you to think about sex."
"It's always a perfect time to appreciate a good uniform," Sungmin said.
Their staggering, stumbling performance managed to get them to the door and out into the courtyard, where Shindong was waiting. The girl was gone. "Where's--" Sungmin began, but Shindong was already pulling Siwon's free arm over his shoulder, pulling him onto his back so he could take his weight and they could move quicker.
"Sent her with Kibum," Shindong said. "Okay, Siwon, lay off the protein shakes."
Siwon didn't answer because he'd passed out again.
"Okay," said Eeteuk patiently. "Look, Kyuhyun, just calm down, the last thing we need is for you to have some sort of a nervous breakdown."
Kyuhyun took in a deep breath and then let it out in short intervals, feeling like he was on the verge of screaming. God, he was getting hysterical. He needed to focus. "I need that chip," he said. "It's the most important thing in the entire world right now, and I need it."
"Maybe Zhou Mi knows where it is," Eeteuk suggested. "Here, I'll wake him and we can ask." He held out a hand, ready to place on Zhou Mi's shoulder to shake him awake.
"Don't touch him," Kyuhyun snapped. Looking taken aback, Eeteuk pulled his hand away, staring. Kyuhyun shook his head slowly. "Nobody touch him. Nobody wake him up. Leave him the fuck alone."
"But Kyuhyun, what if he knows where it is?" Ryeowook asked, voice quiet.
Kyuhyun laughed bitterly. "I don't want to know if he knows where my microchip is," he said. "I'd rather not know what, exactly, he knows."
"Kyuhyun, you do realise you're making no sense, right?" Kangin asked. "I'm just throwing that out there, I don't know if you know."
Kyuhyun ignored him. He sank down in a chair, trying to work out where he could have put the chip. He was certain that he'd put it in there, but his mind had been preoccupied for the past few days and he could have moved it somewhere else and then forgotten. He ran a hand through his hair. He needed to find it. The plan couldn't work unless he found that god damned microchip.
The doors to the van were wrenched open and at least three guns were cocked and raised ready to shoot, but it was just Kibum, Donghae on his back, a young girl by his side. "She's Chinese," he grunted, turning so he could place Donghae on the floor of the van, so that he was lying mostly on the microchips. "Someone tell her to get in the van."
Hankyung relayed the message and they managed to convince the girl to get into the van, though Kangin did mutter at one point about what the point of that was, since they didn't know her and weren't really going to be much help to her. Eeteuk shushed him. The girl decided to stick to Hankyung, possibly simply because he could speak Chinese, eyeing everyone else warily, as Hankyung alternated between talking quietly to Heechul, and every so often letting the girl know that they weren't going to hurt her.
"Where's Sungmin-hyung?" Henry asked. The girl in his arms had her face against his chest and seemed to be having some sort of a panic attack, so Henry didn't even wait for an answer to his question before he was stroking her back and whispering in English that he knew there were a lot of people but soon that wouldn't be the case.
"He's coming," Kibum said. He didn't sound so sure.
"Well he'd better hurry up," Kangin said, "because I don't like the look of that head wound that Donghae is sporting."
"Could everyone," Kyuhyun said, very tensely, "please shut the fuck up."
They fell silent, exchanging glances that seemed to be saying that he'd completely lost it, but he couldn't think when they were all chattering on. It was hard enough anyway, with the revelation about Zhou Mi clogging up his mind, he didn't need to the extra distraction. He could see the chip in his mind, could see it in his hands, could see himself--
Then a lot of things seemed to happen in the next ten seconds. The first was that the doors opened again and Shindong was huffing as he lay Siwon down next to Donghae. Sungmin climbed in, taking a seat next to Eeteuk's legs and glaring at them all as if to dare them to say anything at all about him sitting on the floor.
"What if they die?" Ryeowook asked.
Then Hankyung said, "Guys," because Heechul's limbs had suddenly snapped into stiff positions that didn't look like normal limb activity. Almost like he had been expecting it, Hankyung threw his gun at Shindong, who caught it at the last second and somehow managed to not shoot it off, and then Hankyung fastened his arms around Heechul's body.
It took everyone a few seconds to realise what was happening since they'd been so busy being shit scared of what was going to happen to Donghae and Siwon, but when Heechul started struggling, trying to lash out, they noticed. It took everyone exactly one second to realise what was happening.
"Oh god, we're idiots," Eeteuk moaned, looking grey. "He's still got the chip inside him, they know where he is."
"Okay, time to get the fuck out of here," Shindong said, and he started for the front of the van to take his seat around the same time that Kyuhyun shouted, "I am a fucking moron!" and dived for the front of the van.
He yanked open the glove compartment, pulled out a small box and made it back to his desk, apparently oblivious to Shindong trying to get past him, Heechul trying to break out of Hankyung's hold -- and now Kangin's hold on top of that -- and just the general panic that was going on around him. He inserted the chip in his computer, typed in the password, pressed enter, sat back and said, "There."
Key gasped in pain, slapping both his hands to the back of his neck. At the same time, Jonghyun hissed, raising one hand to place it at the same spot on his own neck, just above the top of his spine. "What is it?" Yehsung asked sharply, paused in placing a card down on the floor in the game of poker he was playing with Eunhyuk to take his mind off what was going on.
"Nothing," Jonghyun said, looking unsure. "It was just like someone had pinched the skin of my neck. With really long fingernails. Man, that hurt."
"But you both had the same reaction," Yehsung said, standing up. "That's not normal."
Jonghyun shook his head, looking like he didn't know what to say. Key grabbed him, quickly fired off some signs and then grabbed him into a close hug, cheek to cheek. "What," said Jonghyun, "no, that can't be it, Key, seriously, you're--"
"What did he say?"
Heechul went limp, boneless in an instant, slumping down into Hankyung's arms. "Fuck, Kyuhyun, what the fuck did you just do?" Hankyung yelled, grabbing Heechul by the shoulders and shaking him.
"Oh," said Kyuhyun, but then he noticed that the girl by Hankyung's feet was just rubbing the back of her neck looking confused, and the girl that Henry had brought in had a hand to the back of her neck, head raised off Henry's chest so Kyuhyun could see the shocked way her mouth hung open.
Heechul stirred, then shook his head, opening his eyes and seeing Hankyung. "Stop shaking me," he muttered, "stupid Chinese man." Hankyung made a helpless noise in the back of his throat.
"Oh, it did work," Kyuhyun said, but he couldn't even feel happy about it. His mind had already gone back to Zhou Mi and what the new information meant. He'd always planned for casualties in this plan, there had always been the chance of something happening that would change their dynamics forever; he just hadn't thought the casualty would be his own relationship.
"What was it?" Kibum asked. He had one of Donghae's hands held in his own.
"Oh, it was just a chip," Kyuhyun said absently, "infected with a virus that just took out every single piece of information on the Institution's database so that none of their chips work anymore."
"He said he thinks our chips are gone."
The further into the compound they got, the more rubble they were supposed to clamber over -- and the hotter the fire got. It was spreading quickly, and there was a risk of being trapped within the walls, unable to escape, but Shindong was having a hard enough time climbing over giant pieces of the building that had been blown to smithereens and keeping Sungmin in his eye sight to really worry about it. Better to try to get Sungmin to see sense, then worry about how exactly they were supposed to get out of the place.
The building that Siwon and Donghae had been instructed to lock themselves in, and which they now found themselves trapped in, had, apparently, only just missed being crushed by falling debris. The fire was creeping ever closer, growing hotter still, and Shindong could see that Sungmin was beginning to slow in his frantic race. The air was thick with petrol fumes and smoke and when Sungmin doubled over, coughing, Shindong managed to stagger towards him.
"Sungmin, this is crazy," he shouted. "You'll just end up killing yourself."
"I can't just leave him," Sungmin shouted back, then pulled his t-shirt up so that it covered his mouth and continued onwards. Shindong sighed, pulled his neck-tie over his mouth, and then almost lost his balance as Kibum crashed into his back.
"Sorry," Kibum gasped, eyes red and streaming. "I couldn't see."
"What the hell are you doing here?" Shindong asked, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him. Kibum stared coughing, and Shindong released him, worry nudging at him. Kibum's lungs still weren't in the greatest of states; smoke and fumes like this could probably affect him more quickly than Sungmin.
"Donghae," Kibum said, taking a few steps forward. "He's in there too."
"Kibum, you should have just left it to us. If we can't save them, then it's probably useless you being here."
"I know," said Kibum, stiffening just a little. He refused to meet Shindong's eyes. "But I wanted to come anyway."
The door that they came to was, they knew, only one of two doors into the building. The fire, however, thanks to a parked car that had been left too conveniently outside of the other door, had already reached it, and was licking at that wall. Their only chance was the one that they stood in front of; the one which was covered by a large slab of concrete which had crushed a guard and blocked the door.
Sungmin tried to push at it, shouting back at Shindong when someone on the other side of the door tried to push it open, where it banged against the concrete. "Siwon--" Sungmin cried, but it wasn't him. It was the scared face of a young woman, trying desperately to get out of the building but unable to. It must have been a hostage that they'd taken.
The girl didn't seem to see them to begin with; as soon as she realised that her escape route was blocked, she turned and started shouting frantically in Chinese, practically sobbing in fear. One of her arms stretched out, grappling as if to find the source of what was keeping her trapped, and Sungmin grabbed it. Her face swung towards him, eyes begging.
He didn't know enough Chinese to help reassure her, so instead he tried to look around her body in the gap for Siwon, but couldn't see. "Siwon," he shouted, as Shindong and Kibum tried to push the concrete away. It didn't budge. "Siwon, are you there?"
"Sungmin?"
His name was barely audible, but it was there. The weakness in his voice caused panic to grip Sungmin's chest. The girl was freaking out again, talking far too fast in a language that Sungmin didn't understand, her hands gripping his like a lifeline.
"Sungmin, we need your help with this," Shindong panted. "We're not going to be able to move it unless we tip it or something."
"Siwon," Sungmin shouted through the gap. "Don't worry, we're going to get you out."
"You're crazy, hyung."
Sungmin froze for a second while peeling the girl's frightened grip off his hand. "Don't call me hyung," he shouted, trying to be playfully cross, but the smoke was making his voice too husky for that. "You know it sounds too formal."
Siwon didn't answer.
Sungmin dropped the girl's hand. She clearly didn't understand what was going on, and the expression on her face seemed to scream that she thought she was being abandoned. Sungmin gave her a tight smile, then turned his attention to the obstacle.
It took a minute for the three of them to feel comfortable about their positions, then another minute before they felt that they had the oxygen level worthy of the job. Eventually, though, Sungmin gave the countdown, and he pushed while the other two pulled, and the chunk of concrete lifted a little from the ground. "Right!" Sungmin shouted, and shoved just a bit harder, until Shindong could reach around and get his fingers under the bottom of it and yank it up so that it tipped on an edge.
When Sungmin gave a final push, it almost fell onto Kibum's foot, who had to quickly jump out of the way. He gave Sungmin a half-hearted glare, looking too tired to really give a damn. Sungmin winced in apology, just as the girl in the room burst through the door straight into his chest. He winced, then passed her over to Shindong, who took one look at her petrified face and lifted her up over one shoulder. Strangely enough, she fell still after he did that.
"Will you need my help in there?" he asked, nodding his head at the doorway, where there was no sign of movement. Sungmin shook his head as Kibum pushed past him. Shindong nodded. "I'll take her back, then come back for you."
Sungmin nodded tensely, then ducked into the room.
"I'm surprised you recognised me."
Kyuhyun shrugged, leaning casually against his desk, though his gun was still burning for use against his thigh. "You haven't changed all that much," he said. "I'm surprised you recognisedme."
His dad smiled, sitting in a chair opposite him. His gun was out; the ball was in his court. "You look the same," he said. "Taller, thinner, but it was obviously you."
"So, what?" Kyuhyun asked, feeling like this nostalgia was pretty pointless. He wanted to get to the point of why he was currently sitting across from the father that he hadn't seen for eleven years. "Why are you here?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
Kyuhyun snorted. "Oh, it is, but I'd like to believe that it's not true." There was silence, his father just staring at him expectantly. Eventually Kyuhyun sighed and gave him what he wanted. "You're working for the Institution, aren't you?"
"Not through any desire of my own," his father said, almost like he was trying to reassure him, but Kyuhyun hadn't seen him in eleven years; the level of fuck he gave about what he was doing with his life right now wasn't particularly high. "No, I was kind of forced into it, you know? Unforeseen circumstances."
"Really," Kyuhyun said flatly.
There was a shout in his ear: Eeteuk trying to get in contact with him. It was distracting, pointless. He couldn't exactly help anyone right now. He pulled his ear piece out and lay it against the desk, almost slamming it down. Then he left out one long breath and felt the apathy wash over him again. That was better than anger. He could work with apathy.
"Yes," said his father. Their voices were polite, like they were old acquaintances discussing the weather. "You see, when your genius son rips out his chip and runs off to start a terrorist group, then they tend to like to keep the family close."
"Oh," said Kyuhyun. Maybe he was supposed to feel guilty about that, but his father hadn't exactly supported Kyuhyun, so he wasn't likely to feel any sympathy for him.
"So thanks to you, I've been working for eleven years for the Institution. Luckily they had some use for me, being a doctor and all, I get to do a few experiments on political prisoners or the poor souls who get pulled into the detention center. Your mother wasn't so lucky. They shipped her off to a camp on the south coast. No contact since then. She could be dead for all I know."
To Kyuhyun's right, one of the screens had been completely covered by smoke as the fire spread into the middle building. The other camera feeds were full of people racing here and there, trying to evacuate or, as seemed to be the case with most of the guards, leaving their wards locked in their cells and saving their own skin. Kyuhyun turned away from them.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked.
His father looked gobsmacked. "An apology would be nice," he spluttered.
Kyuhyun sighed. "Look, an apology isn't going to change the past. I wasn't the one who did that, was I? I did what you told me, I got out of your house and then I did what I needed to do to survive. The Institution is the one who made your life a living hell."
"She's your mother."
"You could be talking about a stranger for all I care," Kyuhyun said. "I'm supposed to feel guilty for it? I'm sorry that it happened but it's nothing to do with me."
His dad stared at him silently for a minute. Then he said, "I always knew you were cold, but not this much of a heartless bastard."
"Yeah, I'm a heartless bastard," Kyuhyun said, shrugging. "You're the one who threw me out of the house when I was thirteen, dad, because you were too scared to look after your own son. Forgive me if I'm not overly forgiving of you."
There was a pause. Zhou Mi rolled onto his back, rubbed once at his face, then dropped his arm. Kyuhyun's father glanced quickly at him, then back at Kyuhyun. "Okay," he said. "I admit that it was the wrong decision to make."
"Whatever. If you're here to kill me, then could you get it over with? I'm not exactly the biggest fan of playing catch up, especially when there's so much to catch up on."
His dad laughed, devoid of any real humour. "Oh, I'm not here to kill you, Kyuhyun. This gun is just for my own protection. You've got some pretty dangerous friends -- but then I'm sure you know that. No, I'm just here to pass some information on."
"Well, it would be nice if you could get on with it," Kyuhyun said. "I don't really have all day for this."
"I think you'll be interested in this, though. I think you'll be very interested in this." He paused, possibly just for dramatic effect, and then said, in a rather abrupt change of subject, "I'm surprised Zhou Mi stayed with you."
"Uh." Kyuhyun glanced at Zhou Mi's sleeping face. "Well, wouldn't he stay?"
"He wasn't tied to you," his father said. "It wasn't like there was anything really keeping him as part of your little group, was there?"
Kyuhyun contemplated letting his father know exactly what had kept Zhou Mi part of the group, exactly what tied them together, but he got the feeling that his father already knew and was just trying to rile him up. Hadn't that been one of the problems when he was younger, his friendship with Zhou Mi that sometimes seemed to go too far? Besides, it was really none of his father's business. In the end, he just stayed silent.
"And then," he continued, once he realised Kyuhyun wasn't going to answer him, "there's what you did to him."
That caught Kyuhyun's attention pretty fast. "What?" he asked sharply, sending a darting look at Zhou Mi, asleep. "I didn't do anything to him."
"Kyuhyun, he's slept through this entire conversation, and you're trying to tell me that you didn't do anything to him?"
"I didn't do anything," Kyuhyun said, gathering his wits back in and shrugging. "You don't always know everything, dad."
"But I do know this, Kyuhyun. Because he told us."
There were a long few minutes of utter silence, in which nobody, not even Zhou Mi, moved. "You're lying," Kyuhyun said eventually.
"You only say that because you know that I'm not," said his father. "Zhou Mi told us, Kyuhyun. Don't you find it odd that they took one of your own when according to our databases, Kim Heechul has never actually existed? How could the Institution have tracked him down, manipulated everything he did, if we didn't have information coming from the inside."
"You expect me to believe," Kyuhyun said slowly, "that Heechul was taken, that he was forced to kill all those people...because Zhou Mi passed the information on?"
"You've been expecting loyalty from someone that you hurt deeply, Kyuhyun. You damaged him and then you expected him to just accept that and move on. You should know better than anyone else that you shouldn't trust anyone in this world. Isn't that what you've built your entire sub-human empire on?"
"No."
The word from Zhou Mi was quiet, but potent in it's desperation. He obviously hadn't been awake that long, since he was forced to struggle upright into a sitting position, lethargy in every movement. "You're twisting it," he said, his confused expression focused on Kyuhyun's father. "You're making it sound like I wanted to do it. I didn't want to do it! I wanted to do it even less than you did!"
"Then you admit it," Kyuhyun said, voice like flint to cover the sudden screaming in his ears. "You passed them information."
Zhou Mi's eyes moved to his, absolutely terrified. After a moment he said, "Yes," and then followed up immediately with, "But I didn't want to, Kui Xian! They knew where you were living, they said they would kill you if I didn't tell them what you were doing."
Kyuhyun started to laugh, shaking his head. "So just let me have a moment, I need to make sure I understand this. You, who I have trusted most of all, are the one that sold me out to the Institution, told them everything we've done, but it's okay, because it was for my sake."
"It wasn't everything," Zhou Mi said. "It was--" He cut himself off.
"How long, Zhou Mi? How fucking long?"
Zhou Mi looked on the verge of tears. "It was for two years."
Kyuhyun snatched his gun from his pocket, shot forwards and held it to his father's forehead, struggling to keep all his emotions in check. He didn't want to react badly and do something he regretted; he did not want to kill his father, no matter how angry he was at that moment in time.
"I'm asking you very politely," he said, and it was helpful, having so much practise in being cold and unfeeling, because he managed to keep all and any emotion out of his voice. "I want you to leave and never come back."
"What's wrong?" His father asked. He didn't look particularly worried by Kyuhyun's gun against his head. Maybe he didn't think Kyuhyun would do it. Maybe he just didn't care if he died. "You don't find my information interesting?"
"Seriously," ground out Kyuhyun, "just get out."
His father stood up, shaking his head. "They're coming for you, Kyuhyun. Once I leave, they'll just come for you." He paused. "You should leave."
"Your advice has been filed away. Now get out."
Turning his back, his father put his hand on the back door of the van. A quick glance over his shoulder showed Kyuhyun that he couldn't quite believe that he was getting out of the confrontation alive, which made Kyuhyun think that he hadn't wanted to get out of it alive anyway. In that case, he was glad to once more be a disappointment.
His father opened the door, stepped outside into partial light as the smoke from the detention center fire was partly blocking the sun, and then a gunshot rang out, cracking through the air like whip shots, almost simultaneously. His father choked, brought a hand up to his chest, then fell dead to the floor. Kyuhyun took an involuntary step forward. Zhou Mi gasped behind him.
Kangin ran forward, his gun still out. The first thing he did was step over the body and look into the van. "Christ, Kyuhyun, are you okay?"
"Yes," said Kyuhyun, lips slightly numb. "I'm fine."
Hankyung clambered into the van, Heechul held in his arms. He put Heechul down on a chair, muttered something in Chinese, and then started out of the van again. "I'm going to go find Siwon," he said, but stopped in his tracks when Heechul choked out his name. He closed his eyes for a moment and then went back to hug Heechul to his chest and stroke his hair.
Henry helped a girl into the van, holding her close and, for some reason, hiding her face. Kyuhyun chose not to say anything about that, instead sitting back down on his chair and staring at the screens. Sungmin, Shindong and Kibum had disappeared without a trace from his feed.
He looked at Zhou Mi. He'd fallen back asleep.
"Who the fuck was that, anyway?" Kangin asked, giving Eeteuk a boost into the back of the van and nudging the dead body out of the way.
"My dad," said Kyuhyun. He opened a drawer and started fumbling around in it, pulling out computer chips, then throwing them on the floor by his feet.
"Christ," said Kangin. "Christ, Kyuhyun, what the fuck?"
"It's fine," said Kyuhyun. In the end he pulled the drawer out and emptied it all over the floor. Ryeowook yelped. Kyuhyun noted that they were all staring at him like they thought he'd gone crazy, but he didn't care. The chip was missing. "It's okay, I don't care."
"Kyuhyun, I just fucking killed your father."
"And I said I don't care!" Kyuhyun rounded on them. "Jesus Christ, you guys, that doesn't fucking matter. I have a chip, it's important, it's blue with zero written on it, have you seen it?"
Blank faces all around. Kyuhyun sank into his chair, held his head in his hands and thought about crying.
The air inside the small guard building was choked with smoke billowing in through the open windows set high in the walls. Sungmin, his shirt pulled up over his mouth to stop himself breathing too much smoke, keeping low to the floor, managed to find his way to Siwon, lying still on the floor. Siwon was so zen that Sungmin was actually a little scared.
"I'm surprised you came here," Siwon said, then didn't say anything else because he was coughing too hard.
"Oh, don't be so stupid," Sungmin said, helping him into a sitting position. "Why wouldn't I come back for you?"
Behind him Kibum had managed to lug the still unconscious Donghae onto his back, hooking his arms over his shoulders and holding him under the legs. He ran out of the room without looking back. Sungmin pulled one of Siwon's arms over his shoulders. Siwon allowed him to do that but he said softly, "Sungmin, you can't carry me out of here."
"Who said anything about carrying your lazy ass? You can still hop, can't you?"
Siwon turned his head towards him and kissed him, lips lingering. "Get out of here, Sungmin," he whispered. "It'll be too late for both of us soon."
"Aw, come on," Sungmin said, standing up and bring Siwon mostly to his feet as he did so. "I can't leave you like this, especially not when you're wearing that uniform and all. I've got special plans for that uniform and you dying from smoke inhalation or whatever doesn't really factor in."
"It's always nice," Siwon said, managing to find some semblance of footing with his good foot, letting the other one drag behind, "to know that no matter what our situation, no matter whether we're both choking or whether I've been shot in the foot, it's always nice to know that I can always rely on you to think about sex."
"It's always a perfect time to appreciate a good uniform," Sungmin said.
Their staggering, stumbling performance managed to get them to the door and out into the courtyard, where Shindong was waiting. The girl was gone. "Where's--" Sungmin began, but Shindong was already pulling Siwon's free arm over his shoulder, pulling him onto his back so he could take his weight and they could move quicker.
"Sent her with Kibum," Shindong said. "Okay, Siwon, lay off the protein shakes."
Siwon didn't answer because he'd passed out again.
"Okay," said Eeteuk patiently. "Look, Kyuhyun, just calm down, the last thing we need is for you to have some sort of a nervous breakdown."
Kyuhyun took in a deep breath and then let it out in short intervals, feeling like he was on the verge of screaming. God, he was getting hysterical. He needed to focus. "I need that chip," he said. "It's the most important thing in the entire world right now, and I need it."
"Maybe Zhou Mi knows where it is," Eeteuk suggested. "Here, I'll wake him and we can ask." He held out a hand, ready to place on Zhou Mi's shoulder to shake him awake.
"Don't touch him," Kyuhyun snapped. Looking taken aback, Eeteuk pulled his hand away, staring. Kyuhyun shook his head slowly. "Nobody touch him. Nobody wake him up. Leave him the fuck alone."
"But Kyuhyun, what if he knows where it is?" Ryeowook asked, voice quiet.
Kyuhyun laughed bitterly. "I don't want to know if he knows where my microchip is," he said. "I'd rather not know what, exactly, he knows."
"Kyuhyun, you do realise you're making no sense, right?" Kangin asked. "I'm just throwing that out there, I don't know if you know."
Kyuhyun ignored him. He sank down in a chair, trying to work out where he could have put the chip. He was certain that he'd put it in there, but his mind had been preoccupied for the past few days and he could have moved it somewhere else and then forgotten. He ran a hand through his hair. He needed to find it. The plan couldn't work unless he found that god damned microchip.
The doors to the van were wrenched open and at least three guns were cocked and raised ready to shoot, but it was just Kibum, Donghae on his back, a young girl by his side. "She's Chinese," he grunted, turning so he could place Donghae on the floor of the van, so that he was lying mostly on the microchips. "Someone tell her to get in the van."
Hankyung relayed the message and they managed to convince the girl to get into the van, though Kangin did mutter at one point about what the point of that was, since they didn't know her and weren't really going to be much help to her. Eeteuk shushed him. The girl decided to stick to Hankyung, possibly simply because he could speak Chinese, eyeing everyone else warily, as Hankyung alternated between talking quietly to Heechul, and every so often letting the girl know that they weren't going to hurt her.
"Where's Sungmin-hyung?" Henry asked. The girl in his arms had her face against his chest and seemed to be having some sort of a panic attack, so Henry didn't even wait for an answer to his question before he was stroking her back and whispering in English that he knew there were a lot of people but soon that wouldn't be the case.
"He's coming," Kibum said. He didn't sound so sure.
"Well he'd better hurry up," Kangin said, "because I don't like the look of that head wound that Donghae is sporting."
"Could everyone," Kyuhyun said, very tensely, "please shut the fuck up."
They fell silent, exchanging glances that seemed to be saying that he'd completely lost it, but he couldn't think when they were all chattering on. It was hard enough anyway, with the revelation about Zhou Mi clogging up his mind, he didn't need to the extra distraction. He could see the chip in his mind, could see it in his hands, could see himself--
Then a lot of things seemed to happen in the next ten seconds. The first was that the doors opened again and Shindong was huffing as he lay Siwon down next to Donghae. Sungmin climbed in, taking a seat next to Eeteuk's legs and glaring at them all as if to dare them to say anything at all about him sitting on the floor.
"What if they die?" Ryeowook asked.
Then Hankyung said, "Guys," because Heechul's limbs had suddenly snapped into stiff positions that didn't look like normal limb activity. Almost like he had been expecting it, Hankyung threw his gun at Shindong, who caught it at the last second and somehow managed to not shoot it off, and then Hankyung fastened his arms around Heechul's body.
It took everyone a few seconds to realise what was happening since they'd been so busy being shit scared of what was going to happen to Donghae and Siwon, but when Heechul started struggling, trying to lash out, they noticed. It took everyone exactly one second to realise what was happening.
"Oh god, we're idiots," Eeteuk moaned, looking grey. "He's still got the chip inside him, they know where he is."
"Okay, time to get the fuck out of here," Shindong said, and he started for the front of the van to take his seat around the same time that Kyuhyun shouted, "I am a fucking moron!" and dived for the front of the van.
He yanked open the glove compartment, pulled out a small box and made it back to his desk, apparently oblivious to Shindong trying to get past him, Heechul trying to break out of Hankyung's hold -- and now Kangin's hold on top of that -- and just the general panic that was going on around him. He inserted the chip in his computer, typed in the password, pressed enter, sat back and said, "There."
Key gasped in pain, slapping both his hands to the back of his neck. At the same time, Jonghyun hissed, raising one hand to place it at the same spot on his own neck, just above the top of his spine. "What is it?" Yehsung asked sharply, paused in placing a card down on the floor in the game of poker he was playing with Eunhyuk to take his mind off what was going on.
"Nothing," Jonghyun said, looking unsure. "It was just like someone had pinched the skin of my neck. With really long fingernails. Man, that hurt."
"But you both had the same reaction," Yehsung said, standing up. "That's not normal."
Jonghyun shook his head, looking like he didn't know what to say. Key grabbed him, quickly fired off some signs and then grabbed him into a close hug, cheek to cheek. "What," said Jonghyun, "no, that can't be it, Key, seriously, you're--"
"What did he say?"
Heechul went limp, boneless in an instant, slumping down into Hankyung's arms. "Fuck, Kyuhyun, what the fuck did you just do?" Hankyung yelled, grabbing Heechul by the shoulders and shaking him.
"Oh," said Kyuhyun, but then he noticed that the girl by Hankyung's feet was just rubbing the back of her neck looking confused, and the girl that Henry had brought in had a hand to the back of her neck, head raised off Henry's chest so Kyuhyun could see the shocked way her mouth hung open.
Heechul stirred, then shook his head, opening his eyes and seeing Hankyung. "Stop shaking me," he muttered, "stupid Chinese man." Hankyung made a helpless noise in the back of his throat.
"Oh, it did work," Kyuhyun said, but he couldn't even feel happy about it. His mind had already gone back to Zhou Mi and what the new information meant. He'd always planned for casualties in this plan, there had always been the chance of something happening that would change their dynamics forever; he just hadn't thought the casualty would be his own relationship.
"What was it?" Kibum asked. He had one of Donghae's hands held in his own.
"Oh, it was just a chip," Kyuhyun said absently, "infected with a virus that just took out every single piece of information on the Institution's database so that none of their chips work anymore."
"He said he thinks our chips are gone."
...............................................
No comments:
Post a Comment