episode four: don't go.
Terminal Wolf is the lowest level of the GeoFront. Kyungsoo doesn't have the authorization to come down this far, but Chanyeol's ID card does. Kyungsoo had stolen it on a whim, hoping to leave behind a false record of entrance. In the end, he'd swiped his own card anyway, just to double check, and the bright red "UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY" that flashed back was like the scolding he should have given himself for trusting Chanyeol's performance that night at the pojangmacha. God's in his heaven, and all's bad luck in Kyungsoo's life.
What awaits him behind reinforced triple doors is a network of deep trenches, dotted with mechanical spines fifty meters tall, like titanic tombstones. Triple-exposed in Kyungsoo's mind, they're the EXO specs laid out on Baekhyun's computer screen, the remains of RYEOWOOK that they manage to recover after they'd laid Jongin away in the hospital bay, the path of a drop of sweat as it traces its way now down Kyungsoo's nape. It took God seven days to make the world, Commander Wu had said, when they'd first put Yixing into LAY. It'd taken SME more than seven years to turn models into cores, then cores into EXOs, but Kyungsoo had always assumed the failures were destroyed. Instead, hundreds of malformed skulls and spines stretch out in front of him, painted LCL orange like EXO LAY, the word "REJECT" printed in the iconic script of the SME logo across where the forehead would be. Their limbs have been detached and haphazardly slotted between spinal cords, sometimes piled on the remains of older, rotting models. A few meters away, one of the failed prototype arms is poking out, as if whoever had thrown it away forgot to properly stuff it down the trench. The rusting hand rests against the edge, fingers still curled, as if scrabbling for purchase.
The Tree of Life, Chanyeol had said that night as they leaned into each other, and Kyungsoo had asked him if it was some sort of code. No, he realizes now, not code, but just a bad joke. The trenches fan out in front of him like the tributaries of a river - or, perhaps, the branches of a tree hollowed out.
When Kyungsoo gets to the end of the graveyard, the wall opens automatically, revealing an atrium with only a central walkway lit up. The path leads to a pillar, but the meager lights are barely enough to trace the circumference, and Kyungsoo can't tell how tall the pillar is, or what the atrium walls are made of. Glass, Kyungsoo thinks, filled with something liquid that bubbles through a filtration system. He smells metal, refrigeration, LCL; nothing human. Still, he reaches for his gun, takes it off safety, just in case. But when he whips around to look for a light switch, he ends up pointing the gun straight at Jongin's face.
"Hyung," Jongin whispers.
Kyungsoo almost pulls the trigger out of shock. At the last minute, his finger slips, and he lowers his arm. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"I followed you," Jongin says. "You passed by my hospital room door on the way down and I-I thought-"
He is wearing a hospital robe, ice blue in the faint light, which makes him appear skinnier, almost ghost-like. When he takes a few steps forward, Kyungsoo realizes that he's shuffling. The plastic and paper slippers issued to him are too big for his feet. "Jongin, you should go back," Kyungsoo hisses, but, as if mocking him, the door to the EXO graveyard slides noiselessly shut. Kyungsoo curses. Like a frightened animal, Jongin rushes towards him, away from the exit.
"Where are we?" he says, pressing himself into Kyungsoo's shoulder.
Kyungsoo opens his mouth to say, I don't know, but a voice behind them, immense with echoes, answers, "The crown of the Tree of Life."
There are two strange things about Kyungsoo's next target. The first, and most obvious, is that despite his nonchalant expression and relaxed hands-in-pocket posture, he is floating. The second, which takes Kyungsoo a minute to realize, is that he is glowing. At first Kyungsoo mistakes it for a trick of light, a combination of the stranger's bleached, almost white hair, and pale collared shirt, but there's no mistaking how the reflection off the pillar behind the stranger follows him as he descends down and forward, towards Jongin and Kyungsoo. Despite hovering a meter or so right over their heads, he is not looking at them. Instead, he seems to peer into the darkness around them, meditative.
"Or, should I say, the roots?" the stranger muses, before gesturing, like a dancer striking a pose, to both sides.
Around them, the atrium explodes with light. After the graveyard and the barely lit walkway, the intensity of a fully lit room is almost physical, and it's a full minute before Kyungsoo's eyes adjust. Jongin seems to process their surroundings first, and lets out a noise like he's been kicked in the head. Half-blind, Kyungsoo turns, expecting to fight off the stranger, but when he manages to focus his vision properly, he sees that the stranger is still hovering above them, harmless and distant, and Jongin is untouched by his side.
In fact, there are many Jongins, untouched, on all sides of them. The atrium turns out to be one large circular tank, like the centerpiece of an aquarium, only filled with the orange glow of LCL and hundreds of naked, floating bodies, all bearing Jongin's face. Their limbs, Kyungsoo realizes with dawning horror, are half-formed, or maybe half-rotting. He catches sight of webbed feet, another with a rubbery appendage that only hints at fingers and a hand. A few seem to be merely torsos and, as if mocking the other room, taper off into exposed spinal cords. But there is a body in the center pillar, floating at the stranger's height, that is complete: a perfectly identical Jongin, who seems to be merely sleeping. A little ring of air bubbles quivers by his head, disappearing, reforming. Kyungsoo wants to tell him that's not how LCL works, but his own mouth doesn't seem to be working.
"Hyung, I think I'm going to throw up," Jongin moans, nails digging into Kyungsoo's gun arm.
"Jongin," the stranger says, finally looking down at them. "Can I call you Kai? We've been waiting for you."
Now that he is no longer glowing in the dark, the stranger looks almost normal. He might be Jongin's age, and is dressed in a mockery of Jongin's school uniform, right down to a leather belt and shoes. Kyungsoo keeps the gun trained on his head, but the stranger only has eyes for Jongin, and rotates a little in the air, to get a better view of Jongin's face. "Who's we?" Kyungsoo demands, jerking the gun a little to try to draw attention away from Jongin.
"All of Kai's brothers, for one," the stranger says with a little laugh. When the sound echoes around them, it gives Kyungsoo the dizzying illusion that every clone is answering his question. In the tube, Jongin' clone twitches. Above them, the stranger flickers, then reappears by Jongin's side, too fast for Kyungsoo to follow. "And me, I suppose," he continues, placing his hands on both sides of Jongin's face. "I'm the first and last child of Adam. I guess your leader Kris calls me Luhan."
Kyungsoo starts to pull the trigger, but Luhan flickers again, now behind Kyungsoo, then once more, halfway to the ceiling and level with the Jongin in the tube. He strokes the surface of the pillar, where the clone's face shows through, with a tender hand, before turning back to Jongin.
"I've seen you before," Jongin says. "In my dream." He throws a helpless glance at Kyungsoo, who, frustrated, tries to nudge Jongin towards the door. "When I turned into one of the-"
"Jongin," Kyungsoo growls, "don't talk, try to get out of here, there has to be a switch-"
But it's too late. Slowly, as if summoned, Jongin begins to rise up from the ground. Like a man hypnotized, he keeps his eyes trained on Luhan and doesn't seem to hear Kyungsoo yelling for him to come back down. "Kai, I'm so glad to meet you," Luhan says. His face is half turned towards Kyungsoo, watching as Kyungsoo tries to pull Jongin back down with both hands, his fingers slipping, one by one, until they've pulled Jongin's slippers off of his airborne body. "Kris said I would like you," Luhan continues. He smiles, trying on the expression like a spare jacket, before tossing it aside. "After all, I was born to meet you."
Jongin is too far out of Kyungsoo's reach, and still rising. Desperate, Kyungsoo scrambles to pick up the gun he dropped. When he manages, finally, to wrap his trembling fingers around the gun, he aims for Luhan's face. For just a second Luhan looks like Jongin. Then, he looks like Yixing. Then, he is wearing Kyungsoo's face. That's when Kyungsoo fires. The bullet passes through Luhan's stomach and exits into the enormous test tube behind him, just inches shy of Jongin's clone. LCL gushes forth, tearing away at the edges of the broken glass like tissue. Somewhere, too, something erupts in Kyungsoo. When he looks down, he sees blood spreading down his lower torso. As he watches, it reaches his waist, his upper leg. Reaching for his knees. He can't feel anything, the LCL sticky and only a little thinner than blood as it clings to his feet. The bullet - he thinks, Luhan must have sent it back, Luhan must have - he fires his gun again, blindly - with the face of a true stranger, Kyungsoo - then Kyungsoo's father - Luhan fires - and Kyungsoo sinks into a sea of LCL. Pain, the press of air squeezing him on all sides, drowning out the sound of Jongin - or maybe EXO KAI - screaming his name.
As he sinks, he sees Jongin falling from great heights. Arms spread, both hands caked in blood, eyes closed, naked. Like an angel, descending to meet him.
notes:
- thanks to svenge (http://svenge.pcriot.com/index.htm) for their complete collection of eva title cards, without which i would have never been able to make the only interesting part of this fic. the actual font used in eva for the hiragana/kanji is ryumin, which i did not want to purchase, which is why the second to last title card looks so out of place. i could have done a paste job but unfortunately the hiragana "o" of "omedetou" never appears in the original title card set, and instead of risking inconsistency, i just used another font entirely. the 'exogenlion' logo is a recreation using the font nhl washington. there is a glaring mistake in the 'g' but hopefully you wouldn't have noticed that if i didn't tell you.
- obvious character parallels are obvious. vice commander kim is junmyeon, not jongdae.
- one_if_by_land suggested that i should make the suju angels go in age order and not haphazard-i-have-no-idea-who-the-members-of-suju-are order, but in an ideal world hankyung is actually the first "angel" adam and henry is tabris and exo is the 18th angel i.e. us kukukuku
- realistically eva is a terrible series to try to graft exo onto, but if i tried to do this accurately and in-character i'd end up mobile suit gundam xoxo.
- the plot of eva hangs precariously on a lot of mother complexes that despite the obvious "MAMA" reference just wouldn't fly as well with exo, so instead i guess we have... clones?! and ~paternal sacrifices~. i originally planned for this to end with the dirac sea fight but it felt really incomplete, so at the last minute i shoved in luhaworu and i was too tired to work through the rest of the plot properly. and now i know how it feels to be hideki anno.
- THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED NIM AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD. THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED MAMA AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD. THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED AWOOOO AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD. THE WOLF THAT GROWLED EUREUREONG AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD. the joke is endlessly giving.
- one more final: thank you to my idol group, the yui to my gendo.