Angel Maker 3/27
title: Angel Maker
chapter rating: PG
warnings: mild language
summary: Mathematically gifted Oh Sehun makes a miscalculation that could cost him his life when he agrees to run an errand for an old high school acquaintance. The job brings Sehun face to face with much more than he'd bargained for and suddenly he has to question the binary makings of his existence, eventually ending up coming across the most delicate secret hosted by a quasi-governmental data bank.
story notes: See the foreword for more information on the story.
He takes a single viewpoint in a room.
It is surprisingly large, larger than Sehun has expected, but based on what he cannot be certain. Fluorescent lights line the otherwise pale ceiling casting a cold light into every nook of the room, shadows drawing long. His view casts from close to one wall across the whole room. While it is a cold room he can see it isn't a simple cage to contain something. There are things: right in front of him across the room, in his direct line of sight, there is a small window, high up on the wall close to the ceiling, with light creamy curtains drawn open. They're not plain in colour, but patterned instead yet from the distance it is hard to tell what the pictures represent. To his right, against the long wall close to the other end there is a desk, dark wooden and quite sturdy; a default model of an anonymous company. On top of it there are thin picture books in a language he cannot read. Their spines are colourful and bright, the writing quite large. There are plush toys of which all distinctively resemble small deer despite the odd colours. In a green glass there are colour pencils and one thick paintbrush. Whether there is paper, too, he cannot see from where he is standing. In front of the desk is a chair, matching in style and colour.
In front of the high window, its long side against the wall is a bed, properly made with a thick cover pulled over the pillow. The linen match the curtains, most likely made of the same fabric. Underneath he can see plastic boxes, see-through, with various items inside. Above the dark wooden frame, stuck on the walls are glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, and from the ceiling hang thin metal wires with small colourful lamps attached, but they are turned off and look dull to him. At the end of the bed, in the corner of the room, he sees more toy animals and some decorative pillows.
Part of the white tile floor is covered with a thick white carpet. It looks soft much like thick grass.
There on the carpet, on their side, back toward Sehun lays a person. They are clad simply in whites and greys, but he can't tell much from where he's standing. Yet somehow he knows this person is a male teenager. He knows not to be worried of them: they are not dead nor hurt.
His focus is back on the design of the room. It doesn't come off as a young man's room. In fact, the more he looks at it, the more it seems like the room of a child with the toys and colourful books. He moves closer to the desk. His presence in the room is transparent like he was only air, his purpose not to interfere. He does not touch anything as he hovers above the desk looking at the items. Not a single object looks truly loved. There isn't emotion residing in any of them. The toys look new and untouched. Nobody has clutched them against their chest and loved them. The books are, indeed, children's books although he cannot read their titles. There are no papers for drawing. The plush toys look at him with sad eyes as if they knew of his presence in the room. They are sorrowful and forgotten, lost and lonely, and a craving to pick one up washes over him; but it is not his place to do so. He is here only to watch.
He turns to look at the person in the room. From the desk Sehun can see his face. He lies on one side in relaxed foetal position, eyes closed. When Sehun looks closer, he finds the boy is breathing calmly, deep asleep. Why has he decided to sleep on the mat instead of the bed? Sehun does not understand, but he knows there's no use trying to reason with the things he sees here. It is not his place. He's here as something of a passer-by. The world feels familiar to him to the extent that he can believe he's either been here before or knows general or only partially detailed things about it; while this very room is new to him its resident not entirely. Still he cannot point out where he is, exactly.
Sehun takes a closer look at the boy. He has very delicate features and his dark hair looks smooth like silk. He has thick long lashes and beautiful plump lips, parted slightly to allow the deep breaths of sleep pass by. His feet are bare. It seems to Sehun that the boy bites his nails frequently. Around the other's left wrist he sees a hospital bracelet, but it does not read a name. Instead, there are numbers printed on it. His clothes, too, suggest he is a patient of sorts: plain, simple, and probably somewhat uncomfortable. Observing him Sehun finds his sleep is peaceful and deep despite the emotionless surroundings. It seems that he is used to this place. It isn't a prison to him, but rather, home of sorts, perhaps.
Moving around the room Sehun looks at things. It is a timeless room. There is no clock, nothing to signify the time or date. The window is the only obvious connection to the world outside. Right now, it seems to be dusk. No rain. From the room nothing but the sky is visible. The window is too high up to be peeked out through; maybe too high for anyone to see outside even when standing on a chair, and certainly too small to use as an exit. He's entered the room through the door at the other end. He can't help but wonder what is outside, if the window is high above ground level as well. Is there a city, perhaps, or a field instead? It is difficult to imagine. He tries to picture what this place might look like from the outside to no avail.
Aside from the boy asleep on the mat nothing in the room moves. He shifts from time to time as he breathes and moves slightly, but that is the only thing suggesting there is life in the room. The toys and the properly made bed all seem like it could be a scene from some sort of a play: like one wall of the room should have been missing, and had Sehun turned to look he would've found the audiences seated in rows and rows of comfortable chairs watching keenly to see what was to happen on stage, like soon someone was bound to enter to read their lines and make sense to it. He feels like someone came here every day to make sure it was properly in order, replacing anything broken or dirty with new and clean. It is sanitary to the point where it comes off as logical for him to be inside a hospital building. Maybe this is a children's hospital room. That would explain the toys and books.
On the floor the boy turns onto their back. Sehun looks at him from where he's standing, not going closer. While he knows he can't interfere with things, knows that his presence here is neutral, he does not want to disturb the boy's dream. He wonders whether it is a good one. Their lips tremble and he finds the boy is trying to speak, but no voice leaves their lips. Head lulling to the side he does not seem close to waking up. His chest rises with every breath and he loosely balls his other hand into a fist for a moment. Carefully Sehun moves closer to look at the boy. Their face is beautiful, their skin fair and even. For a teenager he looks young, but he does not find any reason to question how does he know the boy's age.
Sehun turns his attention to the door, anticipating. He knows something will happen soon. His being here bears no meaning, but it is obvious he's been placed here to see something. The calmness of the room is too much for it to be for no reason: it's certainly calm before the storm. As he trains his ears to listen to the silence he can hear speech from outside the closed door. His deduction about a hospital room sounds very accurate.
He waits.
For a moment his surroundings are still, nothing in his sight moving apart from the breaths of the boy on the floor.
The boy shifts again, looking as though he might be stirring awake. His deep sleep has been interrupted by something Sehun is unaware of like clockwork. It appears as though something inside him has simply decided it is time for him to wake up. He has watched a dream and it has ended and it is time to awaken. In one fluid movement the boy sits up on the floor, but as Sehun looks on, the boy does not seem to behave like a person waking from a deep sleep. He does not rub his eyes, stretch his arms, or brush the dark hair away from his eyes. Instead he sits with his back straight staring ahead blinking only rarely. It seems his humanity has washed away with the sleep, and now he is fully awake. Sehun observes him in silence.
In front of him the boy climbs to their feet, but does not move. It seems he has to consider his movements, taking his time with every thing he does, as though it was somehow unnatural of him to perform any of these actions. Their surroundings do not seem to concern the boy. Finally he moves again, shaking the remnants of slumber, across the room to the desk to pull the chair and sits down. Sehun stands by the boy, looking down at him. Not blinking his eyes the boy picks the topmost book of the pile, opens it on the table, and watches it. He does not seem to be reading, eyes unmoving, blank, as if he was not really registering what's in front of him. The boy turns the page. Looking down from beside the boy, Sehun cannot understand the foreign text. The book is bright and colourful with animal characters performing actions, and he can only assume the story contains an adventure and a moral.
Sehun cannot shake the feeling of being placed in a dollhouse as he watches the boy turn a page with their expression unchanging. It isn't like he wasn't real. Having watched the boy's sleep Sehun is certain the boy is as real as everything around him. If Sehun was in the position to touch the other he could reach out and try their skin and hair, and they would all be realistic. But the boy comes off like he would've had all emotion removed from him. While the room does not bother him and while he does not seem surprised to be here it comes off as though he had no ability to remember, feel or decide. There is a childish naivety to the way in which the boy seems absorbed into the task at hand, looking through the book slowly and patiently despite surely having seen it before. Looking at them Sehun finds the setting more peaceful than it is disquieting or unnerving. Nothing about the boy suggests this would be an unpleasant place for him to be.
The room remains timeless and calm. With the boy seated at the desk there is nothing else to move about in the large cold space. Sehun moves from by them to the door to the bed, slowly, observing everything in detail. The more he looks, the clearer it becomes he is right that someone must come to look after the boy very closely, cleaning and arranging things. The white carpet is spotless and the bed is made meticulously in a way that suggests routine and habit. The boy slowly looking at the children's book, he thinks, wouldn't be capable of such precision. Instead, Sehun feels the boy might very well be able to take care of himself, but the quality of the work here is different from doing something to a point with one's best effort. The one who cleans and makes the bed, perhaps a nurse of some kind does it so often they know every nook of this room. Maybe this boy is sick somehow and therefore requires such extensive care.
At last he turns back to observe the door. He knows something's coming.
He waits.
chapter rating: PG
warnings: mild language
summary: Mathematically gifted Oh Sehun makes a miscalculation that could cost him his life when he agrees to run an errand for an old high school acquaintance. The job brings Sehun face to face with much more than he'd bargained for and suddenly he has to question the binary makings of his existence, eventually ending up coming across the most delicate secret hosted by a quasi-governmental data bank.
story notes: See the foreword for more information on the story.
He takes a single viewpoint in a room.
It is surprisingly large, larger than Sehun has expected, but based on what he cannot be certain. Fluorescent lights line the otherwise pale ceiling casting a cold light into every nook of the room, shadows drawing long. His view casts from close to one wall across the whole room. While it is a cold room he can see it isn't a simple cage to contain something. There are things: right in front of him across the room, in his direct line of sight, there is a small window, high up on the wall close to the ceiling, with light creamy curtains drawn open. They're not plain in colour, but patterned instead yet from the distance it is hard to tell what the pictures represent. To his right, against the long wall close to the other end there is a desk, dark wooden and quite sturdy; a default model of an anonymous company. On top of it there are thin picture books in a language he cannot read. Their spines are colourful and bright, the writing quite large. There are plush toys of which all distinctively resemble small deer despite the odd colours. In a green glass there are colour pencils and one thick paintbrush. Whether there is paper, too, he cannot see from where he is standing. In front of the desk is a chair, matching in style and colour.
In front of the high window, its long side against the wall is a bed, properly made with a thick cover pulled over the pillow. The linen match the curtains, most likely made of the same fabric. Underneath he can see plastic boxes, see-through, with various items inside. Above the dark wooden frame, stuck on the walls are glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, and from the ceiling hang thin metal wires with small colourful lamps attached, but they are turned off and look dull to him. At the end of the bed, in the corner of the room, he sees more toy animals and some decorative pillows.
Part of the white tile floor is covered with a thick white carpet. It looks soft much like thick grass.
There on the carpet, on their side, back toward Sehun lays a person. They are clad simply in whites and greys, but he can't tell much from where he's standing. Yet somehow he knows this person is a male teenager. He knows not to be worried of them: they are not dead nor hurt.
His focus is back on the design of the room. It doesn't come off as a young man's room. In fact, the more he looks at it, the more it seems like the room of a child with the toys and colourful books. He moves closer to the desk. His presence in the room is transparent like he was only air, his purpose not to interfere. He does not touch anything as he hovers above the desk looking at the items. Not a single object looks truly loved. There isn't emotion residing in any of them. The toys look new and untouched. Nobody has clutched them against their chest and loved them. The books are, indeed, children's books although he cannot read their titles. There are no papers for drawing. The plush toys look at him with sad eyes as if they knew of his presence in the room. They are sorrowful and forgotten, lost and lonely, and a craving to pick one up washes over him; but it is not his place to do so. He is here only to watch.
He turns to look at the person in the room. From the desk Sehun can see his face. He lies on one side in relaxed foetal position, eyes closed. When Sehun looks closer, he finds the boy is breathing calmly, deep asleep. Why has he decided to sleep on the mat instead of the bed? Sehun does not understand, but he knows there's no use trying to reason with the things he sees here. It is not his place. He's here as something of a passer-by. The world feels familiar to him to the extent that he can believe he's either been here before or knows general or only partially detailed things about it; while this very room is new to him its resident not entirely. Still he cannot point out where he is, exactly.
Sehun takes a closer look at the boy. He has very delicate features and his dark hair looks smooth like silk. He has thick long lashes and beautiful plump lips, parted slightly to allow the deep breaths of sleep pass by. His feet are bare. It seems to Sehun that the boy bites his nails frequently. Around the other's left wrist he sees a hospital bracelet, but it does not read a name. Instead, there are numbers printed on it. His clothes, too, suggest he is a patient of sorts: plain, simple, and probably somewhat uncomfortable. Observing him Sehun finds his sleep is peaceful and deep despite the emotionless surroundings. It seems that he is used to this place. It isn't a prison to him, but rather, home of sorts, perhaps.
Moving around the room Sehun looks at things. It is a timeless room. There is no clock, nothing to signify the time or date. The window is the only obvious connection to the world outside. Right now, it seems to be dusk. No rain. From the room nothing but the sky is visible. The window is too high up to be peeked out through; maybe too high for anyone to see outside even when standing on a chair, and certainly too small to use as an exit. He's entered the room through the door at the other end. He can't help but wonder what is outside, if the window is high above ground level as well. Is there a city, perhaps, or a field instead? It is difficult to imagine. He tries to picture what this place might look like from the outside to no avail.
Aside from the boy asleep on the mat nothing in the room moves. He shifts from time to time as he breathes and moves slightly, but that is the only thing suggesting there is life in the room. The toys and the properly made bed all seem like it could be a scene from some sort of a play: like one wall of the room should have been missing, and had Sehun turned to look he would've found the audiences seated in rows and rows of comfortable chairs watching keenly to see what was to happen on stage, like soon someone was bound to enter to read their lines and make sense to it. He feels like someone came here every day to make sure it was properly in order, replacing anything broken or dirty with new and clean. It is sanitary to the point where it comes off as logical for him to be inside a hospital building. Maybe this is a children's hospital room. That would explain the toys and books.
On the floor the boy turns onto their back. Sehun looks at him from where he's standing, not going closer. While he knows he can't interfere with things, knows that his presence here is neutral, he does not want to disturb the boy's dream. He wonders whether it is a good one. Their lips tremble and he finds the boy is trying to speak, but no voice leaves their lips. Head lulling to the side he does not seem close to waking up. His chest rises with every breath and he loosely balls his other hand into a fist for a moment. Carefully Sehun moves closer to look at the boy. Their face is beautiful, their skin fair and even. For a teenager he looks young, but he does not find any reason to question how does he know the boy's age.
Sehun turns his attention to the door, anticipating. He knows something will happen soon. His being here bears no meaning, but it is obvious he's been placed here to see something. The calmness of the room is too much for it to be for no reason: it's certainly calm before the storm. As he trains his ears to listen to the silence he can hear speech from outside the closed door. His deduction about a hospital room sounds very accurate.
He waits.
For a moment his surroundings are still, nothing in his sight moving apart from the breaths of the boy on the floor.
The boy shifts again, looking as though he might be stirring awake. His deep sleep has been interrupted by something Sehun is unaware of like clockwork. It appears as though something inside him has simply decided it is time for him to wake up. He has watched a dream and it has ended and it is time to awaken. In one fluid movement the boy sits up on the floor, but as Sehun looks on, the boy does not seem to behave like a person waking from a deep sleep. He does not rub his eyes, stretch his arms, or brush the dark hair away from his eyes. Instead he sits with his back straight staring ahead blinking only rarely. It seems his humanity has washed away with the sleep, and now he is fully awake. Sehun observes him in silence.
In front of him the boy climbs to their feet, but does not move. It seems he has to consider his movements, taking his time with every thing he does, as though it was somehow unnatural of him to perform any of these actions. Their surroundings do not seem to concern the boy. Finally he moves again, shaking the remnants of slumber, across the room to the desk to pull the chair and sits down. Sehun stands by the boy, looking down at him. Not blinking his eyes the boy picks the topmost book of the pile, opens it on the table, and watches it. He does not seem to be reading, eyes unmoving, blank, as if he was not really registering what's in front of him. The boy turns the page. Looking down from beside the boy, Sehun cannot understand the foreign text. The book is bright and colourful with animal characters performing actions, and he can only assume the story contains an adventure and a moral.
Sehun cannot shake the feeling of being placed in a dollhouse as he watches the boy turn a page with their expression unchanging. It isn't like he wasn't real. Having watched the boy's sleep Sehun is certain the boy is as real as everything around him. If Sehun was in the position to touch the other he could reach out and try their skin and hair, and they would all be realistic. But the boy comes off like he would've had all emotion removed from him. While the room does not bother him and while he does not seem surprised to be here it comes off as though he had no ability to remember, feel or decide. There is a childish naivety to the way in which the boy seems absorbed into the task at hand, looking through the book slowly and patiently despite surely having seen it before. Looking at them Sehun finds the setting more peaceful than it is disquieting or unnerving. Nothing about the boy suggests this would be an unpleasant place for him to be.
The room remains timeless and calm. With the boy seated at the desk there is nothing else to move about in the large cold space. Sehun moves from by them to the door to the bed, slowly, observing everything in detail. The more he looks, the clearer it becomes he is right that someone must come to look after the boy very closely, cleaning and arranging things. The white carpet is spotless and the bed is made meticulously in a way that suggests routine and habit. The boy slowly looking at the children's book, he thinks, wouldn't be capable of such precision. Instead, Sehun feels the boy might very well be able to take care of himself, but the quality of the work here is different from doing something to a point with one's best effort. The one who cleans and makes the bed, perhaps a nurse of some kind does it so often they know every nook of this room. Maybe this boy is sick somehow and therefore requires such extensive care.
At last he turns back to observe the door. He knows something's coming.
He waits.