SH 2015: Lacuna (for obscurain)
For: obscurain
From: ANONYMOUS until May 22, 2015
Title: Lacuna
Rating: R
Pairing(s)/Focus: [endgame spoiler]endgame Suho/Baekhyun
Length: 8,853 words
Summary: “Do you understand the risks of this procedure?”
Warning/s: mention of character death, suicide
Notes: SCREAMS. I’d like to thank my recipient for giving me such fun prompts to work with! I would have loved to do one of the other two, but I wasn’t sure I could really do them justice. That leaves this prompt, which was vague enough for me to deviate just...slightly...as in it still respects it!...but it happens shortly after the fact...Hopefully it’ll make sense by the end of it and you’ll like it. :< Thank you to MJ for keeping me sane, to J for holding my hand through this my breakdowns and N, too, for being as emotionally supportive as her short arrangement of feelings will allow. A big thank you to the mods for being understanding and patient with me as well!!
He couldn’t breathe.
As if there was something pressing against his chest, pushing from all sides. It didn't matter how many breaths he took; all of his intakes brought a cold liquid with them. It ran over his skin, filled him, surrounded him, drowned him. The water was merciless in its action. It weighed him down until it could pull him under, and when he stopped reaching for the surface, he could feel it.
He was going to die.
“Suho?”
He raised his head at the call, the weight of it making his movement slow. For a moment he was confused, the office in which he’d spent many hours unfamiliar to him. His vision cleared as if a thin veil had been lifted, and he remembered where he was and what he was doing. Dr Lu Han was sitting opposite him, one leg crossed over the other, and he was looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. His hands were neatly folded in his lap. He could tell now that the man hadn’t moved since the start of this session, but his expression had changed. He felt somehow exposed under the doctor’s clinical gaze. He slowly straightened in his seat from his bent form and tried to mirror his posture.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been calling you for a while, now.”
Dr Lu Han liked to think that he was stern in his words, certainly when he had rather bad news to deliver, or medical advice he truly wished his patients followed. His words were cutting, perhaps, but the man was so soft-spoken, it wasn’t in his nature to sound firm, his voice never reaching sixty decibels. He must have spoken so quietly that he hadn’t heard him in the midst of his thoughts.
Or maybe it was the name itself. Suho. It was new, and he supposed he still had trouble responding to it.
“I’m sorry.”
The doctor regarded him grimly. His eyes a stormy grey, hues of dark blues dancing in his irises as he flicked his gaze over Suho. In his weeks under observation, he had done some observing of his own. Whenever Dr Lu Han took a moment to look at him intently like this, he was doing a physical assessment. He took in his perpetually tired state, his hunched shape, his sunken cheeks and pale complexion. Sometimes he would look at him sadly, as if he were an old friend afflicted by a terminal illness, and all he could do was pity him. He never commented, however. It wasn’t what he was really monitoring.
When the end of their session neared, the doctor would always ask one question, the same one every time.
“Do you remember anything?”
Two months ago, Suho had woken from a comatose state. He called it his First Day, because to him it was. He had not a name, not a memory in mind at that time, only the distinct feeling of panic crawling through him and the burning of his chest every time he took a strained breath. But even those early memories came in hazy clips. He had suffered a severe cerebral accident, they had told him, resulting in the loss of all his memories until he'd woken. All other details were lost upon him, in one ear, out the other. But they never stopped asking him if he remembered anything.
What Suho remembered never went beyond the two months since he'd woken. Fishing for anything further back was like trying to rewind a cassette that had no more tape to wind. His mind was indeed just like a broken tape, white noise the only image appearing on the screen. So they gave him an identity, a new name, a new life.
Suho breathed in a shallow breath. He never really dreaded this question, but he was never eager to answer it either. His answer was always the same.
“No.”
If Suho leaned his head against the wall, he could hear the soft whirring of the tracks from inside the compartment. It was a quiet sound, a dull humming that could lull a passenger to sleep if they listened closely.
If he lifted his head, it was radio silent in the train, not a single sound heard. Not the papery slide of a newspaper like there used to be; not the impatient tapping of a late man’s dress shoes against the floor. Though there were few commuters at a time, barely anyone ever made a sound. It was as though he'd stepped into a void, every noise vacuumed away leaving only a dull tinnitus. He wondered how people could stand living in a constant state of noiselessness when the only things abuzz were their own conflicting thoughts.
He rested his head and the humming reached his ears. He liked this because for a moment, he could forget that everything in him felt wrong, as if his world was leaning on an axis differing from everybody else’s.
His eyes followed the scenery flying past him through the window, patches of green shrubbery, blue skies and white skyscrapers coming in and out of view. He wasn't really looking at it, or taking in his new surroundings. It was evident to him that not even the environment was right, as if he was born-or reborn-in a time wholly unfamiliar to him.
A gentle vibration in his lap caught his attention, and Suho raised his head to see the small light of his Messenger blinking at him, indicating he’d received a prompt. Suho clicked on the screen of the blue watch. A hologram appeared before him. A cursor blinked briefly before the small screen slowly filled with words. It was his daily schedule he was receiving: he would start with a visit to Dr Lu Han’s office, where he was headed, then commute to his workplace for a day of filing and re-filing. It was mundane, but it was part of his program.
They called it Reintegration. It was a guided system for citizens going through their last steps of rehabilitation after suffering a great trauma-in Suho’s case, his accident, after which they would return to society on their own. It took a certain period of time for each person to be trained in the ways of the community so they followed a schedule.
The cursor stopped after it had written its last sentence: one-hundred-twenty-four days until end of Reintegration.
Suho longed for the end of those days, because maybe by then he will have found direction.
Despite the banality of his routine, Suho found himself busy enough to distract himself. At times, though, his mind would wander.
He worked in a tall building outlined by windows looking into aseptic offices; his was on the twenty-third floor. He’d often stare out the window, forgetting his work, too lost in a reality that wasn’t his current one to bring himself back. He would watch strangers dressed in various colours and uniforms, indications of their profession, and observe how small they were from this high up. He’d imagine himself observing the edifice, looking up until his neck was craned as far back as it could go. He couldn’t make out their faces or consider how tall they really were, because from here they were all small specks of life walking along gravel. They were much like his shattered memory, except that was lifeless, and he didn’t know why. It was at times like these Suho wondered how insignificant he was when he was down there looking up, and someone was up here looking down.
There came a soft knocking. Suho turned around to meet Do Kyungsoo, small figure standing between desks. It was dim in the room, but his round face was illuminated by the light of the pool, where the holographic screen had gone to sleep. Kyungsoo adjusted the light and Suho could better see the furrow of his eyebrows. It was often he that snapped Suho back to the real world.
Kyungsoo had much the look Dr Lu Han often sported when he considered him, irises a deep brown, but unlike his doctor, his expression was etched with lines of worry. Suho noticed how his colleague often followed his actions carefully, the unease expressed in the widening of his owlish eyes. Suho was under the impression that he felt obligated to worry about him-to worry for him, but why he didn’t know. He supposed it was just in his personality to do so.
“Hello,” Suho greeted, stretching his lips in a semblance of a smile. Kyungsoo nodded tersely.
“I’ll be assisting you today,” Kyungsoo announced quietly. His gaze followed Suho as he gathered the few objects he needed. He had a file in his hand inserted in a plastic pocket, no doubt to return to the Physical Mail Room. He would take the top between his thumb and index, and slowly slide his fingers along. It was a nervous habit, Suho noticed, and he did it quite often in his presence.
"Will you? That's nice."
If Suho were being honest, he didn't feel any kind of contentment towards the situation. He will go through the routine with Kyungsoo, which meant sit in front of a computer, file, refile, organize, reorganize. That's what he did every day.
On days they could allow it, the workers in Suho's building would choose a nice restaurant to go to after work. It was usually on Fridays as a means to welcome the weekend. Occasionally, they would go out on weekdays, and upon Kyungsoo's insistence, his co-workers would invite Suho.
Though Kyungsoo’s was just trying to be friendly, he knew the others didn’t want him to come along. He had gained somewhat of a reputation, one he thought wasn’t fit for him at all. He knew he came off as rather unapproachable, and it wasn’t very wise to try to hold up a conversation with him. Suho was stuck in his own world, so far-off and unreachable people stopped grasping for him. They didn’t avoid him because he was mean, but because he was unresponsive. He was thought to be a generally unpleasant person because of his constant state of despondency. It was what he portrayed, and he didn’t know how to act otherwise without pretending to be someone else, or without feeling like there was a gaping hole in his center.
Tonight, his fellow workmen conversed idly among them. Suho sat quietly among his fellow workmen. He could hear the distinct noise of chatter nearby, but his eyes were fixed on nothing in particular, his food mostly untouched. He’d long ago given up on trying to follow Zhang Yixing and Kim Jongdae’s banter, much less participate in conversation, choosing to nod absently every once in a while.
Laughter erupted at the table, and Suho simpered as to not let on that he hadn’t been paying attention. Conversation resumed then. Suho fiddled with his fingers in his lap. It was easy to notice how easily these people got along, and how effortlessly it had been for them too, while he himself couldn’t help but feel awkward. He thought it was fine, it was just who he was at the moment, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t sometimes envious.
He wished he knew how to be happy or content, or know who he was much like Yixing did. Yixing often bragged about his new position as Director-in-chief of the Architecture Department. He said it was his calling to be both a leader and a designer, and he’d known ever since he was young. It made Suho think-was he at all like what he used to be? Was he still following his calling despite his memory loss? Or was he following a new one? Suho didn’t know. What he did know was the heavy loneliness weighing on him when he compared his life to others’, and how even now it seemed foreign, unknown to him, as if alone was not at all how he was supposed to be feeling.
“Are you okay?” Kyungsoo asked him, interrupting his thoughts. Suho didn’t realize he had been staring at Yixing this whole time, and he seemed to have made the man quite uncomfortable. Suho smiled awkwardly and nodded, muttering a quiet, “Sorry,” before he briefly glanced at Kyungsoo.
He didn’t fool Kyungsoo, however, whose heavy gaze was watching him carefully now. It was disconcerting constantly being under his worried scrutiny. Suho looked away. How was he to explain to Kyungsoo that no, he wasn’t really okay, when he himself didn’t know why?
The sky had dimmed by the time Suho took the train back home. It was a shade of orange mixed with dark blues and greys, the fading sunlight seeping through faintly. He took the eight o'clock train. It wasn't usually the time he boarded, but dinner had run a little late and so had he.
Suho always liked to sit in the same compartment of the train, three rows away on the left from the door to the next compartment. The sections were four seats forming a square, uniformly separated. Four sections per compartment for a total of sixteen chairs. Four compartments per train meant that sixty-four people could travel all at once. It was a considerably small number that could be handled in case of emergency. He knew, because Yixing had spent all of dinner bragging about the newly implemented designs. He had heard countless times about the efficiency of building the trains this way. He nodded through the explanations, but thought the architect must have said it so many times the last few dinners, it must have seeped through to his brain.
The compartment could accommodate sixteen persons at a time, but there was rarely ever that many people travelling. This evening was no exception. It made for a pretty lonely ride when each person took to their own section.
Not everyone cared to be alone for a long ride. When someone sat in his favoured section, Suho took a break from his star-gazing to inspect his companion, observation a skill he'd picked up quickly in his early months of consciousness while left to his own devices. There was who he guessed was a student sitting across from him, one knee up as he balanced a messy binder on his leg. He'd probably gotten them from the Archives, Suho thought briefly.
He chewed nervously on his thumb nail as he read and re-read the words on the pages, brows furrowed. He could tell he didn’t understand. Suho wondered what it was he wasn’t grasping, but didn’t know if he could be of any help. There wasn’t much in which Suho was knowledgeable, and since he’d woken, he’d had time to indulge in nothing else but Reintegration.
The student made a small cry of frustration, snapping Suho out of his mode of focus. He muttered something under his breath and shifted, one of the pages cascading towards Suho. They both watched as it fell, silent like a leaf gently gliding against the air.
"Um," the student said smartly. He'd expected Suho to pick it up, but he hadn't. "Can you pick that up for me, please?"
Suho smiled sheepishly at him before bending forward to pick up the page. He redressed himself and extended it towards him. The student reached for the paper, but before he could get it, Suho paused in his action. He unexpectedly retracted his hand, startling the student. He stared at him wide-eyed as Suho approached and stood over him, suddenly agitated.
“What if we could displace neurons or redirect them to a buffer zone?” Suho pointed to the paper in his hand, where he could see the picture of a nervous system’s cell. His eyes flickered wildly between the student’s startled ones.
It was silent between them as the realization of Suho’s outburst hit him. The student took a good look at the brand embroidered on the left breast of his grey uniform shirt; it was that of a Communications serviceman. It must be weird to this student for someone of such class to know anything about neurons at all, much less suggest what he suggested-whatever that meant.
Suho repeatedly blinked absently before returning the paper to the student, arms having lost all animation they had had earlier. “I-I apologize.” The younger one watched him, perplexed, as he trembled and took his seat across from him and resumed leaning against the window. He closed his eyes, the soft whirring soothing him some.
What was that? he thought. He had momentarily been seized, energized by a thought he didn’t know he could have. But it was clear to him what he was suggesting, as if he’d known what he was talking about, a part of his brain unlocking as he’d said it.
Suho hadn’t slept very well last night after his incident on the train, which he was trying to forget. How ironic was it that a man with no memories was trying to forget the few that he had? He didn’t dwell on it too long, the low humming of the train straying his thoughts. When he checked his Messenger, his schedule consisted only of filtering electronic messages. One-hundred-twenty-three until the end of Reintegration.
He thought he’d have enough to do to keep himself distracted as he worked, but when Suho sat in front of his computer and looked at the list of codes-he had no idea what they meant.
The arranger figured he was just too tired to properly function, but he had sat hours staring absently at his screen, scrolling through messages he didn’t know where to sort.
A panic slowly started rising inside him. Suho was filled with a cold emptiness suddenly. It consumed him and his thoughts. He was spiralling down quickly, and it oddly felt like he was losing his sense of self all over again-if he didn't know what these codes meant, then who was he? He was nothing. He was a vessel, a corpse walking among soundless backdrops and unwelcomed company. He was nothing more than a body reduced to its biological elements, starved of his fundamental needs of reason and order.
He was alone.
A hand posed itself gently on Suho's shoulder. The gesture had startled him right out his thoughts.
When Suho looked up, he met Kyungsoo's furrowed eyebrows and weighty gaze, worry apparent on his features.
"Suho," he said grimly. "You haven't done anything or moved for three hours."
The man blinked. Reality was slowly trickling back for him, as if he'd momentarily spent time in another one and didn't know how he'd gotten back.
"Suho?" Kyungsoo’s voice sounded distant and close all at once, but it had somehow cut clear through the fog of his senses.
He stood suddenly, as if propelled into action. At that moment, everything had been thrown back into place but too suddenly, leaving him nauseous and disoriented. His colleague extended an arm for him to balance himself.
"Is it all right," Suho began, "if I head home early today? I don't feel very well."
“Yes, of course,” Kyungsoo responded.
Suho nodded appreciatively and unsteadily turned his back to walk down the corridor.
"What happened at work yesterday?"
Suho looked up. Dr Lu Han considered his patient with an expression the latter found strange. He sighed audibly and averted his gaze.
“Upset stomach,” he lied, wanting to avoid the therapy part of his session where the doctor told him what he was feeling was no big deal, he needn’t worry. Lu Han nodded. He didn’t believe him, Suho knew, but he didn’t push.
“How is work generally? Not too taxing?"
Suho always found this question funny considering his simple job.
"Work is fine."
"Are you making any friends?"
"I suppose Kyungsoo is a friend..."
"Do you remember anything?"
"No. I don't."
And the session ended that way.
Suho took the six o'clock train back home after work, no student slaving over work to distract him.
One-hundred-twenty-one days until end of Reintegration.
There are days where Suho found himself working in the Physical Mail Room, twenty-four floors below his usual level in the basement. He wasn't allowed there, but Security had always been lazy with keeping the door locked. He took extra care to make sure no one would know he'd been in unauthorised.
This room harboured any personal remnants of people before the Switch, the age where most everything was digitised, or was still in the process of being digitised. Such solid packages still appeared from time to time and are usually archived. The storage rooms would fill quickly-no one came by to claim the items.
In a society mostly technology-based, it was refreshing to see things of Old-but not that old, he liked to remind himself-arranged in actual shelves and folders instead of virtual ones. Suho liked walking through the aisles, his hand tracing the edge of the tall racks. He would trudge along like this until he stumbled upon a section he hadn't yet thoroughly looked over and rifle through the boxes.
Today he perused section J-23.
The items he found never really differed, always varying from books full of outdated information they've yet to get rid of or of personal belongings they couldn't easily do away with.
Suho spotted a blue-white pannier in his inspection. It stood out, being the only box of bright colour that he'd seen in a while.
He slid it out without much effort and began looking around. It didn't seem like there was anything of much interest in there as he leisurely disturbed the contents with his hand. Scraps of paper, pens and pencils, a gold chain, used wrappers-and a notebook. Suho picked it up and turned it in his hand. It was fully intact, hard red cover secured closed by an elastic of the same colour, yellowing papers between the bindings. The spine was clear of any writing, as were both surfaces front and back. He slid the basket back, taking a pointed interest in the book, and opened both flaps to spy a name-nowhere was there one written.
Suho had no reservations as he opened the notebook to a random page and frowned. The message he saw upset him.
He quickly flipped through the notebook. The same disturbing messages were repeated throughout, written in legible, practiced writing, until the calligraphy grew unruly, as if written with a drunken madness.
You have to forget.
It was written over and over, at first peppered throughout the journal. But the further he read, the more the message appeared, until it filled pages. Suho got the distinct feeling the narrator had been writing it like a mantra for days-until he got to the last page, where there was only one thing written in its center.
Forget everything.
It was particularly quiet when he closed the book. So much so, Suho thought he could hear the electric buzzing of the lights twenty feet overhead. He was left with such an empty feeling, as if the journal had sucked his soul dry. He was left feeling cold, as if he someone had decreased the temperature degrees lower and he was just now beginning to notice.
He was left wondering why anyone would wish to forget everything, why anyone would want to experience the torturous event of losing every memory, your whole sense of self, when he was living that exactly-
He hated it.
Despite the sombre feeling the journal brought on, Suho took it out of the archive. He didn't intend on keeping it, eager to get it back in the hands of the owner.
He didn't know why he was compelled to do so. He told himself maybe he wanted to meet this person and ask them why he filled his journal with such morose thoughts. But it occurred to him that it would be encroaching what was supposed to be intimate to admittedly satisfy personal curiosity.
Suho went up to the third floor laboratories and dropped off the journal for a Scan under official pretenses. He inserted the book in the Box and watched it frost as the machine worked, revealing a few fingerprints on the cover. Suho was almost eager for the results, waiting impatiently as the machine processed the prints and looked through its database to associate it to a person. There wasn't anyone who wasn't registered as far as Suho knew, so he was hopeful.
But when the results came, only his name and picture appeared as a candidate. There were no other prints but his.
It must have been archived so long, he reasoned, that any other print would have faded by now.
If it weren't the electronic prompt the Messenger sent him, Suho might have forgotten about his appointment with Dr Lu Han.
He'd been moving slowly since the previous Friday, his limbs seemingly laden by an invisible force.
For three nights, his thoughts had plagued by the journal. He knew he shouldn't have, and that it was absolutely against protocol, but Suho had brought the book back home with him after visiting the labs.
He knew he shouldn't have, and it was a violation of privacy, but Suho had thoroughly read the diary.
Hunched over his desk with a bright light illuminating the words, there wasn't much in the book pertaining to a story so much as general reminders to forget it-but what it was, Suho had wondered all night.
There had been one particularly distressing post he'd come across in his investigation, scratchy black drawings that reminded him of the incident on the train with the student, and what he'd seen on the student's paper. Suho hadn't quite understood as well as he had that evening, words like 'myelin', 'influx' and 'frontal lobe' meaning little to nothing to him now.
What had been clear to him was the concept of Blank Slate. The narrator had drawn many detailed plans to encourage induced memory loss, many he scribbled over, scratched into oblivion or ripped out.
Suho had begun to wonder then what memory could be so bad, the narrator would want to force them all erased?
"What are you thinking about?"
Snap, as if he'd been standing alone in a glade, no rustle to be heard as his thoughts carried him, only to be sucked back to reality by the snapping of a twig nearby.
Suho was again conscious of Dr Lu Han sitting across him. He was looking at him doe-eyed. It was unsettling suddenly how the doctor regarded him intently. His irises quaked in their search, like Lu Han was trying hard to hold himself back. It was distracting and unpleasant, so Suho averted his gaze.
"Pardon?"
"I asked what are you thinking about."
"Ah...Work..."
The doctor considered Suho's vague response, saying nothing as he scrutinized him further. It was a while before Lu Han spoke again.
"Do you remember anything else?"
Suho usually stroked the arm of his chair when he was in the office. It was soothing to him, like the humming of the train on the track. He had heard this question countless times before this session, and had never really thought anything of it, but there was something about this time, about the way he'd asked him that made him stutter in his action.
"No..."
Dr Lu Han took it upon himself to escort Suho to the elevator at the end of the hall. They trudged silently, the doctor's hands clasped behind his back as he sported a thoughtful expression.
When the lift arrived, Suho hesitated to step in, glancing at the doctor. If he sensed his uncertain, he made no sign of acknowledgement as he held the door open for his patient.
"Doctor?"
"Yes?"
Suho entered and contemplated his next question, nervously pulling at the hem of his white slacks.
"Will I ever remember?"
The doctor's expression dissolved, and he was giving him that look again, the mournful one, as if he had bad news to deliver to a good friend. He smiled wryly.
"The idea is that you never do."
The doors rolled closed then. Suho was left with his last words hanging in the air.
It was strange...He had the distinct feeling that Dr Lu Han wanted him to remember something.
His meeting with the doctor had left him feeling off.
He constantly replayed it as if trying to pinpoint exactly why it was off-putting. His mind always played back the end of the session, scanning his expression as best as he could analyze it. It only fleetingly occurred to Suho that he was abusing his observations skills and might be reading too much into the session. Unconvinced, he would go through it again.
At work, he was unfocused, only half aware of his desk, the codes, the files-Kyungsoo peering over him with a perpetual worried gaze. He went on all day as if he was stuck in a vortex, an eerie ringing following him.
It was the same when he'd travelled home via train, and for the first time in two months, it hadn't relaxed him. The ringing only seemed amplified each time he posed his head on the wall.
When Suho returned to his unit he didn't firstly step in. He watched the door slide open and stared at the white wall that greeted him for a long moment.
When he did step in, heels loudly on linoleum floor, it was as if he'd stepped into nothingness, the ringing having completely ceased.
He stood between the kitchen and the living room, frozen among the grey and white furniture. There was a simple vase with a single cyclamen sitting in it, bold and beautiful in its full blossom. It was the only hint of colour in the dismal decor, a pretty contrast to the rest of the room.
It was quiet as he stared at it. He'd been having it delivered to him for a month-just the one-because he hated that vase to be empty, as if it bare wasn't right, wasn't meant, and it irked his very being every time the flower died.
He trembled suddenly as if seized by an uncontrollable frenzy, approaching the stool the flower stood on with hesitant steps. When he got close enough to touch it, to put its petals between his thumb and forefinger and feel the soft texture, he pushed it.
White shattered almost instantly, shards of the vase flying as the water spilled from it and puddled on the floor.
It wasn't enough.
Suho entered the kitchen and slid open every cabinet, frantically and haphazardly removing the contents.
He had glasses and ceramic plates in the cupboards over the sink he didn't bother setting down properly, the silence he'd earlier stood in replaced by sharp clinking and clacking and shattering. He hastily exited the kitchen, not minding the pricking at his feet, and tossed the living room too, displacing couch cushions, pillows and flipping the coffee table in the center.
Suho groaned audibly as he hit the bathroom, removing everything from around the sink and behind the mirror above it, soaps and toothpastes, medicines and ointments littering the ground. He moved quickly in his actions now, growing irritated, and moved to turn the bedroom too. He tousled sheets, turned the mattress, pushed off what was on the dresser and its contents without regard for the mess he was creating.
Suho cried out after he'd started pulling his clothes from their hangers, plunked down to the floor completely frustrated.
Suho basked in the silence now that he wasn't rustling through his every belonging, no ringing screeching in his ears either. He was panting, a wave of fatigue hitting him suddenly, his present activity having used a lot of his already minimal energy.
The quiet gave him time to reflect. He turned to see his room in a state, like a storm had passed through it and left nothing intact in its wake. He thought he had looked over everything, and still he didn't find it.
Suho supposed this was to be expected.
He didn't at all know what he was looking for anymore. But he'd been so sure in his forage that...
Suho retraced his steps. He returned to see his bathroom, living room and kitchen in a chaotic state. He certainly notice the wilting cyclamen, pressed against the floor as if someone had stepped on it repeatedly.
He stood at the entrance, the kitchen and the living room viewable. Past the broken vase was a small, dark hallway leading to the bedroom. He stared into this darkness, not a shred of light passing the awning.
Through the threshold, nothing came. The house was quiet again, and it felt cold and empty.
But Suho swore he saw the shadow of a person standing there.
Suho's dreams had become stranger the last few nights.
He could never remember what occurred during the dream, but he always recalled how they made him feel. They instilled in him a sense of urgency. They were clipped, dark, like an action movie trailer, and always left him feeling crushed.
Last night, he'd had another dream. It was the same kind of dream, but this time, something unusual happened-he'd heard a voice.
When he dreamt, Suho often thought he was submerged, the bubbly sound of underwater pressure rising reaching his ears. The voice had called, cutting clear, loud and hoarse as it was.
Suho woke up in a cold sweat. He was startled awake, a frigid fear rising within him. He reached out beside him, expecting his hand to meet flesh, a body, but he only managed to grasp onto sheets.
There was no one there.
Where'd he go?...he thought in a moment of panic, then it passed, and he'd forgotten he thought it.
His heart sank to the pit of his stomach. The house was silent again. He took the moment to notice that everything he'd tossed in his room was as it was supposed to be, neat and organized, as if no storm had wreaked havoc here.
Suho calmed. The house fell silent again save for the humming of the air conditioner.
He had never felt more alone than in this moment.
Suho worked leisurely, having little to no energy to work at the productivity he once did.
While he was completing a task, a creeping panic invaded him. He became so restless, so jittery, he couldn't stay staring at his screen. He turned away momentarily to take a breather then abandoned his seat in a hurry.
It wasn't the first time that Wednesday Suho had left his seat, rushing through the hallways of the twenty-third floor to check the Belongings' Bay. It was mandatory for employees of this floor to drop their things not work-related there should they choose to bring anything as to not distract them. As it was, Suho was distracted, even when the object wasn't present when he worked.
Suho never brought anything to work, because he never had anything to bring-but today, he carried the journal.
He told himself his periodically checking was to make sure he wasn't caught harbouring unlisted items without express permission, and not because he was close to paranoia if he didn't.
The truth was he had built some sense of security around the book, a fixation that could only be appeased by having it with him at all times. Seeing as he couldn't, he would find himself floating toward it.
In his haste to get to the other room, Suho collided with a co-worker. It was Kyungsoo he'd bumped into. The man dropped the tray of computer pools he'd been carrying, the odd shapes clattering to the floor. Kyungsoo stared at the mess, brows furrowed, then kneeled to start piling them back on the tray he'd set down.
"I'm so sorry," Suho breathed, crouching a few beats after Kyungsoo had, hands trembling.
"Clumsy, are we?" he said to lighten the mood, but his tone was a little too serious to be considered playful.
"Ah, yes. I'm sorry."
His colleague ignored his apology. "Are you okay?" he asked. If Suho thought it possible, he would think Kyungsoo's eyebrows creased even more as he regarded him now, pausing in his action. "You haven't been yourself lately. I'm worried."
"I know. I'm sorry..."
He didn't respond to that. The two continued in silence. Suho was a little bit more relaxed now, burdened less by the thought of the journal and more by Kyungsoo's worry. He didn’t know which version of himself his co-worker had gotten used to, but he had to admit, a lot of his behaviour was erratic and called for attention. He wondered if the doctor had noticed that morning how fidgety he'd been, and if he had, why didn't he-
"Yes?"
Suho's voice rang loudly in the hall as he peered behind him over his shoulder to address who had called him, startling Kyungsoo. When he looked, there was no one.
He looked to Kyungsoo, who sported a perplexed expression, owlish eyes observing him intently.
"Who was that?" Suho asked, assuming Kyungsoo must have seen who it was as he was facing him.
"Who was that where?"
"Behind me-the person who said my name."
Kyungsoo frowned deeply, confusion seeping into his features, mixing with doubt and concern. "I don't know what you're talking about..."
"Someone said my name," he insisted. He was speaking quickly, sharply, seized by impatience suddenly. "You saw them. Who was it?"
"Suho..."
"Who was it? Tell me."
"No one called your name..."
He stilled staring at Kyungsoo, eyes flickering wildly over his person. He didn't believe him. Someone had to have been there. "But," he said weakly, voice rising, "I heard it. He was right there, and now-"
Suho stopped mid-speech as if a sudden thought occurred to him.
It hadn't been his name to be called but someone else's, one he recognized but had answered to as if were his own. That's how it had felt, like familiar syllables had been spilled into his ears and he had caught them.
"Who is he?" Kyungsoo asked softly. Suho snapped his head up to look at him, eyes brimming with tears as if he was about ready to cry. He staggered to his feet and laughed nervously, leaning against the nearest white wall, though it had sounded more like a pathetic series of hahas. He was shaking, unsteady, and more than a little rattled. He tried to speak over the sudden tinnitus ringing sharply, his voice coming out louder than he'd intended.
"I must be-" he started instead of answering the question. "It must be-it’s so cold. In the office. I'm shaking."
Kyungsoo didn't quite understand. He stood to extend a hand, but Suho recoiled. He simpered apologetically.
"May I be excused?"
"Ah. Yes-be careful."
Suho nodded and carefully made his way to the Bay.
Dr Lu Han watched Suho carefully. He seemed different, more wistful, as if he was afflicted by insomnia the past few nights. Suho could sympathize. He hadn't been sleeping well the last few nights either.
But when the doctor asked, Suho didn't tell him that.
"Did you rest well last night?"
"I slept fine."
The doctor noticed how reserved Suho was being. He was fidgeting in his seat, bouncing his knee up and down rapidly and tapping his index nervously on the arm of the chair. Tic, tic, tic, tic. His responses were short, clipped, and delivered with an impatience he hadn't displayed in a while. He was reminded of their initial meeting, when Suho was first admitted.
"What about the other nights?"
"Fine."
"Your work never ends too late?"
"No."
"You're eating well?"
"Yes."
"Are you taking care of the flower?"
Something about the question entirely bothered Suho. Was he suggesting he would neglect it, he asked himself, forgetting that he once had? Was he suggesting that one bad day and a few sleepless nights made him careless? Would he disregard the one thing he had? Suho's whole expression changed, his face contorting with contempt.
"Why does everyone keep asking so many questions? I'm fine."
Dr Lu Han seemed thrown by the glare Suho directed at him, neither having expected him to snap as he did. He appeared to have noticed and sat further in his seat.
"I'm sorry. I'm..."
But Suho had no explanation.
Lu Han nodded grimly, looking a little put-off.
"Do you remember?"
"No, I don't."
When Suho stood to leave the doctor didn't accompany him. He stayed behind to update his patient's record and add a note.
Patient showing signs of relapse again.
Suho hated weekends.
Saturday and Sunday were always days he was left to his own surly thoughts, lately
pounding against his brain as if the most buried ones were trying to reach the surface of his mind. It was like trying to remember something he'd just forgotten and driving himself crazy unable to remember it. He liked to think he'd long ago given up that hunt.
Suho laid the palm of his hand flat against his forehead. He took a breath and started beating against his skull as if it could stop the strong pulsing.
It didn't.
Neither did it make him forget about the dream he'd had the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that one too.
Suho had dreamt of drowning before, but never so frequently or so intensely.
Every night there was something about the dream that noticeably changed. The temperature of the water the first night, searing hot one minute and ice cold the next; the hairs on his arms raised remembering, skin peppered with goosebumps as if someone had suddenly turned down the temperature of the apartment. He gripped the edge of his bed and exhaled sharply. The clear blue water turned crimson the second night, making Suho draw in blood every panicked breath he took. The third night, Suho couldn’t see clearly, as if he were staring through the hazy surface of the water as someone forced him down, face indecipherable. But Suho had felt the person, hands soft against his skin as long, bony fingers wrapped around his neck to keep him immobile.
It had been shockingly familiar, the touch. Suho was almost saddened to know it was gone, too brief a contact before he’d woken.
Suho sat contemplating the journal. He felt as if it were staring at him, calling to him, which was probably crazy.
He stood and pulled out his desk chair that swung noiselessly. He dropped himself on the chair and tugged it forward effortlessly to be closer to the desk. He hunched himself over the red book, staring at the cover as if waiting for it to do something.
Maybe the idea of a journal wasn’t so bad. He was having trouble talking about anything to Dr Lu Han, or at least being truthful with him. Had Suho always been a compulsive liar, he wondered, being dishonest about trivial things and information otherwise important for a doctor to know of his patient?
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the doctor. Suho determined he had problems defining what he was feeling and then relaying it into words. Or perhaps he didn’t want Lu Han to be his therapist, sitting across from him observing his every active response while scrutinizing his features.
Suho felt bitter suddenly thinking visiting the doctor every other day had done nothing for him. Maybe writing will clear his mind. It was why people recorded their private thoughts, to find relief?
He was well aware as he paged through the journal that it wasn’t his, but he permitted his action thinking it technically didn’t have an owner, remaining unclaimed in the database. Maybe the old owner will be interested to know the new possessor’s insights when he or she gets this back.
Suho didn’t think too long about the morality of his action. He picked up an electric pen and turned to an unused page. He started writing about the drowning, how real it had felt, how he could still the water running over him-
The pen stopped scratching against the paper. Suho re-read what he’d written thus far, his words filling about half the page. Curiously, he turned the page back.
Forwards.
Back.
Forwards.
Back.
The narrator’s writing was strikingly similar to his calligraphy.
Suho flattened the page and put the tip of his pen over the faded pencil marks. He leisurely retraced the words.
It wasn’t strikingly similar to his calligraphy, it was his handwriting.
He didn’t wait until Monday’s appointment.
Suho wasn’t thinking when he landed on the office floor, weeping for Dr Lu Han to attend to him. He had sunk to the ground clutching his chest, lamenting about an unbearable pain. He kept his temples to the floor and kept hitting himself against it, hoping the throbbing of his head would go away with the impact.
Physicians tended to Suho before Lu Han arrived, worried laced in his hard features.
“Suho? Can you hear me?”
He could, but he sounded very far away, his voice muddled under the force of the ringing in his ear. His vision blurred at the edges.
A cold pressure was applied to his neck. Suho felt something like a cold liquid stream through his muscles, his body growing limp as he stilled. Lu Han had cradled his head in lap. He silently gestured for his colleagues to stay back. Suho’s breath came in short, distressed intakes as Lu Han moved very carefully, kneeling so he may gently prompt his patient to take a seating position.
“It’s okay, Suho. You’re all right.”
The doctor’s words went right over Suho’s head. He knew he wasn’t going to be all right, so why was Lu Han lying to him? His stature was languid but his grip strong, startling the doctor.
“I don’t understand.”
He had spoken so softly Lu Han had to strain to hear.
“What is it, Suho?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tell me what’s wrong, Suho.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand!”
Every time Lu Han frantically asked him to elaborate, Suho cried, a question of his own unvoiced.
Why are my prints the only ones on the journal?
Why is the writing the same? Is it mine?
What about its contents?
Was my forgetting really an accident?
“Was my forgetting an accident?”
Lu Han watched as Suho pushed himself to his knees and weakly held himself there. He staggered to his feet and stumbled, sluggishly making his way forward.
“Where is he?”
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
“Shh.”
Suho had been speaking to no one in particular but everyone had paused. Was that laughter he heard? It was quiet, and the sudden stillness drove him mad. He turned to the doctor, groaning and sobbing, tears spilling without reservations.
“What is happening to me?”
If Suho could find a way to properly describe it, he’d say it felt like he was dying. Like he was drowning in a sea of melancholy and misery.
Maybe that was why he often dreamt of being submerged.
It was scary how quickly bits and pieces of him were coming back to him. The memories hit him like a freight train every time they surfaced, leaving an intolerable burn, because every one had one thing in common and reminded him that everything he’d lived from the moment he’d woken was a lie. Dr Lu Han thought it was in his patient’s best interest now to know his own story, and decided the experimental phase was over because it didn’t take years for Suho to remember like he’d originally-it’d taken him days. To Suho it had felt like seconds, long, agonizing, insufferable fractions of a minute.
Kim Junmyun was his real name, the same name he’d answered to on his way to the Belongings’ Bay.
Junmyun was part of a team of scientists working to develop memory restoration, but Junmyun was particularly interested in the effects of the opposite. The team researched decluttering neurotic area and repairing damaged brain cells in the region of the frontal lobe. Junmyun always thought what could be done to build could also be undone.
“What if we could displace neurons or redirect them to a buffer zone?” he proposed one day, meaning he’d stop certain signals from passing. There was a problem with this, of course, because the frontal lobe had other major functions, so Suho tried his best to work around those obstacles only virtually testing his theories.
Junmyun was always busy with his project, immersed in its complexity with the drive to solve it. Even among his busy schedule, he had a lover.
Byun Baekhyun was a lively spirit. He was a different kind of constant in Junmyun’s life, bright and noisy and not at all akin to the sciences, and Junmyun loved him.
He remembered him like his image persisted through the grainy white noise, the broken cassette of his memory finally starting to play without skip.
He had soft features, Baekhyun, small eyes that formed crescents whenever he so much as quirked his lips, or smirked or smiled with the fullness of his square mouth, and he recognized it now as the face he’d seen through the water.
Baekhyun liked to tease and lark, never short of any witty comment should the moment need one, and Junmyun was often the target of his jokes.
Nothing was as soft as his touch.
He could recall the nights Baekhyun lay next to him, tracing mindless circles into his skin with the pads of his thumbs. He recalled when he laid his palms flat against his torso as they made their way up, and sometimes their way down, wrapping around him until he was driven mad with love and lust.
Junmyun always loved returning the favour if it meant hearing Baekhyun’s affectionate giggles turn into moans of pleasure as he imbibed every kiss and every embrace.
Junmyun loved Baekhyun for being the sun set in a dreary, empty sky.
He would never know why, but he had been his lover.
He had been his lover.
And the force of that statement deeply cut him, because one moment he was there, answering his greetings when he stepped into their unit, and the next no one answered his cries.
When he found out why no one answered, Junmyun couldn’t breathe. For a moment, he thought he wasn’t, seeing the still form of his lover hunched over a crimson bath, blood pouring from his hand, his beautiful, soft hands, and staining the white marble of the tub.
Junmyun had followed the evidence from memory. His favourite vase had been knocked over, shattered into pieces, one noticeably missing. He’d find it later stabbed under his chin.
He had run a gash over by the kitchen and let it drip along his arm to the bedroom, where he’d undressed and neatly laid his bloodied clothes on the bed. He carved an array of lines into his skin
before he crawled to the bathroom and succumbed to his deepest wound.
Junmyun knew his lover well enough to retrace his steps, but not to know what he’d been hiding behind the wall of snark.
His death had ripped him apart.
He’d always compared losing his lover to drowning: engulfed by liquid sorrow, heartache and loss. What felt more like drowning than actually drowning, he reasoned. Junmyun had been certain he’d never wanted to live without the constant warmth, but his friends wouldn’t let the waves take him.
So he put his efforts elsewhere.
He secluded himself and worked to develop his version of the project to completion.
He had to test it on someone.
“Do you understand the risks of this procedure?” another doctor was obliged to ask him, and he had responded yes, he’d created it. It was unapproved, untried, but approaching the right people allowed him to avoid what could have taken years to accept.
Lu Han, his colleague and closest friend, had strongly advised Junmyun not follow through. It was unsafe, uncertain, and inconsiderate. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to feel this way, dead on the inside, burdened by the weight of his guilt-he couldn’t save him, he hadn’t paid enough attention. His love was dead, and all he had to go on was that he hadn’t been good enough, he didn’t give him what he wanted-he pushed him to death. But after the procedure he had no such thoughts.
His parents, his pets, his siblings, his friends, his occupation, his life-all of that gone, ultimately destroyed by a naive attempt to outplay the brain.
He’d wanted to forget his grief, but it washed over him cold and merciless as if he’d discovered his body yesterday. Which, he supposed, wasn’t far off from the truth, because today he was truly wakened, and it was devastating knowing he remembered him as if he were here, present, beside him yesterday, but he’d in reality long ago departed.
He had tried to escape the death of his lover once, only to end up living it twice, the pain multiplied a hundredfold.
In his haste to forget, he’d made sure he’d never manage it.
From: ANONYMOUS until May 22, 2015
Title: Lacuna
Rating: R
Pairing(s)/Focus: [endgame spoiler]endgame Suho/Baekhyun
Length: 8,853 words
Summary: “Do you understand the risks of this procedure?”
Warning/s: mention of character death, suicide
Notes: SCREAMS. I’d like to thank my recipient for giving me such fun prompts to work with! I would have loved to do one of the other two, but I wasn’t sure I could really do them justice. That leaves this prompt, which was vague enough for me to deviate just...slightly...as in it still respects it!...but it happens shortly after the fact...Hopefully it’ll make sense by the end of it and you’ll like it. :< Thank you to MJ for keeping me sane, to J for holding my hand through this my breakdowns and N, too, for being as emotionally supportive as her short arrangement of feelings will allow. A big thank you to the mods for being understanding and patient with me as well!!
He couldn’t breathe.
As if there was something pressing against his chest, pushing from all sides. It didn't matter how many breaths he took; all of his intakes brought a cold liquid with them. It ran over his skin, filled him, surrounded him, drowned him. The water was merciless in its action. It weighed him down until it could pull him under, and when he stopped reaching for the surface, he could feel it.
He was going to die.
“Suho?”
He raised his head at the call, the weight of it making his movement slow. For a moment he was confused, the office in which he’d spent many hours unfamiliar to him. His vision cleared as if a thin veil had been lifted, and he remembered where he was and what he was doing. Dr Lu Han was sitting opposite him, one leg crossed over the other, and he was looking at him as if seeing him for the first time. His hands were neatly folded in his lap. He could tell now that the man hadn’t moved since the start of this session, but his expression had changed. He felt somehow exposed under the doctor’s clinical gaze. He slowly straightened in his seat from his bent form and tried to mirror his posture.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been calling you for a while, now.”
Dr Lu Han liked to think that he was stern in his words, certainly when he had rather bad news to deliver, or medical advice he truly wished his patients followed. His words were cutting, perhaps, but the man was so soft-spoken, it wasn’t in his nature to sound firm, his voice never reaching sixty decibels. He must have spoken so quietly that he hadn’t heard him in the midst of his thoughts.
Or maybe it was the name itself. Suho. It was new, and he supposed he still had trouble responding to it.
“I’m sorry.”
The doctor regarded him grimly. His eyes a stormy grey, hues of dark blues dancing in his irises as he flicked his gaze over Suho. In his weeks under observation, he had done some observing of his own. Whenever Dr Lu Han took a moment to look at him intently like this, he was doing a physical assessment. He took in his perpetually tired state, his hunched shape, his sunken cheeks and pale complexion. Sometimes he would look at him sadly, as if he were an old friend afflicted by a terminal illness, and all he could do was pity him. He never commented, however. It wasn’t what he was really monitoring.
When the end of their session neared, the doctor would always ask one question, the same one every time.
“Do you remember anything?”
Two months ago, Suho had woken from a comatose state. He called it his First Day, because to him it was. He had not a name, not a memory in mind at that time, only the distinct feeling of panic crawling through him and the burning of his chest every time he took a strained breath. But even those early memories came in hazy clips. He had suffered a severe cerebral accident, they had told him, resulting in the loss of all his memories until he'd woken. All other details were lost upon him, in one ear, out the other. But they never stopped asking him if he remembered anything.
What Suho remembered never went beyond the two months since he'd woken. Fishing for anything further back was like trying to rewind a cassette that had no more tape to wind. His mind was indeed just like a broken tape, white noise the only image appearing on the screen. So they gave him an identity, a new name, a new life.
Suho breathed in a shallow breath. He never really dreaded this question, but he was never eager to answer it either. His answer was always the same.
“No.”
If Suho leaned his head against the wall, he could hear the soft whirring of the tracks from inside the compartment. It was a quiet sound, a dull humming that could lull a passenger to sleep if they listened closely.
If he lifted his head, it was radio silent in the train, not a single sound heard. Not the papery slide of a newspaper like there used to be; not the impatient tapping of a late man’s dress shoes against the floor. Though there were few commuters at a time, barely anyone ever made a sound. It was as though he'd stepped into a void, every noise vacuumed away leaving only a dull tinnitus. He wondered how people could stand living in a constant state of noiselessness when the only things abuzz were their own conflicting thoughts.
He rested his head and the humming reached his ears. He liked this because for a moment, he could forget that everything in him felt wrong, as if his world was leaning on an axis differing from everybody else’s.
His eyes followed the scenery flying past him through the window, patches of green shrubbery, blue skies and white skyscrapers coming in and out of view. He wasn't really looking at it, or taking in his new surroundings. It was evident to him that not even the environment was right, as if he was born-or reborn-in a time wholly unfamiliar to him.
A gentle vibration in his lap caught his attention, and Suho raised his head to see the small light of his Messenger blinking at him, indicating he’d received a prompt. Suho clicked on the screen of the blue watch. A hologram appeared before him. A cursor blinked briefly before the small screen slowly filled with words. It was his daily schedule he was receiving: he would start with a visit to Dr Lu Han’s office, where he was headed, then commute to his workplace for a day of filing and re-filing. It was mundane, but it was part of his program.
They called it Reintegration. It was a guided system for citizens going through their last steps of rehabilitation after suffering a great trauma-in Suho’s case, his accident, after which they would return to society on their own. It took a certain period of time for each person to be trained in the ways of the community so they followed a schedule.
The cursor stopped after it had written its last sentence: one-hundred-twenty-four days until end of Reintegration.
Suho longed for the end of those days, because maybe by then he will have found direction.
Despite the banality of his routine, Suho found himself busy enough to distract himself. At times, though, his mind would wander.
He worked in a tall building outlined by windows looking into aseptic offices; his was on the twenty-third floor. He’d often stare out the window, forgetting his work, too lost in a reality that wasn’t his current one to bring himself back. He would watch strangers dressed in various colours and uniforms, indications of their profession, and observe how small they were from this high up. He’d imagine himself observing the edifice, looking up until his neck was craned as far back as it could go. He couldn’t make out their faces or consider how tall they really were, because from here they were all small specks of life walking along gravel. They were much like his shattered memory, except that was lifeless, and he didn’t know why. It was at times like these Suho wondered how insignificant he was when he was down there looking up, and someone was up here looking down.
There came a soft knocking. Suho turned around to meet Do Kyungsoo, small figure standing between desks. It was dim in the room, but his round face was illuminated by the light of the pool, where the holographic screen had gone to sleep. Kyungsoo adjusted the light and Suho could better see the furrow of his eyebrows. It was often he that snapped Suho back to the real world.
Kyungsoo had much the look Dr Lu Han often sported when he considered him, irises a deep brown, but unlike his doctor, his expression was etched with lines of worry. Suho noticed how his colleague often followed his actions carefully, the unease expressed in the widening of his owlish eyes. Suho was under the impression that he felt obligated to worry about him-to worry for him, but why he didn’t know. He supposed it was just in his personality to do so.
“Hello,” Suho greeted, stretching his lips in a semblance of a smile. Kyungsoo nodded tersely.
“I’ll be assisting you today,” Kyungsoo announced quietly. His gaze followed Suho as he gathered the few objects he needed. He had a file in his hand inserted in a plastic pocket, no doubt to return to the Physical Mail Room. He would take the top between his thumb and index, and slowly slide his fingers along. It was a nervous habit, Suho noticed, and he did it quite often in his presence.
"Will you? That's nice."
If Suho were being honest, he didn't feel any kind of contentment towards the situation. He will go through the routine with Kyungsoo, which meant sit in front of a computer, file, refile, organize, reorganize. That's what he did every day.
On days they could allow it, the workers in Suho's building would choose a nice restaurant to go to after work. It was usually on Fridays as a means to welcome the weekend. Occasionally, they would go out on weekdays, and upon Kyungsoo's insistence, his co-workers would invite Suho.
Though Kyungsoo’s was just trying to be friendly, he knew the others didn’t want him to come along. He had gained somewhat of a reputation, one he thought wasn’t fit for him at all. He knew he came off as rather unapproachable, and it wasn’t very wise to try to hold up a conversation with him. Suho was stuck in his own world, so far-off and unreachable people stopped grasping for him. They didn’t avoid him because he was mean, but because he was unresponsive. He was thought to be a generally unpleasant person because of his constant state of despondency. It was what he portrayed, and he didn’t know how to act otherwise without pretending to be someone else, or without feeling like there was a gaping hole in his center.
Tonight, his fellow workmen conversed idly among them. Suho sat quietly among his fellow workmen. He could hear the distinct noise of chatter nearby, but his eyes were fixed on nothing in particular, his food mostly untouched. He’d long ago given up on trying to follow Zhang Yixing and Kim Jongdae’s banter, much less participate in conversation, choosing to nod absently every once in a while.
Laughter erupted at the table, and Suho simpered as to not let on that he hadn’t been paying attention. Conversation resumed then. Suho fiddled with his fingers in his lap. It was easy to notice how easily these people got along, and how effortlessly it had been for them too, while he himself couldn’t help but feel awkward. He thought it was fine, it was just who he was at the moment, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t sometimes envious.
He wished he knew how to be happy or content, or know who he was much like Yixing did. Yixing often bragged about his new position as Director-in-chief of the Architecture Department. He said it was his calling to be both a leader and a designer, and he’d known ever since he was young. It made Suho think-was he at all like what he used to be? Was he still following his calling despite his memory loss? Or was he following a new one? Suho didn’t know. What he did know was the heavy loneliness weighing on him when he compared his life to others’, and how even now it seemed foreign, unknown to him, as if alone was not at all how he was supposed to be feeling.
“Are you okay?” Kyungsoo asked him, interrupting his thoughts. Suho didn’t realize he had been staring at Yixing this whole time, and he seemed to have made the man quite uncomfortable. Suho smiled awkwardly and nodded, muttering a quiet, “Sorry,” before he briefly glanced at Kyungsoo.
He didn’t fool Kyungsoo, however, whose heavy gaze was watching him carefully now. It was disconcerting constantly being under his worried scrutiny. Suho looked away. How was he to explain to Kyungsoo that no, he wasn’t really okay, when he himself didn’t know why?
The sky had dimmed by the time Suho took the train back home. It was a shade of orange mixed with dark blues and greys, the fading sunlight seeping through faintly. He took the eight o'clock train. It wasn't usually the time he boarded, but dinner had run a little late and so had he.
Suho always liked to sit in the same compartment of the train, three rows away on the left from the door to the next compartment. The sections were four seats forming a square, uniformly separated. Four sections per compartment for a total of sixteen chairs. Four compartments per train meant that sixty-four people could travel all at once. It was a considerably small number that could be handled in case of emergency. He knew, because Yixing had spent all of dinner bragging about the newly implemented designs. He had heard countless times about the efficiency of building the trains this way. He nodded through the explanations, but thought the architect must have said it so many times the last few dinners, it must have seeped through to his brain.
The compartment could accommodate sixteen persons at a time, but there was rarely ever that many people travelling. This evening was no exception. It made for a pretty lonely ride when each person took to their own section.
Not everyone cared to be alone for a long ride. When someone sat in his favoured section, Suho took a break from his star-gazing to inspect his companion, observation a skill he'd picked up quickly in his early months of consciousness while left to his own devices. There was who he guessed was a student sitting across from him, one knee up as he balanced a messy binder on his leg. He'd probably gotten them from the Archives, Suho thought briefly.
He chewed nervously on his thumb nail as he read and re-read the words on the pages, brows furrowed. He could tell he didn’t understand. Suho wondered what it was he wasn’t grasping, but didn’t know if he could be of any help. There wasn’t much in which Suho was knowledgeable, and since he’d woken, he’d had time to indulge in nothing else but Reintegration.
The student made a small cry of frustration, snapping Suho out of his mode of focus. He muttered something under his breath and shifted, one of the pages cascading towards Suho. They both watched as it fell, silent like a leaf gently gliding against the air.
"Um," the student said smartly. He'd expected Suho to pick it up, but he hadn't. "Can you pick that up for me, please?"
Suho smiled sheepishly at him before bending forward to pick up the page. He redressed himself and extended it towards him. The student reached for the paper, but before he could get it, Suho paused in his action. He unexpectedly retracted his hand, startling the student. He stared at him wide-eyed as Suho approached and stood over him, suddenly agitated.
“What if we could displace neurons or redirect them to a buffer zone?” Suho pointed to the paper in his hand, where he could see the picture of a nervous system’s cell. His eyes flickered wildly between the student’s startled ones.
It was silent between them as the realization of Suho’s outburst hit him. The student took a good look at the brand embroidered on the left breast of his grey uniform shirt; it was that of a Communications serviceman. It must be weird to this student for someone of such class to know anything about neurons at all, much less suggest what he suggested-whatever that meant.
Suho repeatedly blinked absently before returning the paper to the student, arms having lost all animation they had had earlier. “I-I apologize.” The younger one watched him, perplexed, as he trembled and took his seat across from him and resumed leaning against the window. He closed his eyes, the soft whirring soothing him some.
What was that? he thought. He had momentarily been seized, energized by a thought he didn’t know he could have. But it was clear to him what he was suggesting, as if he’d known what he was talking about, a part of his brain unlocking as he’d said it.
Suho hadn’t slept very well last night after his incident on the train, which he was trying to forget. How ironic was it that a man with no memories was trying to forget the few that he had? He didn’t dwell on it too long, the low humming of the train straying his thoughts. When he checked his Messenger, his schedule consisted only of filtering electronic messages. One-hundred-twenty-three until the end of Reintegration.
He thought he’d have enough to do to keep himself distracted as he worked, but when Suho sat in front of his computer and looked at the list of codes-he had no idea what they meant.
The arranger figured he was just too tired to properly function, but he had sat hours staring absently at his screen, scrolling through messages he didn’t know where to sort.
A panic slowly started rising inside him. Suho was filled with a cold emptiness suddenly. It consumed him and his thoughts. He was spiralling down quickly, and it oddly felt like he was losing his sense of self all over again-if he didn't know what these codes meant, then who was he? He was nothing. He was a vessel, a corpse walking among soundless backdrops and unwelcomed company. He was nothing more than a body reduced to its biological elements, starved of his fundamental needs of reason and order.
He was alone.
A hand posed itself gently on Suho's shoulder. The gesture had startled him right out his thoughts.
When Suho looked up, he met Kyungsoo's furrowed eyebrows and weighty gaze, worry apparent on his features.
"Suho," he said grimly. "You haven't done anything or moved for three hours."
The man blinked. Reality was slowly trickling back for him, as if he'd momentarily spent time in another one and didn't know how he'd gotten back.
"Suho?" Kyungsoo’s voice sounded distant and close all at once, but it had somehow cut clear through the fog of his senses.
He stood suddenly, as if propelled into action. At that moment, everything had been thrown back into place but too suddenly, leaving him nauseous and disoriented. His colleague extended an arm for him to balance himself.
"Is it all right," Suho began, "if I head home early today? I don't feel very well."
“Yes, of course,” Kyungsoo responded.
Suho nodded appreciatively and unsteadily turned his back to walk down the corridor.
"What happened at work yesterday?"
Suho looked up. Dr Lu Han considered his patient with an expression the latter found strange. He sighed audibly and averted his gaze.
“Upset stomach,” he lied, wanting to avoid the therapy part of his session where the doctor told him what he was feeling was no big deal, he needn’t worry. Lu Han nodded. He didn’t believe him, Suho knew, but he didn’t push.
“How is work generally? Not too taxing?"
Suho always found this question funny considering his simple job.
"Work is fine."
"Are you making any friends?"
"I suppose Kyungsoo is a friend..."
"Do you remember anything?"
"No. I don't."
And the session ended that way.
Suho took the six o'clock train back home after work, no student slaving over work to distract him.
One-hundred-twenty-one days until end of Reintegration.
There are days where Suho found himself working in the Physical Mail Room, twenty-four floors below his usual level in the basement. He wasn't allowed there, but Security had always been lazy with keeping the door locked. He took extra care to make sure no one would know he'd been in unauthorised.
This room harboured any personal remnants of people before the Switch, the age where most everything was digitised, or was still in the process of being digitised. Such solid packages still appeared from time to time and are usually archived. The storage rooms would fill quickly-no one came by to claim the items.
In a society mostly technology-based, it was refreshing to see things of Old-but not that old, he liked to remind himself-arranged in actual shelves and folders instead of virtual ones. Suho liked walking through the aisles, his hand tracing the edge of the tall racks. He would trudge along like this until he stumbled upon a section he hadn't yet thoroughly looked over and rifle through the boxes.
Today he perused section J-23.
The items he found never really differed, always varying from books full of outdated information they've yet to get rid of or of personal belongings they couldn't easily do away with.
Suho spotted a blue-white pannier in his inspection. It stood out, being the only box of bright colour that he'd seen in a while.
He slid it out without much effort and began looking around. It didn't seem like there was anything of much interest in there as he leisurely disturbed the contents with his hand. Scraps of paper, pens and pencils, a gold chain, used wrappers-and a notebook. Suho picked it up and turned it in his hand. It was fully intact, hard red cover secured closed by an elastic of the same colour, yellowing papers between the bindings. The spine was clear of any writing, as were both surfaces front and back. He slid the basket back, taking a pointed interest in the book, and opened both flaps to spy a name-nowhere was there one written.
Suho had no reservations as he opened the notebook to a random page and frowned. The message he saw upset him.
He quickly flipped through the notebook. The same disturbing messages were repeated throughout, written in legible, practiced writing, until the calligraphy grew unruly, as if written with a drunken madness.
You have to forget.
It was written over and over, at first peppered throughout the journal. But the further he read, the more the message appeared, until it filled pages. Suho got the distinct feeling the narrator had been writing it like a mantra for days-until he got to the last page, where there was only one thing written in its center.
Forget everything.
It was particularly quiet when he closed the book. So much so, Suho thought he could hear the electric buzzing of the lights twenty feet overhead. He was left with such an empty feeling, as if the journal had sucked his soul dry. He was left feeling cold, as if he someone had decreased the temperature degrees lower and he was just now beginning to notice.
He was left wondering why anyone would wish to forget everything, why anyone would want to experience the torturous event of losing every memory, your whole sense of self, when he was living that exactly-
He hated it.
Despite the sombre feeling the journal brought on, Suho took it out of the archive. He didn't intend on keeping it, eager to get it back in the hands of the owner.
He didn't know why he was compelled to do so. He told himself maybe he wanted to meet this person and ask them why he filled his journal with such morose thoughts. But it occurred to him that it would be encroaching what was supposed to be intimate to admittedly satisfy personal curiosity.
Suho went up to the third floor laboratories and dropped off the journal for a Scan under official pretenses. He inserted the book in the Box and watched it frost as the machine worked, revealing a few fingerprints on the cover. Suho was almost eager for the results, waiting impatiently as the machine processed the prints and looked through its database to associate it to a person. There wasn't anyone who wasn't registered as far as Suho knew, so he was hopeful.
But when the results came, only his name and picture appeared as a candidate. There were no other prints but his.
It must have been archived so long, he reasoned, that any other print would have faded by now.
If it weren't the electronic prompt the Messenger sent him, Suho might have forgotten about his appointment with Dr Lu Han.
He'd been moving slowly since the previous Friday, his limbs seemingly laden by an invisible force.
For three nights, his thoughts had plagued by the journal. He knew he shouldn't have, and that it was absolutely against protocol, but Suho had brought the book back home with him after visiting the labs.
He knew he shouldn't have, and it was a violation of privacy, but Suho had thoroughly read the diary.
Hunched over his desk with a bright light illuminating the words, there wasn't much in the book pertaining to a story so much as general reminders to forget it-but what it was, Suho had wondered all night.
There had been one particularly distressing post he'd come across in his investigation, scratchy black drawings that reminded him of the incident on the train with the student, and what he'd seen on the student's paper. Suho hadn't quite understood as well as he had that evening, words like 'myelin', 'influx' and 'frontal lobe' meaning little to nothing to him now.
What had been clear to him was the concept of Blank Slate. The narrator had drawn many detailed plans to encourage induced memory loss, many he scribbled over, scratched into oblivion or ripped out.
Suho had begun to wonder then what memory could be so bad, the narrator would want to force them all erased?
"What are you thinking about?"
Snap, as if he'd been standing alone in a glade, no rustle to be heard as his thoughts carried him, only to be sucked back to reality by the snapping of a twig nearby.
Suho was again conscious of Dr Lu Han sitting across him. He was looking at him doe-eyed. It was unsettling suddenly how the doctor regarded him intently. His irises quaked in their search, like Lu Han was trying hard to hold himself back. It was distracting and unpleasant, so Suho averted his gaze.
"Pardon?"
"I asked what are you thinking about."
"Ah...Work..."
The doctor considered Suho's vague response, saying nothing as he scrutinized him further. It was a while before Lu Han spoke again.
"Do you remember anything else?"
Suho usually stroked the arm of his chair when he was in the office. It was soothing to him, like the humming of the train on the track. He had heard this question countless times before this session, and had never really thought anything of it, but there was something about this time, about the way he'd asked him that made him stutter in his action.
"No..."
Dr Lu Han took it upon himself to escort Suho to the elevator at the end of the hall. They trudged silently, the doctor's hands clasped behind his back as he sported a thoughtful expression.
When the lift arrived, Suho hesitated to step in, glancing at the doctor. If he sensed his uncertain, he made no sign of acknowledgement as he held the door open for his patient.
"Doctor?"
"Yes?"
Suho entered and contemplated his next question, nervously pulling at the hem of his white slacks.
"Will I ever remember?"
The doctor's expression dissolved, and he was giving him that look again, the mournful one, as if he had bad news to deliver to a good friend. He smiled wryly.
"The idea is that you never do."
The doors rolled closed then. Suho was left with his last words hanging in the air.
It was strange...He had the distinct feeling that Dr Lu Han wanted him to remember something.
His meeting with the doctor had left him feeling off.
He constantly replayed it as if trying to pinpoint exactly why it was off-putting. His mind always played back the end of the session, scanning his expression as best as he could analyze it. It only fleetingly occurred to Suho that he was abusing his observations skills and might be reading too much into the session. Unconvinced, he would go through it again.
At work, he was unfocused, only half aware of his desk, the codes, the files-Kyungsoo peering over him with a perpetual worried gaze. He went on all day as if he was stuck in a vortex, an eerie ringing following him.
It was the same when he'd travelled home via train, and for the first time in two months, it hadn't relaxed him. The ringing only seemed amplified each time he posed his head on the wall.
When Suho returned to his unit he didn't firstly step in. He watched the door slide open and stared at the white wall that greeted him for a long moment.
When he did step in, heels loudly on linoleum floor, it was as if he'd stepped into nothingness, the ringing having completely ceased.
He stood between the kitchen and the living room, frozen among the grey and white furniture. There was a simple vase with a single cyclamen sitting in it, bold and beautiful in its full blossom. It was the only hint of colour in the dismal decor, a pretty contrast to the rest of the room.
It was quiet as he stared at it. He'd been having it delivered to him for a month-just the one-because he hated that vase to be empty, as if it bare wasn't right, wasn't meant, and it irked his very being every time the flower died.
He trembled suddenly as if seized by an uncontrollable frenzy, approaching the stool the flower stood on with hesitant steps. When he got close enough to touch it, to put its petals between his thumb and forefinger and feel the soft texture, he pushed it.
White shattered almost instantly, shards of the vase flying as the water spilled from it and puddled on the floor.
It wasn't enough.
Suho entered the kitchen and slid open every cabinet, frantically and haphazardly removing the contents.
He had glasses and ceramic plates in the cupboards over the sink he didn't bother setting down properly, the silence he'd earlier stood in replaced by sharp clinking and clacking and shattering. He hastily exited the kitchen, not minding the pricking at his feet, and tossed the living room too, displacing couch cushions, pillows and flipping the coffee table in the center.
Suho groaned audibly as he hit the bathroom, removing everything from around the sink and behind the mirror above it, soaps and toothpastes, medicines and ointments littering the ground. He moved quickly in his actions now, growing irritated, and moved to turn the bedroom too. He tousled sheets, turned the mattress, pushed off what was on the dresser and its contents without regard for the mess he was creating.
Suho cried out after he'd started pulling his clothes from their hangers, plunked down to the floor completely frustrated.
Suho basked in the silence now that he wasn't rustling through his every belonging, no ringing screeching in his ears either. He was panting, a wave of fatigue hitting him suddenly, his present activity having used a lot of his already minimal energy.
The quiet gave him time to reflect. He turned to see his room in a state, like a storm had passed through it and left nothing intact in its wake. He thought he had looked over everything, and still he didn't find it.
Suho supposed this was to be expected.
He didn't at all know what he was looking for anymore. But he'd been so sure in his forage that...
Suho retraced his steps. He returned to see his bathroom, living room and kitchen in a chaotic state. He certainly notice the wilting cyclamen, pressed against the floor as if someone had stepped on it repeatedly.
He stood at the entrance, the kitchen and the living room viewable. Past the broken vase was a small, dark hallway leading to the bedroom. He stared into this darkness, not a shred of light passing the awning.
Through the threshold, nothing came. The house was quiet again, and it felt cold and empty.
But Suho swore he saw the shadow of a person standing there.
Suho's dreams had become stranger the last few nights.
He could never remember what occurred during the dream, but he always recalled how they made him feel. They instilled in him a sense of urgency. They were clipped, dark, like an action movie trailer, and always left him feeling crushed.
Last night, he'd had another dream. It was the same kind of dream, but this time, something unusual happened-he'd heard a voice.
When he dreamt, Suho often thought he was submerged, the bubbly sound of underwater pressure rising reaching his ears. The voice had called, cutting clear, loud and hoarse as it was.
Suho woke up in a cold sweat. He was startled awake, a frigid fear rising within him. He reached out beside him, expecting his hand to meet flesh, a body, but he only managed to grasp onto sheets.
There was no one there.
Where'd he go?...he thought in a moment of panic, then it passed, and he'd forgotten he thought it.
His heart sank to the pit of his stomach. The house was silent again. He took the moment to notice that everything he'd tossed in his room was as it was supposed to be, neat and organized, as if no storm had wreaked havoc here.
Suho calmed. The house fell silent again save for the humming of the air conditioner.
He had never felt more alone than in this moment.
Suho worked leisurely, having little to no energy to work at the productivity he once did.
While he was completing a task, a creeping panic invaded him. He became so restless, so jittery, he couldn't stay staring at his screen. He turned away momentarily to take a breather then abandoned his seat in a hurry.
It wasn't the first time that Wednesday Suho had left his seat, rushing through the hallways of the twenty-third floor to check the Belongings' Bay. It was mandatory for employees of this floor to drop their things not work-related there should they choose to bring anything as to not distract them. As it was, Suho was distracted, even when the object wasn't present when he worked.
Suho never brought anything to work, because he never had anything to bring-but today, he carried the journal.
He told himself his periodically checking was to make sure he wasn't caught harbouring unlisted items without express permission, and not because he was close to paranoia if he didn't.
The truth was he had built some sense of security around the book, a fixation that could only be appeased by having it with him at all times. Seeing as he couldn't, he would find himself floating toward it.
In his haste to get to the other room, Suho collided with a co-worker. It was Kyungsoo he'd bumped into. The man dropped the tray of computer pools he'd been carrying, the odd shapes clattering to the floor. Kyungsoo stared at the mess, brows furrowed, then kneeled to start piling them back on the tray he'd set down.
"I'm so sorry," Suho breathed, crouching a few beats after Kyungsoo had, hands trembling.
"Clumsy, are we?" he said to lighten the mood, but his tone was a little too serious to be considered playful.
"Ah, yes. I'm sorry."
His colleague ignored his apology. "Are you okay?" he asked. If Suho thought it possible, he would think Kyungsoo's eyebrows creased even more as he regarded him now, pausing in his action. "You haven't been yourself lately. I'm worried."
"I know. I'm sorry..."
He didn't respond to that. The two continued in silence. Suho was a little bit more relaxed now, burdened less by the thought of the journal and more by Kyungsoo's worry. He didn’t know which version of himself his co-worker had gotten used to, but he had to admit, a lot of his behaviour was erratic and called for attention. He wondered if the doctor had noticed that morning how fidgety he'd been, and if he had, why didn't he-
"Yes?"
Suho's voice rang loudly in the hall as he peered behind him over his shoulder to address who had called him, startling Kyungsoo. When he looked, there was no one.
He looked to Kyungsoo, who sported a perplexed expression, owlish eyes observing him intently.
"Who was that?" Suho asked, assuming Kyungsoo must have seen who it was as he was facing him.
"Who was that where?"
"Behind me-the person who said my name."
Kyungsoo frowned deeply, confusion seeping into his features, mixing with doubt and concern. "I don't know what you're talking about..."
"Someone said my name," he insisted. He was speaking quickly, sharply, seized by impatience suddenly. "You saw them. Who was it?"
"Suho..."
"Who was it? Tell me."
"No one called your name..."
He stilled staring at Kyungsoo, eyes flickering wildly over his person. He didn't believe him. Someone had to have been there. "But," he said weakly, voice rising, "I heard it. He was right there, and now-"
Suho stopped mid-speech as if a sudden thought occurred to him.
It hadn't been his name to be called but someone else's, one he recognized but had answered to as if were his own. That's how it had felt, like familiar syllables had been spilled into his ears and he had caught them.
"Who is he?" Kyungsoo asked softly. Suho snapped his head up to look at him, eyes brimming with tears as if he was about ready to cry. He staggered to his feet and laughed nervously, leaning against the nearest white wall, though it had sounded more like a pathetic series of hahas. He was shaking, unsteady, and more than a little rattled. He tried to speak over the sudden tinnitus ringing sharply, his voice coming out louder than he'd intended.
"I must be-" he started instead of answering the question. "It must be-it’s so cold. In the office. I'm shaking."
Kyungsoo didn't quite understand. He stood to extend a hand, but Suho recoiled. He simpered apologetically.
"May I be excused?"
"Ah. Yes-be careful."
Suho nodded and carefully made his way to the Bay.
Dr Lu Han watched Suho carefully. He seemed different, more wistful, as if he was afflicted by insomnia the past few nights. Suho could sympathize. He hadn't been sleeping well the last few nights either.
But when the doctor asked, Suho didn't tell him that.
"Did you rest well last night?"
"I slept fine."
The doctor noticed how reserved Suho was being. He was fidgeting in his seat, bouncing his knee up and down rapidly and tapping his index nervously on the arm of the chair. Tic, tic, tic, tic. His responses were short, clipped, and delivered with an impatience he hadn't displayed in a while. He was reminded of their initial meeting, when Suho was first admitted.
"What about the other nights?"
"Fine."
"Your work never ends too late?"
"No."
"You're eating well?"
"Yes."
"Are you taking care of the flower?"
Something about the question entirely bothered Suho. Was he suggesting he would neglect it, he asked himself, forgetting that he once had? Was he suggesting that one bad day and a few sleepless nights made him careless? Would he disregard the one thing he had? Suho's whole expression changed, his face contorting with contempt.
"Why does everyone keep asking so many questions? I'm fine."
Dr Lu Han seemed thrown by the glare Suho directed at him, neither having expected him to snap as he did. He appeared to have noticed and sat further in his seat.
"I'm sorry. I'm..."
But Suho had no explanation.
Lu Han nodded grimly, looking a little put-off.
"Do you remember?"
"No, I don't."
When Suho stood to leave the doctor didn't accompany him. He stayed behind to update his patient's record and add a note.
Patient showing signs of relapse again.
Suho hated weekends.
Saturday and Sunday were always days he was left to his own surly thoughts, lately
pounding against his brain as if the most buried ones were trying to reach the surface of his mind. It was like trying to remember something he'd just forgotten and driving himself crazy unable to remember it. He liked to think he'd long ago given up that hunt.
Suho laid the palm of his hand flat against his forehead. He took a breath and started beating against his skull as if it could stop the strong pulsing.
It didn't.
Neither did it make him forget about the dream he'd had the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that one too.
Suho had dreamt of drowning before, but never so frequently or so intensely.
Every night there was something about the dream that noticeably changed. The temperature of the water the first night, searing hot one minute and ice cold the next; the hairs on his arms raised remembering, skin peppered with goosebumps as if someone had suddenly turned down the temperature of the apartment. He gripped the edge of his bed and exhaled sharply. The clear blue water turned crimson the second night, making Suho draw in blood every panicked breath he took. The third night, Suho couldn’t see clearly, as if he were staring through the hazy surface of the water as someone forced him down, face indecipherable. But Suho had felt the person, hands soft against his skin as long, bony fingers wrapped around his neck to keep him immobile.
It had been shockingly familiar, the touch. Suho was almost saddened to know it was gone, too brief a contact before he’d woken.
Suho sat contemplating the journal. He felt as if it were staring at him, calling to him, which was probably crazy.
He stood and pulled out his desk chair that swung noiselessly. He dropped himself on the chair and tugged it forward effortlessly to be closer to the desk. He hunched himself over the red book, staring at the cover as if waiting for it to do something.
Maybe the idea of a journal wasn’t so bad. He was having trouble talking about anything to Dr Lu Han, or at least being truthful with him. Had Suho always been a compulsive liar, he wondered, being dishonest about trivial things and information otherwise important for a doctor to know of his patient?
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the doctor. Suho determined he had problems defining what he was feeling and then relaying it into words. Or perhaps he didn’t want Lu Han to be his therapist, sitting across from him observing his every active response while scrutinizing his features.
Suho felt bitter suddenly thinking visiting the doctor every other day had done nothing for him. Maybe writing will clear his mind. It was why people recorded their private thoughts, to find relief?
He was well aware as he paged through the journal that it wasn’t his, but he permitted his action thinking it technically didn’t have an owner, remaining unclaimed in the database. Maybe the old owner will be interested to know the new possessor’s insights when he or she gets this back.
Suho didn’t think too long about the morality of his action. He picked up an electric pen and turned to an unused page. He started writing about the drowning, how real it had felt, how he could still the water running over him-
The pen stopped scratching against the paper. Suho re-read what he’d written thus far, his words filling about half the page. Curiously, he turned the page back.
Forwards.
Back.
Forwards.
Back.
The narrator’s writing was strikingly similar to his calligraphy.
Suho flattened the page and put the tip of his pen over the faded pencil marks. He leisurely retraced the words.
It wasn’t strikingly similar to his calligraphy, it was his handwriting.
He didn’t wait until Monday’s appointment.
Suho wasn’t thinking when he landed on the office floor, weeping for Dr Lu Han to attend to him. He had sunk to the ground clutching his chest, lamenting about an unbearable pain. He kept his temples to the floor and kept hitting himself against it, hoping the throbbing of his head would go away with the impact.
Physicians tended to Suho before Lu Han arrived, worried laced in his hard features.
“Suho? Can you hear me?”
He could, but he sounded very far away, his voice muddled under the force of the ringing in his ear. His vision blurred at the edges.
A cold pressure was applied to his neck. Suho felt something like a cold liquid stream through his muscles, his body growing limp as he stilled. Lu Han had cradled his head in lap. He silently gestured for his colleagues to stay back. Suho’s breath came in short, distressed intakes as Lu Han moved very carefully, kneeling so he may gently prompt his patient to take a seating position.
“It’s okay, Suho. You’re all right.”
The doctor’s words went right over Suho’s head. He knew he wasn’t going to be all right, so why was Lu Han lying to him? His stature was languid but his grip strong, startling the doctor.
“I don’t understand.”
He had spoken so softly Lu Han had to strain to hear.
“What is it, Suho?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tell me what’s wrong, Suho.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand!”
Every time Lu Han frantically asked him to elaborate, Suho cried, a question of his own unvoiced.
Why are my prints the only ones on the journal?
Why is the writing the same? Is it mine?
What about its contents?
Was my forgetting really an accident?
“Was my forgetting an accident?”
Lu Han watched as Suho pushed himself to his knees and weakly held himself there. He staggered to his feet and stumbled, sluggishly making his way forward.
“Where is he?”
“He’s here, isn’t he?”
“Shh.”
Suho had been speaking to no one in particular but everyone had paused. Was that laughter he heard? It was quiet, and the sudden stillness drove him mad. He turned to the doctor, groaning and sobbing, tears spilling without reservations.
“What is happening to me?”
If Suho could find a way to properly describe it, he’d say it felt like he was dying. Like he was drowning in a sea of melancholy and misery.
Maybe that was why he often dreamt of being submerged.
It was scary how quickly bits and pieces of him were coming back to him. The memories hit him like a freight train every time they surfaced, leaving an intolerable burn, because every one had one thing in common and reminded him that everything he’d lived from the moment he’d woken was a lie. Dr Lu Han thought it was in his patient’s best interest now to know his own story, and decided the experimental phase was over because it didn’t take years for Suho to remember like he’d originally-it’d taken him days. To Suho it had felt like seconds, long, agonizing, insufferable fractions of a minute.
Kim Junmyun was his real name, the same name he’d answered to on his way to the Belongings’ Bay.
Junmyun was part of a team of scientists working to develop memory restoration, but Junmyun was particularly interested in the effects of the opposite. The team researched decluttering neurotic area and repairing damaged brain cells in the region of the frontal lobe. Junmyun always thought what could be done to build could also be undone.
“What if we could displace neurons or redirect them to a buffer zone?” he proposed one day, meaning he’d stop certain signals from passing. There was a problem with this, of course, because the frontal lobe had other major functions, so Suho tried his best to work around those obstacles only virtually testing his theories.
Junmyun was always busy with his project, immersed in its complexity with the drive to solve it. Even among his busy schedule, he had a lover.
Byun Baekhyun was a lively spirit. He was a different kind of constant in Junmyun’s life, bright and noisy and not at all akin to the sciences, and Junmyun loved him.
He remembered him like his image persisted through the grainy white noise, the broken cassette of his memory finally starting to play without skip.
He had soft features, Baekhyun, small eyes that formed crescents whenever he so much as quirked his lips, or smirked or smiled with the fullness of his square mouth, and he recognized it now as the face he’d seen through the water.
Baekhyun liked to tease and lark, never short of any witty comment should the moment need one, and Junmyun was often the target of his jokes.
Nothing was as soft as his touch.
He could recall the nights Baekhyun lay next to him, tracing mindless circles into his skin with the pads of his thumbs. He recalled when he laid his palms flat against his torso as they made their way up, and sometimes their way down, wrapping around him until he was driven mad with love and lust.
Junmyun always loved returning the favour if it meant hearing Baekhyun’s affectionate giggles turn into moans of pleasure as he imbibed every kiss and every embrace.
Junmyun loved Baekhyun for being the sun set in a dreary, empty sky.
He would never know why, but he had been his lover.
He had been his lover.
And the force of that statement deeply cut him, because one moment he was there, answering his greetings when he stepped into their unit, and the next no one answered his cries.
When he found out why no one answered, Junmyun couldn’t breathe. For a moment, he thought he wasn’t, seeing the still form of his lover hunched over a crimson bath, blood pouring from his hand, his beautiful, soft hands, and staining the white marble of the tub.
Junmyun had followed the evidence from memory. His favourite vase had been knocked over, shattered into pieces, one noticeably missing. He’d find it later stabbed under his chin.
He had run a gash over by the kitchen and let it drip along his arm to the bedroom, where he’d undressed and neatly laid his bloodied clothes on the bed. He carved an array of lines into his skin
before he crawled to the bathroom and succumbed to his deepest wound.
Junmyun knew his lover well enough to retrace his steps, but not to know what he’d been hiding behind the wall of snark.
His death had ripped him apart.
He’d always compared losing his lover to drowning: engulfed by liquid sorrow, heartache and loss. What felt more like drowning than actually drowning, he reasoned. Junmyun had been certain he’d never wanted to live without the constant warmth, but his friends wouldn’t let the waves take him.
So he put his efforts elsewhere.
He secluded himself and worked to develop his version of the project to completion.
He had to test it on someone.
“Do you understand the risks of this procedure?” another doctor was obliged to ask him, and he had responded yes, he’d created it. It was unapproved, untried, but approaching the right people allowed him to avoid what could have taken years to accept.
Lu Han, his colleague and closest friend, had strongly advised Junmyun not follow through. It was unsafe, uncertain, and inconsiderate. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to feel this way, dead on the inside, burdened by the weight of his guilt-he couldn’t save him, he hadn’t paid enough attention. His love was dead, and all he had to go on was that he hadn’t been good enough, he didn’t give him what he wanted-he pushed him to death. But after the procedure he had no such thoughts.
His parents, his pets, his siblings, his friends, his occupation, his life-all of that gone, ultimately destroyed by a naive attempt to outplay the brain.
He’d wanted to forget his grief, but it washed over him cold and merciless as if he’d discovered his body yesterday. Which, he supposed, wasn’t far off from the truth, because today he was truly wakened, and it was devastating knowing he remembered him as if he were here, present, beside him yesterday, but he’d in reality long ago departed.
He had tried to escape the death of his lover once, only to end up living it twice, the pain multiplied a hundredfold.
In his haste to forget, he’d made sure he’d never manage it.