episode one: let out the beast
EXO KAI goes berserk and destroys a good fourth of Seoul-3 along with the Angel the first time Jongin pilots him.
"It," Baekhyun corrects, one eyebrow raised. "The first time Jongin pilots it."
"You're the one who said it when we were giving Jongin the grand tour," Kyungsoo reminds Baekhyun, blowing on his coffee to cool it. "The EXOs are basically giant humans in armor."
Baekhyun snorts. "It was an over-simplification for Jongin's benefit. I didn't mean to anthropomorphize."
Kyungsoo, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, just shrugs. Behind Baekhyun, the supercomputers S.E.S thrum with schizophrenic activity, running reports on EXO KAI's percent damage, how much it will cost to repair the motors of ten of Seoul-3's retractable buildings, and analysis on the composition of the Angel, which Baekhyun has named 'LEETEUK.' Isn't this just asking for there to be eleven more of them? Kyungsoo had asked that morning, when they were picking through the rescued remains, and Baekhyun's snort had been loud enough to hear through the mas of their hazmat suits as he said, they had thirteen members, actually. That had been a few hours ago, and the S.E.S. is still torn as to whether the Angel leftovers are safe enough for them to touch with bare hands. BADA says yes, EUGENE no, and SHOO is still contemplating, its blinking signal like a tinny mechanical heartbeat throbbing behind Baekhyun's head.
"So what's the damage?" Baekhyun asks, interrupting Kyungsoo's train of thought.
"To KAI? We can keep cannibalizing LAY's spare parts, as long as Yixing is still recovering. It's dicey, though. They're not totally compatible models, since they use different core prototypes."
"I wasn't talking about the EXO," Baekhyun says. When Kyungsoo stares back at him, blank, he adds, "I meant, how is Jongin doing?"
"He's fine." Kyungsoo puts up a hand before Baekhyun can interrupt. "Okay, okay, I think he's fine. I haven't spoken to him since he woke up. The medical department said he's physically fine."
"You should talk to him," Baekhyun offers. "Berserking is a traumatic event, especially since he can't remember anything. He needs a hyung's support."
Kyungsoo bristles, but this is an argument he and Baekhyun already hashed out after Kyungsoo signed himself up to be Jongin's guardian, and if there's one thing Kyungsoo has learned, it's that Baekhyun never changes his mind. "I'm not his hyung," Kyungsoo answers, rote. "I'm his commanding officer."
"He lives with you," Baekhyun insists, turning back to his laptop as if to dismiss further argument. "You're the one who took him in. You're family now."
"He has family," Kyungsoo reminds Baekhyun, and Baekhyun gives him a look that says more clearly than any words, don't be stupid, and, well, Baekhyun is right, he's usually right, so Kyungsoo takes in a deep breath, pulls his jacket closer around him, and goes back to his apartment to find Jongin.
What he finds instead is a kitchen full of SME agents in black suits, hidden Kevlar, and earpieces. Jongin's phone is on the table, powered off; with its GPS signal that connects straight to the S.E.S. and Baekhyun in the Technical Division, it would be too simple otherwise. "Do you know where he might have gone?" one of the agents asks Kyungsoo, after a brusque salute, and barely manages to suppress his look of surprise when Kyungsoo shakes his head.
"I-" was only his guardian for convenience's sake, is what Kyungsoo is about to say. But he remembers the way Jongin looked when Kyungsoo told him he wouldn't have to live alone, the way he'd hesitated between resistance and relief, the obliging way Jongin let himself be led into a stranger's house and the stranger house of SME. He sees out of the corner of his eye the pile of spare clothes Kyungsoo had procured for Jongin, folded in a clumsy imitation of Kyungsoo's own methods. Jongin had been living with his aging elementary teacher out in Busan before Kyungsoo picked him up and plopped him in the middle of Seoul-3 - into the cockpit of EXO KAI, in the middle, in fact, of an intergalatic fight for the survival of mankind. Loneliness is no one's responsibility, but maybe Kyungsoo had, without even knowing it, bargained for some small part of Jongin's when he brought Jongin into his life.
In his head, Baekhyun's voice is saying, don't be stupid.
So Kyungsoo swallows and says instead, "Let me help with the search."
-
36 hours later, Jongin comes back to the apartment, unaccompanied. Kyungsoo tries to convince the SME agents guarding the perimeter to stand down and let Jongin off, but they're under Commander Wu's orders, and there are, in fact, procedures for these things. They take Jongin to the solitary confinement cells in HQ, even though Kyungsoo argues long and hard that there's nothing to charge Jongin with. As a paramilitary organization with one foot in the United Nations and the other foot in wherever their funding comes from, SME has a very detailed section in its employment contract providing for exactly how much force can be used in the event of an employee's unscheduled abandonment. But Jongin was never given a contract to sign. Come to think of it, Kyungsoo's not sure any of the EXO pilots have.
It takes three hours before the order letting Kyungsoo see Jongin comes down. He's handed Jongin's personnel sheet, the details all blacked out with a permanent marker and a big red stamp across Jongin's picture that says 'PROBATION.'
"For what?" Kyungsoo asks, frowning. He flips the page over and, besides the marker bleeding through, there's nothing.
The guard doesn't even look up. "Insubordination and theft of government property."
"What was the government property?"
"His ID card. SME makes them through a ROKA grant," the man deadpans. He's wearing sunglasses, even though they're twenty levels down in the GeoFront, so Kyungsoo can't tell if he's joking, which is probably the point. Before Kyungsoo can think to say anything else, the cell door bangs shut behind him.
-
The first thing Jongin says when he sees Kyungsoo is a soft, "Oh." It sounds pushed out of him, so quiet Kyungsoo wonders if it's a sound at all, or just a sharp intake.
The next thing he says is, "I thought they'd send my father."
"Commander Wu is a very busy man," Kyungsoo tells him, a little too sharply.
Jongin nods, looking back down at where they have him triple-cuffed. It's more SME procedure, and not an actual assessment of Jongin's flight risk, but Kyungsoo still winces. The cuffs hang off of him, too heavy and big for his thin wrists. If Kyungsoo were the kind of person to think in metaphors-
"I guess I knew he was too busy for me," Jongin continues. "But I thought, if I at least tried to run away-after, you know, I showed I could be a pilot-"
It's Kyungsoo's turn to breathe, "oh," and Jongin falls silent.
Kyungsoo's father died during Second Comeback when Kyungsoo was still a teenager. It had been his idea to bring Kyungsoo along during the activation experiment, and he'd spent the last seconds of his life pushing Kyungsoo out of the explosion radius and out to sea, which is how they found Kyungsoo later, wrapped in his father's jacket, pupils blown wide trying to see through the thick darkness of the escape pod. Kyungsoo's never thought of himself as a person with father issues (but daddy complexes aren't the only things that can fuck you up, and trust me, Chanyeol once told him, you're plenty fucked up, but that was back in college and in the middle of an argument which segued into bad, drunk make-up sex, so as psychoanalysis sessions go, not very helpful), but Kyungsoo has also never known much about father-son bonding. To Kyungsoo, Commander Wu's relationship to Jongin as "father" is less than a week old, and hasn't yet eclipsed the way Kyungsoo thought of Jongin before, when he was just a pilot assignation on a computer print-out: impersonal, instrumental, as much a piece of EXO KAI's machinery as an arm or a bolt. It's both easier and harder to see Jongin more completely, as a boy mostly-orphaned at the same age Kyungsoo was. Easier, because Kyungsoo knows what it feels like, to be alone.
Harder, because he's never figured out what to do to make that feeling go away.
"I'm sure your father didn't come to see you," Kyungsoo says, very slowly, "because he trusts you to do the right thing no matter what."
Jongin's head snaps up. "And piloting the EXO, that's the right thing?" he demands.
"What do you think?"
"I thought, if I did this for him, he'd at least look at me. And, you know, one day accept me as his son." As if embarrassed by his honesty, Jongin looks back down at his handcuffs. He lifts up his hands, lets them fall back down. The sound is familiar, and Kyungsoo is shocked to realize he knows why: they're made of the same metal as the EXO cages, and he hears the rattling every time they pull open the cages for access.
He takes a cautious step towards Jongin. In the dim light of the cell, it's hard to tell what expression is on Jongin's face. "Are you going to go through life doing everything just to get your father's acceptance?" Kyungsoo asks.
"Why else should I pilot it?"
"The EXO was made for you. You were chosen to pilot it, and when you did, it responded. You defeated an Angel in it, when no one else could, with your own hands. Isn't that enough?"
There's a glint of plastic by Jongin's feet, which turns out to be Jongin's voided ID card, punched through with holes in the shape of diamonds and triangles, making giant X's across the surface. Kyungsoo bends down to pick it up, then places it between Jongin's hands, which are cold and very dry. "We're all counting on you," Kyungsoo says. Jongin fingers tighten suddenly around the voided ID card, and Kyungsoo licks his lips, praying for the right words. "SME, South Korea, even the world. Don't do it for your dad. Do it for yourself, and for the rest of us."
At the time of his death, Kyungsoo's father was a member of the proto-group that would one day become SME. Kyungsoo took a long time after college deciding whether joining SME would be carrying or betraying his legacy. When Kyungsoo interviewed with the Tactical Division, there were no EXOs, only M1 and M2, prototype cores connected to the S.E.S like massive hearts on life support waiting for a transplant. Right before his interview, the technician on duty gave Kyungsoo a tour and he'd - Minseok, Kyungsoo remembers, that was his name - even let Kyungsoo touch M1. Unexpectedly, it had flared up under his hand, jolting SHOO, who sent out a query to the other two asking if this was the right pilot. It likes you, Minseok had said wryly. Who knows, we might have to use you as a pilot. To Kyungsoo, that had felt like a sign, one that he couldn't explain, and one that was wholly unconnected to the memory of his father silhouetted against the Second Comeback.
So when SME sent him a job offer, Kyungsoo had taken it. A year later, they put M1 into EXO KAI.
(You're so simple to win over, Chanyeol had said, once upon a time. All it takes is a fucking pat on your head and you're gone.)
"You did well, Jongin," Kyungsoo whispers, putting his hand over the ID and covering Jongin's fingers. "For defeating the Angel, thank you. And good job."
Finally, Jongin looks up and, with a shaky smile, nods.
-
"But why didn't you say, 'do it for me?'" Baekhyun asks cheekily when, afterwards, they are reviewing the transcript from the covert recordings.
"I couldn't ask something like that from him," Kyungsoo scoffs. "I barely even know him." He plays idly with the twin porcelain cat figurines, one black and one white, on Baekhyun's table, as Baekhyun guides the supercomputers through another stage of analysis. The model of the Angel Baekhyun is constructing looks oddly humanoid, especially side-by-side with the outline of EXO KAI on the other screen. It reminds Kyungsoo that when he first joined SME, Commander Wu had told him the EXOs were made in the shape of Adam. The one in the Bible? Kyungsoo had asked, confused, but no, Adam, the first Angel, Commander Wu corrected with a characteristic tight smile, because only monsters are capable of fighting monsters, and Kyungsoo didn't think to ask then, what does that make us?
Maybe monsters, he thinks now, always end up making things in the shape of themselves.
"Well," Baekhyun says, shaking his head and throwing his copy of the transcript down on the table, "now that you're stuck with him, you might as well get to know him better."
After a bit Baekhyun frowns. Through the window, they can see EXO KAI's face as it sits in its hanger. Even on standby, the eyes are lit up, as if it's looking in on the both of them, measuring them, and not liking what it sees. Somewhere, Jongin, too, is on standby: trying on a plugsuit, getting a new ID card made, turning on the SME phone issued to him and finding Kyungsoo's number, the only contact in his address book. Kyungsoo wonders if Jongin is also measuring them up. He wonders whether Jongin, calm and safe now that he's no longer in an isolation cell surrounded by armed guards, regrets what he sees.
"I guess we're all stuck with him," Baekhyun finishes. He presses a key on his laptop to turn EXO KAI completely off.
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