Chapter Text
Their footsteps echoed like bombs in the open space. They bombarded her ears, as blood ran hot and eager through her veins. His heart was beating too fast or too slow, each beat rocking him to his feet, throbbing so hard in his chest he feared he would sink.
Calm down. He snapped his fingers.
White, white, lit, too bright. Everything there was too much. The walls were white, smooth and perfect, no marks, no dirt, no imperfections, no decorations. All the hallways were like that, it was driving him crazy. All similar, like a labyrinth. They walked and walked and walked, but no change happened.
Calmed down. There was no way he could snap his fingers.
The rectangular, hanging lamps cast a bright light, blinding him with the pale walls. They stretched for meters, competing with the endless corridor. And they, the fools, walking through them and daring them to their end. His legs didn't ache from training, but his mind raced as his eyes darted from every corner, like bullets fired at fast, maddeningly agile targets.
There was a constant beeping under his clothes, in sync and harmony with his heart, lagging and slow to his thoughts. Anxious, nervous. He avoided wringing his hands. They sweat. He avoided wiping on his white jacket.
White white white white.
Calm down. He lost it, snapped his fingers again.
The soldier leading him showed signs of bored curiosity. He was irritated, bothered. He would arouse suspicion that way. He didn't clear his throat or cough or snort or sigh. There was a model, and he was going to fit it.
He looked at the great white pillars, encrusted with art, simple and beautiful. Disgusting and disrespectful in that environment. He concentrated on the details in the half of the pilaster, polka dots. He imagined it as Morse code, and crossed his fingers, drumming his right pinky and thumb in the socket. The cameras wouldn't catch. They were being monitored. Who doesn't?
"Calm down." He wrote.
A bubble rose in his chest as huge golden doors loomed over them. A beep. They were getting closer. The soldier partially ignored him, the only noises he heard were his boots hitting the ground and crunching the gray carpets under the metallic soles. There was the beep. He held on to that beep. There was no way the soldier could hear that beep.
The bubble in his chest grew. He had a similar one a decade ago, it grew, consumed his lungs, his liver, his heart, his kidneys, his guts and his life.
In less than two years, his torso was the habitat of a monster, and there was nothing he could do but expose himself to radiation daily to try to survive and be medicated hourly to try to wake up. His body was the tumor and the tumor was his body.
A few months later, the tumor turned into this bubble that was in tune with his emotions. Once draining every ounce of energy he barely had, now any fickleness in his energies, the bubble grew, expanded, concentrated and exploded, protecting the core and its rays, expelling anything it detected as a threat.
The bubble remained in her heart, and as he calmed down, so did she.
The soldier took the lead when the doors were a few steps away. This was important, so he focused on the beep. He stood unblinking, looking intently and not needing to pretend attention. According to Yeosang, that would activate his lenses, and they would send the images to the technician.
His beep sped up, and he slumped his shoulders in mock pride and contentment. He felt like a stray.
This was one of the Guardians' HQ, which they broke into from the base and he was supposed to climb to the top. There was a beeper on it, which he still didn't know what it was for, but Yeosang installed it in his smuggled suit from the countless missions and tests he passed which the Guardians sent to all qualified.
It was like a tick on a purebred dog. Jongho calmed down with that comparison. He was lame, stupid, pathetic and idiotic, but anything that would lift her mood and her heart would do.
The soldier positioned himself in front of the door. A compartment silently opened from the ceiling and descended. It was a metallic rectangle connected by extremely thin blue scanner wires. There was no command or request, it must have been the norm, and Jongho remained with his eyes open. The scanner did its job on the soldier, from head to toe, and disappeared across the floor, circling the carpet on which the soldier in white had positioned himself to the millimeter.
A monotone robotic voice greeted him, giving his name and rank. Everything there was monotonous and colorless. To his well-disguised astonishment, the voice did not grant access to the lieutenant, asking him to leave and Jongho to position himself.
The bubble grew with her heart beating faster and faster, like a pump blowing up a balloon. This was not good. There was a panel on the right, which opened and turned on after the end of the scan, which showed all the information necessary to release the passage, the voice just dictated. Her heart rate was included, her body temperature, like a polygraph test. Any abnormality in the subject was an alert to the system and sent to those of higher rank. Hongjoong reported this morning, cementing how calm he needed to be.
He could already hear Lieutenant Byeong unlocking his gun, sounding like a gunshot to his brain or his leg, incapacitating him and easing his way to the cells. They
far underground, rumored to be hot from their proximity to the earth's core, and dropped all the damned into boiling lava.
The bubble swelled. The beeping overtook his heartbeat, distracted him, and the scanner descended over his head, slid down his torso and slid down his legs, disappearing at his feet.
Jongho blinked, floating in and out of his mind, but conscious as the doors opened with what he hoped were loud, loud creaks. They broke all dramatic and distracting effect, opening as silently as a tiger hunting in the forest.
Whiter. It reminded him of the hospital, ten years ago, where he, as pale as the walls, could only lie on his white gurney, consuming his white meds, being exposed to radiation to try to shrink his tumor, which his father traced on his gown. white to show its size.
"Welcome, Private Choi." Jongho could not feel welcomed in the place that reminded him of where he had waited for two years for the cancer to take him away painlessly and quickly.
The lieutenant took the lead, and Jongho was grateful. There was a little more life on this side, not just his footsteps and the beep, and he appreciated that. More things to amuse yourself. There are plants in there, especially in the corners. A single attempt at life, he understands. He blinked, remembering that this wasn't important to the operation. May Yeosang forgive him.
He strayed to the lieutenant's uniform, which he would soon wear with minor differences. He was on his way to one of the barracks, to be placed under the command of one of the colonels, being the only survivor of the fifteen missions he was charged with, and the only one qualified from the five fifty-question tests. He wouldn't hurt to fool his watchers with a dreamy look at the lieutenant's back.
It reminded him of one of the memories Hongjoong had shared with them.
He was white, and the thought of going into battle with something so immaculate and smearing it with destruction and death and blood almost made him sick, if that wasn't the Guardians' goal. They wore white, the color of purity and peace. They wanted to preserve that innocence and peace, and they would do anything and prove that their causes, motives, and goals are noble. It was the phrase of sinners wearing holy robes, no explanation needed.
It made him sick to remember what Hongjoong told him in his years as a lieutenant. His stomach protests when he remembers the state they found him in, the surgery they subjected him to.
Biochips. Every man there was microchipped. There were voices in their heads that weren't his thoughts, commands that weren't his brain, and commands that weren't his mind. Goals that were not his life. Would Jongho have one of those, or wouldn't he? Would Yeosang find a way? He doesn't want to go back on a gurney.
Jongho doesn't need medical treatment, he accepts it only if it's Yeosang or Hongjoong, the only ones trained in medicine and first aid. He hates a scalpel, he hates pills, spotlights, white, white. Orchids, their scent enveloping her senses like a snake ready to strike.
He was sick, he was sickly, manic. He sighed and the bubble inflated. There were other low ranks, recruits and midshipmen passing by bowing their heads to Lieutenant Byeong, and Jongho concentrated on that. Appearances, he was in one of the Guardians' fists, needed to act like their superiors, for appearances. Then he bowed in respect to those he recognized as lieutenants and colonels, and greeted with a slight bow to those of his rank.
There it felt like a center. The HQ was outside, he knew, Hongjoong drew a map, as detailed as a stolen one, even showing which box of a certain warehouse had ammunition. Their captain was amazing, he must have been an amazing captain.
Lieutenant Byeong stopped, and Jongho was concentrating on not bumping into the man. He took steps to the side and left her back, being greeted by sunlight that dared to illuminate that place even more. It was the entrance to one of the training grounds, a few shots could be heard from the doorway of the huge door.
"Commander Park." He bowed, for the first time, and Jongho copied it on automatic. The bubble inflated, so close to bursting, and her confusion grew. He clenched his fists, trying to contain what pumped through his protection.
The title and the name that bore it dropped into her mind just as her heart dropped into her stomach. Park. Park. Jongho stood up, trembling from head to toe, haunted by a ghost. There were many Parks, Korea was full of Parks.
He dared to look up, and was met by opaque irises. They were gray, white, pure and untouched. He was wrong. Jongho got a shock. This was so wrong. Whoever put him there didn't have that right, whether he did it himself. He didn't care, the important thing didn't make sense. He had no life.
"Lieutenant Byeong." His superior's superior responded by nodding, and Jongho could only thank his body's automatic responses to be back in the lieutenant's shadow. The beeper went off, like a machine gun, through a desperate sniper, fighting for the lives of thousands.
It felt like his flesh was being chewed. Zombies pulled his heels out of their pits and held him frozen in place. Those of higher rank spoke formally, elegantly despite being barbarians in the field. Most of it was praise and compliments from Byeong, trying to stay on the commander's warm side.
Jongho's mind couldn't understand. She was running from thoughts as much as the two soldiers ever had to run for their lives.
The beep sped up, like one of the countless chases and escapes that Mingi and San have already done. Jongho feared a short circuit. On the beeper and in your brain. That wasn't right. The beep ran like a time bomb, the bubble grew and increased like the power of a tornado, and Jongho's faith in his team, in himself and in the future that Yunho saw diminished with every second that he witnessed the conversation.
He didn't think he was capable anymore. The compliments the lieutenant bestowed upon him after a few minutes of hearing a man did not belong to him. Jongho could no longer remember that he survived and was there.
"Commendable for someone so young." Commander Paek nodded, not taking his eyes off the said recruit.
Jongho wore the cloak of appearances when those empty orbs that could easily disappear into the sclera stared at him. He bent down again, just as deeply as before, hoping to crush some organ, crush the bubble, burst it and possibly disappear. He wanted to disappear, be somewhere else, anywhere. With his family, as far removed from him as he felt from himself, with his new family, in the arms of which he had learned to see himself as a father, those he had learned to see as brothers. Curled up in his room, staring at nothing and wanting to be reduced to it.
He was wrong. It was wrong. Fake, fake, fake. Jongho was being fake. He was being shallow. He thanked him, and the soldiers continued to talk. Jongho wouldn't stay in the lieutenant's squad, he caught that part of the conversation, he hoped the beep had caught the rest. He couldn't fail, but he would fail if it only cost him his life.
"Welcome to Squad Alpha, Private Choi." The words didn't sound as empty as Jongho was sure a dead man's body should. There was conviction and confidence, and he wanted to get his organs out.
Lieutenant Byeong said something about it being an honor for a rookie to be under the leadership of the strongest soldier. Jongho didn't feel honorable, not facing a ghost from the past and some creature wearing Seonghwa's body, using his voice to utter sins in noble armor.
The beeping continued to accelerate, and he really wanted to throw his brain out. Nervousness, terror, desperation and anxiety blotted out the memory of him, but the mix of them all that descended through his understanding and stomach cleared it all up.
Commander Park had guided him somewhere, his quarters during his shift, the only rookies among the Alpha, so he'd be alone, some shit like that.
The beep didn't stop, but Jongho had to stop his thoughts. The beep sped up, running miles per second, downloads if he remembers, and the bike climbed higher and higher in his throat.
Jongho just nodded and followed Commander Park. The same name haunted him twice, and he was unable to keep it to himself.
He blinked slowly, remembering that the action would pause and restart the last five minutes of videos. Yeosang didn't need to know that yet. Wooyoung didn't need to know that yet. They don't need to know this.
Hongjoong didn't need to know that yet.
Not this way.
Yeosang considered himself cautious. His internship months were brief sixty days, but enough for him to understand that with a cool head and a calm mind, it is possible to deal with stress. It's enough to deal with anxiety, it's enough to deal with anger. It's what it takes to deal with ugly feelings.
When that wasn't enough, he filled his mind with unnecessary, futile things. Getting distracted and keeping yourself focused on something alternative to the core of confusion that sometimes explodes around you is his solution.
In a fortnight the scalpel no longer trembled in his hand. In class, the cut doesn't come out shaky or uneven. He could, he did. But sometimes it was too much. He didn't see himself in charge of surgery or taking orders for a transplant, transfusion, cesarean, or anything else that involved blood, white walls, white coats, and white tools to be stained in human blood.
But he almost reached his diploma. He was just a few steps away, just missing being dignified for his resident and himself, to finally embrace the prestige that a surgeon should have and pride in graduating.
While he was away from the anesthetics and half-serum cleaners for a while, he would stick his hands into anything metallic. They didn't bleed, they didn't suffer, they wouldn't have sequels and there wouldn't be any crying or resentful family members. Yeosang could actually treat his malfunctioning organs like parts. The only consequence of poor maintenance would be for a part to fail or for the system not to work.
Not a death.
So Kang Yeosang would shove his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and deliver good or bad news to the patient's family, palms red and sterilized from the panic of wiping the blood from his skin. Yeosang would dip his hands in oil and threads, smile or ask for more time to create a system, test it, handle it, and finally quickly type the commands needed to run it.
Medicine was his passion, technology too. At the startless end of his career in the medical field, he had nowhere to run and take refuge.
Distraction from him had proven useful several times since that day. The Guardians' technology was trusting and fascinating, and he took as much of it as he could with eager hands.
In schools, after students with commendable grades and notorious performance leave, there is a letter being sent to them, directly from the government, inviting them to take a test. From this test, four more appear, trying their best to reduce the candidates, and the only ones who obtain satisfactory results are assigned to missions. And from the missions, into the greedy hands of the army and trained in one of the headquarters.
It wasn't hard being the parasite in the system. It wasn't difficult to falsify and delete any and all information about Jongho, let alone pass each test and come out of each mission alive and nearly unscathed.
Jongho was at HQ, and so was Yeosang.
Despite everything, the Guardians provide protection to the qualified, resistant but ineffective uniform for the bloody adventures that the students send, but all with the necessary devices to evaluate the performance and judge it for the designation of barracks. When Jongho handed him the vests, bracelets, anklets and helmet, Yeosang promptly created and installed viruses into the small, inconspicuous monitoring system located on the vest's chest. From the military uniform to the surveillance sector, to security and HR. He's gone far, he's proud, but not enough. They had an impenetrable firewall, and Yeosang spent nights trying to get through it undetected.
The only thing that got him out of the computer and his office was Jongho's trip to the barracks, and Yeosang had a new task.
The week was complicated. Jongho has been away for a month, none of them lost in worry over the hacked monitoring, but in anxiety for the next step. His approval was the entry pass to one of the Guardians' headquarters, and Yeosang was supposed to prepare it.
There were the lenses, and there was the beeper, both with technology stolen from the creators themselves, modified to Yeosang's tastes, and imperceptible to the impenetrable, analytical system. The lenses were used by those of greater kin, sent on mostly espionage missions, which required immediate reports. The beeper was from the security system, used to detect foreign technology or acting abnormally or out of code.
The beeper had its function completely adulterated. Yeosang, you see, has always been curious about the workings of a heart and the board of some machine. The Guardians' technology came from an admirable mind, and the beeper became a little parasite detector and invader of unknown systems.
Yeosang couldn't get into the Guardians' main sources and systems behind his screen and desperately typing. Jongho, being constantly exposed to his technologies and being scanned by them, opened up an unimaginable path for the technician to explore. Any foreign individual or collective system would be detected by the beep and invaded, or at least there would be one attempt, among thousands, where a breach would be opened for Yeosang to invade.
Everyone planted themselves behind them and their huge and diverse screens watched Jongho's entire path inside the HQ. Hongjoong was a nervous wreck, trusting the younger one and anxious that he wouldn't be able to guide him further. He himself was in much the same state, but he never had the experience of walking the white corridors and bowing to superiors.
He was never a soldier or an employee of the Guardians, so his trauma question came entirely from his personal life.
The beep sounded as Jongho was scanned through the door, accompanied by additional comments that Hongjoong made based on memories of him. The beep stopped sounding with each new presence in the center of the HQ, already detected the biochips in the lieutenant who guided Jongho.
However, there was a break in real-time lens imaging. They stared at the carpeted floor for long seconds before jumping when the beeper went off. Countless messages flooded the designated screens for your system. Notifications, warnings, break-in attempts and failures, and overload warnings.
He tried not to despair at first, imagining a particularly rigorous scanner. But when Jongho's heart monitor kept pace with the beep, he jumped out of his chair and got to work.
"Sangie?" Wooyoung was the only one who spoke in the mess the room turned into, everyone fearing the worst, and Yeosang's reaction cementing the worst ideas.
He wasn't paying attention. No, not when the images stopped and something interrupted the millimeter operation. Jongho had self-sacrificing tendencies and would lay down his life for them as much as anyone among the six would. But it would deprive them of any panic and anxiety, causing even more negative backlash.
They've been through it, Yeosang has seen it, so he knew.
He typed and ran as much spyware as he could, all the programs available for situations like that were activated and used, he accessed everything within his reach to try to find out at least Jongho's status.
Error, failure, incompatibility, location not found, recipient not available, system overload, cooling required, try again later, these words in red filled Yeosang's screens, and Hongjoong was the first to understand what they meant, painting his mind of both with bloody images and fresh corpses.
"What is happening?" Yunho asked already trembling. Heavens, he hated how even though they'd been through the worst and hardened from wounds, they were fragile to anything that involved the one who'd shed blood.
"Yeosang? Is Jongho okay?" He couldn't answer with words, not with his mouth sealed for his mind to work on. So he just plucked the intruder's rampant heartbeat from his headphones and sent it to the speakers.
"Is he…being microchipped?" There was so much tremor and disgust in Mingi's voice that he shuddered, but he kept his hands steady and his eyes sharp. No, he couldn't be undergoing this surgery. Yeosang promised him, Hongjoong promised him. They've been thinking about it for years, this invasion wasn't planned overnight. There were many other rebel groups and mercenary metahumans involved.
It was a big sign. He only did it once. The room fell silent as chaos reigned.
They all supported his ideals and offered full collaboration, in addition to great empathy for each of them. Jongho would not lie in a medical bed, let alone undergo surgery.
Yeosang realized, he knew, he should have known. Jongho turned off the lens. Without any interference. There was no way, it was their technology, recognized like so many others, disguised under the name of a soldier. Jongho didn't want them to be something.
Jongho discovered something. And Yeosang too.
The beep has not diminished. He would only stop when he hacked in and send the source codes to Yeosang, and he would send the analyzed information for the beeper to recognize and familiarize itself with the system. This did not happened. No codes arrived for Yeosang, which meant that no hacking attempts were successful. None of the thousands it was programmed to do per second.
Anything. Nothing has come to Yeosang and nothing has improved, nothing has changed.
Just the weather. The weather dropped like anvils on their shoulders and their hearts dropped into their stomachs, being dissolved by the juice. As if they were chained to the world and it was falling lower and lower, dragging them with it.
He got inside and tampered with the lens system, forcing activation, something he tried over the ten minutes that the beeper and Jongho's heart raced.
At the same time the lens came back on, the beeper turned off.
Yeosang knows all areas of a brain and has performed many surgeries on each of the limbs. He didn't study for psychology but he had a fellow resident who planted the observant side of things in his mind. Jongho was in a dorm, and there was a mirror in front of him. Yeosang and the five behind him studied the youngest's expression.
Hongjoong must know, or he couldn't find out, he must fear and maybe hide, but Yeosang was terrified when the beeper only managed to pick up something that was the result of the technician's paranoia.
Yeosang has plunged his hands into human entrails many times, as many times as into the entrails of a machine. He studied both and was fascinated by both.
Whatever prevented Jongho from showing them and the beeper from working, it wasn't a scanner, let alone a program, android or robot. There was cyborg technology in the hands of the Guardians and he feared where his mind would go.
Jongho was being monitored and it wasn't the dorm cameras or the lens in the mirror.
It was the damned cyborg technology that had kept him awake through anxious nights, desperate to keep another member alive.
The beeper registered an artificial heart and as metallic and hardened as a man gets from war. A brain fished by wires and dipped in sparks as a stimulator to keep it working but not active. It was a puppet of flesh and blood, a trained, mechanical, fully functional beast at its master's command.
There was a zombie inside, and Yeosang didn't know what to do with this discovery, nor how to tell the others, nor how to warn Jongho.
The Guardians had what he feared was a super soldier, because the beeper didn't register any microchipped soldiers, but the damn walking motherboard.
The barracks system updated and listed Jongho's name on one of its lists. He may not have had his biochip installed in his spine yet, but he would be as closely monitored as any other soldier. For when Yeosang expanded the beeper's range, the barracks' digital map perfectly indicated the mass of flesh and metal roaming the area.
Any misstep by Jongho would not be reported to the Headquarters, where it would cause him to be apprehended and tortured. This freak of nature would be the first to know and the first to hunt him down in any abnormality.
“Yeosang.” It was the early hours of the first night that Jongho was at HQ. A rotation of shifts was decided to ensure the well-being of the youngest on enemy soil, as the coach needed to rest as much as anyone else.
Who should take over the monitors until now was Mingi. Yeosang hid his surprise when he found one of the group's brains in his room. He raised one thin eyebrow, covering his face as he took a much-needed sip of coffee.
The strain could be cut with a knife and stored. He offered no explanation of the system's downfall, nor of the countless words in red that seemed to have been tacked behind his eyelids. Mingi had a little understanding, unlike the rest, but it was common knowledge that blue in programming was the best color one could come up with, other than red.
“Yunho-hyung?” The oldest was sitting in one of the eight chairs in his living room, huddled in the upholstery as if wishing for the umpteenth time that everything was a lie, a movie, a creative series, or that he just didn't have to go through this.
It was a little harder for him. Each of them had mutations that involved direct contact with others, altering their physical or mental state. Except Yunho. Yunho just saw, observed and absorbed.
"I won't force you to tell, or clarify what happened this morning." Both sighed. The tallest slowly rises, uncoiling itself from the ball of limbs and melancholy it has become. As she passed him, his hand rested on her shoulder, warm and supportive and empathetic. “But I can't see Jongho's future anymore.” And he left.
Yeosang felt a needle inject ice into his spine.
Either Jongho's future was changing, or he just didn't have enough to live to create one.
When a gun malfunctioned, it either fired dangerously or refused to fire. That's what the Commander already said to Hongjoong.
He never believed it. Never took it seriously. He was never on the battlefield, or at its epicenter.
"They said he was defective hyung, but they just hoped he came back alive."
Seonghwa was the only one to come back alive. He wondered and asked Wooyoung and San how they came back unharmed, covered in blood that didn't belong to them and images that would never leave their minds, painted like a sickly landscape behind their eyelids.
Hongjoong knows now. He was in the same situation, with only a sense of control and security.
It was like watching two wild beasts fight over one prey and subdue the other for a more profitable meal. The prey was Hongjoong, and Seonghwa was his predator.
It would almost be a pretty picture if the older one's eyes didn't waver and blink so much. His right eye blinked twice, then his left eye blinked five, but there was never a change in his expression. Discomfort, anger, annoyance. Flat, neutral, dead.
Seonghwa's hand trembled. The tips blacken and lighten, as if his insides are ignited and extinguished. But the gaze never left Hongjoong. His eyes were heterochromatic, but one would always be open and attentive to any movement. Just like Yeosang, who monitored any abnormality.
This wasn't normal, but it was enough for Hongjoong to get out of that room at least alive.
He was stared at by the jet-black irises, the ghostly black sclera, the lifeless, artificial cyan. Neither retreated nor attacked. The will and intention just hovered like a vulture spotting corpses.
Unlucky is the dead. Unlucky is Hongjoong, who was just a nameless face, but with the identity of an enemy, who was once a friend and dreamed of being a lover. Unlucky is Seonghwa. Unlucky are the anxious ones behind the door. Unlucky is Yeosang, who has the task and duty to observe the clash and intervene in the worst possible way for a mind fed by stripped wires.
Unlucky is Commander Park, who took the ricochet from the faulty weapon.