[oneshot] blood in my legs for flight
Title: blood in my legs for flight
Pairing: baekhyun/kai (other, highlight for spoilers: brief baekhyun/chanyeol)
Rating: pg13
Genre: romance, au
Warnings: swearing
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: kai just wants to be a real boy. super self-indulgent magical realist pinocchio/pygmalion au, inspired by this teaser. 6,030 words.
Kai achieves sentience on a Saturday morning, his mind fully formed and functional, like it's every day that mannequins just come to life out of the blue.
At first, he's not quite sure what it means. Having a mind. Being aware. A minute ago he was just a pile of stuff, smooth plastic and twisted electric wires-but now he's here, conscious, blinking down at his own synthetic hand. All he knows is that he's Kai, because that's the name of the installation exhibit he's supposed to be a part of: the crowning jewel, so to speak, of artistic robotics.
His maker doesn't come down into the workshop until half past noon, when the sun's shining through the ceiling window and Kai's testing his legs out, trying to get a feel for the way his feet move underneath him. He freezes the minute Baekhyun-ah, yes, that's his name-walks in.
Kai's halfway across the room from where he's supposed to be. Baekhyun does this little double take when he sees him, the bow of his mouth turning down in confusion. Confusion: an emotion. "Fucking Chanyeol," he says, striding forward. His hands are warm around Kai's plastic arms, and he lifts him up like a doll.
Baekhyun puts him down beneath the skylight again, rays slanting straight into Kai's eyes, and Kai lets out a testy grumble that surprises both of them. He wasn't sure he'd be able to speak. He probably should've tried that, first.
Baekhyun jumps back and knocks a large set of paints off the table behind him when Kai lifts his arm to block the light. "What the fuck," he says, voice flat. He grabs a brush off the table and brandishes it at Kai. "Who are you?" he asks, which is an absurd question, even to someone who's only been around for a couple of hours. Baekhyun was the one who made him. He, of all people, should know.
"I don't know," Kai says, the hinge of his jaw moving oddly beneath artificial skin. "All I did was wake up."
When Baekhyun gets over the initial shock, he spends the better part of the afternoon just poking and prodding at him, taking measurements and trying to figure out what Kai can and can't do. "In the name of science," he explains, and pinches a bit of the skin on Kai's arm. Kai doesn't flinch. "Right," Baekhyun says, half to himself. He notes something down on his clipboard. "No pain sensors. That's convenient." He straightens up and brushes invisible flecks of dust off his shirt. "I'm pretty sure I had a nightmare like this once," he mutters. He pinches his own arm, eyes flicking up to stare into Kai's. "But you're real?"
"You tell me," Kai drawls, dragging his fingers through cellophane hair.
Baekhyun rolls his eyes and steps back. "Of course. My robot fucking comes to life and he's a sarcastic little shit." He smiles, entire face crinkling into it. "Can't catch a break."
They were going to program him to dance, Baekhyun tells him later. Kai's perched on a bench watching him charcoal, the sweep of his fingers against the paper somehow soothing.
Baekhyun'd been a computer science and electrical engineering double major at school, but he always had an interest in art, which the PR department at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers took advantage of. "The intersection of art and science, to make robotics more palatable to the public," he says, rubbing his chin and smudging a line of dark gray on its tapered point. "That was my assignment. So I wired you up." He runs a hand through his hair. "I'd been stuck on the logistics of it for a while. The connections weren't talking to each other. SME's probably forgotten all about you, really, but-" he shrugs, and stares at Kai like he's still not sure whether or not to believe he's actually there. Kai waves. "This changes things."
Kai tilts his head to the side. "How?"
"We can just teach you," he replies. He puts the charcoal down on the easel and leans forward. "Do you want to learn?"
"Depends on what it is," Kai says, scrunching his nose, and Baekhyun laughs a little. "I guess I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
Baekhyun huffs. "Well, I'm not going to make you do something you don't want to do."
Doesn't your source of income kind of depend on this? he wants to ask, but bites his lip as Baekhyun scoots over and boots his laptop up.
It turns out not to be a problem. Maybe there's something of Baekhyun's intent built into his circuitry, because the Bolshoi Ballet video's barely over before Kai's saying, "I want to do that," arms tossed up in a paltry imitation of effortless grace. "Teach me."
"Yeah?" Baekhyun says, eyes crinkling again. "That can be arranged."
"You want me to teach a robot how to dance?" someone's asking from the other side of the threshold. "I have linear algebra homework to do, man. What is this, some science fiction shit? Does he look like C3PO?"
Kai shuffles to the door, leans over Baekhyun's head and glares at the other guy.
"Whoa, never mind. He looks, like, human."
"Kai, this is Sehun, a family friend," Baekhyun says, shaking his head. "Listen, I would've asked Jaewon, but you know I can't afford an actual instructor's fees on SME's budget. I'd teach him myself but I can't do ballet."
"I can try, I guess," Sehun mumbles, eyes sweeping over Kai dubiously. He checks his watch. "I've got an hour. Let's see how he does. Then we'll talk."
Sehun takes them to a community recreation center two blocks away, all spacious rooms with mirrored walls and open spaces, so unlike Baekhyun's workshop or his cluttered apartment above it. Kai spends a lot of time in front of the mirrors when he first walks in, cataloguing all the different parts of himself: the full lips, long limbs, the way his hair flops into his face. Baekhyun's reflection from the back looks amused.
"If you're gonna be like this then I'm leaving," Sehun complains.
"Sorry," Kai says, moving away from the wall. "I haven't-I just woke up this morning."
"Right," Sehun says. He tosses Kai a pair of floppy shoes. "Ballet flats," he explains at the furrow in Kai's brow. "You put them on your feet."
"Oh," Kai says, recalling the video and nodding. He pulls them on and stands. "Now what?"
"Now we dance," Sehun says drily, and when he dips down to tap the CD player in the corner, staccato music pours out. "Try to follow me."
Tracing Sehun's steps is easier than Kai expected it to be. It's that thing again, something about the way he was made with this exact purpose in mind, with the right build and balance and muscle precision. Sehun runs the routine twice and Kai's already a perfect mimic by then, his entire body locking into textbook-arabesque, Sehun calls, cabriole and saut de chat and fouetté en tournant.
"Geez," Sehun says at the end of the hour, a pinched expression on his face that Kai registers as grudging admiration. He wipes the sweat off his forehead, chest heaving with effort in a way that Kai's never will, and glances back at Baekhyun. "What did you do, hyung? You're gonna put real dancers out of business with this."
Real dancers echoes in Kai's head like a curse. Not even half a day old and he already knows what it means to be different, removed, set apart. He pulls out of his last grand jeté and straightens up, at a loss.
"Just doing my job," Baekhyun says in response, but he's looking at Kai with this wide grin on his face, like he might burst with pride, and Kai can't help but smile back.
Kai spends daytime hours devouring all the dance videos he can find-jazz, swing, ballroom, hip-hop, everything, memorizes it all with near total recall. Baekhyun tweaks his circuitry as often as time permits in between his other projects, opens Kai up to make him better and then sends him off to the studio in the afternoons to practice with Sehun. An older man he assumes is Jaewon catches the two of them at it one night and lets out a noise of appreciation at Kai's improv.
"He used to be the artistic director of the Korea National Ballet Company," Sehun whispers after he's gone. "But he quit to start teaching people one on one. He thought it'd be more rewarding, I guess."
"Oh," Kai says, and the information doesn't have any significance to him until he goes home and reads about what it means online.
"No dice," Sehun says, when Kai tries to time his practice sessions to the hours when Jaewon's around to instruct. "He's really picky about the students he takes on."
"It's a wonder he chose you, then, " Kai deadpans, and Sehun just smacks him on the shoulder, even though he knows Kai won't feel the pain.
They figure out that he doesn't need to sleep, so when Baekhyun clears a space in his art studio and installs a floor-to-ceiling mirror for him to practice in front of, Kai takes full advantage of it. Baekhyun comes down in the middle of the night sometimes, or in the wee hours morning, and asks, "What are you doing, aren't you tired-" but shuts up and rubs a hand over his face, smiling into his palm. "Sorry, forgot," he says, and for some reason, something painful tugs in Kai's chest. He never tells Baekhyun about it. It seems wrong to.
Sehun has other friends at the studio who train with different instructors: Zitao's from China, and came to Seoul to acquire taekwondo. It takes Kai three days to cobble together a set of skills that doesn't have him flat on the floor after ten seconds of fighting with Zitao, a weird mixture of hapkido and a Bruce Lee compilation video he'd found on Youtube.
On the weekends they'll take him out, Sehun the ballerino and Zitao the martial artist, to the movies, which Kai likes-and to the library, which he likes even better, pages and pages of information to subsume, whole new worlds to discover. "Nerd," Sehun says, laughing, when Kai walks into the studio with his nose crammed in a book. Zitao counters it in his own way, brings his laptop and buries Kai in dramas, Goong and Gumiho and Coffee Prince.
They drag him with them for food after practice and Sehun tries to buy him bubble tea or dukbokki before realizing-"Oh, right, you don't eat," and smiling into his drink. "It's hard to remember, sometimes," Zitao adds, in his accented Korean, and snatches the cup out of Sehun's hand, downs half of it in one gulp. "I mean, it's a little weird when you forget to blink, but that's alright. We all have our idiosyncrasies."
It's nice. It makes him feel worth something.
His favorite thing, though, is still to dance for hours on end, just him and the next step, because nothing else makes him feel so close to life-for as long as the routine lasts, anyway.
"You said," Kai remarks, a month into it, "that you didn't do ballet."
Baekhyun looks up from the robotic mouse he's fiddling with. "I don't."
"But you dance."
"Just a little," he replies, putting his pliers down. "Why?"
"I want to see."
Baekhyun chuckles. "I'm definitely not as good as you are at this point."
"That's not the point," Kai says, pulling his lips down.
He laughs again, shaking his head. "Where'd you learn how to pout like that?"
Kai just walks over and grabs his wrist. Baekhyun lets him tug him to the mirror and spread his arms. "Well?"
Baekhyun pulls his iPod out with a lot of showy reluctance, puts on something sedate. Some day, when I'm awfully low, the speakers sing, and Baekhyun grabs Kai's hand, leads him into an easy foxtrot.
"Ballroom dancing?" Kai says over Sinatra's voice, grinning when Baekhyun dips him. "Really?"
"Needed something to woo the ladies in college," Baekhyun says. He waggles his eyebrows sleazily and spins Kai twice as the song ends, arm stretched out to accommodate his height. Something warm and tight blooms in Kai's chest cavity and he wonders, vaguely, if he needs another check-up.
Baekhyun lets go of him and goes back to his work. Kai stares down at his hand, the grooves of his fingerprints and the lines crisscrossing his palm, and feels strangely bereft.
Two days later, Kai comes back from an evening out with Sehun and Zitao with a huge gash down the back of his thigh, one that he doesn't notice until Baekhyun makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat and sits him down on the bench, the thin material of his pant-leg rucked up. "You should be more careful with yourself," he says as he checks Kai's insides.
"I felt it when it happened, but I didn't realize it was this bad," Kai mutters. "Sorry."
Baekhyun exhales, carding a hand through his hair. "It's alright. Just-be more alert. No practice for a week, I've got to replace some of the padding and grow you new skin."
Sehun lugs over his entire collection of One Piece volumes as light reading during Kai's house arrest. "It's not house arrest," Kai says, rolling his eyes. "I'm just resting."
"I thought you didn't need rest. You're like a tank or something. Indestructible."
Kai snorts. "It's not like I'm made out of fucking titanium."
Baekhyun sings in the shower sometimes, belts out high notes through the spray of water, voice clear and steady. Baekhyun in general is just-loud: even when he's working he'll hum things under his breath and clatter around the studio, tinkering with other, less humanoid robots. It's comforting, all that noise. Kai can speak, could probably sing a few notes if he tried, but there's no real mechanism in his neck for it-he'd just come out of the ether like this, a soul in a fake body, doing things that Baekhyun, for all his engineering prowess, can't explain.
Chanyeol the absentee roommate comes back from his stint abroad at the end of November. "He left the day you woke up," Baekhyun tells him, as Chanyeol struggles to shove his three bulging suitcases in through the door. "He does customer service for some big firm downtown, so he travels a lot."
"Hey, you got your baby to work!" is the first thing out of Chanyeol's mouth when he sees them. His voice is low and a little rough, but it's got this sort of peppy, elated quality that Kai imagines is pretty essential for his job. He lifts his sunglasses and leans in to peer at Kai. "He looks so real."
"I am real," Kai snaps irritably, and Chanyeol rears back in surprise.
"Holy shit. It talks."
"His name is Kai," Baekhyun says pointedly, "and he doesn't sleep or eat, so don't try to charge him for rent."
"Who, me?" Chanyeol says, eyes wide. "I would never."
"Don't trust him," Baekhyun tells Kai, patting his shoulder before turning back. "To be fair, I did loot your closet for Kai's clothes, but God knows you have enough shit in there that you've never worn and never will. Plus, you still owe me for the thing with Kris."
Chanyeol sends him a betrayed look. "Help me bring my stuff up at least," he whines, and Baekhyun cheerfully ignores him. He meanders back to his bench and goes back to work, fingers flying over his laptop.
Kai heaves a long sigh-he'd learned that from Zitao, after Sehun'd had one too many shots of peach soju-and grabs one of the suitcases.
With Chanyeol home, the apartment and studio fill with a steady stream of banter, a new backtrack for Kai's daily routine. The day after he returns, Kai comes back from the dance studio to find the apartment empty at night for the first time since he'd woken. He tries not to think too much of it.
He kicks a stray volume of manga out of the way and puts the iPod on, some Justin Timberlake/Britney Spears mash-up that Zitao had sent him, begins working on rudimentary choreography he'd been trying to develop for days. "It's the logical next step," Sehun had said that afternoon, mouth pinched. "Composition, creating your own sequences. That's what Jaewon always tells us, anyway. I'm not very good at it."
Kai sinks into it so thoroughly that he doesn't notice, at first, when the door swings open and Baekhyun and Chanyeol pour in. It's only when Chanyeol grabs his arm that he resurfaces from his reverie, startled.
"Hey," Kai says. "What's up?"
Chanyeol's body temperature seems lower than usual, and he's got this huge shit-eating grin on his face. "What were you doing?"
"Dancing," he says, drawing the syllables out long for emphasis.
"That shit's fucking sick," Chanyeol says fervently. "I'm uncoordinated as hell but chicks dig guys who can dance. You need to come out with us next time."
Baekhyun materializes at his shoulder, eyeliner dovetailing beyond his lids. Kai studies the flush in his face, his dilated pupils, puts it together with Chanyeol's hand waving and chattering, more incessant than usual, and comes out with: "You're both very drunk and I'm going to let you pass out now." Chanyeol does the predictable thing and drops in a heap on one of the benches, starts snoring after a minute. He's going to have a terrible ache in his neck in the morning, Kai thinks dispassionately, and leaves him there.
Baekhyun seems a little more lucid. He sways in, hands coming up to brush Kai's shoulders. "Do you want to come? You could bring your friends, too."
He tips over before Kai can give him an answer, eyes fluttering closed. Kai catches him and lugs him upstairs, dumps him into bed. Baekhyun mumbles something indistinct and turns over into the covers as Kai shuffles out of the room.
Sehun and Zitao are all for it, so when the occasion arises a couple of days later, Baekhyun and Chanyeol take them all to Gangnam. Kai meets a whole laundry list of people: Joonmyun, their VIP pass into the club; Minseok the stealth hyung with the baby-face; Kris, who Baekhyun calls a gentle giant; Lu Han with the big eyes and Yixing who dances almost as well as Kai does; and Kyungsoo and Jongdae, who steal Chanyeol away only to shove him into a ridiculous birthday hat. There's a lot of glad-handing for Chanyeol's twenty-fifth year ("Your turn in January, Kyungsoo," Chanyeol crows, rubbing his hands together, right before Baekhyun smashes a piece of cake into his face), and then they split off into groups. Zitao gravitates to Baekhyun's Chinese friends, and everyone else starts downing shots like there's no tomorrow.
"I've never partied with, like, actual people before," Sehun says, gazing wide-eyed at the gyrating dance floor.
"Do college kids not count as actual people?" Kai shouts over the loud bass.
"Please," Sehun yells back, waving him away. He dives headfirst into the crowd and disappears. Kai turns back to the table and slides in next to Baekhyun, who gives him a breezy smile around the rim of his glass.
Kai can't drink, of course. This means he's 1) the perfect built-in designated driver (though he can't actually drive, so maybe herder of people on their way home would be a better description), and 2) has the distinct pleasure of watching everyone else get more and more wasted as the night progresses. Chanyeol tries to get Kai to be his wingman, to little success-half the girls they approach end up staring at Kai instead. One, Krystal, slips her number into his hand with the flash of a smile. "Ah, to be young and nubile," Chanyeol laments, hand pressed to his chest, after she's gone.
"Please never use that word again," Kai replies, wrinkling his nose. "Especially in reference to me." Chanyeol just tosses an arm over his shoulder and laughs.
He finally ventures out onto the dance floor at half past midnight. You should be more careful with yourself rings in his head, but it all flies out the window when something loud and heavy comes on and the crowd clears for him. He moves fluidly from step to step, everything seamless, his mind always five beats ahead of what he's doing, mapping out the rest of the routine on the fly. If he stops paying too close attention, he can almost pretend that he can feel adrenaline pumping through his plastic body, blood rushing through instead of just closed-circuit wires.
The song changes (too soon) and he snaps out of it, and-everyone in the room is looking at him. Or that's what it feels like, at least, and it takes him a minute to remember to heave his chest in a pale imitation of life. But it's a club on a Saturday night, and he's soon forgotten, the mass of people closing in around him again. This anonymity is good, too; partiers don't seem to look too closely at whom they're dancing with. It's enough that the body's there, and that it's moving.
Baekhyun had tossed him a new phone before they left the house, and Kai pulls it out of his pocket at two in the morning to a slew of messages: sooooo durnnk and a series of what are presumably butt texts from Sehun, Where are you? We're leaving from Zitao, and a softer we'll wait for you at the stoplight outside the subway station from Baekhyun, sent five minutes ago.
He picks his way out of the club, glittery tank top askew around his shoulders. He spots the back of Kris's head bobbing above the late night streetwalkers and makes a beeline for it. At the crosswalk, he stops to wait for the green light.
What happens next plays out as if in slow motion. The pedestrian light turns green and Kai takes a step forward. The crowd in front of him thins for a moment. Baekhyun, standing next to the stoplight three meters away, looks up, and Chanyeol dips his head down to press their mouths together, his hands cradling Baekhyun's shoulders.
Oh, Kai thinks first, and then, immediately after: I want that. It hits him like a punch to the gut-or what he'd always read a punch to the gut might feel like-and he thinks, oh. He thinks, this must be what it means to feel pain.
I want that with Baekhyun, he thinks, and the thought's coupled with a sort of quiet despair of comprehension when he realizes he's probably wanted it for a while, now.
Baekhyun and Chanyeol are still glued to each other by the time they get home. They trip up the stairs, giggling, and Kai puts music on downstairs to drown it out when they start-well. These are things Kai's read about in passing at the library or on the internet, gaps in his knowledge filled in with snide remarks from Sehun and demure ones from Zitao. He's familiar enough with the idea.
He's not sure when he decided he had a claim on anyone. It's easy to forget he's just a robot when the warm weight of everyone else presses in around him-Zitao rapping drunkenly into Kai's ear, Sehun's arm draped against his shoulder, Yixing's impressed look when he'd watched Kai break-dance to Satisfaction. They look at him like he's actually a person, but the reality of the situation is that Kai doesn't even have a real name.
He lies down spread-eagle on the wooden paneling of the workshop and just stares up at the grooves in the ceiling. This is how Baekhyun finds him when he comes back down at dawn, wearing a pair of ratty boxers and a shirt three sizes too big for him.
"How are you feeling?" Baekhyun asks, voice cracking drily. He sinks down cross-legged next to him, fingers rubbing at his temples.
"No hangover," Kai shoots back, sitting up, and hopes his voice doesn't betray anything. Baekhyun's probably too out of it to notice, anyway.
The schadenfreude doesn't last for long-not with Baekhyun looking at him so pitifully. Kai's fingers end up in Baekhyun's hair, massaging smooth circles into his scalp, and Baekhyun lets out a low moan of appreciation. He falls asleep like that, head pillowed in Kai's lap, and Kai forcibly resists the urge to see what it'd feel like to lean over and kiss him. He carries Baekhyun up to his room and tiptoes out the door.
He's never been to the rec center in the morning, and never alone. It's a Sunday and things are slower than usual, without the bustle of weekday students. The receptionist recognizes him and waves him in, no questions asked.
He plugs his phone into the speakers and clicks over to Zitao's mash-up. It fills the entire room in a flood of sound and Kai closes his eyes, lets the music take him.
Six minutes of nonstop dancing, pop and lock and flourish, with a bit of ballet and swing thrown in-and then it ends, Kai's spine bent, his fingers curled up in the material of shirt. That bit's new; he'll have to add it into his notes later.
"Did you choreograph that yourself?" comes a gruff voice from the door, and Kai opens his eyes to see Jaewon standing there, arms crossed.
He remembers to blink. "Yes."
"What's your name?"
"Kai."
Jaewon lets out a huff of laughter. "Got a last name?"
The first one that comes to mind is: "Kim," Kai lies, shoving his hands in his pockets. "My last name's Kim."
This is how he acquires Jaewon and starts learning from him alongside Sehun, who digs an elbow into Kai's side and slaps him on the back when Kai tells him the news. "Does he know you're-" he makes a wild gesture in the air that Kai assumes is supposed to mean his little electronic problem.
He shakes his head, puts a finger to his mouth. "I didn't tell him. He thinks I'm Kim Kai, some local kid."
"Sneaky, sneaky," Sehun tisks, but his eyes sparkle at the secret.
Chanyeol's gone on business for all of December, but he comes back in January, just in time for Kyungsoo's birthday. Joonmyun takes them to a packed place just south of the river, all strobe lights and pounding music that reverberates straight through his chest and shot after shot of tequila. Baekhyun draws the short stick for designated friend-herder and takes it in stride, spends most of the night shoving drinks at other people and dancing in the crowd. Kai watches him the whole time, can't tear his eyes away-Baekhyun might not be so technically sound, but there's an art in the way that he moves, the sweep of his legs and the twist of his hand in the air, column of his neck stark and pale in the low light.
After two songs, Kai swims through the sea of people to get to him. Baekhyun yells a greeting and Kai bends down to whisper against the shell of his ear, "You should dance more," before spinning off into his own improvised sequence, flashes of Baekhyun's grinning face coming to him at every turn.
Someone at the club that night records a blurry video of Kai and uploads it onto Youtube. It's gone viral by the next morning. Kai wakes up to a deluge of excited texts from Sehun and a link to the video on Naver. MYSTERY BOY FROM SEOUL KRUMPS TO GANGNAM STYLE, the clip's title reads. His face is obscured for most of it because of the poor lighting and shaky cameraman, but it's definitely him in the nondescript tank top.
All Jaewon says when Kai sees him next is, "Your flares still look awkward, kid. Fix it." Kai hides his smile and gets to work.
Zitao flies home for Chinese New Year a couple of weeks later. Sehun and Kai spending long days in the studio, perfecting their routines. Jaewon's incredibly focused on the minutiae of their expressions and Kai works for hours in front of the mirrors, twisting his features to fit the dances.
"Emotion," Jaewon roars one night, when it's just Kai. Sehun has midterms or something-linear algebra, he laments over the phone. "You've got everything else down, but the romance-I know you're a robot, damn it, but haven't you ever been in love?"
Kai's mouth drops open. He's not sure which part of the question surprises him more, to be honest, and Jaewon grunts at the look on his face.
"There-that's surprise. Good."
"You knew?" Kai asks, with tremendous effort. "How did you-?"
"Please," Jaewon interrupts, an impatient frown pulling at his lips. "Did you really think you'd be able to hide that kind of shit from me?"
"I didn't-"
"I've been studying dancers since before you were born," he continues, on a roll now. "Before you were made, I should say. But-of course I knew. I'm not an idiot. You don't breathe right. You don't sweat. You look exactly the same as you did when I saw you for the first time in October: same hair, same nails, same percentage body fat. Temperature's been below zero every day for the past month and you still come in with that flimsy shirt on, no coat in sight."
Kai blinks-an involuntary response. "I don't-I thought for sure you'd drop me if-"
Jaewon snorts, waves his stuttering away. "So maybe you aren't made of blood and guts like the rest of us. Big fucking deal. It's probably an enhancement on the current model, and you're as human as any other student I've had." He leans in. "I'll ask you again. Have you ever been in love?"
"I don't know," Kai says slowly, turning it over in his head. He thinks of Baekhyun (the stupid nothings he texts Kai just to annoy him, the way his hands pull and tug when fine-tuning Kai's circuitry, his bedhead in the morning and his lazy smirks at Chanyeol's patent ridiculousness, the pleased expression on his face when he's figured out the next step in his latest project) and feels something warm spread in his chest. "But I think I could be."
Kai walks in through the front door after practice and Chanyeol's got Baekhyun pressed against one of the easels in the workshop, hand reaching underneath his shirt. He freezes, arms locking, and tries to back out again. Baekhyun catches sight of him over Chanyeol's angular shoulder before he can move.
He must see something of Kai's dismay on his face-so expressive for a robot, Sehun'd teased him once-because his eyes go wide over Chanyeol's shoulder. Kai whirls around and leaves the way he came, snow blowing almost horizontal into his face as he walks out. He plops down on the curb and ignores the curious glances of passersby. There's nowhere else to go.
For some reason, Baekhyun follows him out. All he's wearing is a thin hoodie over his shirt, probably because he's an idiot. He shivers in the cold as he sits down, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle.
"Hi," Kai says, and can't help the tightness in his voice.
"You're mad," Baekhyun notes, and there's a strange tenor in his voice.
A moment of uncomfortable silence, and then: "Sometimes," Kai blurts out, looking down at the pavement, "I really wish I were real."
"You are real."
"No, I mean-" He scrubs a hand over his face, tosses his head. "I wish I were human." He turns and looks at Baekhyun, eyes trailing down to the part of his lips. "Then maybe I could-" He reaches out and runs a thumb over Baekhyun's bottom lip, hears him exhale shallowly.
"Kai," Baekhyun says-and Kai jolts his hand back, halting apologies ready to spill out of his mouth, but Baekhyun just shakes his head. The corner of his mouth pulls up. "When I said that I'd had dreams about this-about you coming to life-"
If Kai had a circulatory system, he might say the rush of sound in his ears was from blood. "I remember."
"It wasn't a nightmare." Baekhyun swallows, and Kai tracks the movement of his Adam's apple with interest.
He tilts his head to the side. "What does that mean?"
"It means-" Baekhyun places a delicate hand on Kai's cheek and leans in, breath skating across his skin. "It means I couldn't give less of a fuck whether you're a human or a robot." Kai's mouth is dry, but Baekhyun flicks his tongue into it anyway, warm and wet. Kai's hands clench in the material of Baekhyun's sweatpants as Baekhyun traces the roof of Kai's mouth, where it meets the backs of his teeth. The sensation makes Kai want to squirm a little, and he pulls back, gasping. Ticklish, he thinks, and puts a hand to his mouth.
"What about-" His voice cracks and he makes a noise of frustration, tries again: "What about Chanyeol?"
Baekhyun sits back, laces his fingers together in his lap. "Chanyeol and I met in college. Roommates. We tried to strike up a relationship that didn't work for a billion different reasons, so we remained friends with occasional benefits, in between other significant others. That means-"
"I know what it means," Kai snaps, and Baekhyun laughs, scrubbing a hand through his hair.
"I'm sorry. I should've explained, earlier, but I didn't think-Jesus. I think Chanyeol's been secretly pining over your friend Zitao, actually, but don't tell him I said that," he says, grinning a little before his face goes serious again. "But-you."
"What?"
Baekhyun sways in again, lashes casting half-shadows beneath his eyes. If Kai had breath, he'd probably be losing it around now, air caught in his throat. "I didn't think you'd want this. I didn't want to risk projecting any of my feelings onto you, and you never said anything."
"I do want it," he says. "I didn't know I could feel-at all, but I do. I think I do. I don't know-it's hard." He presses a palm to where his heart should be. "Sometimes my chest feels like it's about to explode. It's stupid."
Baekhyun leans his forehead against Kai's and laughs again. "No, it isn't. Me too." A pause, and then, amused: "You understand that the ethics of this are highly suspect."
Kai snorts, rears back and punches his arm. Baekhyun winces. "Why? Because you made all the parts of me? I think any precedent flew out the window when I, you know, spontaneously came to life. No thanks to you."
"Hey, no need to be an ass about it," Baekhyun says, but he's still smiling. Then he shivers, teeth chattering, and pulls his hands into his sleeves. "Can we go inside now, though? It's fucking freezing."
"You should be more careful with yourself," Kai mimics, hauling him up.
Chanyeol takes one look at them as they fall in through the entrance and immediately starts going on about the morality of sex robots. There's a twinkle in his eye, though, and he doesn't even try to dodge it when both of them sock him in the shoulder, so Kai can't be too irritated. Baekhyun's grinning at him, hands pulling at his wrists, and Kai can't feel much irritation at all.
Baekhyun finally brings Kai in for an informal demo with the SME higher-ups just as winter's turning into spring, right on the cusp of warmer weather. Jaewon had finally signed off on his self-choreographed routine with grudging approval the week before.
It's a Saturday morning. Kai's dressed in simple, loose-fitting clothing and has a cap pulled over his head, and it takes the stuffy-looking men that file into the studio a couple of minutes to realize that he's the robot.
Baekhyun winks at him from the back as the music comes on. Kai closes his eyes and begins to dance.
fin
A/N: the society of manufacturing engineers does actually exist! but for story purposes, the one in this is obviously a bit different. the title of the story is from this poem by ali shapiro.
Pairing: baekhyun/kai (other, highlight for spoilers: brief baekhyun/chanyeol)
Rating: pg13
Genre: romance, au
Warnings: swearing
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: kai just wants to be a real boy. super self-indulgent magical realist pinocchio/pygmalion au, inspired by this teaser. 6,030 words.
Kai achieves sentience on a Saturday morning, his mind fully formed and functional, like it's every day that mannequins just come to life out of the blue.
At first, he's not quite sure what it means. Having a mind. Being aware. A minute ago he was just a pile of stuff, smooth plastic and twisted electric wires-but now he's here, conscious, blinking down at his own synthetic hand. All he knows is that he's Kai, because that's the name of the installation exhibit he's supposed to be a part of: the crowning jewel, so to speak, of artistic robotics.
His maker doesn't come down into the workshop until half past noon, when the sun's shining through the ceiling window and Kai's testing his legs out, trying to get a feel for the way his feet move underneath him. He freezes the minute Baekhyun-ah, yes, that's his name-walks in.
Kai's halfway across the room from where he's supposed to be. Baekhyun does this little double take when he sees him, the bow of his mouth turning down in confusion. Confusion: an emotion. "Fucking Chanyeol," he says, striding forward. His hands are warm around Kai's plastic arms, and he lifts him up like a doll.
Baekhyun puts him down beneath the skylight again, rays slanting straight into Kai's eyes, and Kai lets out a testy grumble that surprises both of them. He wasn't sure he'd be able to speak. He probably should've tried that, first.
Baekhyun jumps back and knocks a large set of paints off the table behind him when Kai lifts his arm to block the light. "What the fuck," he says, voice flat. He grabs a brush off the table and brandishes it at Kai. "Who are you?" he asks, which is an absurd question, even to someone who's only been around for a couple of hours. Baekhyun was the one who made him. He, of all people, should know.
"I don't know," Kai says, the hinge of his jaw moving oddly beneath artificial skin. "All I did was wake up."
When Baekhyun gets over the initial shock, he spends the better part of the afternoon just poking and prodding at him, taking measurements and trying to figure out what Kai can and can't do. "In the name of science," he explains, and pinches a bit of the skin on Kai's arm. Kai doesn't flinch. "Right," Baekhyun says, half to himself. He notes something down on his clipboard. "No pain sensors. That's convenient." He straightens up and brushes invisible flecks of dust off his shirt. "I'm pretty sure I had a nightmare like this once," he mutters. He pinches his own arm, eyes flicking up to stare into Kai's. "But you're real?"
"You tell me," Kai drawls, dragging his fingers through cellophane hair.
Baekhyun rolls his eyes and steps back. "Of course. My robot fucking comes to life and he's a sarcastic little shit." He smiles, entire face crinkling into it. "Can't catch a break."
They were going to program him to dance, Baekhyun tells him later. Kai's perched on a bench watching him charcoal, the sweep of his fingers against the paper somehow soothing.
Baekhyun'd been a computer science and electrical engineering double major at school, but he always had an interest in art, which the PR department at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers took advantage of. "The intersection of art and science, to make robotics more palatable to the public," he says, rubbing his chin and smudging a line of dark gray on its tapered point. "That was my assignment. So I wired you up." He runs a hand through his hair. "I'd been stuck on the logistics of it for a while. The connections weren't talking to each other. SME's probably forgotten all about you, really, but-" he shrugs, and stares at Kai like he's still not sure whether or not to believe he's actually there. Kai waves. "This changes things."
Kai tilts his head to the side. "How?"
"We can just teach you," he replies. He puts the charcoal down on the easel and leans forward. "Do you want to learn?"
"Depends on what it is," Kai says, scrunching his nose, and Baekhyun laughs a little. "I guess I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
Baekhyun huffs. "Well, I'm not going to make you do something you don't want to do."
Doesn't your source of income kind of depend on this? he wants to ask, but bites his lip as Baekhyun scoots over and boots his laptop up.
It turns out not to be a problem. Maybe there's something of Baekhyun's intent built into his circuitry, because the Bolshoi Ballet video's barely over before Kai's saying, "I want to do that," arms tossed up in a paltry imitation of effortless grace. "Teach me."
"Yeah?" Baekhyun says, eyes crinkling again. "That can be arranged."
"You want me to teach a robot how to dance?" someone's asking from the other side of the threshold. "I have linear algebra homework to do, man. What is this, some science fiction shit? Does he look like C3PO?"
Kai shuffles to the door, leans over Baekhyun's head and glares at the other guy.
"Whoa, never mind. He looks, like, human."
"Kai, this is Sehun, a family friend," Baekhyun says, shaking his head. "Listen, I would've asked Jaewon, but you know I can't afford an actual instructor's fees on SME's budget. I'd teach him myself but I can't do ballet."
"I can try, I guess," Sehun mumbles, eyes sweeping over Kai dubiously. He checks his watch. "I've got an hour. Let's see how he does. Then we'll talk."
Sehun takes them to a community recreation center two blocks away, all spacious rooms with mirrored walls and open spaces, so unlike Baekhyun's workshop or his cluttered apartment above it. Kai spends a lot of time in front of the mirrors when he first walks in, cataloguing all the different parts of himself: the full lips, long limbs, the way his hair flops into his face. Baekhyun's reflection from the back looks amused.
"If you're gonna be like this then I'm leaving," Sehun complains.
"Sorry," Kai says, moving away from the wall. "I haven't-I just woke up this morning."
"Right," Sehun says. He tosses Kai a pair of floppy shoes. "Ballet flats," he explains at the furrow in Kai's brow. "You put them on your feet."
"Oh," Kai says, recalling the video and nodding. He pulls them on and stands. "Now what?"
"Now we dance," Sehun says drily, and when he dips down to tap the CD player in the corner, staccato music pours out. "Try to follow me."
Tracing Sehun's steps is easier than Kai expected it to be. It's that thing again, something about the way he was made with this exact purpose in mind, with the right build and balance and muscle precision. Sehun runs the routine twice and Kai's already a perfect mimic by then, his entire body locking into textbook-arabesque, Sehun calls, cabriole and saut de chat and fouetté en tournant.
"Geez," Sehun says at the end of the hour, a pinched expression on his face that Kai registers as grudging admiration. He wipes the sweat off his forehead, chest heaving with effort in a way that Kai's never will, and glances back at Baekhyun. "What did you do, hyung? You're gonna put real dancers out of business with this."
Real dancers echoes in Kai's head like a curse. Not even half a day old and he already knows what it means to be different, removed, set apart. He pulls out of his last grand jeté and straightens up, at a loss.
"Just doing my job," Baekhyun says in response, but he's looking at Kai with this wide grin on his face, like he might burst with pride, and Kai can't help but smile back.
Kai spends daytime hours devouring all the dance videos he can find-jazz, swing, ballroom, hip-hop, everything, memorizes it all with near total recall. Baekhyun tweaks his circuitry as often as time permits in between his other projects, opens Kai up to make him better and then sends him off to the studio in the afternoons to practice with Sehun. An older man he assumes is Jaewon catches the two of them at it one night and lets out a noise of appreciation at Kai's improv.
"He used to be the artistic director of the Korea National Ballet Company," Sehun whispers after he's gone. "But he quit to start teaching people one on one. He thought it'd be more rewarding, I guess."
"Oh," Kai says, and the information doesn't have any significance to him until he goes home and reads about what it means online.
"No dice," Sehun says, when Kai tries to time his practice sessions to the hours when Jaewon's around to instruct. "He's really picky about the students he takes on."
"It's a wonder he chose you, then, " Kai deadpans, and Sehun just smacks him on the shoulder, even though he knows Kai won't feel the pain.
They figure out that he doesn't need to sleep, so when Baekhyun clears a space in his art studio and installs a floor-to-ceiling mirror for him to practice in front of, Kai takes full advantage of it. Baekhyun comes down in the middle of the night sometimes, or in the wee hours morning, and asks, "What are you doing, aren't you tired-" but shuts up and rubs a hand over his face, smiling into his palm. "Sorry, forgot," he says, and for some reason, something painful tugs in Kai's chest. He never tells Baekhyun about it. It seems wrong to.
Sehun has other friends at the studio who train with different instructors: Zitao's from China, and came to Seoul to acquire taekwondo. It takes Kai three days to cobble together a set of skills that doesn't have him flat on the floor after ten seconds of fighting with Zitao, a weird mixture of hapkido and a Bruce Lee compilation video he'd found on Youtube.
On the weekends they'll take him out, Sehun the ballerino and Zitao the martial artist, to the movies, which Kai likes-and to the library, which he likes even better, pages and pages of information to subsume, whole new worlds to discover. "Nerd," Sehun says, laughing, when Kai walks into the studio with his nose crammed in a book. Zitao counters it in his own way, brings his laptop and buries Kai in dramas, Goong and Gumiho and Coffee Prince.
They drag him with them for food after practice and Sehun tries to buy him bubble tea or dukbokki before realizing-"Oh, right, you don't eat," and smiling into his drink. "It's hard to remember, sometimes," Zitao adds, in his accented Korean, and snatches the cup out of Sehun's hand, downs half of it in one gulp. "I mean, it's a little weird when you forget to blink, but that's alright. We all have our idiosyncrasies."
It's nice. It makes him feel worth something.
His favorite thing, though, is still to dance for hours on end, just him and the next step, because nothing else makes him feel so close to life-for as long as the routine lasts, anyway.
"You said," Kai remarks, a month into it, "that you didn't do ballet."
Baekhyun looks up from the robotic mouse he's fiddling with. "I don't."
"But you dance."
"Just a little," he replies, putting his pliers down. "Why?"
"I want to see."
Baekhyun chuckles. "I'm definitely not as good as you are at this point."
"That's not the point," Kai says, pulling his lips down.
He laughs again, shaking his head. "Where'd you learn how to pout like that?"
Kai just walks over and grabs his wrist. Baekhyun lets him tug him to the mirror and spread his arms. "Well?"
Baekhyun pulls his iPod out with a lot of showy reluctance, puts on something sedate. Some day, when I'm awfully low, the speakers sing, and Baekhyun grabs Kai's hand, leads him into an easy foxtrot.
"Ballroom dancing?" Kai says over Sinatra's voice, grinning when Baekhyun dips him. "Really?"
"Needed something to woo the ladies in college," Baekhyun says. He waggles his eyebrows sleazily and spins Kai twice as the song ends, arm stretched out to accommodate his height. Something warm and tight blooms in Kai's chest cavity and he wonders, vaguely, if he needs another check-up.
Baekhyun lets go of him and goes back to his work. Kai stares down at his hand, the grooves of his fingerprints and the lines crisscrossing his palm, and feels strangely bereft.
Two days later, Kai comes back from an evening out with Sehun and Zitao with a huge gash down the back of his thigh, one that he doesn't notice until Baekhyun makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat and sits him down on the bench, the thin material of his pant-leg rucked up. "You should be more careful with yourself," he says as he checks Kai's insides.
"I felt it when it happened, but I didn't realize it was this bad," Kai mutters. "Sorry."
Baekhyun exhales, carding a hand through his hair. "It's alright. Just-be more alert. No practice for a week, I've got to replace some of the padding and grow you new skin."
Sehun lugs over his entire collection of One Piece volumes as light reading during Kai's house arrest. "It's not house arrest," Kai says, rolling his eyes. "I'm just resting."
"I thought you didn't need rest. You're like a tank or something. Indestructible."
Kai snorts. "It's not like I'm made out of fucking titanium."
Baekhyun sings in the shower sometimes, belts out high notes through the spray of water, voice clear and steady. Baekhyun in general is just-loud: even when he's working he'll hum things under his breath and clatter around the studio, tinkering with other, less humanoid robots. It's comforting, all that noise. Kai can speak, could probably sing a few notes if he tried, but there's no real mechanism in his neck for it-he'd just come out of the ether like this, a soul in a fake body, doing things that Baekhyun, for all his engineering prowess, can't explain.
Chanyeol the absentee roommate comes back from his stint abroad at the end of November. "He left the day you woke up," Baekhyun tells him, as Chanyeol struggles to shove his three bulging suitcases in through the door. "He does customer service for some big firm downtown, so he travels a lot."
"Hey, you got your baby to work!" is the first thing out of Chanyeol's mouth when he sees them. His voice is low and a little rough, but it's got this sort of peppy, elated quality that Kai imagines is pretty essential for his job. He lifts his sunglasses and leans in to peer at Kai. "He looks so real."
"I am real," Kai snaps irritably, and Chanyeol rears back in surprise.
"Holy shit. It talks."
"His name is Kai," Baekhyun says pointedly, "and he doesn't sleep or eat, so don't try to charge him for rent."
"Who, me?" Chanyeol says, eyes wide. "I would never."
"Don't trust him," Baekhyun tells Kai, patting his shoulder before turning back. "To be fair, I did loot your closet for Kai's clothes, but God knows you have enough shit in there that you've never worn and never will. Plus, you still owe me for the thing with Kris."
Chanyeol sends him a betrayed look. "Help me bring my stuff up at least," he whines, and Baekhyun cheerfully ignores him. He meanders back to his bench and goes back to work, fingers flying over his laptop.
Kai heaves a long sigh-he'd learned that from Zitao, after Sehun'd had one too many shots of peach soju-and grabs one of the suitcases.
With Chanyeol home, the apartment and studio fill with a steady stream of banter, a new backtrack for Kai's daily routine. The day after he returns, Kai comes back from the dance studio to find the apartment empty at night for the first time since he'd woken. He tries not to think too much of it.
He kicks a stray volume of manga out of the way and puts the iPod on, some Justin Timberlake/Britney Spears mash-up that Zitao had sent him, begins working on rudimentary choreography he'd been trying to develop for days. "It's the logical next step," Sehun had said that afternoon, mouth pinched. "Composition, creating your own sequences. That's what Jaewon always tells us, anyway. I'm not very good at it."
Kai sinks into it so thoroughly that he doesn't notice, at first, when the door swings open and Baekhyun and Chanyeol pour in. It's only when Chanyeol grabs his arm that he resurfaces from his reverie, startled.
"Hey," Kai says. "What's up?"
Chanyeol's body temperature seems lower than usual, and he's got this huge shit-eating grin on his face. "What were you doing?"
"Dancing," he says, drawing the syllables out long for emphasis.
"That shit's fucking sick," Chanyeol says fervently. "I'm uncoordinated as hell but chicks dig guys who can dance. You need to come out with us next time."
Baekhyun materializes at his shoulder, eyeliner dovetailing beyond his lids. Kai studies the flush in his face, his dilated pupils, puts it together with Chanyeol's hand waving and chattering, more incessant than usual, and comes out with: "You're both very drunk and I'm going to let you pass out now." Chanyeol does the predictable thing and drops in a heap on one of the benches, starts snoring after a minute. He's going to have a terrible ache in his neck in the morning, Kai thinks dispassionately, and leaves him there.
Baekhyun seems a little more lucid. He sways in, hands coming up to brush Kai's shoulders. "Do you want to come? You could bring your friends, too."
He tips over before Kai can give him an answer, eyes fluttering closed. Kai catches him and lugs him upstairs, dumps him into bed. Baekhyun mumbles something indistinct and turns over into the covers as Kai shuffles out of the room.
Sehun and Zitao are all for it, so when the occasion arises a couple of days later, Baekhyun and Chanyeol take them all to Gangnam. Kai meets a whole laundry list of people: Joonmyun, their VIP pass into the club; Minseok the stealth hyung with the baby-face; Kris, who Baekhyun calls a gentle giant; Lu Han with the big eyes and Yixing who dances almost as well as Kai does; and Kyungsoo and Jongdae, who steal Chanyeol away only to shove him into a ridiculous birthday hat. There's a lot of glad-handing for Chanyeol's twenty-fifth year ("Your turn in January, Kyungsoo," Chanyeol crows, rubbing his hands together, right before Baekhyun smashes a piece of cake into his face), and then they split off into groups. Zitao gravitates to Baekhyun's Chinese friends, and everyone else starts downing shots like there's no tomorrow.
"I've never partied with, like, actual people before," Sehun says, gazing wide-eyed at the gyrating dance floor.
"Do college kids not count as actual people?" Kai shouts over the loud bass.
"Please," Sehun yells back, waving him away. He dives headfirst into the crowd and disappears. Kai turns back to the table and slides in next to Baekhyun, who gives him a breezy smile around the rim of his glass.
Kai can't drink, of course. This means he's 1) the perfect built-in designated driver (though he can't actually drive, so maybe herder of people on their way home would be a better description), and 2) has the distinct pleasure of watching everyone else get more and more wasted as the night progresses. Chanyeol tries to get Kai to be his wingman, to little success-half the girls they approach end up staring at Kai instead. One, Krystal, slips her number into his hand with the flash of a smile. "Ah, to be young and nubile," Chanyeol laments, hand pressed to his chest, after she's gone.
"Please never use that word again," Kai replies, wrinkling his nose. "Especially in reference to me." Chanyeol just tosses an arm over his shoulder and laughs.
He finally ventures out onto the dance floor at half past midnight. You should be more careful with yourself rings in his head, but it all flies out the window when something loud and heavy comes on and the crowd clears for him. He moves fluidly from step to step, everything seamless, his mind always five beats ahead of what he's doing, mapping out the rest of the routine on the fly. If he stops paying too close attention, he can almost pretend that he can feel adrenaline pumping through his plastic body, blood rushing through instead of just closed-circuit wires.
The song changes (too soon) and he snaps out of it, and-everyone in the room is looking at him. Or that's what it feels like, at least, and it takes him a minute to remember to heave his chest in a pale imitation of life. But it's a club on a Saturday night, and he's soon forgotten, the mass of people closing in around him again. This anonymity is good, too; partiers don't seem to look too closely at whom they're dancing with. It's enough that the body's there, and that it's moving.
Baekhyun had tossed him a new phone before they left the house, and Kai pulls it out of his pocket at two in the morning to a slew of messages: sooooo durnnk and a series of what are presumably butt texts from Sehun, Where are you? We're leaving from Zitao, and a softer we'll wait for you at the stoplight outside the subway station from Baekhyun, sent five minutes ago.
He picks his way out of the club, glittery tank top askew around his shoulders. He spots the back of Kris's head bobbing above the late night streetwalkers and makes a beeline for it. At the crosswalk, he stops to wait for the green light.
What happens next plays out as if in slow motion. The pedestrian light turns green and Kai takes a step forward. The crowd in front of him thins for a moment. Baekhyun, standing next to the stoplight three meters away, looks up, and Chanyeol dips his head down to press their mouths together, his hands cradling Baekhyun's shoulders.
Oh, Kai thinks first, and then, immediately after: I want that. It hits him like a punch to the gut-or what he'd always read a punch to the gut might feel like-and he thinks, oh. He thinks, this must be what it means to feel pain.
I want that with Baekhyun, he thinks, and the thought's coupled with a sort of quiet despair of comprehension when he realizes he's probably wanted it for a while, now.
Baekhyun and Chanyeol are still glued to each other by the time they get home. They trip up the stairs, giggling, and Kai puts music on downstairs to drown it out when they start-well. These are things Kai's read about in passing at the library or on the internet, gaps in his knowledge filled in with snide remarks from Sehun and demure ones from Zitao. He's familiar enough with the idea.
He's not sure when he decided he had a claim on anyone. It's easy to forget he's just a robot when the warm weight of everyone else presses in around him-Zitao rapping drunkenly into Kai's ear, Sehun's arm draped against his shoulder, Yixing's impressed look when he'd watched Kai break-dance to Satisfaction. They look at him like he's actually a person, but the reality of the situation is that Kai doesn't even have a real name.
He lies down spread-eagle on the wooden paneling of the workshop and just stares up at the grooves in the ceiling. This is how Baekhyun finds him when he comes back down at dawn, wearing a pair of ratty boxers and a shirt three sizes too big for him.
"How are you feeling?" Baekhyun asks, voice cracking drily. He sinks down cross-legged next to him, fingers rubbing at his temples.
"No hangover," Kai shoots back, sitting up, and hopes his voice doesn't betray anything. Baekhyun's probably too out of it to notice, anyway.
The schadenfreude doesn't last for long-not with Baekhyun looking at him so pitifully. Kai's fingers end up in Baekhyun's hair, massaging smooth circles into his scalp, and Baekhyun lets out a low moan of appreciation. He falls asleep like that, head pillowed in Kai's lap, and Kai forcibly resists the urge to see what it'd feel like to lean over and kiss him. He carries Baekhyun up to his room and tiptoes out the door.
He's never been to the rec center in the morning, and never alone. It's a Sunday and things are slower than usual, without the bustle of weekday students. The receptionist recognizes him and waves him in, no questions asked.
He plugs his phone into the speakers and clicks over to Zitao's mash-up. It fills the entire room in a flood of sound and Kai closes his eyes, lets the music take him.
Six minutes of nonstop dancing, pop and lock and flourish, with a bit of ballet and swing thrown in-and then it ends, Kai's spine bent, his fingers curled up in the material of shirt. That bit's new; he'll have to add it into his notes later.
"Did you choreograph that yourself?" comes a gruff voice from the door, and Kai opens his eyes to see Jaewon standing there, arms crossed.
He remembers to blink. "Yes."
"What's your name?"
"Kai."
Jaewon lets out a huff of laughter. "Got a last name?"
The first one that comes to mind is: "Kim," Kai lies, shoving his hands in his pockets. "My last name's Kim."
This is how he acquires Jaewon and starts learning from him alongside Sehun, who digs an elbow into Kai's side and slaps him on the back when Kai tells him the news. "Does he know you're-" he makes a wild gesture in the air that Kai assumes is supposed to mean his little electronic problem.
He shakes his head, puts a finger to his mouth. "I didn't tell him. He thinks I'm Kim Kai, some local kid."
"Sneaky, sneaky," Sehun tisks, but his eyes sparkle at the secret.
Chanyeol's gone on business for all of December, but he comes back in January, just in time for Kyungsoo's birthday. Joonmyun takes them to a packed place just south of the river, all strobe lights and pounding music that reverberates straight through his chest and shot after shot of tequila. Baekhyun draws the short stick for designated friend-herder and takes it in stride, spends most of the night shoving drinks at other people and dancing in the crowd. Kai watches him the whole time, can't tear his eyes away-Baekhyun might not be so technically sound, but there's an art in the way that he moves, the sweep of his legs and the twist of his hand in the air, column of his neck stark and pale in the low light.
After two songs, Kai swims through the sea of people to get to him. Baekhyun yells a greeting and Kai bends down to whisper against the shell of his ear, "You should dance more," before spinning off into his own improvised sequence, flashes of Baekhyun's grinning face coming to him at every turn.
Someone at the club that night records a blurry video of Kai and uploads it onto Youtube. It's gone viral by the next morning. Kai wakes up to a deluge of excited texts from Sehun and a link to the video on Naver. MYSTERY BOY FROM SEOUL KRUMPS TO GANGNAM STYLE, the clip's title reads. His face is obscured for most of it because of the poor lighting and shaky cameraman, but it's definitely him in the nondescript tank top.
All Jaewon says when Kai sees him next is, "Your flares still look awkward, kid. Fix it." Kai hides his smile and gets to work.
Zitao flies home for Chinese New Year a couple of weeks later. Sehun and Kai spending long days in the studio, perfecting their routines. Jaewon's incredibly focused on the minutiae of their expressions and Kai works for hours in front of the mirrors, twisting his features to fit the dances.
"Emotion," Jaewon roars one night, when it's just Kai. Sehun has midterms or something-linear algebra, he laments over the phone. "You've got everything else down, but the romance-I know you're a robot, damn it, but haven't you ever been in love?"
Kai's mouth drops open. He's not sure which part of the question surprises him more, to be honest, and Jaewon grunts at the look on his face.
"There-that's surprise. Good."
"You knew?" Kai asks, with tremendous effort. "How did you-?"
"Please," Jaewon interrupts, an impatient frown pulling at his lips. "Did you really think you'd be able to hide that kind of shit from me?"
"I didn't-"
"I've been studying dancers since before you were born," he continues, on a roll now. "Before you were made, I should say. But-of course I knew. I'm not an idiot. You don't breathe right. You don't sweat. You look exactly the same as you did when I saw you for the first time in October: same hair, same nails, same percentage body fat. Temperature's been below zero every day for the past month and you still come in with that flimsy shirt on, no coat in sight."
Kai blinks-an involuntary response. "I don't-I thought for sure you'd drop me if-"
Jaewon snorts, waves his stuttering away. "So maybe you aren't made of blood and guts like the rest of us. Big fucking deal. It's probably an enhancement on the current model, and you're as human as any other student I've had." He leans in. "I'll ask you again. Have you ever been in love?"
"I don't know," Kai says slowly, turning it over in his head. He thinks of Baekhyun (the stupid nothings he texts Kai just to annoy him, the way his hands pull and tug when fine-tuning Kai's circuitry, his bedhead in the morning and his lazy smirks at Chanyeol's patent ridiculousness, the pleased expression on his face when he's figured out the next step in his latest project) and feels something warm spread in his chest. "But I think I could be."
Kai walks in through the front door after practice and Chanyeol's got Baekhyun pressed against one of the easels in the workshop, hand reaching underneath his shirt. He freezes, arms locking, and tries to back out again. Baekhyun catches sight of him over Chanyeol's angular shoulder before he can move.
He must see something of Kai's dismay on his face-so expressive for a robot, Sehun'd teased him once-because his eyes go wide over Chanyeol's shoulder. Kai whirls around and leaves the way he came, snow blowing almost horizontal into his face as he walks out. He plops down on the curb and ignores the curious glances of passersby. There's nowhere else to go.
For some reason, Baekhyun follows him out. All he's wearing is a thin hoodie over his shirt, probably because he's an idiot. He shivers in the cold as he sits down, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle.
"Hi," Kai says, and can't help the tightness in his voice.
"You're mad," Baekhyun notes, and there's a strange tenor in his voice.
A moment of uncomfortable silence, and then: "Sometimes," Kai blurts out, looking down at the pavement, "I really wish I were real."
"You are real."
"No, I mean-" He scrubs a hand over his face, tosses his head. "I wish I were human." He turns and looks at Baekhyun, eyes trailing down to the part of his lips. "Then maybe I could-" He reaches out and runs a thumb over Baekhyun's bottom lip, hears him exhale shallowly.
"Kai," Baekhyun says-and Kai jolts his hand back, halting apologies ready to spill out of his mouth, but Baekhyun just shakes his head. The corner of his mouth pulls up. "When I said that I'd had dreams about this-about you coming to life-"
If Kai had a circulatory system, he might say the rush of sound in his ears was from blood. "I remember."
"It wasn't a nightmare." Baekhyun swallows, and Kai tracks the movement of his Adam's apple with interest.
He tilts his head to the side. "What does that mean?"
"It means-" Baekhyun places a delicate hand on Kai's cheek and leans in, breath skating across his skin. "It means I couldn't give less of a fuck whether you're a human or a robot." Kai's mouth is dry, but Baekhyun flicks his tongue into it anyway, warm and wet. Kai's hands clench in the material of Baekhyun's sweatpants as Baekhyun traces the roof of Kai's mouth, where it meets the backs of his teeth. The sensation makes Kai want to squirm a little, and he pulls back, gasping. Ticklish, he thinks, and puts a hand to his mouth.
"What about-" His voice cracks and he makes a noise of frustration, tries again: "What about Chanyeol?"
Baekhyun sits back, laces his fingers together in his lap. "Chanyeol and I met in college. Roommates. We tried to strike up a relationship that didn't work for a billion different reasons, so we remained friends with occasional benefits, in between other significant others. That means-"
"I know what it means," Kai snaps, and Baekhyun laughs, scrubbing a hand through his hair.
"I'm sorry. I should've explained, earlier, but I didn't think-Jesus. I think Chanyeol's been secretly pining over your friend Zitao, actually, but don't tell him I said that," he says, grinning a little before his face goes serious again. "But-you."
"What?"
Baekhyun sways in again, lashes casting half-shadows beneath his eyes. If Kai had breath, he'd probably be losing it around now, air caught in his throat. "I didn't think you'd want this. I didn't want to risk projecting any of my feelings onto you, and you never said anything."
"I do want it," he says. "I didn't know I could feel-at all, but I do. I think I do. I don't know-it's hard." He presses a palm to where his heart should be. "Sometimes my chest feels like it's about to explode. It's stupid."
Baekhyun leans his forehead against Kai's and laughs again. "No, it isn't. Me too." A pause, and then, amused: "You understand that the ethics of this are highly suspect."
Kai snorts, rears back and punches his arm. Baekhyun winces. "Why? Because you made all the parts of me? I think any precedent flew out the window when I, you know, spontaneously came to life. No thanks to you."
"Hey, no need to be an ass about it," Baekhyun says, but he's still smiling. Then he shivers, teeth chattering, and pulls his hands into his sleeves. "Can we go inside now, though? It's fucking freezing."
"You should be more careful with yourself," Kai mimics, hauling him up.
Chanyeol takes one look at them as they fall in through the entrance and immediately starts going on about the morality of sex robots. There's a twinkle in his eye, though, and he doesn't even try to dodge it when both of them sock him in the shoulder, so Kai can't be too irritated. Baekhyun's grinning at him, hands pulling at his wrists, and Kai can't feel much irritation at all.
Baekhyun finally brings Kai in for an informal demo with the SME higher-ups just as winter's turning into spring, right on the cusp of warmer weather. Jaewon had finally signed off on his self-choreographed routine with grudging approval the week before.
It's a Saturday morning. Kai's dressed in simple, loose-fitting clothing and has a cap pulled over his head, and it takes the stuffy-looking men that file into the studio a couple of minutes to realize that he's the robot.
Baekhyun winks at him from the back as the music comes on. Kai closes his eyes and begins to dance.
fin
A/N: the society of manufacturing engineers does actually exist! but for story purposes, the one in this is obviously a bit different. the title of the story is from this poem by ali shapiro.