Veruca
originally posted at sooheaven ages ago. didn't cross-post out of shame.
Title: Veruca
Pairing: Kyungsoo/Sehun
Rating: PG-13 (cursing only)
Length: What a maroon.
Warnings: Pretentious and annoying as fuck. Will stick to your teeth like tar.
Author's Notes: Isn't a charlieandthechocolatefactory!au.
Summary: Shower curtains, ammonia, the works.
For the average human being, the odor threshold of ammonia is about 5 ppm.
At this concentration, the gas is far from dangerous, perhaps just irritating.
Dusty sunlight stains the interior of the metal shell as it shoots across the cityscape. The rail itself is an aluminum work, the oldest transport line built entirely off the ground. It once traveled between the major junction points of Seoul, but since then, parts of it have been torn down and reclaimed by titanium. Bleached walls and seats of stiff ABS, the new trains are streaks of silver against the sky, weaving through Seoul's morass of metal and synthetics. They lack the windows and fading paint of the older lines and are specifically designed to be many times more efficient, but none of them leave the cluttered heart of Seoul, circling endlessly in its tangled arteries.
Kyungsoo stares out the smudged glass, the golden light of sunset falling over his face like moving microscope slides. The haze of city has settled over the squat buildings of Seoul's outskirts. Forgotten by the populace in the center, they have decomposed to small dots of brick and faded billboard posters peeling off like listless butterflies.
Kyungsoo watches with some interest as a lone man--just a speck from this height--dashes across the cracked and filthy street. He makes it across with little fanfare and continues to sprint down the walkway. Plastic bags litter the sidewalk like tumbleweeds. The passing wind catches the ugly, garish blooms and tosses them airborne, PET posies that died white and brown.
Kyungsoo doesn't come back here often, and he doesn't particularly need to either, but regardless, every two or three months, he does so anyways, a forty-five minute ride on the last line to Seoul's older, almost abandoned fringe. In the peduncle of the city, there is little ground visible through the sea of towering steel construction and windows too reflective to see through. If Kyungsoo breathes in too deeply during this leg of the trip, he can taste the stinging ammonia that pervades the city. ("They circulate small amounts of it to keep the buildings free of rust and other hydroxides," Baekhyun whispers in the hallway.) And some days, Kyungsoo can hear the city's steady chorus of medical beeps, flocks of tropical birds screeching that something is flatlining in these metal capsules. [That, despite all the apidates and phthalates, the dripline hotwiring TBHQ and BHT straight to his arteries, man is stubborn in his determination to die.]
Beyond the polished chrome of downtown, Seoul is a different brand of ruin; ashen and wrecked, hugging the earth in humility. Sawdust confetti gathers in drifts on the streets, and no one shows their face.
The hollow capsule stutters on its circuit, a fit of velocity and electric sparks underneath Kyungsoo's feet. He swings with the shuddering car, and his grip tightens on the rubber strap hanging from the ceiling. A slouching man sleeps on a seat of cracked vinyl, a newspaper fallen over his face. (Improved Efficiency in Food Production! Perfected Civil Order!)
A halting, quantized voice rings through the metal container.
"Please remain calm. [sic] Help will be on its way [sic] immediately."
The announcement rings in quasi-musical tones, hemisemiquadri-melodies cut and reworked, cut and reworked. They had once shown a documentary on the voice, Kyungsoo recalls. The narrator said she had belonged to a popular singer once upon a time, and the rest of thirty minute special had been a hashed collage of the singer in various sequined gowns, swaying before various microphones in various qualities of film.
Nowadays, they just butchered and chopped her audio samples until “7:30 arrival in C12” could be pieced together, and nobody gave a shit about the woman who had once sung the words to those songs.
The sleeping man stirs at the disturbance and looks up.
"The train stopped," Kyungsoo offers. "All the other cars are empty. It's just us."
His companion nods and folds up his newspaper. (Improved Efficiency in Food Production! Perfected Civil Order!) He yawns and stands.
Kyungsoo looks through the back window, watching the sun play off the faraway skyscrapers.
"You know," the man speaks up, "they're probably not going to send a technician out here until tomorrow."
Kyungsoo pulls off his tie and folds it into his briefcase.
"We're pretty far away from downtown, and we're in the outside anyways. It's not like anyone will want to come get us."
And after a moment, "I doubt they even know people still ride the rail out here."
Kyungsoo snaps his briefcase closed.
The man falls silent.
They get off the rail by the emergency ladder on one of the supports.
After Kyungsoo has had enough of the high fructose pop songs pumped into the car, he pries the doors open with the emergency hammer and, holding on to the grooved side of the train, works his way down to the ground.
Once Kyungsoo has finished brushing the dust off his otherwise immaculate suit, the other passenger has set foot on the ground and is trying to introduce himself.
"I'm Zhang Yixing, medical researcher from C9." Pressed tie, folded newspaper, Zhang Yixing doesn’t have any business outside of shrink-wrapped, vacuum-sealed Inner Seoul. His gaunt frame communicates a life-long diet of flash-freeze fast food, and his wide eyes watching the fairy-tale shower of sawdust around them suggest a childhood living in a disposable cup. Newsprint smears under Yixing’s clammy hands, and as he opens his mouth to try again, Kyungsoo speaks.
"Nice to meet you.” Hi-gloss, turn up the sheen, Kyungsoo smiles.
“Could I--, uh, what’s your name?” Yixing asks and offers his hand for a handshake, jerkily shifting his periodical under his elbow.
Grey ink rubs onto Kyungsoo’s fingers when he grips Yixing’s hand, but he tries not to make note of it. “I’m Do Kyungsoo, quant, A6.”
“A6?” Yixing recoils, eyes dazed by the shot of celebrity. He wipes his moist fingers on his pants. “What are you doing out here?”
"I have an apartment out here,” Kyungsoo shrugs.
“But you have an apartment in district?” Yixing is incredulous, eyebrows furrowed.
“Yeah, but sometimes, I need to get away from all that,” Kyungsoo waves his hand toward the steel cornucopia in the distance and gives a short chuckle. The sun glints off the edifice with silver ferocity, and Kyungsoo shields his eyes.
Yixing laughs mildly. “But out here,” he says haltingly, “it’s so--” He gestures to the floating sawdust highlighted in the sunlight and dilapidated buildings sinking in pools of space jam and mold.
Kyungsoo nods understandingly. “Why are you out here, then?”
Yixing shifts a little and secures his newspaper under his arm. “Business matters.”
There’s a faraway crack overhead as a gust of air jets over them. Kyungsoo looks up to see crests of sawdust take flight, waves and waves crashing above them; Yixing is open-mouthed with wonder. A series of winds sweeps through the lane, each one whipping new fronts of dust into the air. In two breaths, it’s amalgamated in a small tornado roaming the abandoned street, grabbing in greedy fistfuls, all the trash, all the refuse left in the gullies.
In two breaths, Kyungsoo has ducked into a side alley littered with bottles and cheerful advertisements (Try VivoPar and You'll NEVER Go Back!), but a glance backwards tells him that Yixing is caught in the furious glory of golden light and sawdust. The medical researcher doubles over coughing. It creeps down his throat, fills his nostrils. He coughs again, again.
The wind reaches a crescendo, and particles fly up in his face. Try as he might, Yixing just keeps breathing them in-it’s a whirlwind, a storm. The grains cram down his throat; Yixing wheezes and closes his eyes. His throat is drying up, his airways are clogging.
For the first time and seriously now, Yixing considers it. How absurd it would be, Yixing decides, to die like this, kneeling on a dirty sidewalk, choking on sawdust. Halfway to a new life and now, how absurd, how absurd. It's almost comforting, that mantra that no one should be--will be!--allowed to die as a spectacle, watched by a man they just met.
Yixing coughs again, again, and Kyungsoo waits, with half-horror from the alley.
Mercifully, the gusts pass as quickly as they came, and Yixing crawls over the sidewalk curb. Chest heaving, Yixing picks out his lungs in the wreckage. Quiet, Kyungsoo walks up to the fallen man on the side walk and offers Yixing a bottle of water that was buried in his briefcase. Yixing drinks quickly and murmurs a subdued thanks.
Kyungsoo clears his throat, guilty all of a sudden. “I don’t know anyone involved with medicine out here,” he murmurs, “but if you’re looking for Jongin--”
Yixing looks up, startled. His expression freezes. He splutters. Stops and starts again. “I have a family-I mean, I want a family, I want a better--”
“Future, for both me and my children,” Kyungsoo finishes, somber. He tries to shake off the feeling of victimization. “I can take you to meet Jongin.”
Yixing nods fervently.
Kyungsoo turns the tap on mindlessly, and water rushes out in eager bullets, thundering against the flimsy plastic basin. It’s a high, thin room that reminds Kyungsoo of a motel chapel, dirty tiling and swimming pool baptisms: alcoholic religion lying on the side of the road, screaming about the stars and the sky. The only window in the bathroom has been smashed through, leaving shards of fallen glass strewn across the white tile, and a fine layer of sawdust coats everything like new-fallen snow.
After the water surges over the sides of the container, Kyungsoo dunks his head in and breathes liberally. Water rushes through his nostrils, nearly making its way back to his throat. He snorts it out and inhales again. Eventually, he whips his head out of the water, chest shuddering as he catches his breath. Water dribbles down his neck, tracing meanders over his pressed white-collared shirt.
After several months in the city, the burn and tingle of ammonia takes root in his mind. It stings when he inhales, setting off a metallic ring like tin cans clattering together on a string or defunct telephones ringing in empty streets. It’s a vice around his mind, contracting with every breath. The noose of fiber-optics and fluorescence, ammonia is original sin.
He pushes the door open while toweling his soaked head. Yixing is slumped in a wicker chair, staring at the desolate state of Kyungsoo’s apartment. Three panels of ceiling-to-floor windows lie in glittering pieces over the ground, leaving only empty metal frames in the wall. Sawdust traces breezes across the ground, the buffets whipping it into tiny fronts that inch across the room.
“Do you wanna go next?” Kyungsoo asks, sitting down next to him. The motion kicks up a new cloud of sawdust, and Yixing’s coughs rattle in his chest. He manages a quick shake of his head.
Kyungsoo pulls the man up and leads him to the bathroom. Yixing’s violent hacking expels a puff of dust, and he watches with horror as it floats to the floor. Kyungsoo turns away in embarrassment and busies himself with the faucet. He fills the basin again.
“Thanks,” Yixing wheezes, clutching his dry throat. “But I still don’t need to wash my face.”
They sprinkle water over the kitchen floor. (“All this dust,” Yixing mumbles as he dips his fingers back into the water. Kyungsoo showers the counters with the liquid.) And backlit by the blue evening, they start to cook.
“Why are we making so much?” Yixing ventures, tremulous. The old tofu crumbles underneath his knife like dry flowers, bright blooms of arsenic, phosphorus, antimony.
“It’s Tuesday.” Kyungsoo fills a large pot with water and slides it over the crusted stovetop in a screech. “Jongin always brings his friends on Tuesdays.” He turns on the stove, waiting for the blue flame to burst alight. Instead, the hiss of natural gas trickles into the room, and Kyungsoo turns it off again in disgust. He digs out a match stump, flips the gas on again. Orange-red tongues lick up against the fuel, reincarnating in blue under the pot. (Dry flowers of antimony, phosphorus, and arsenic.)
“Wait, so do you do this often?” Yixing focuses on the wilted lettuce before him. The tip of his knife traces lopsided squares through the limp leaves, spiny lines that make everything fall apart.
“As often as I come.” Kyungsoo grunts as he stretches for the bowl on the top shelf. Yixing puts down his knife and tugs it down for him. “Thanks,” Kyungsoo mumbles. “And I come here every few months.”
“But there’s food in the fridge?” Yixing stares at his uneven slices. The weak evening light casts long shadows over his cutting board.
“Jongin leaves it there,” Kyungsoo hums, “That’s why it’s all shit, really.” He fiddles with the intensity of the flames.
Kyungsoo begins on the load of tomatoes that was stowed in the back of the refrigerator. They’re all dehydrated and taut to the touch, near rupturing under the pressure. The tip of his knife slices into the first one, and the wrinkled skin bursts in a splatter of dilute red.
It’s a massacre on his cutting board. The grainy, filamentous inside starts to melt under the weight of Kyungsoo’s hand. He pulls the next one up.
Kyungsoo is fully absorbed in slicing the tomatoes until Yixing pauses in his cutting and “Don’t you,” he swallows, “don’t you want to know why I’m looking for Jongin?”
Yixing’s fingers feel like metal prosthetics wrapped around the knife. He clenches and unclenches them.
“Everyone comes to Jongin for the same reasons,” Kyungsoo shrugs, “They don’t know it, but they all want the same thing from Jongin.”
“But you get it, right?” Yixing breathes. “You get why I want this.”
Kyungsoo shrugs again.
The knife slips out of Yixing’s grip with a dull thud. It smashes the remaining whole tomatoes, and seeds spill out like tiny rhinestones, slick and glittery in the dim light.
Kyungsoo frowns.
There’s a rustle as Yixing shifts to let Kyungsoo salvage the mess.
“It’s not about what’s happening now,” Yixing tries, his voice shaky and inching on too high. “It’s-it’s about where we’re heading. It’s the future, you know, our children’s children, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah.” Kyungsoo scrapes the tofu bits and tomato pulp into the soup. “I get that.” The soup bubbles, thick and viscous. (Dry flowers of antimony, phosphorus, and arsenic.) He adds some salt and stirs.
Yixing watches him quietly. After a moment, he picks up his knife again. Glossy with tomato juice, it feels even heavier than before.
Jongin’s friends are all ruffians of some sort, rejects of the street. Even the slums of the city didn’t want them, Jongin jokes, and they all laugh with him because absolutely nothing in that statement is true. There aren’t even slums in the city, they know. Whatever ghettos there may have been have already drowned in Seoul’s atmosphere of ammonia and muriatic acid, the area evacuated with the wave of a hand and cheap sweepstakes. Everything in Seoul is clean and iridescent, a paradise of glass, metal, and efficiency; there’s no room for rundown basements and weeds sprouting in the sidewalk.
They’re all some degree of unclean and unshowered. Some are reformed members of Inner Seoul, having left their jobs, slipped off the radar, and ditched the city all together. Others are the odds and ends Jongin picked up on the outskirts, dragging their feet through the dust, hoping to choke to death on the stuff.
Jongin has always been a magnet for the unhappy and wayward, even before he started his dreams of reorganization.
Tonight, though, there’s a quiet suit and tie standing in the corner, staring into his cup by the dim light of the half-obscured moon. He’s a newcomer, Kyungsoo’s sure, fresh from the city, clean-shaven and well-pressed. His hair is an electric white in the weak light, and he’s a sliver of human soul and spine against the shadows of the apartment.
(What’s all this about Oh Sehun? Kyungsoo asks tensely. Why are you suddenly bringing more people in? The faucet is quiet, but even that stands out in the silence.)
“He’s a periodical like you,” Jongin says, sidling up to Kyungsoo as he nearly ladles the soup over his hand. Kyungsoo bites down a curse. "He comes by about every three weeks.”
“Oh, Sehun,” he shouts, “Get over here! I need you to meet someone.”
(Big things, Kyungsoo, I have big things planned. Jongin pants.)
“Lame pun, Jongin,” Oh, Sehun says as he strides over. “And I think you need to get the taps checked. My water smells odd.”
Jongin laughs and nods. “Kyungsoo, this is Oh Sehun, my second-in-command.”-Kyungsoo’s eyebrows bunch up immediately-“And Sehun, this is Kyungsoo, my best friend. We grew up together.”
(Listen, Jongin, Kyungsoo hums, scrubbing at dried tomato, I don’t care when you need him to do some inside job or whatever. Warm water drips over his hands, heat bleeding into his fingers. I care when you name some guy your right hand and you’ve known him for less than two months. You aren’t thinking this through. He wasn’t here last time, and-fuck, you’re just going to pull down your armor for him?)
Oh Sehun moves forward a bit, snapping attention and refocusing on him. “Oh Sehun, fund manager, A3.” He offers his hand as a greeting.
(There’s a dull thud in the other room, and a sweaty Jongin stumbles into the kitchen. Do Kyungsoo, he pronounces gravely. You’re the one in danger. You’re walking on the edge of the world, Kyungsoo, expecting everything to stay in equilibrium for you.)
Kyungsoo stares at the pale, tenuous fingers. “Do Kyungsoo, quant, A6,” he answers mechanical and polite, like treacle cut and squared on doilies. He dons his industry standard smile. Sehun’s digits are ice-cold, freezing against Kyungsoo’s. They brush up to Kyungsoo’s wrist, and he shivers.
(Kyungsoo laughs bitterly, And what are you doing, Jongin? Wasting your life on your childhood dream? Jongin falls quiet.
Kyungsoo washes the dishes in silence. After a while, he runs a soapy hand through his hair. That was really out of line of me. Sor--)
“A6,” Sehun nods mildly. “It’s a nice place.”
(Tomorrow, Jongin jabs a finger at the shattered windows. You’re going to cover up those gaps and start cleaning. You’ll pull out all your supplies and try to sweep up all the dust in this place. And the day after, you’ll try to live in this apartment, as if there’s nothing wrong.)
“So’s A3,” Kyungsoo shrugs, “Better, even.” Kyungsoo continues spooning the soup into bowls. The scalding soup is dripping down the ladle and onto Kyungsoo’s hand.
Sehun stares at Kyungsoo as he swirls the water in his cup.
(What’s the point, Kyungsoo? Jongin says, You’ll be gone by next week.
He stalks out of the room.)
The Tuesdays when Kyungsoo comes back, Jongin gathers up all of his lost little ducklings and drags them downtown to have a meal and laugh at Kyungsoo’s expense. Jongin leaves the materials in the fridge; Kyungsoo dumps them in a pot of water and heats. Kyungsoo tries not to appear too welcoming, and they all just laugh and have a meal.
Tonight, though, Jongin is delighted at the newcomer, fresh from the city, he’s sure. He has his arm hooked around Yixing, and the fidgety medical researcher from C9 looks much more at ease. A certain Park Chanyeol cackles and lands a heavy hand on Yixing’s back. His smudged pilot goggles swing around his neck. It's all a bunch of noise against subtle wallpaper, subtle furniture, and subtle glances in a nearly empty kitchen.
(Kyungsoo’s mouth twists. You took my shower curtains, fucker, he shouts after Jongin.)
Kyungsoo continues spooning soup into the bowls.
“Jongin needs something from the closet,” Sehun says.
“What the hell are you doing here.” There’s something a little bitter about cleaning after Jongin’s declaration last night, but Kyungsoo isn’t the mood to contemplate it. He raises the spray bottle of water blankly, spritzing some on Sehun. “You’re only allowed here Tuesdays and Fridays; now go away.”
Sehun frowns at the moisture soaking into his shirt and elbows past Kyungsoo, his lanky frame slipping and crunching into Kyungsoo’s apartment. “Where’s the closet?” Dark eyes rake across the half-furnished interior, and his eyes catch on the shower curtains tacked over the missing windows.
“Tell me what it is, and I’ll go get it,” Kyungsoo insists, arms folded. The scowl digs even deeper into his expression.
“No,” Sehun sneers. “Jongin says you can’t know.” He begins to inspect the various corners of apartment, opening all the doors and rifling through their contents. “What’s all this trash anyways? Why’re you cleaning this place if it’s just going to get dirty again?”
“Tell me what’s in my closet,” Kyungsoo says instead, trailing behind Sehun. “I have a right to know what’s in my own closet.”
“Where did you get the idea that it was your closet?” Sehun rolls his eyes. He stands up, pants creased and dusty. “So you have the legal documents, but it’s no more yours than it is mine.”
“My grandmother bought this apartment,” Kyungsoo frowns, his fingers tight and throbbing, “Of course it’s mine; I grew up here.” Kyungsoo licks his lips. “I grew up here,” he repeats.
“Does that really matter, though?” Sehun scoffs, pulling an end table back. “Who your mother was, who your father was, who gives a shit?”
The fragile stand screeches across the floor, revealing a small, half-size door with a handle flaking gold paint. The metallic flecks adhere to his fingers as he reaches for the knob, and the panel pops open with a puff of dust. Sehun drags out a floral box jammed with paperclips and wires and small electronics chips, little glimmers of the electronic. He drops to the floor, legs crossed, and begins counting the little black cards in a low, fervent whisper.
The afternoon light creeps around him in a halo. It almost looks like he’s laughing, Kyungsoo thinks. Sehun, laughing, maybe smiling. Sehun, who is still so young. Whose hands are made of gold. Leaning against the couch his grandmother had spent half her life sitting on, a spray bottle tangled in his fingers, Kyungsoo can see it--
Sehun finishes the survey and nods. Swift steps carry him towards the door.
--He can see Sehun laughing, maybe smiling, who is still so young, whose hands are made of gold, fingers soft and- Sehun who was given a job in A3 when he was fresh out of school, barely able to hold his own hand; Sehun who couldn’t stand it, didn’t like it; Sehun who woke up every morning to greet the chemical city and its noxious fog. Sehun who rode a train out to the fringe. Sehun who met Jongin.
“Um,” Kyungsoo says. His tongue burns in the cradle of his mouth. “Would you like some tea?”
Sehun (laughing, maybe smiling) stares at Kyungsoo with an unreadable expression. Kyungoo shivers for no reason.
Then, deliberately, as if he knows the tea is a lie, Sehun says yes.
(Green. Fingers soft and unbearably green.)
Kyungsoo rides the line back on Monday. At the edge of the city, he transfers cars and boards one of the bright silver capsules. The train schedule within Inner Seoul is a complicated system of circles and circles, tracing Seoul’s faint pulse in nauseous figure-eights.
(People get on that train, thinking they’re looking for something, but then they never get off. They ride and ride and ride. The city becomes a blur, the streets become a blur. Sehun leaned back in his chair. And I’m not actually talking about the trains.)
The light inside is bleach white and ugly, the anti-septic light of hospitals that makes everyone look jaundiced. The searing scent of ammonia floods the car at each stop, prickling white-hot needles in Kyungsoo’s throat. He coughs a little. Everyone sits in paralytic silence, each passenger soundlessly flipping through magazines or newspapers or wrinkled business papers, gnawing on private worries or nails or that report due next Monday.
(Sehun isn’t that bad, it turns out. Back in-district, he works the markets, choreographs deals, seeks out investments. It’s his job, he says, all nice and easy.
So you came to Jongin. Kyungsoo’s hands tremble as he sprays the ammonia solution on the table. He wrinkles his nose and tries to swallow the irony.
Yeah, Sehun says.
Ugh, that smell, he turns away, covering his nose and grimacing.
Kyungsoo cracks a smile.)
At the B4 station, a woman decked out in Day-Glo colors and Saran wrap wobbles into the car. Purple strands of PET woven through her hair, she breathes in heavy, saponaceous exhales, and a cloying lilac cloud sinks over the car.
(You don’t mind if I smoke, right? a cigarette positioned carefully between his fingers.
No, Kyungsoo hums, I don’t.
Thanks. There’s an airy sigh, and the smell of ash and ruin begins to fill the room. Kyungsoo thinks about the bits of lung and throat and smooth, pink musculature that Sehun incinerates with each inhale, but at least the odor is a welcome change.)
A few people glance up upon her entrance, but these are just ascetic little side-looks. Most display no reaction, but the page-flipping continues, intensifies. The shift in atmosphere is distinct. The quiet hardens from the mutual consent of a library to an absolute-zero loss of will. All passengers freeze at the touch, liquid nitrogen waterfalls that sparkle, gleam.
Kyungsoo slides around in his seat. The ride is far from smooth.
(Did you get what you were coming for? Kyungsoo asks. Finding Jongin and all?
Sehun sighs and takes a drag from his light. He shifts his tongue around and chooses his words carefully.
I don’t think Jongin has what I’m looking for.
Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish you, Sehun grins wryly.)
When the B4 woman gets off, there’s a general release of tension. Shoulders sag, and people shift and rustle and shake out their coats to get comfortable again. Small, secretive smiles are passed around as suddenly, everyone’s thinking the same thing.
Cultish, Sehun had said.
The noxious scent of ammonia comes rushing back.
(Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish as you, Sehun grins wryly.
Kyungsoo laughs with him.)
It's early afternoon when Kyungsoo arrives at the A6 stop, and Baekhyun is waiting at the station, pale lips stretched in a tenuous smile. Immediately after he steps off the car, Baekhyun is by his side and pulling him in deep for a hug.
Baekhyun smells like computer exhaust and fax machines running all night: he just came from the office. His grip on Kyungsoo shakes with muted anger.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing, being gone for so long?" Baekhyun hisses into Kyungsoo’s ear, his hot breath vitriolic.
"Car broke down midway," Kyungsoo murmurs back, awkwardly patting Baekhyun’s back as bystanders shoot them lightning-quick glances.
Now is the age of the crowd, Sehun had said. Kyungsoo feels the back of his neck prickling.
"Yeah, well, perhaps you should have phoned to tell me," Baekhyun snarls. He pulls back as if to appraise Kyungsoo’s dusty suit and wrinkled dress shirt. "Man, I missed you so much," he proclaims a little too loudly. He embraces Kyungsoo again and growls, "You fucking lowlife, I had to cover for you at work."
"I bought you something," Kyungsoo whispers back.
He disentangles himself from Baekhyun and pulls out two clear rectangular packages from his briefcase.
Mouth tightly pursed, Baekhyun narrows his eyes. His spindly fingers fold over the shrink-wrapped bundles, and Baekhyun takes the gifts, appeased.
“Fucking shower curtains,” Baekhyun curses over a cup of steaming tea. “You bought me dusty fucking shower curtains.” Kyungsoo quietly sips from his own mug of jasmine. “I had to deal with Kim for a week, and you bring back dusty shower curtains.”
“Where’s all the cool stuff?” Baekhyun demands sharply, “You got them from the black market, didn’t you? So couldn’t you at least have gotten something a little more interesting?” He shoves a biscuit into his mouth, flaky white crumbs of wheat and high fructose gathering on his face. He furiously pours the tea down his throat. “Where’re the illegal goods? Where’re the drugs, the guns? Smuggled items--”
“Baekhyun.” Kyungsoo forces a heavy frown over his face and puts down his cup. He drops his voice to a pleasant monotone and continues. “Baekhyun. My cousin.” The cold air scrapes its way through Kyungsoo’s lungs, and his hands feel weak. He clenches them into fists.
Baekhyun stares for a moment, dumbfounded by the shift in conversation. His eyes turn suspicious and searching, raking over Kyungsoo’s expression. (Nothing is your own anymore, Sehun had said.)
“Right,” he sniffs. “Your cousin.”
Stiff, they finish their tea in silence.
(You of all people should know that, Sehun snorts. You’re so damn protective of this shoddy place.
Kyungsoo’s laughter is airy, light, helium twists and plastic balloons knocking into the ceiling.
I grew up here, is all he says.)
((Why can’t you just fucking tell me, Baekhyun shoves into him in the glass corridor. The city is dizzying underneath their feet, meters and meters of distance, straight up distance. Kyungsoo can’t even see the ground through the fog of pollution.
Family matters, Kyungsoo grits out, eyes staring at the grey abyss below. These hallways always make him nervous. He’s terrified of touching the clean glass and being burned.
That’s bullshit and you know it! Baekhyun is livid.
Light streams in through streakless windows, and Baekhyun looks downright angelic as he storms down the hallway, hazy with afternoon glow.))
Kyungsoo walks by the rows and rows of gray cubicles. Each encases a busy little worker, plugging numbers and testing systems with a lazy finger on the stock market’s pulse. Every point change is analyzed and adjusted for, equation after equation. X equals, and we want, we desire; math triumphant over man. Polite phone calls and the clatter of keyboards, the entire floor works in rhythmic, endless cycles.
“Yep.” As Kyungsoo rounds the corner, Baekhyun’s leaning over the carpeted temporary wall, stage-whispering in the uberchrome tone he reserves for superiors. “His name’s Jongin, and apparently, he lives on the edge of the city.”
“Oh really,” comes a soft voice. There’s a slender figure folded in one of the plastic chairs before Kyungsoo’s desk. He spins a cheap pen in his fingers, and his hair is bone-white in the fluorescent light. “So when is Mr. Do going to be here?”
“Baekhyun.” Baekhyun’s head whips up at Kyungsoo’s voice. His eyes are blank, then in a spark, alive.
“Mr. Do is here right now, sir, and he’ll be with you in a moment,” Baekhyun slides down from his desk and brushes up against Kyungsoo, pulling him away from his cubicle. “Listen,” he whispers, “I don’t know what this guy wants from you, but he’s A3, a fund manager, and Kim was all up on him, trying to suck his dick. Watch what you say in front of him.” Kyungsoo nods quickly. Baekhyun pats him on the back and slips back into his cubicle.
(It’s dangerous, I know, Baekhyun starts while staring out the window. His hands have frozen over the keyboard as he churns out the words. I wish you would tell me more, but-he sighs-I can understand that you can’t.
Baekhyun, Kyungsoo spins around in his chair, a pencil perched in his fingers. He stares at Baekhyun, his lips pressed together firmly. I already told you about my cousin.
Baekhyun cracks a small smile. Yeah, your cousin.)
“I’m sorry, sir, to keep you waiting,” Hi-gloss, turn up the sheen, Kyungsoo flashes his industry standard smile. His voice is tight, shiny, like plastic stretched too thin. He slides his briefcase under the desk and pulls out a few papers.
“It’s alright,” says his visitor. Kyungsoo looks up to sharp eyes and thin features. He barely smiles. “I was hoping that we could discuss this matter after hours, actually.”
They walk home in the dark. Distilled moonlight falls through layers of chemical clouds and glass hallways to land in front of their feet. Sehun pauses in one of the connector corridors and turns to Kyungsoo. He smiles, briefly, and they continue walking. Kyungsoo stares at the miasma covering the city beneath them.
Seoul tonight is a television on mute, flashing colors and brief sparks all silent, a show for sleeping people. It feels like they’re suspended, creeping across telephone wires on their bare feet as they walk through empty hallways. Everything is made of steel, glass, cold, and they marvel at the slumbering metropolis.
Kyungsoo shivers.
“Alright.” Sehun comes to a full stop in another of the numerous glass hallways that connect Seoul’s buildings. He is bright against the dismal skyline, pure almost. “I have an offer to make you.”
Kyungsoo offers a grunt in response.
Sehun plows on, “Jongin and I were thinking,”--Kyungsoo snorts.--“you work in a key financial firm, and what’s more, you design the systems that dictate the cash flow in this city.” Sehun pauses and licks his lips. “We were wondering if-”
Kyungsoo’s eyebrows fly up in sudden alarm. His tongue feels like a hundred pounds.
“You want me to sabotage it.” The words fall dead between them, and Sehun nods slowly, eyes fixed on Kyungsoo’s reaction.
“You want me to ruin a city,” Kyungsoo begins shakily. “You want me to turn my back on a civilization and the millions of people who comprise it.”
“And your answer?” Sehun prods, lightning hair falling into his face.
“My answer?” Kyungsoo laughs in a short breath. “Sehun, you and Jongin can play hero all you like, and I won’t pretend that there aren’t some things here that are fucked up, but tearing the down the basis of all this stability, that,” he breathes with a chuckle, “that’s ridiculous.”
“Kyungsoo,” Sehun frowns, frustration knitting together his brows. “please. You know things aren’t going to get better this way. Do you think they’re suddenly going to desegregate the districts? And what about the people on the fringe? Do you think they’re going to take them in at any point? Are you just going to wait for the day when they tell you that they don’t give a shit about D level people?” Kyungsoo stares as Sehun’s features harden into grave seriousness. “There’s a point where something must be done, Kyungsoo, and day by day, in this pool of caustics, we’re getting closer and closer.”
“You don’t know what will happen if we pull apart the finances,” Kyungsoo laughs. “There’ll be no reason to keep up all this.” Kyungsoo waves his hands at the concentric districts and grey smoke. “It’ll be absolute anarchy, and I won’t have the blood of thousands on my hands, Sehun.”
“The blood of thousands,” Sehun snorts. “I know you can smell that ammonia.”
Kyungsoo stares at him, blank.
“Think, Kyungsoo,” he hisses. “Can’t ammonia kill? Doesn’t long-term exposure ruin one’s health? This city,” Sehun spits on the glass with vitriol, and the viscous blob dribbles down slowly, “this city will do anything for stability. Clean windows for people’s lives, Christ.”
“Most people can’t even smell it, the poor bastards,” Sehun laughs.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bent cigarette. Kyungsoo watches as he lights it and throws the smoking, glowing stick into a dark hallway. Without warning, a spray of water bursts from the ceiling and puts out the small fire.
“See,” Sehun nods at leaking puddle, “no alarm. The city wouldn’t give a shit if the people in that building had died. They’d rather not incite panic by telling people the truth. You can bet your ass that if someone had died, they would’ve made up some bogus story about how he transferred to a different district. Then they’d reorg the floor, so no one would be around people they knew and they wouldn't be able to talk about it.”
Kyungsoo’s lips press together. The city is gleaming, as much as it can through the cloud cover, and shifting wraiths of polluted ammonia crown the city. A quick shadow cuts over their faces, and they both look up to watch the unseen creature circle the barely breathing metropolis.
Seoul tonight is a television on mute, flashing colors and brief sparks all silent, a show for sleeping people. It feels like they’re suspended, telephone wires cutting into their bare feet as they toe the line between here and infinity. The ground is far away at this height, but the sky feels like a myth face-down in the gutter.
The silence between them is thick, nearly tangible, the reverential quality that comes with church services in stained-glass cathedrals.
"It won't take long," Sehun finally says.
Kyungsoo asks, “Where will I go afterwards?”
And Sehun smiles.
(Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish as you, Sehun grins wryly.
Kyungsoo laughs with him.)
Writing mathematical systems for the market is only difficult when accuracy is necessary, so Kyungsoo writes the new system quickly, a couple hours over two weekends. Peel away the ornamental recursives he has sprinkled in, it’s really quite simple, a series of statements tying the company’s funds to joke stock and men who in two months, will blow their money on one of the many black holes in the economy. Men who, Sehun says, have been allied with Jongin for years, waiting only for the day that Kyungsoo would agree to put his position to work and take up Jongin’s side. Men who trudge to work and sit in their cubicles and wake up with only a faraway hope on their minds, their eyes misty with the horizon.
Kyungsoo hates that he might have been the deciding factor to Jongin’s plan.
“Wait,” Sehun whispers to him in the copy room. He's over on another one of his business calls. “You need to hold off on the system. Jongin is timing this. Like you said, it’ll be absolute anarchy once it’s in place, and shit will go down in the city. Jongin’s arranging several things down in D.” The printer beeps, and Sehun checks on his documents. There’s nothing in the tray. “He wants this to go off just right.”
“Understandable,” Kyungsoo mumbles back as he fiddles with the printer buttons. The machine lets out one long tone, and the sound of churning starts up again. “So are we leaving tonight?”
“Yeah,” Sehun nods, looking over the papers the printer’s spitting out. “We’ll take the 5 o’clock."
Holding Sehun's hand, riding the train, Kyungsoo watches the city and wonders who they are, really, with or without Seoul.
(Jongin is beyond pleased to see Kyungsoo.
What did I say, Kyungsoo, he laughs. Big things, big things!
Yeah, yeah, Jongin. Kyungsoo concentrates on pinning up the shower curtains.)
Kyungsoo pieces the system together carefully. It's now 4:15, and he's just waiting for Sehun's signal to take flight. He clicks his mouse in boredom and adds another recursive for the heck of it.
He spins in his chair, pensive.
In a few minutes, he's going to torch a virtual stock of wealth; in a few minutes, millions of accounts will spin until they reach zero and there will be nothing left in this city that can be flashed on a badge and instill fear. Millions of people will mourn the loss of money that never existed, that only ever had presence in their minds. They will howl at the missing digital code; some electric sparks fell through the cracks in the floor, the hollow city will echo, where are they? Where are they?! They will stagger through the streets in agony. The loss of a nothing, made tragic, moving. And the last remnants of the city that drained itself in favor of pumping data will ask God, supplicant at last, where all numbers went. All those beautiful numbers, stacks and stacks of zeros and ones. Gone. Seoul will cry.
His phone vibrates. Kyungsoo smiles and begins to install the new system.
Just in time for the 4:30 rounds, Kyungsoo boards at the A6 station and sits through the stops and turns. The long body of the train whips out behind the engine as they make infinite rounds in carousel. And the city becomes a blur, the streets become a blur.
When the doors open on the D19 station, Kyungsoo snaps his briefcase closed, slides it under his seat, and steps out of the metal capsule. He doesn’t need anything on this final trip.
The station is crammed with writhing people, hollow cheeks painted glow-in-the-dark, each trying to get on the proverbial first train home. Everyone is pushing, moving, trying to slip past. Then a bell rings, and the desperation hitches, intensifies. Everyone shoves a little faster, hurrying to the next train, the next station. The cacophony grows: bells dinging, doors beeping, and above it all, that anonymous singer, her glitter and sequins now dressing up last-minute transfers and “leaving in five minutes”. The melody is disjointed, aleatoric; a messy cantata to the accompaniment of shouts and beeps and that ever-pressing need to go home.
He finds Sehun at the end of the station, smoking against a pole. The few people on this side are trench-coated, hooded figures, quickly limping back to the crush of people at the center of the station. They are, at best, ephemeral, so Kyungsoo pays them no heed as he walks increasingly faster towards the blond man sucking a cigarette dry. The vaporous scent of ash envelopes him, and Kyungsoo breathes in deep, almost grateful for the choking smell.
Sehun smiles, and together, they duck into one of the ancient cars.
Kyungsoo asks how he’s been.
Fine.
Oh.
Sehun looks up with a faint grin and slides his hand over Kyungsoo’s. The train jolts, and Seoul breaks away from them, spiny and cold, an eternal forest of steel buildings. Kyungsoo stares at it with nostalgia.
Sehun clears his throat and subtly tugs on Kyungsoo’s hand. We’re leaving. There’s no good in developing attachments, Sehun tries to tell him, but instead, Sehun tells Kyungsoo a story about little boys who meet in the summer time, in a meadow of cows and flowers. It’s dead and mundane, but do you know another, asks Kyungsoo.
So Sehun does his best. Stories that aren’t about them, stories that don’t have anything to do with the life they know.
He tells stories about people who bump in the streets and fall in love.
(Kim stops Baekhyun in the hallway, knuckles white and crackling, grabs him by the collar, and slams his cheek against the freezing glass windows. Where is Kyungsoo? He roars. Where is he?!
Kim’s screams are small and tinny as Baekhyun’s memory bursts in Technicolor. Kyungsoo’s blond friend waiting by his desk, Kyungsoo’s cold and empty bed at midnight, and Kyungsoo’s cousin--Kyungsoo’s fucking cousin--with her bubbly smiles and sawdust clogged lungs. Baekhyun thinks about Kyungsoo’s fucking fictional cousin and chokes out an I don’t know.)
People who dream on the weekends and restock convenience stores Monday through Friday.
(Jongin adjusts his watch and tries to see the train that is now leaving Seoul. Before leaving for the station, he stored a bucket of kimchi in the fridge and a box of spaghetti somewhere in the cabinets.)
People who laugh and blow kisses to the mirror. People who walk around convinced they’ve left the stove on, people who don’t know how to cook or how to remember. People, in their many forms and many names.
(Kyungsoo stares out the window. The streets are incredibly empty, refuse tumbling through the mad, plastic wonderland.)
(((Hey, Sehun says, let’s rehang the shower curtains when we get home.)))
Title: Veruca
Pairing: Kyungsoo/Sehun
Rating: PG-13 (cursing only)
Length: What a maroon.
Warnings: Pretentious and annoying as fuck. Will stick to your teeth like tar.
Author's Notes: Isn't a charlieandthechocolatefactory!au.
Summary: Shower curtains, ammonia, the works.
For the average human being, the odor threshold of ammonia is about 5 ppm.
At this concentration, the gas is far from dangerous, perhaps just irritating.
Dusty sunlight stains the interior of the metal shell as it shoots across the cityscape. The rail itself is an aluminum work, the oldest transport line built entirely off the ground. It once traveled between the major junction points of Seoul, but since then, parts of it have been torn down and reclaimed by titanium. Bleached walls and seats of stiff ABS, the new trains are streaks of silver against the sky, weaving through Seoul's morass of metal and synthetics. They lack the windows and fading paint of the older lines and are specifically designed to be many times more efficient, but none of them leave the cluttered heart of Seoul, circling endlessly in its tangled arteries.
Kyungsoo stares out the smudged glass, the golden light of sunset falling over his face like moving microscope slides. The haze of city has settled over the squat buildings of Seoul's outskirts. Forgotten by the populace in the center, they have decomposed to small dots of brick and faded billboard posters peeling off like listless butterflies.
Kyungsoo watches with some interest as a lone man--just a speck from this height--dashes across the cracked and filthy street. He makes it across with little fanfare and continues to sprint down the walkway. Plastic bags litter the sidewalk like tumbleweeds. The passing wind catches the ugly, garish blooms and tosses them airborne, PET posies that died white and brown.
Kyungsoo doesn't come back here often, and he doesn't particularly need to either, but regardless, every two or three months, he does so anyways, a forty-five minute ride on the last line to Seoul's older, almost abandoned fringe. In the peduncle of the city, there is little ground visible through the sea of towering steel construction and windows too reflective to see through. If Kyungsoo breathes in too deeply during this leg of the trip, he can taste the stinging ammonia that pervades the city. ("They circulate small amounts of it to keep the buildings free of rust and other hydroxides," Baekhyun whispers in the hallway.) And some days, Kyungsoo can hear the city's steady chorus of medical beeps, flocks of tropical birds screeching that something is flatlining in these metal capsules. [That, despite all the apidates and phthalates, the dripline hotwiring TBHQ and BHT straight to his arteries, man is stubborn in his determination to die.]
Beyond the polished chrome of downtown, Seoul is a different brand of ruin; ashen and wrecked, hugging the earth in humility. Sawdust confetti gathers in drifts on the streets, and no one shows their face.
The hollow capsule stutters on its circuit, a fit of velocity and electric sparks underneath Kyungsoo's feet. He swings with the shuddering car, and his grip tightens on the rubber strap hanging from the ceiling. A slouching man sleeps on a seat of cracked vinyl, a newspaper fallen over his face. (Improved Efficiency in Food Production! Perfected Civil Order!)
A halting, quantized voice rings through the metal container.
"Please remain calm. [sic] Help will be on its way [sic] immediately."
The announcement rings in quasi-musical tones, hemisemiquadri-melodies cut and reworked, cut and reworked. They had once shown a documentary on the voice, Kyungsoo recalls. The narrator said she had belonged to a popular singer once upon a time, and the rest of thirty minute special had been a hashed collage of the singer in various sequined gowns, swaying before various microphones in various qualities of film.
Nowadays, they just butchered and chopped her audio samples until “7:30 arrival in C12” could be pieced together, and nobody gave a shit about the woman who had once sung the words to those songs.
The sleeping man stirs at the disturbance and looks up.
"The train stopped," Kyungsoo offers. "All the other cars are empty. It's just us."
His companion nods and folds up his newspaper. (Improved Efficiency in Food Production! Perfected Civil Order!) He yawns and stands.
Kyungsoo looks through the back window, watching the sun play off the faraway skyscrapers.
"You know," the man speaks up, "they're probably not going to send a technician out here until tomorrow."
Kyungsoo pulls off his tie and folds it into his briefcase.
"We're pretty far away from downtown, and we're in the outside anyways. It's not like anyone will want to come get us."
And after a moment, "I doubt they even know people still ride the rail out here."
Kyungsoo snaps his briefcase closed.
The man falls silent.
They get off the rail by the emergency ladder on one of the supports.
After Kyungsoo has had enough of the high fructose pop songs pumped into the car, he pries the doors open with the emergency hammer and, holding on to the grooved side of the train, works his way down to the ground.
Once Kyungsoo has finished brushing the dust off his otherwise immaculate suit, the other passenger has set foot on the ground and is trying to introduce himself.
"I'm Zhang Yixing, medical researcher from C9." Pressed tie, folded newspaper, Zhang Yixing doesn’t have any business outside of shrink-wrapped, vacuum-sealed Inner Seoul. His gaunt frame communicates a life-long diet of flash-freeze fast food, and his wide eyes watching the fairy-tale shower of sawdust around them suggest a childhood living in a disposable cup. Newsprint smears under Yixing’s clammy hands, and as he opens his mouth to try again, Kyungsoo speaks.
"Nice to meet you.” Hi-gloss, turn up the sheen, Kyungsoo smiles.
“Could I--, uh, what’s your name?” Yixing asks and offers his hand for a handshake, jerkily shifting his periodical under his elbow.
Grey ink rubs onto Kyungsoo’s fingers when he grips Yixing’s hand, but he tries not to make note of it. “I’m Do Kyungsoo, quant, A6.”
“A6?” Yixing recoils, eyes dazed by the shot of celebrity. He wipes his moist fingers on his pants. “What are you doing out here?”
"I have an apartment out here,” Kyungsoo shrugs.
“But you have an apartment in district?” Yixing is incredulous, eyebrows furrowed.
“Yeah, but sometimes, I need to get away from all that,” Kyungsoo waves his hand toward the steel cornucopia in the distance and gives a short chuckle. The sun glints off the edifice with silver ferocity, and Kyungsoo shields his eyes.
Yixing laughs mildly. “But out here,” he says haltingly, “it’s so--” He gestures to the floating sawdust highlighted in the sunlight and dilapidated buildings sinking in pools of space jam and mold.
Kyungsoo nods understandingly. “Why are you out here, then?”
Yixing shifts a little and secures his newspaper under his arm. “Business matters.”
There’s a faraway crack overhead as a gust of air jets over them. Kyungsoo looks up to see crests of sawdust take flight, waves and waves crashing above them; Yixing is open-mouthed with wonder. A series of winds sweeps through the lane, each one whipping new fronts of dust into the air. In two breaths, it’s amalgamated in a small tornado roaming the abandoned street, grabbing in greedy fistfuls, all the trash, all the refuse left in the gullies.
In two breaths, Kyungsoo has ducked into a side alley littered with bottles and cheerful advertisements (Try VivoPar and You'll NEVER Go Back!), but a glance backwards tells him that Yixing is caught in the furious glory of golden light and sawdust. The medical researcher doubles over coughing. It creeps down his throat, fills his nostrils. He coughs again, again.
The wind reaches a crescendo, and particles fly up in his face. Try as he might, Yixing just keeps breathing them in-it’s a whirlwind, a storm. The grains cram down his throat; Yixing wheezes and closes his eyes. His throat is drying up, his airways are clogging.
For the first time and seriously now, Yixing considers it. How absurd it would be, Yixing decides, to die like this, kneeling on a dirty sidewalk, choking on sawdust. Halfway to a new life and now, how absurd, how absurd. It's almost comforting, that mantra that no one should be--will be!--allowed to die as a spectacle, watched by a man they just met.
Yixing coughs again, again, and Kyungsoo waits, with half-horror from the alley.
Mercifully, the gusts pass as quickly as they came, and Yixing crawls over the sidewalk curb. Chest heaving, Yixing picks out his lungs in the wreckage. Quiet, Kyungsoo walks up to the fallen man on the side walk and offers Yixing a bottle of water that was buried in his briefcase. Yixing drinks quickly and murmurs a subdued thanks.
Kyungsoo clears his throat, guilty all of a sudden. “I don’t know anyone involved with medicine out here,” he murmurs, “but if you’re looking for Jongin--”
Yixing looks up, startled. His expression freezes. He splutters. Stops and starts again. “I have a family-I mean, I want a family, I want a better--”
“Future, for both me and my children,” Kyungsoo finishes, somber. He tries to shake off the feeling of victimization. “I can take you to meet Jongin.”
Yixing nods fervently.
Kyungsoo turns the tap on mindlessly, and water rushes out in eager bullets, thundering against the flimsy plastic basin. It’s a high, thin room that reminds Kyungsoo of a motel chapel, dirty tiling and swimming pool baptisms: alcoholic religion lying on the side of the road, screaming about the stars and the sky. The only window in the bathroom has been smashed through, leaving shards of fallen glass strewn across the white tile, and a fine layer of sawdust coats everything like new-fallen snow.
After the water surges over the sides of the container, Kyungsoo dunks his head in and breathes liberally. Water rushes through his nostrils, nearly making its way back to his throat. He snorts it out and inhales again. Eventually, he whips his head out of the water, chest shuddering as he catches his breath. Water dribbles down his neck, tracing meanders over his pressed white-collared shirt.
After several months in the city, the burn and tingle of ammonia takes root in his mind. It stings when he inhales, setting off a metallic ring like tin cans clattering together on a string or defunct telephones ringing in empty streets. It’s a vice around his mind, contracting with every breath. The noose of fiber-optics and fluorescence, ammonia is original sin.
He pushes the door open while toweling his soaked head. Yixing is slumped in a wicker chair, staring at the desolate state of Kyungsoo’s apartment. Three panels of ceiling-to-floor windows lie in glittering pieces over the ground, leaving only empty metal frames in the wall. Sawdust traces breezes across the ground, the buffets whipping it into tiny fronts that inch across the room.
“Do you wanna go next?” Kyungsoo asks, sitting down next to him. The motion kicks up a new cloud of sawdust, and Yixing’s coughs rattle in his chest. He manages a quick shake of his head.
Kyungsoo pulls the man up and leads him to the bathroom. Yixing’s violent hacking expels a puff of dust, and he watches with horror as it floats to the floor. Kyungsoo turns away in embarrassment and busies himself with the faucet. He fills the basin again.
“Thanks,” Yixing wheezes, clutching his dry throat. “But I still don’t need to wash my face.”
They sprinkle water over the kitchen floor. (“All this dust,” Yixing mumbles as he dips his fingers back into the water. Kyungsoo showers the counters with the liquid.) And backlit by the blue evening, they start to cook.
“Why are we making so much?” Yixing ventures, tremulous. The old tofu crumbles underneath his knife like dry flowers, bright blooms of arsenic, phosphorus, antimony.
“It’s Tuesday.” Kyungsoo fills a large pot with water and slides it over the crusted stovetop in a screech. “Jongin always brings his friends on Tuesdays.” He turns on the stove, waiting for the blue flame to burst alight. Instead, the hiss of natural gas trickles into the room, and Kyungsoo turns it off again in disgust. He digs out a match stump, flips the gas on again. Orange-red tongues lick up against the fuel, reincarnating in blue under the pot. (Dry flowers of antimony, phosphorus, and arsenic.)
“Wait, so do you do this often?” Yixing focuses on the wilted lettuce before him. The tip of his knife traces lopsided squares through the limp leaves, spiny lines that make everything fall apart.
“As often as I come.” Kyungsoo grunts as he stretches for the bowl on the top shelf. Yixing puts down his knife and tugs it down for him. “Thanks,” Kyungsoo mumbles. “And I come here every few months.”
“But there’s food in the fridge?” Yixing stares at his uneven slices. The weak evening light casts long shadows over his cutting board.
“Jongin leaves it there,” Kyungsoo hums, “That’s why it’s all shit, really.” He fiddles with the intensity of the flames.
Kyungsoo begins on the load of tomatoes that was stowed in the back of the refrigerator. They’re all dehydrated and taut to the touch, near rupturing under the pressure. The tip of his knife slices into the first one, and the wrinkled skin bursts in a splatter of dilute red.
It’s a massacre on his cutting board. The grainy, filamentous inside starts to melt under the weight of Kyungsoo’s hand. He pulls the next one up.
Kyungsoo is fully absorbed in slicing the tomatoes until Yixing pauses in his cutting and “Don’t you,” he swallows, “don’t you want to know why I’m looking for Jongin?”
Yixing’s fingers feel like metal prosthetics wrapped around the knife. He clenches and unclenches them.
“Everyone comes to Jongin for the same reasons,” Kyungsoo shrugs, “They don’t know it, but they all want the same thing from Jongin.”
“But you get it, right?” Yixing breathes. “You get why I want this.”
Kyungsoo shrugs again.
The knife slips out of Yixing’s grip with a dull thud. It smashes the remaining whole tomatoes, and seeds spill out like tiny rhinestones, slick and glittery in the dim light.
Kyungsoo frowns.
There’s a rustle as Yixing shifts to let Kyungsoo salvage the mess.
“It’s not about what’s happening now,” Yixing tries, his voice shaky and inching on too high. “It’s-it’s about where we’re heading. It’s the future, you know, our children’s children, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah.” Kyungsoo scrapes the tofu bits and tomato pulp into the soup. “I get that.” The soup bubbles, thick and viscous. (Dry flowers of antimony, phosphorus, and arsenic.) He adds some salt and stirs.
Yixing watches him quietly. After a moment, he picks up his knife again. Glossy with tomato juice, it feels even heavier than before.
Jongin’s friends are all ruffians of some sort, rejects of the street. Even the slums of the city didn’t want them, Jongin jokes, and they all laugh with him because absolutely nothing in that statement is true. There aren’t even slums in the city, they know. Whatever ghettos there may have been have already drowned in Seoul’s atmosphere of ammonia and muriatic acid, the area evacuated with the wave of a hand and cheap sweepstakes. Everything in Seoul is clean and iridescent, a paradise of glass, metal, and efficiency; there’s no room for rundown basements and weeds sprouting in the sidewalk.
They’re all some degree of unclean and unshowered. Some are reformed members of Inner Seoul, having left their jobs, slipped off the radar, and ditched the city all together. Others are the odds and ends Jongin picked up on the outskirts, dragging their feet through the dust, hoping to choke to death on the stuff.
Jongin has always been a magnet for the unhappy and wayward, even before he started his dreams of reorganization.
Tonight, though, there’s a quiet suit and tie standing in the corner, staring into his cup by the dim light of the half-obscured moon. He’s a newcomer, Kyungsoo’s sure, fresh from the city, clean-shaven and well-pressed. His hair is an electric white in the weak light, and he’s a sliver of human soul and spine against the shadows of the apartment.
(What’s all this about Oh Sehun? Kyungsoo asks tensely. Why are you suddenly bringing more people in? The faucet is quiet, but even that stands out in the silence.)
“He’s a periodical like you,” Jongin says, sidling up to Kyungsoo as he nearly ladles the soup over his hand. Kyungsoo bites down a curse. "He comes by about every three weeks.”
“Oh, Sehun,” he shouts, “Get over here! I need you to meet someone.”
(Big things, Kyungsoo, I have big things planned. Jongin pants.)
“Lame pun, Jongin,” Oh, Sehun says as he strides over. “And I think you need to get the taps checked. My water smells odd.”
Jongin laughs and nods. “Kyungsoo, this is Oh Sehun, my second-in-command.”-Kyungsoo’s eyebrows bunch up immediately-“And Sehun, this is Kyungsoo, my best friend. We grew up together.”
(Listen, Jongin, Kyungsoo hums, scrubbing at dried tomato, I don’t care when you need him to do some inside job or whatever. Warm water drips over his hands, heat bleeding into his fingers. I care when you name some guy your right hand and you’ve known him for less than two months. You aren’t thinking this through. He wasn’t here last time, and-fuck, you’re just going to pull down your armor for him?)
Oh Sehun moves forward a bit, snapping attention and refocusing on him. “Oh Sehun, fund manager, A3.” He offers his hand as a greeting.
(There’s a dull thud in the other room, and a sweaty Jongin stumbles into the kitchen. Do Kyungsoo, he pronounces gravely. You’re the one in danger. You’re walking on the edge of the world, Kyungsoo, expecting everything to stay in equilibrium for you.)
Kyungsoo stares at the pale, tenuous fingers. “Do Kyungsoo, quant, A6,” he answers mechanical and polite, like treacle cut and squared on doilies. He dons his industry standard smile. Sehun’s digits are ice-cold, freezing against Kyungsoo’s. They brush up to Kyungsoo’s wrist, and he shivers.
(Kyungsoo laughs bitterly, And what are you doing, Jongin? Wasting your life on your childhood dream? Jongin falls quiet.
Kyungsoo washes the dishes in silence. After a while, he runs a soapy hand through his hair. That was really out of line of me. Sor--)
“A6,” Sehun nods mildly. “It’s a nice place.”
(Tomorrow, Jongin jabs a finger at the shattered windows. You’re going to cover up those gaps and start cleaning. You’ll pull out all your supplies and try to sweep up all the dust in this place. And the day after, you’ll try to live in this apartment, as if there’s nothing wrong.)
“So’s A3,” Kyungsoo shrugs, “Better, even.” Kyungsoo continues spooning the soup into bowls. The scalding soup is dripping down the ladle and onto Kyungsoo’s hand.
Sehun stares at Kyungsoo as he swirls the water in his cup.
(What’s the point, Kyungsoo? Jongin says, You’ll be gone by next week.
He stalks out of the room.)
The Tuesdays when Kyungsoo comes back, Jongin gathers up all of his lost little ducklings and drags them downtown to have a meal and laugh at Kyungsoo’s expense. Jongin leaves the materials in the fridge; Kyungsoo dumps them in a pot of water and heats. Kyungsoo tries not to appear too welcoming, and they all just laugh and have a meal.
Tonight, though, Jongin is delighted at the newcomer, fresh from the city, he’s sure. He has his arm hooked around Yixing, and the fidgety medical researcher from C9 looks much more at ease. A certain Park Chanyeol cackles and lands a heavy hand on Yixing’s back. His smudged pilot goggles swing around his neck. It's all a bunch of noise against subtle wallpaper, subtle furniture, and subtle glances in a nearly empty kitchen.
(Kyungsoo’s mouth twists. You took my shower curtains, fucker, he shouts after Jongin.)
Kyungsoo continues spooning soup into the bowls.
“Jongin needs something from the closet,” Sehun says.
“What the hell are you doing here.” There’s something a little bitter about cleaning after Jongin’s declaration last night, but Kyungsoo isn’t the mood to contemplate it. He raises the spray bottle of water blankly, spritzing some on Sehun. “You’re only allowed here Tuesdays and Fridays; now go away.”
Sehun frowns at the moisture soaking into his shirt and elbows past Kyungsoo, his lanky frame slipping and crunching into Kyungsoo’s apartment. “Where’s the closet?” Dark eyes rake across the half-furnished interior, and his eyes catch on the shower curtains tacked over the missing windows.
“Tell me what it is, and I’ll go get it,” Kyungsoo insists, arms folded. The scowl digs even deeper into his expression.
“No,” Sehun sneers. “Jongin says you can’t know.” He begins to inspect the various corners of apartment, opening all the doors and rifling through their contents. “What’s all this trash anyways? Why’re you cleaning this place if it’s just going to get dirty again?”
“Tell me what’s in my closet,” Kyungsoo says instead, trailing behind Sehun. “I have a right to know what’s in my own closet.”
“Where did you get the idea that it was your closet?” Sehun rolls his eyes. He stands up, pants creased and dusty. “So you have the legal documents, but it’s no more yours than it is mine.”
“My grandmother bought this apartment,” Kyungsoo frowns, his fingers tight and throbbing, “Of course it’s mine; I grew up here.” Kyungsoo licks his lips. “I grew up here,” he repeats.
“Does that really matter, though?” Sehun scoffs, pulling an end table back. “Who your mother was, who your father was, who gives a shit?”
The fragile stand screeches across the floor, revealing a small, half-size door with a handle flaking gold paint. The metallic flecks adhere to his fingers as he reaches for the knob, and the panel pops open with a puff of dust. Sehun drags out a floral box jammed with paperclips and wires and small electronics chips, little glimmers of the electronic. He drops to the floor, legs crossed, and begins counting the little black cards in a low, fervent whisper.
The afternoon light creeps around him in a halo. It almost looks like he’s laughing, Kyungsoo thinks. Sehun, laughing, maybe smiling. Sehun, who is still so young. Whose hands are made of gold. Leaning against the couch his grandmother had spent half her life sitting on, a spray bottle tangled in his fingers, Kyungsoo can see it--
Sehun finishes the survey and nods. Swift steps carry him towards the door.
--He can see Sehun laughing, maybe smiling, who is still so young, whose hands are made of gold, fingers soft and- Sehun who was given a job in A3 when he was fresh out of school, barely able to hold his own hand; Sehun who couldn’t stand it, didn’t like it; Sehun who woke up every morning to greet the chemical city and its noxious fog. Sehun who rode a train out to the fringe. Sehun who met Jongin.
“Um,” Kyungsoo says. His tongue burns in the cradle of his mouth. “Would you like some tea?”
Sehun (laughing, maybe smiling) stares at Kyungsoo with an unreadable expression. Kyungoo shivers for no reason.
Then, deliberately, as if he knows the tea is a lie, Sehun says yes.
(Green. Fingers soft and unbearably green.)
Kyungsoo rides the line back on Monday. At the edge of the city, he transfers cars and boards one of the bright silver capsules. The train schedule within Inner Seoul is a complicated system of circles and circles, tracing Seoul’s faint pulse in nauseous figure-eights.
(People get on that train, thinking they’re looking for something, but then they never get off. They ride and ride and ride. The city becomes a blur, the streets become a blur. Sehun leaned back in his chair. And I’m not actually talking about the trains.)
The light inside is bleach white and ugly, the anti-septic light of hospitals that makes everyone look jaundiced. The searing scent of ammonia floods the car at each stop, prickling white-hot needles in Kyungsoo’s throat. He coughs a little. Everyone sits in paralytic silence, each passenger soundlessly flipping through magazines or newspapers or wrinkled business papers, gnawing on private worries or nails or that report due next Monday.
(Sehun isn’t that bad, it turns out. Back in-district, he works the markets, choreographs deals, seeks out investments. It’s his job, he says, all nice and easy.
So you came to Jongin. Kyungsoo’s hands tremble as he sprays the ammonia solution on the table. He wrinkles his nose and tries to swallow the irony.
Yeah, Sehun says.
Ugh, that smell, he turns away, covering his nose and grimacing.
Kyungsoo cracks a smile.)
At the B4 station, a woman decked out in Day-Glo colors and Saran wrap wobbles into the car. Purple strands of PET woven through her hair, she breathes in heavy, saponaceous exhales, and a cloying lilac cloud sinks over the car.
(You don’t mind if I smoke, right? a cigarette positioned carefully between his fingers.
No, Kyungsoo hums, I don’t.
Thanks. There’s an airy sigh, and the smell of ash and ruin begins to fill the room. Kyungsoo thinks about the bits of lung and throat and smooth, pink musculature that Sehun incinerates with each inhale, but at least the odor is a welcome change.)
A few people glance up upon her entrance, but these are just ascetic little side-looks. Most display no reaction, but the page-flipping continues, intensifies. The shift in atmosphere is distinct. The quiet hardens from the mutual consent of a library to an absolute-zero loss of will. All passengers freeze at the touch, liquid nitrogen waterfalls that sparkle, gleam.
Kyungsoo slides around in his seat. The ride is far from smooth.
(Did you get what you were coming for? Kyungsoo asks. Finding Jongin and all?
Sehun sighs and takes a drag from his light. He shifts his tongue around and chooses his words carefully.
I don’t think Jongin has what I’m looking for.
Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish you, Sehun grins wryly.)
When the B4 woman gets off, there’s a general release of tension. Shoulders sag, and people shift and rustle and shake out their coats to get comfortable again. Small, secretive smiles are passed around as suddenly, everyone’s thinking the same thing.
Cultish, Sehun had said.
The noxious scent of ammonia comes rushing back.
(Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish as you, Sehun grins wryly.
Kyungsoo laughs with him.)
It's early afternoon when Kyungsoo arrives at the A6 stop, and Baekhyun is waiting at the station, pale lips stretched in a tenuous smile. Immediately after he steps off the car, Baekhyun is by his side and pulling him in deep for a hug.
Baekhyun smells like computer exhaust and fax machines running all night: he just came from the office. His grip on Kyungsoo shakes with muted anger.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing, being gone for so long?" Baekhyun hisses into Kyungsoo’s ear, his hot breath vitriolic.
"Car broke down midway," Kyungsoo murmurs back, awkwardly patting Baekhyun’s back as bystanders shoot them lightning-quick glances.
Now is the age of the crowd, Sehun had said. Kyungsoo feels the back of his neck prickling.
"Yeah, well, perhaps you should have phoned to tell me," Baekhyun snarls. He pulls back as if to appraise Kyungsoo’s dusty suit and wrinkled dress shirt. "Man, I missed you so much," he proclaims a little too loudly. He embraces Kyungsoo again and growls, "You fucking lowlife, I had to cover for you at work."
"I bought you something," Kyungsoo whispers back.
He disentangles himself from Baekhyun and pulls out two clear rectangular packages from his briefcase.
Mouth tightly pursed, Baekhyun narrows his eyes. His spindly fingers fold over the shrink-wrapped bundles, and Baekhyun takes the gifts, appeased.
“Fucking shower curtains,” Baekhyun curses over a cup of steaming tea. “You bought me dusty fucking shower curtains.” Kyungsoo quietly sips from his own mug of jasmine. “I had to deal with Kim for a week, and you bring back dusty shower curtains.”
“Where’s all the cool stuff?” Baekhyun demands sharply, “You got them from the black market, didn’t you? So couldn’t you at least have gotten something a little more interesting?” He shoves a biscuit into his mouth, flaky white crumbs of wheat and high fructose gathering on his face. He furiously pours the tea down his throat. “Where’re the illegal goods? Where’re the drugs, the guns? Smuggled items--”
“Baekhyun.” Kyungsoo forces a heavy frown over his face and puts down his cup. He drops his voice to a pleasant monotone and continues. “Baekhyun. My cousin.” The cold air scrapes its way through Kyungsoo’s lungs, and his hands feel weak. He clenches them into fists.
Baekhyun stares for a moment, dumbfounded by the shift in conversation. His eyes turn suspicious and searching, raking over Kyungsoo’s expression. (Nothing is your own anymore, Sehun had said.)
“Right,” he sniffs. “Your cousin.”
Stiff, they finish their tea in silence.
(You of all people should know that, Sehun snorts. You’re so damn protective of this shoddy place.
Kyungsoo’s laughter is airy, light, helium twists and plastic balloons knocking into the ceiling.
I grew up here, is all he says.)
((Why can’t you just fucking tell me, Baekhyun shoves into him in the glass corridor. The city is dizzying underneath their feet, meters and meters of distance, straight up distance. Kyungsoo can’t even see the ground through the fog of pollution.
Family matters, Kyungsoo grits out, eyes staring at the grey abyss below. These hallways always make him nervous. He’s terrified of touching the clean glass and being burned.
That’s bullshit and you know it! Baekhyun is livid.
Light streams in through streakless windows, and Baekhyun looks downright angelic as he storms down the hallway, hazy with afternoon glow.))
Kyungsoo walks by the rows and rows of gray cubicles. Each encases a busy little worker, plugging numbers and testing systems with a lazy finger on the stock market’s pulse. Every point change is analyzed and adjusted for, equation after equation. X equals, and we want, we desire; math triumphant over man. Polite phone calls and the clatter of keyboards, the entire floor works in rhythmic, endless cycles.
“Yep.” As Kyungsoo rounds the corner, Baekhyun’s leaning over the carpeted temporary wall, stage-whispering in the uberchrome tone he reserves for superiors. “His name’s Jongin, and apparently, he lives on the edge of the city.”
“Oh really,” comes a soft voice. There’s a slender figure folded in one of the plastic chairs before Kyungsoo’s desk. He spins a cheap pen in his fingers, and his hair is bone-white in the fluorescent light. “So when is Mr. Do going to be here?”
“Baekhyun.” Baekhyun’s head whips up at Kyungsoo’s voice. His eyes are blank, then in a spark, alive.
“Mr. Do is here right now, sir, and he’ll be with you in a moment,” Baekhyun slides down from his desk and brushes up against Kyungsoo, pulling him away from his cubicle. “Listen,” he whispers, “I don’t know what this guy wants from you, but he’s A3, a fund manager, and Kim was all up on him, trying to suck his dick. Watch what you say in front of him.” Kyungsoo nods quickly. Baekhyun pats him on the back and slips back into his cubicle.
(It’s dangerous, I know, Baekhyun starts while staring out the window. His hands have frozen over the keyboard as he churns out the words. I wish you would tell me more, but-he sighs-I can understand that you can’t.
Baekhyun, Kyungsoo spins around in his chair, a pencil perched in his fingers. He stares at Baekhyun, his lips pressed together firmly. I already told you about my cousin.
Baekhyun cracks a small smile. Yeah, your cousin.)
“I’m sorry, sir, to keep you waiting,” Hi-gloss, turn up the sheen, Kyungsoo flashes his industry standard smile. His voice is tight, shiny, like plastic stretched too thin. He slides his briefcase under the desk and pulls out a few papers.
“It’s alright,” says his visitor. Kyungsoo looks up to sharp eyes and thin features. He barely smiles. “I was hoping that we could discuss this matter after hours, actually.”
They walk home in the dark. Distilled moonlight falls through layers of chemical clouds and glass hallways to land in front of their feet. Sehun pauses in one of the connector corridors and turns to Kyungsoo. He smiles, briefly, and they continue walking. Kyungsoo stares at the miasma covering the city beneath them.
Seoul tonight is a television on mute, flashing colors and brief sparks all silent, a show for sleeping people. It feels like they’re suspended, creeping across telephone wires on their bare feet as they walk through empty hallways. Everything is made of steel, glass, cold, and they marvel at the slumbering metropolis.
Kyungsoo shivers.
“Alright.” Sehun comes to a full stop in another of the numerous glass hallways that connect Seoul’s buildings. He is bright against the dismal skyline, pure almost. “I have an offer to make you.”
Kyungsoo offers a grunt in response.
Sehun plows on, “Jongin and I were thinking,”--Kyungsoo snorts.--“you work in a key financial firm, and what’s more, you design the systems that dictate the cash flow in this city.” Sehun pauses and licks his lips. “We were wondering if-”
Kyungsoo’s eyebrows fly up in sudden alarm. His tongue feels like a hundred pounds.
“You want me to sabotage it.” The words fall dead between them, and Sehun nods slowly, eyes fixed on Kyungsoo’s reaction.
“You want me to ruin a city,” Kyungsoo begins shakily. “You want me to turn my back on a civilization and the millions of people who comprise it.”
“And your answer?” Sehun prods, lightning hair falling into his face.
“My answer?” Kyungsoo laughs in a short breath. “Sehun, you and Jongin can play hero all you like, and I won’t pretend that there aren’t some things here that are fucked up, but tearing the down the basis of all this stability, that,” he breathes with a chuckle, “that’s ridiculous.”
“Kyungsoo,” Sehun frowns, frustration knitting together his brows. “please. You know things aren’t going to get better this way. Do you think they’re suddenly going to desegregate the districts? And what about the people on the fringe? Do you think they’re going to take them in at any point? Are you just going to wait for the day when they tell you that they don’t give a shit about D level people?” Kyungsoo stares as Sehun’s features harden into grave seriousness. “There’s a point where something must be done, Kyungsoo, and day by day, in this pool of caustics, we’re getting closer and closer.”
“You don’t know what will happen if we pull apart the finances,” Kyungsoo laughs. “There’ll be no reason to keep up all this.” Kyungsoo waves his hands at the concentric districts and grey smoke. “It’ll be absolute anarchy, and I won’t have the blood of thousands on my hands, Sehun.”
“The blood of thousands,” Sehun snorts. “I know you can smell that ammonia.”
Kyungsoo stares at him, blank.
“Think, Kyungsoo,” he hisses. “Can’t ammonia kill? Doesn’t long-term exposure ruin one’s health? This city,” Sehun spits on the glass with vitriol, and the viscous blob dribbles down slowly, “this city will do anything for stability. Clean windows for people’s lives, Christ.”
“Most people can’t even smell it, the poor bastards,” Sehun laughs.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bent cigarette. Kyungsoo watches as he lights it and throws the smoking, glowing stick into a dark hallway. Without warning, a spray of water bursts from the ceiling and puts out the small fire.
“See,” Sehun nods at leaking puddle, “no alarm. The city wouldn’t give a shit if the people in that building had died. They’d rather not incite panic by telling people the truth. You can bet your ass that if someone had died, they would’ve made up some bogus story about how he transferred to a different district. Then they’d reorg the floor, so no one would be around people they knew and they wouldn't be able to talk about it.”
Kyungsoo’s lips press together. The city is gleaming, as much as it can through the cloud cover, and shifting wraiths of polluted ammonia crown the city. A quick shadow cuts over their faces, and they both look up to watch the unseen creature circle the barely breathing metropolis.
Seoul tonight is a television on mute, flashing colors and brief sparks all silent, a show for sleeping people. It feels like they’re suspended, telephone wires cutting into their bare feet as they toe the line between here and infinity. The ground is far away at this height, but the sky feels like a myth face-down in the gutter.
The silence between them is thick, nearly tangible, the reverential quality that comes with church services in stained-glass cathedrals.
"It won't take long," Sehun finally says.
Kyungsoo asks, “Where will I go afterwards?”
And Sehun smiles.
(Then why are you here? Kyungsoo looks up from his scrubbing.
Well, we can’t all be as selfish as you, Sehun grins wryly.
Kyungsoo laughs with him.)
Writing mathematical systems for the market is only difficult when accuracy is necessary, so Kyungsoo writes the new system quickly, a couple hours over two weekends. Peel away the ornamental recursives he has sprinkled in, it’s really quite simple, a series of statements tying the company’s funds to joke stock and men who in two months, will blow their money on one of the many black holes in the economy. Men who, Sehun says, have been allied with Jongin for years, waiting only for the day that Kyungsoo would agree to put his position to work and take up Jongin’s side. Men who trudge to work and sit in their cubicles and wake up with only a faraway hope on their minds, their eyes misty with the horizon.
Kyungsoo hates that he might have been the deciding factor to Jongin’s plan.
“Wait,” Sehun whispers to him in the copy room. He's over on another one of his business calls. “You need to hold off on the system. Jongin is timing this. Like you said, it’ll be absolute anarchy once it’s in place, and shit will go down in the city. Jongin’s arranging several things down in D.” The printer beeps, and Sehun checks on his documents. There’s nothing in the tray. “He wants this to go off just right.”
“Understandable,” Kyungsoo mumbles back as he fiddles with the printer buttons. The machine lets out one long tone, and the sound of churning starts up again. “So are we leaving tonight?”
“Yeah,” Sehun nods, looking over the papers the printer’s spitting out. “We’ll take the 5 o’clock."
Holding Sehun's hand, riding the train, Kyungsoo watches the city and wonders who they are, really, with or without Seoul.
(Jongin is beyond pleased to see Kyungsoo.
What did I say, Kyungsoo, he laughs. Big things, big things!
Yeah, yeah, Jongin. Kyungsoo concentrates on pinning up the shower curtains.)
Kyungsoo pieces the system together carefully. It's now 4:15, and he's just waiting for Sehun's signal to take flight. He clicks his mouse in boredom and adds another recursive for the heck of it.
He spins in his chair, pensive.
In a few minutes, he's going to torch a virtual stock of wealth; in a few minutes, millions of accounts will spin until they reach zero and there will be nothing left in this city that can be flashed on a badge and instill fear. Millions of people will mourn the loss of money that never existed, that only ever had presence in their minds. They will howl at the missing digital code; some electric sparks fell through the cracks in the floor, the hollow city will echo, where are they? Where are they?! They will stagger through the streets in agony. The loss of a nothing, made tragic, moving. And the last remnants of the city that drained itself in favor of pumping data will ask God, supplicant at last, where all numbers went. All those beautiful numbers, stacks and stacks of zeros and ones. Gone. Seoul will cry.
His phone vibrates. Kyungsoo smiles and begins to install the new system.
Just in time for the 4:30 rounds, Kyungsoo boards at the A6 station and sits through the stops and turns. The long body of the train whips out behind the engine as they make infinite rounds in carousel. And the city becomes a blur, the streets become a blur.
When the doors open on the D19 station, Kyungsoo snaps his briefcase closed, slides it under his seat, and steps out of the metal capsule. He doesn’t need anything on this final trip.
The station is crammed with writhing people, hollow cheeks painted glow-in-the-dark, each trying to get on the proverbial first train home. Everyone is pushing, moving, trying to slip past. Then a bell rings, and the desperation hitches, intensifies. Everyone shoves a little faster, hurrying to the next train, the next station. The cacophony grows: bells dinging, doors beeping, and above it all, that anonymous singer, her glitter and sequins now dressing up last-minute transfers and “leaving in five minutes”. The melody is disjointed, aleatoric; a messy cantata to the accompaniment of shouts and beeps and that ever-pressing need to go home.
He finds Sehun at the end of the station, smoking against a pole. The few people on this side are trench-coated, hooded figures, quickly limping back to the crush of people at the center of the station. They are, at best, ephemeral, so Kyungsoo pays them no heed as he walks increasingly faster towards the blond man sucking a cigarette dry. The vaporous scent of ash envelopes him, and Kyungsoo breathes in deep, almost grateful for the choking smell.
Sehun smiles, and together, they duck into one of the ancient cars.
Kyungsoo asks how he’s been.
Fine.
Oh.
Sehun looks up with a faint grin and slides his hand over Kyungsoo’s. The train jolts, and Seoul breaks away from them, spiny and cold, an eternal forest of steel buildings. Kyungsoo stares at it with nostalgia.
Sehun clears his throat and subtly tugs on Kyungsoo’s hand. We’re leaving. There’s no good in developing attachments, Sehun tries to tell him, but instead, Sehun tells Kyungsoo a story about little boys who meet in the summer time, in a meadow of cows and flowers. It’s dead and mundane, but do you know another, asks Kyungsoo.
So Sehun does his best. Stories that aren’t about them, stories that don’t have anything to do with the life they know.
He tells stories about people who bump in the streets and fall in love.
(Kim stops Baekhyun in the hallway, knuckles white and crackling, grabs him by the collar, and slams his cheek against the freezing glass windows. Where is Kyungsoo? He roars. Where is he?!
Kim’s screams are small and tinny as Baekhyun’s memory bursts in Technicolor. Kyungsoo’s blond friend waiting by his desk, Kyungsoo’s cold and empty bed at midnight, and Kyungsoo’s cousin--Kyungsoo’s fucking cousin--with her bubbly smiles and sawdust clogged lungs. Baekhyun thinks about Kyungsoo’s fucking fictional cousin and chokes out an I don’t know.)
People who dream on the weekends and restock convenience stores Monday through Friday.
(Jongin adjusts his watch and tries to see the train that is now leaving Seoul. Before leaving for the station, he stored a bucket of kimchi in the fridge and a box of spaghetti somewhere in the cabinets.)
People who laugh and blow kisses to the mirror. People who walk around convinced they’ve left the stove on, people who don’t know how to cook or how to remember. People, in their many forms and many names.
(Kyungsoo stares out the window. The streets are incredibly empty, refuse tumbling through the mad, plastic wonderland.)
(((Hey, Sehun says, let’s rehang the shower curtains when we get home.)))