W:onderland
W:onderland
hyunseung/jihyun; 1903 words
She has a beautiful smile, and her eyes have the most graceful half-moon curve when she’s laughing. Her hair falls around her waist, a golden, tangled mess of reddish orange and blonde. She is beautiful, he thinks, as he sits cross legged before her, surrounded by a royal garden which doesn’t even begin to challenge her elegance and perfection. He reaches out to touch her hand, and feels her skin against his for a fraction of a second before everything promptly disintegrates into what they really are - fluorescent wiring and blinking laser lights and an impossibility that is reality.
Jihyun is gone, and all Hyunseung is left with is the simulation lab which is the only place his reality exists.
Something Hyunseung has learnt after taking up the research is that the more desperate and insane you are, the more likely you are to succeed. He cannot imagine anything quite as potent - enough to drive him to live off caffeine and code for months on end with barely a wink of sleep. He has failed to turn up to receive multiple awards praising his work in the scientific community. In fact, Hyunseung doesn’t for a moment consider himself a scientist. Once, a magazine came to him for an interview, after that, nobody approached him. Insane and genetically engineered children aren’t exactly the most attractive specimens for the public, he imagines. But, that is exactly what he is. He is not a scientist, because the workings of the universe, the pursuit of knowledge - none of it means anything to him. His intelligence is a tool, anything his intelligence unlocks is another tool to achieve another goal. If anything, he is an engineer, working towards a single goal. An insane one, which should have given him a one-way ticket to the mental recalibration facilities in the university.
Instead, the dean has left him to fester in his lab, surrounded by years of coding, and half a lifetime’s worth of memories, compacted into three walls worth of high powered hard drives. After all, if it wasn’t for his insanity, he’d never (and nobody else would) have come as far as he has.
He met her when the world was caught in a web of strangeness, and everything was haywire. The sky was never quite blue, but always a shifting veil of purples and greys. He was one of those unfortunate individuals who just happened to be growing up at the time, and he felt rather hopeless. It was the adults that were meant to be pulling the strings and lifting the weight to try and fix the mess they’ve got themselves in, and yet, he felt that they really didn’t know what was wrong exactly, let alone how to fix the problem. It didn’t help that Hyunseung was 16, meaning that despite his massive intelligence - his parents paid a lot of money to ensure that - he had no credibility, and thus, no way to get his beliefs heard. His hair was also bright red, which made every single adult automatically hate him just a little bit extra.
It was also this bright red hair which caught her attention one evening, underneath the city lights one evening. She was wearing a skirt in the middle of winter, and seemed like a lost thing, with a suitcase beside her and what might have been a keyboard in the other hand. And absolutely everybody who was entering and exiting the railway station took a second to cast a look of distaste in her direction. How dare this foreigner interrupt their daily routine by taking up a spot on the pavement! How dare she! Hyunseung though, as he approached the station, found their eyes locking through the crowd. In the next second, he noticed her hair was a reddish gold, right from the roots to the tips.
And he knew, right away, that they were exactly the same.
There is a vintage alarm clock that spends every second of its current existence on his desk. It’s not a very good investment - is what one of the lecturers would say upon entering his working space to deliver some paperwork (this doesn’t happen anymore, because the last time somebody came to deliver anything, they were handicapped for life - the dean made him disable the defensive mechanism too though). The clock was roughly a rectangular prism and the numbers flipped as it counted the time. Hyunseung was exceptionally fond of it though. Everything now was slim, made to look ‘modern’. Clocks now, Hyunseung found an uncomfortable thing; they performed their main purpose, and dutifully informed you of what part of the day you were up to. But alas, they just weren’t the same. Their silence awakened a deep uncertainty in him, as though nothing around him could be trusted, never could be trusted.
He wished that he could bring her back, reach deep into the intangible past and pull her close to him. He misses it, the smell of her hair and the colour of her eyes and how she was his rock, his safe haven.
“I miss you,” he tells her sometimes, as he leans back on his chair, far, far back, and the hydraulics prevent him from flipping completely backwards and shattering his skull. Dying is getting a lot harder these days, and Hyunseung wonders how Jihyun managed.
He didn’t mean to set everything on fire, didn’t mean to kill them. “I didn’t mean to,” he’s sobbing, and he’s trying to get air in but his throat is constricting at the wrong times and he’s just thinking, thinking, thinking too much, “I didn’t - that wasn’t supposed to happen -“ he doesn’t know he’s apologising and explaining to anymore. Isn’t even sure exactly what he’s done, he’s just begging and begging for forgiveness he’s not sure he deserves, “Are they dead? Oh my god are they -“
He feels two hands cup his face, his forehead lean gently against another’s - her’s. He can see her red hair, tumbling down, like a sunset from stories long ago. He can hear her voice, “It’s okay.”
It’s not actually okay, he knows that, but the fact that there’s somebody willing to lie for him pulls his fractured thoughts and emotions together. He feels air filling his lungs again, then her lips on his.
The world goes up in flames.
Sometimes he thinks back and wonders what would have become of him if he had never met Jihyun. What if they had never spoken, never looked at one another. Hyunseung imagines the possibilities on the off days when he’s run one too many simulations and the university has to switch to emergency power. He sits in the dark, head in his arms on his table-top. If, what would have become of him? He wouldn’t have slipped and fallen into a chasm the colour of nightmares. But then again, he’d probably be dead. It’s not like he doesn’t know how to kill himself, it’s gotten a lot harder these days. He doesn’t even have the option of waiting it out, because his estimated lifespan is two centuries long. It’s just that, now, he has a reason to stay alive. At least, he did, before they strapped a black wristband around her wrist, tied her down and let a flesh-eating scorpion into her insides. Apparently they’ve got too many stocked up, and it’s ideal to get rid of illegal immigrants with no relatives like that.
He grabs a staple gun and rams it into his arm. It’s the only reason he keeps it on his desk. Not like there’s anything to staple. The pain pierces his mind but there’s no blood. The doors burst open a few minutes later and he’s dragged out of his chair onto a stretcher. The dean is there with the medics wheeling him away. Hyunseung chuckles a little, “That took you longer than usual.”
“Your substitute minders didn’t know what your self-inflicted torture looked like on night vision cameras.”
He lets them cloud his mind and yank out the metal embedded in his arm. He falls asleep five minutes later, and dreams about Jihyun, when she was still alive and happy. Apologises through the fog, because he knows she’d be worried that he’s added another pair of punctures to the thousands he’s already got on his left arm.
College was a joke for him, but he went anyway, because it meant that they’d wipe his record and give him a place to stay. He spent a night organising Jihyun’s miscellaneous documents (forged of course) so that she could stay with him and go to college, instead of the fantasy school she’s only known in books. Hyunseung felt the happiest he’s felt for a long while. After all, Jihyun was absolutely fine company, and nobody else wrote music like she did. There wasn’t a single female student on campus who could compare to the brilliance that Jihyun was. There wasn’t a single person that he’d rather wake up in bed with, eat breakfast with. Spend the rest of his life with.
He should have realised that like all the best things in the world, it wasn’t going to last.
The university board of directors wants to stop his research. It doesn’t make sense to Hyunseung, who knows full well that the progress he has made is of an international standard. It doesn’t make sense to him, when the dean enters at the next power-out with an official notice demanding Hyunseung’s leave of the university. It hasn’t been signed yet though, by either party.
“Your research has been too much of a disturbance on the rest of the university. The board thinks your research isn’t sustainable.”
Hyunseung stares at the dean from his seat, “You know that my research is basically finished. I have a simulation system that mimics reality to an incredible extent. You get contracts for this technology, and then half the electronics business is paying the uni big money. So why does the board want me out?”
“If you can present the finished product next week, I won’t sign this piece of paper and you won’t have to either.”
They went on a holiday once.
The ocean is a perfect blue, and they’re sitting side by side on that jetty. He can feel the texture of the wood, old and weather-beaten, underneath his hands as he leans back. She’s let her hair out for the first time in a long time, and she looks absolutely stunning. She’s radiant, almost like the sun itself. She glances back at him, smiles. He knows what question he’s supposed to ask, but what he wants to do is stay silent and capture that smile forever.
They stay the same for a long while, before she stands, picks her feet out of the lazy ocean’s grasp and takes his hand in his. She pulls him up onto his own feet on the jetty. There’s an apologetic look in her eyes as she smiles, and it’s what he’s been expecting.
He lets her push him into the water, and he as soon his head is submerged he’s back in his lab.
Hyunseung makes a final note in his report.
Keep broken hearts away from this system.
He reaches for the keyboard to decode the timer and wonders how much of his life with Jihyun he can go through before the medical team tears him away from his memories.
A/N: I feel like I haven't really delivered the sci-fi theme very well, at least, it's definitely not so obvious as it could have been, but even so, I'm kind of satisfied with how it's like this. I feel like I've left a lot unanswered, which is a shame, but it just didn't fit? I'm always writing Jihyun has that princess-like character, haha. I guess it's just very fitting for her. And that photo of her up there - that's how I had imagined her throughout this entire fic. Also, the colon is supposed to be there!