(no subject)
Title: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Chapter 5)
Authors: Scorpions angelinaii, murasaki_plum, nemesis_cry
Characters/Pairings: All (kangteuk, shichul, kihae; potential kyuwook, eunkihae, shihanchul, yeshdong, yewook, minry)
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: AU, organized crime, postcyberpunk
Summary: In a world where money and crime go hand and hand, survival is not determined by the fittest, but the ones who will fight to live.
Warnings: violence, swearing, sexual situations
AN: Thank you so much for the warm response so far!
Introduction and Chapter 1 | Chapters 2 & 3 | Chapter 4
Banner by angelinaii
Dust rose in a yellow cloud, dispersing over the windshield. It was like driving through a sandstorm, one that reached the inner streets of the city, the dilapidated old buildings doing little to cut through the haze. Sungmin's driving did the job just fine instead. He didn't brake until they were well under a dark canopy suspended at the back of a depot. Kyuhyun had a fondness for large spaces that Eeteuk neither challenged nor sought to understand. He provided a service and he deserved the privilege. It really was that simple.
Problems only arose when Kyuhyun couldn't do his job. It was rare, thankfully. So rare, in fact, Eeteuk had no plan B. Or at least, not one that would be desirable.
With Sungmin trailing him--proper to Kangin's orders, he was sure--Eeteuk forced his anxiety to the deepest corners of his being and pressed on.
Wandering through a dark and widening hallway toward the only source of light, they found them. Kyuhyun stared out in their direction, his eyes unfocused and illuminated by the streams of information ran through his processors. His hand hovered above a Eunhyuk's prone body, a white sheet covering the other man from head to foot.
"Shit, is he dead?" Sungmin blurted out and even if Eeteuk couldn't see his expression, there was no mistaking the sudden intake of breath.
Good question, he thought, kneeling by the other two. "Can you fix it?"
"He's not dead." Kyuhyun commented, blinking out to observe the two in the room before returning to his work. "Eunhyuk kept saying that he didn't like staring up at me and so I fixed it for him."
"Can someone pull the sheet down? Please?"
Eeteuk obliged with a contained sigh. Clearly, his gang was made of people with issues reaching only as far as their skills. It was an acceptable trade off.
"Okay there?" he smiled to Eunhyuk, then without waiting for a reply, turned to Kyuhyun again. "Kibum had some interesting things to say about what happened. I don't suppose he made them up, did he?"
"Eunkyuk is still hacked, if that is what you're asking." Kyuhyun said, roaming his hand in the air over Eunhyuk's body. "I am tracing the virus to its source and researching any connections before I sever them. If I disable the hack without using the proper method, it could be dangerous. The hacker who set this off covers his tracks unusually well."
A curt nod because out of all of them, Kyuhyun knew best.
"Aren't you running a risk of infection by doing this?" Eeteuk checked, drawing back to fold one leg under him and lean his arm on the other.
Kyuhyun didn't blink. "Yes."
Eeteuk arched an eyebrow. "I'm assuming there's an absolute need for it, then, and you're not just posing as Heechul for shits and giggles." Without giving the other man a chance to reply, without allowing for the possibility that Kyuhyun hadn't thought this through, he added: "Do you think you'll be able to track down whoever's behind it?" If cybernetics failed, there was always brute force and in the real world, Henry and Hankyung were very efficient.
"I've gotten close." Kyuhyun answered with a slight frown. "I know what he looks like, his presence in the stream is distinct enough. He likes smoke and mirrors. Distorted images, fractured pathways, twisted stuff like that. If I can just find a strong enough signal I can trace him to his offline persona."
"Is there anything we can do to help you?"
"Whoever I'm chasing is too good to just be some hackjob off of the street. Someone made him, government level. That kind of information isn't kept on computers."
"I'll see what I can do." Eeteuk sighed, squeezing Eunhyuk's shoulder before glancing over at Sungmin hovering behind him. "Let's go."
Kyuhyun acknowledged Sungmin's friendly wave but didn't bother to watch them leave, returning his attention to the avatar without a face that continued to taunt him in his mind. He had to close his eyes when the room began to spin, he was reaching his limit. That didn't bring any incentive to stop his pursuit of the faceless man. It was unthinkable for someone to be stronger than him in this; it was impossible. It was in his design.
***
The first thing he remembered after the accident was opening his eyes as he was wheeled into the operating room. A doctor was shouting words at him, but none of it made sense. He caught the word he recognized as his name, and hospital, but everything else was a mystery. He didn't have time to ponder over the frustrating confusion of knowing something but unable to remember it, because the mask placed over his face made everything black again.
The second thing he remembered after the accident was opening his eyes as he laid in a hospital bed. It was something he couldn't forget. He instinctively wanted to look around, make sense of his surroundings, but his eyes remained pointed to the ceiling. He tried to call out, but no sound issued from his vocal cords. His lips, which felt dry as the inside of his mouth and his itchy throat, didn't even move. His arms throbbed with pain, and even that seemed minor to the intense pain he felt in his legs. But even though he could feel them, nothing moved, not even a twitch of a finger or a wiggle of a toe. It was terrifying, all he could do was blink.
Kyuhyun remembered the tone of his father's voice as he explained about the car accident. His father was a man of extreme wealth and power, everything in his life went the way he wanted. To ten year old Kyuhyun, the man seemed invincible. He had never seen his father be shaken by anything, the man guarded every emotion, never showed any weakness to the boy. It was unsettling to see the man so broken, so humbled by something far beyond his control. Kyuhyun's mother was dead. Even though Kyuhyun survived and the broken bones and bruises would heal, there was irreparable damage to his brain stem.
He had all of his senses, he was conscious and able to think as clearly as he did before the accident, but he had no control over most of the muscles in his body. Essentially, Kyuhyun was trapped within his own body.
"I don't care what you have to do, fix my boy." His father demanded as he brought in specialist after specialist. Months and months went by, Kyuhyun learned to communicate by blinking in morse code. His father began to visit him less and less.
After a year, his father didn't visit him at all. By the second year, when Kyuhyun lived in a nursing home, all he got from his father was a generic holiday card signed by his father's secretary. It was when his father signed him over to the care of the state that Kyuhyun was approached by a group of military doctors. They offered him an experimental procedure. If it worked, he'd be able to walk and talk and play like he used to, but that the risks were severe. They had been working on it for decades, but they were sure that this time it would work. Kyuhyun would be part of history, they told him, he would be the first. He agreed to it without any hesitation. Maybe if they fixed him, if he was the first, and a part of history maybe he'd be unique enough for his father to take him back.
He remembered every second of the surgery, he was awake through the entire thing. It was strange to feel them pushing needles and objects into his brain. He felt them inject something cold and distinctly unnatural into the space separating his brain from his skull. Kyuhyun never forgot the first time he moved his fingers after two years. He began to cry and before he realized what he was doing--he lifted his hand and wiped away the tears.
***
After the surgery there were tests. While he learned how to walk, talk, eat, and use the restroom on his own again; he was beginning to learn how to do other things too. He was taught that the implant that allowed him to connect his brain to the rest of his body also let him connect to other things too. Some tests were like games: talk to the man in the other room using his computer's speakers, place whatever number landed on the die on all of the computers in the building, find the story hidden in this computer and send it to the computer in your room. Some of the other tests weren't that fun.
Some days he'd wake up and find that he was unable to move again. They'd tell him that something was stopping the thing in his head from working, and if he could figure out how to fix it himself he'd get a special reward. Those tests were hard to pass, difficult puzzles he'd have to pick apart within his own mind. One day, he found a way to shut them out, keep them from putting hard puzzles that took away his control into his head. After he did that, the atmosphere seemed to change. Kyuhyun did something they didn't think he should be able to do, and it was clear on their faces that it bothered them.
They brought in a girl with wide eyes and guileless smile. Her name was Aoki, and she was like him. They were supposed to play a game, the doctors drew a line in the middle of the room and had each sit at opposite sides of the room.
"Aoki, I want you to get Kyuhyun to walk across that line. Remember how we taught you."
Kyuhyun remembered the smile the girl gave him, but couldn't remember when or how he stood and walked across the line. He didn't like the game at all.
"Kyuhyun, now you get Aoki to walk across the line, and try to do what you think she did."
"This is stupid." He thought with a frown.
"I know, but we have to." Aoki's voice answered in his own mind, as clear as if she thought it.
"Are you in my head?"
"I think you're in my head. You are so loud, your thoughts hurt."
"Sorry, but how do you do it? How did you make me move?"
"I pretended that your legs were my legs and walked as you."
Kyuhyun closed his eyes and thought about her legs, shorter than his were, with girly, fluffy slippers. He stood on those legs and walked across the line on the floor. When he opened his eyes again, she was standing there with a smile on her face.
"You can do it, too."
When they asked her to make him see a pink cat sitting in her chair, she couldn't do it. When it was Kyuhyun's turn, not only did she say that she saw the cat but she insisted that she walked across the room and pet it. The entire time she had sat still, it took the time of her blinking for him to come up with the stupid image. Not only did she see it, but she insisted it was real.
"It was real, wasn't it?"
"I wasn't trying to make you think it was real. I just wanted you to see it."
"It was real!" The girl's insistence even in her mind was unsettling the boy.
"What did I do?"
They asked her to move him again, but she couldn't. He was tired of the game, he didn't want to hear her thoughts anymore, he didn't want her to hear his thoughts anymore. It was weird. If she wanted to talk she could use her mouth, if she spent as much time as him unable to speak she wouldn't want to keep having conversations they couldn't hear anyway. So he shut her out, just like he did with the doctors' computers.
***
He was sixteen and sick of living trapped in the research institution. Despite their best efforts, they couldn't keep the outside world hidden from Kyuhyun. He read the reports, he knew that what they did to him paved the way for others. Brain computer interfaces were now as common as cell phones, not only used to cure paralysis and blindness, but also helped foster a boom within the cybernetic community. Soon bionic prosthetics were available, artificial limbs that worked as well as if they were naturally a part of the body.
It was these advances that kept him locked up. With him and other other test subjects like him, they tested how far such implants could go. Before him, many had died with horrific side effects. There were five others who had the same implants as him, he was the only one left alive because he was the only one that hadn't tried to escape.
He was still interesting to their studies because of a unique syndrome they believed he possessed. They called it CS. Their definition of it was that he had some form of BCI induced autism. That his brain was too compatible with the technology, and that he shut himself off from the outside world to prevent harming himself or anyone else by forcibly hacking his own BCI. It was rare enough that he could hack into other implanted BCIs, but it was a phenomenon in itself that he could hack his own mind.
It was a ruse. While it was true that when he was younger he had instinctively taught himself to shut out others from accessing his BCI, it was more his body protecting itself. He had learned how to trick their devices and scanners into producing whatever he wanted. To them, he was forcing his brain to be unresponsive except to complete simple tasks. It was an act. It kept them from making him do things he had lost taste in doing years ago. Hacking into other people, playing with their memories, there were so many of them now. He was more interested in accessing the internet. The amount of information he could find and manipulate was dizzying. It left him with a rush that nothing else could ever compete with.
It was through the internet that he learned that the scientists were planning on terminating him. He was too much of a risk, him and others like him needed to be flushed out for the good of everyone else. The modifications he had were now illegal to have, they were impossible to remove safely. It was better to let him die. By the time they had made their decision, their ward was gone.
***
Making a life for himself off of the grid was easy. He had long forgotten about the life he had before. It was irrelevant to who he was now. He could have made himself wealthy, feared, and powerful. A man like the father he vaguely remembered. Instead he lived a simple life, in the poorest part of the city. The Bottoms was where the leftovers and forgotten members of their society belonged, and he was one of them.
Kyuhyun offered his services in exchange for food or shelter, since most of the people he chose to work for rarely had any money they could part with. He preferred the jobs that improved the lives of the impoverished, and he had little qualms about messing with the BCIs of heavily modified thugs and crooks.
It was when he hacked into the system of some punk with orange hair that his life changed. The people the kid worked for knew it was him, but instead of retaliating, they offered him a job.
The boss was unlike anything he imagined the man would be. In his mind, those with power were imposing and guarded. The lithe figure who approached him was almost unabashedly cheerful. Every emotion seemed to be in plain view with each passing expression of his face. Kyuhyun was so taken off guard that he forgot to remind himself not to like the man.
It was when the gang leader informally introduced Kyuhyun to his 'sons' that Kyuhyun decided he'd humor the gang for awhile. Even though the two were introduced as the leader's children, they couldn't have been more than a decade younger. The older of the two 'children' was as cheerful and outgoing as the gang leader was, even sporting a similar haircut. It was the smaller, shier, and almost withdrawn youth that captured Kyuhyun's attention.
When their eyes met, those lips that he couldn't help but stare at quirked into the faintest of smiles, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, his heart felt like it skipped a beat. Curiosity was a powerful motivator in Kyuhyun, if the only payment they could offer him was a chance to be around the smaller man, he decided he would take it. Kyuhyun wanted to know what made him smile like he did that day. He wanted to know how someone could have such a piercing and captivating gaze, while seem so uneasy if anyone took notice.
What began as a diversion to pass the time, started to become something else. Instead of being driven to think of what only was best for himself while occasionally thinking of others, his thoughts began to think of other peoples' best interests before his own. Especially when it came to the man he had developed feelings for that he had yet to completely comprehend. He had never had a family, at least a family that he could completely remember, and he never had anyone to love or want to protect. Until Eeteuk brought Ryeowook and the rest of their family into his life.
****
It would have been a beautiful sunset if it wasn't for the bone-chilling wind, or the thick clouds forming overhead. Ryeowook could swear that he could taste the water in the air. It was cold outside, and he knew it was only going to get colder once the clouds broke and buried the city in snow. Unlike other twelve year olds, Ryeowook hated the snow. Snow was enjoyable for kids who had homes and warm beds to take shelter in. Being stuck on the street with nothing but the clothes on his back, snow was yet another dangerous thing to deal with. Because of the holiday, the usual places he knew he could go to take refuge were closed. So he walked further into the Bottoms, down streets he had been too scared to travel before.
He knew how dangerous it could be at night. The people he usually encountered were either nice, not so nice, or very mean to him. The men who found him that night were not nice or even not so nice, but as long as they let him live, he wouldn't mind.
Ever since Yesung pointed out the four men causing him trouble, the memory was stuck on repeat in Ryeowook's mind. Vivid as if it was still happening, it preoccupied his thoughts to the point that the line between then and the present blurred. He was back to being twelve without anywhere to go, starving, and in pain. Back to the fear and despair of being beaten to death just for existing.
Something had to be done. He'd never be able to sleep knowing they were out there, hurting others, hurting him. They were police, more corrupt than the ones that could be tolerated. The police were supposed to help the people and protect them. Instead they hurt defenseless people for fun. They'd kill Yesung if they had the chance, kill any of the people he cared about, kill him. He decided that they had to go.
All it would take was a few phone calls.
***
The open space between walls lured him there, he had wandered the streets aimlessly for hours. The sky was growing dark, if his plan was successful, it would have already been carried out by now. Ryeowook didn't know for sure, he had left his cellphone at home. If it didn't work, he would simply have to think of a new plan.
"It worked." Kyuhyun said once Ryeowook appeared in the doorway, as if he knew what was on the smaller man's mind.
"I left my phone at home." Ryeowook explained as he walked over to the corner of the warehouse Kyuhyun was sitting. It was the only area in the large space that didn't have any furniture. The furniture that did exist in Kyuhyun's space were brought by the others who minded that someone so young could live in such a large space alone without even a chair to relax on.
Ryeowook never minded. He understood. Chairs and beds were for people who never learned to find comfort on the ground.
"I know." Kyuhyun looked up at Ryeowook and smiled at him.
"I know you know. Maybe that's why I left it." Ryeowook returned the smile.
"You forgot it," Kyuhyun guessed with a smirk. "More important things to think about."
Kyuhyun was right, as he often was. Ryeowook was never sure if it was because of the younger man's augmented brain, or his unique perception of other people. With a sigh he nodded and sat down on the floor next to Kyuhyun. "They deserved it."
"I know." Kyuhyun nodded firmly. "Feel any better?"
"What else did I miss?" Ryeowook asked quietly with a yawn.
"Things." Kyuhyun answered evasively and tugged off his jacket to drape it over Ryeowook's shoulders.
"Anything important?" Ryeowook pressed, it was rare that Kyuhyun kept anything from him.
"Depends on what is important to you." A shrug.
"Kyuhyun-" Ryeowook whined even as the other reached over and pulled him close.
"I'll tell you later. Promise." Kyuhyun said instead of telling Ryeowook the events of the day. Of Eunhyuk's paralyzed form in the other room. All telling him would do was get Ryeowook preoccupied with fixing everything.
It was better to allow him some reprieve.
Authors: Scorpions angelinaii, murasaki_plum, nemesis_cry
Characters/Pairings: All (kangteuk, shichul, kihae; potential kyuwook, eunkihae, shihanchul, yeshdong, yewook, minry)
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: AU, organized crime, postcyberpunk
Summary: In a world where money and crime go hand and hand, survival is not determined by the fittest, but the ones who will fight to live.
Warnings: violence, swearing, sexual situations
AN: Thank you so much for the warm response so far!
Introduction and Chapter 1 | Chapters 2 & 3 | Chapter 4
Banner by angelinaii
Dust rose in a yellow cloud, dispersing over the windshield. It was like driving through a sandstorm, one that reached the inner streets of the city, the dilapidated old buildings doing little to cut through the haze. Sungmin's driving did the job just fine instead. He didn't brake until they were well under a dark canopy suspended at the back of a depot. Kyuhyun had a fondness for large spaces that Eeteuk neither challenged nor sought to understand. He provided a service and he deserved the privilege. It really was that simple.
Problems only arose when Kyuhyun couldn't do his job. It was rare, thankfully. So rare, in fact, Eeteuk had no plan B. Or at least, not one that would be desirable.
With Sungmin trailing him--proper to Kangin's orders, he was sure--Eeteuk forced his anxiety to the deepest corners of his being and pressed on.
Wandering through a dark and widening hallway toward the only source of light, they found them. Kyuhyun stared out in their direction, his eyes unfocused and illuminated by the streams of information ran through his processors. His hand hovered above a Eunhyuk's prone body, a white sheet covering the other man from head to foot.
"Shit, is he dead?" Sungmin blurted out and even if Eeteuk couldn't see his expression, there was no mistaking the sudden intake of breath.
Good question, he thought, kneeling by the other two. "Can you fix it?"
"He's not dead." Kyuhyun commented, blinking out to observe the two in the room before returning to his work. "Eunhyuk kept saying that he didn't like staring up at me and so I fixed it for him."
"Can someone pull the sheet down? Please?"
Eeteuk obliged with a contained sigh. Clearly, his gang was made of people with issues reaching only as far as their skills. It was an acceptable trade off.
"Okay there?" he smiled to Eunhyuk, then without waiting for a reply, turned to Kyuhyun again. "Kibum had some interesting things to say about what happened. I don't suppose he made them up, did he?"
"Eunkyuk is still hacked, if that is what you're asking." Kyuhyun said, roaming his hand in the air over Eunhyuk's body. "I am tracing the virus to its source and researching any connections before I sever them. If I disable the hack without using the proper method, it could be dangerous. The hacker who set this off covers his tracks unusually well."
A curt nod because out of all of them, Kyuhyun knew best.
"Aren't you running a risk of infection by doing this?" Eeteuk checked, drawing back to fold one leg under him and lean his arm on the other.
Kyuhyun didn't blink. "Yes."
Eeteuk arched an eyebrow. "I'm assuming there's an absolute need for it, then, and you're not just posing as Heechul for shits and giggles." Without giving the other man a chance to reply, without allowing for the possibility that Kyuhyun hadn't thought this through, he added: "Do you think you'll be able to track down whoever's behind it?" If cybernetics failed, there was always brute force and in the real world, Henry and Hankyung were very efficient.
"I've gotten close." Kyuhyun answered with a slight frown. "I know what he looks like, his presence in the stream is distinct enough. He likes smoke and mirrors. Distorted images, fractured pathways, twisted stuff like that. If I can just find a strong enough signal I can trace him to his offline persona."
"Is there anything we can do to help you?"
"Whoever I'm chasing is too good to just be some hackjob off of the street. Someone made him, government level. That kind of information isn't kept on computers."
"I'll see what I can do." Eeteuk sighed, squeezing Eunhyuk's shoulder before glancing over at Sungmin hovering behind him. "Let's go."
Kyuhyun acknowledged Sungmin's friendly wave but didn't bother to watch them leave, returning his attention to the avatar without a face that continued to taunt him in his mind. He had to close his eyes when the room began to spin, he was reaching his limit. That didn't bring any incentive to stop his pursuit of the faceless man. It was unthinkable for someone to be stronger than him in this; it was impossible. It was in his design.
***
The first thing he remembered after the accident was opening his eyes as he was wheeled into the operating room. A doctor was shouting words at him, but none of it made sense. He caught the word he recognized as his name, and hospital, but everything else was a mystery. He didn't have time to ponder over the frustrating confusion of knowing something but unable to remember it, because the mask placed over his face made everything black again.
The second thing he remembered after the accident was opening his eyes as he laid in a hospital bed. It was something he couldn't forget. He instinctively wanted to look around, make sense of his surroundings, but his eyes remained pointed to the ceiling. He tried to call out, but no sound issued from his vocal cords. His lips, which felt dry as the inside of his mouth and his itchy throat, didn't even move. His arms throbbed with pain, and even that seemed minor to the intense pain he felt in his legs. But even though he could feel them, nothing moved, not even a twitch of a finger or a wiggle of a toe. It was terrifying, all he could do was blink.
Kyuhyun remembered the tone of his father's voice as he explained about the car accident. His father was a man of extreme wealth and power, everything in his life went the way he wanted. To ten year old Kyuhyun, the man seemed invincible. He had never seen his father be shaken by anything, the man guarded every emotion, never showed any weakness to the boy. It was unsettling to see the man so broken, so humbled by something far beyond his control. Kyuhyun's mother was dead. Even though Kyuhyun survived and the broken bones and bruises would heal, there was irreparable damage to his brain stem.
He had all of his senses, he was conscious and able to think as clearly as he did before the accident, but he had no control over most of the muscles in his body. Essentially, Kyuhyun was trapped within his own body.
"I don't care what you have to do, fix my boy." His father demanded as he brought in specialist after specialist. Months and months went by, Kyuhyun learned to communicate by blinking in morse code. His father began to visit him less and less.
After a year, his father didn't visit him at all. By the second year, when Kyuhyun lived in a nursing home, all he got from his father was a generic holiday card signed by his father's secretary. It was when his father signed him over to the care of the state that Kyuhyun was approached by a group of military doctors. They offered him an experimental procedure. If it worked, he'd be able to walk and talk and play like he used to, but that the risks were severe. They had been working on it for decades, but they were sure that this time it would work. Kyuhyun would be part of history, they told him, he would be the first. He agreed to it without any hesitation. Maybe if they fixed him, if he was the first, and a part of history maybe he'd be unique enough for his father to take him back.
He remembered every second of the surgery, he was awake through the entire thing. It was strange to feel them pushing needles and objects into his brain. He felt them inject something cold and distinctly unnatural into the space separating his brain from his skull. Kyuhyun never forgot the first time he moved his fingers after two years. He began to cry and before he realized what he was doing--he lifted his hand and wiped away the tears.
***
After the surgery there were tests. While he learned how to walk, talk, eat, and use the restroom on his own again; he was beginning to learn how to do other things too. He was taught that the implant that allowed him to connect his brain to the rest of his body also let him connect to other things too. Some tests were like games: talk to the man in the other room using his computer's speakers, place whatever number landed on the die on all of the computers in the building, find the story hidden in this computer and send it to the computer in your room. Some of the other tests weren't that fun.
Some days he'd wake up and find that he was unable to move again. They'd tell him that something was stopping the thing in his head from working, and if he could figure out how to fix it himself he'd get a special reward. Those tests were hard to pass, difficult puzzles he'd have to pick apart within his own mind. One day, he found a way to shut them out, keep them from putting hard puzzles that took away his control into his head. After he did that, the atmosphere seemed to change. Kyuhyun did something they didn't think he should be able to do, and it was clear on their faces that it bothered them.
They brought in a girl with wide eyes and guileless smile. Her name was Aoki, and she was like him. They were supposed to play a game, the doctors drew a line in the middle of the room and had each sit at opposite sides of the room.
"Aoki, I want you to get Kyuhyun to walk across that line. Remember how we taught you."
Kyuhyun remembered the smile the girl gave him, but couldn't remember when or how he stood and walked across the line. He didn't like the game at all.
"Kyuhyun, now you get Aoki to walk across the line, and try to do what you think she did."
"This is stupid." He thought with a frown.
"I know, but we have to." Aoki's voice answered in his own mind, as clear as if she thought it.
"Are you in my head?"
"I think you're in my head. You are so loud, your thoughts hurt."
"Sorry, but how do you do it? How did you make me move?"
"I pretended that your legs were my legs and walked as you."
Kyuhyun closed his eyes and thought about her legs, shorter than his were, with girly, fluffy slippers. He stood on those legs and walked across the line on the floor. When he opened his eyes again, she was standing there with a smile on her face.
"You can do it, too."
When they asked her to make him see a pink cat sitting in her chair, she couldn't do it. When it was Kyuhyun's turn, not only did she say that she saw the cat but she insisted that she walked across the room and pet it. The entire time she had sat still, it took the time of her blinking for him to come up with the stupid image. Not only did she see it, but she insisted it was real.
"It was real, wasn't it?"
"I wasn't trying to make you think it was real. I just wanted you to see it."
"It was real!" The girl's insistence even in her mind was unsettling the boy.
"What did I do?"
They asked her to move him again, but she couldn't. He was tired of the game, he didn't want to hear her thoughts anymore, he didn't want her to hear his thoughts anymore. It was weird. If she wanted to talk she could use her mouth, if she spent as much time as him unable to speak she wouldn't want to keep having conversations they couldn't hear anyway. So he shut her out, just like he did with the doctors' computers.
***
He was sixteen and sick of living trapped in the research institution. Despite their best efforts, they couldn't keep the outside world hidden from Kyuhyun. He read the reports, he knew that what they did to him paved the way for others. Brain computer interfaces were now as common as cell phones, not only used to cure paralysis and blindness, but also helped foster a boom within the cybernetic community. Soon bionic prosthetics were available, artificial limbs that worked as well as if they were naturally a part of the body.
It was these advances that kept him locked up. With him and other other test subjects like him, they tested how far such implants could go. Before him, many had died with horrific side effects. There were five others who had the same implants as him, he was the only one left alive because he was the only one that hadn't tried to escape.
He was still interesting to their studies because of a unique syndrome they believed he possessed. They called it CS. Their definition of it was that he had some form of BCI induced autism. That his brain was too compatible with the technology, and that he shut himself off from the outside world to prevent harming himself or anyone else by forcibly hacking his own BCI. It was rare enough that he could hack into other implanted BCIs, but it was a phenomenon in itself that he could hack his own mind.
It was a ruse. While it was true that when he was younger he had instinctively taught himself to shut out others from accessing his BCI, it was more his body protecting itself. He had learned how to trick their devices and scanners into producing whatever he wanted. To them, he was forcing his brain to be unresponsive except to complete simple tasks. It was an act. It kept them from making him do things he had lost taste in doing years ago. Hacking into other people, playing with their memories, there were so many of them now. He was more interested in accessing the internet. The amount of information he could find and manipulate was dizzying. It left him with a rush that nothing else could ever compete with.
It was through the internet that he learned that the scientists were planning on terminating him. He was too much of a risk, him and others like him needed to be flushed out for the good of everyone else. The modifications he had were now illegal to have, they were impossible to remove safely. It was better to let him die. By the time they had made their decision, their ward was gone.
***
Making a life for himself off of the grid was easy. He had long forgotten about the life he had before. It was irrelevant to who he was now. He could have made himself wealthy, feared, and powerful. A man like the father he vaguely remembered. Instead he lived a simple life, in the poorest part of the city. The Bottoms was where the leftovers and forgotten members of their society belonged, and he was one of them.
Kyuhyun offered his services in exchange for food or shelter, since most of the people he chose to work for rarely had any money they could part with. He preferred the jobs that improved the lives of the impoverished, and he had little qualms about messing with the BCIs of heavily modified thugs and crooks.
It was when he hacked into the system of some punk with orange hair that his life changed. The people the kid worked for knew it was him, but instead of retaliating, they offered him a job.
The boss was unlike anything he imagined the man would be. In his mind, those with power were imposing and guarded. The lithe figure who approached him was almost unabashedly cheerful. Every emotion seemed to be in plain view with each passing expression of his face. Kyuhyun was so taken off guard that he forgot to remind himself not to like the man.
It was when the gang leader informally introduced Kyuhyun to his 'sons' that Kyuhyun decided he'd humor the gang for awhile. Even though the two were introduced as the leader's children, they couldn't have been more than a decade younger. The older of the two 'children' was as cheerful and outgoing as the gang leader was, even sporting a similar haircut. It was the smaller, shier, and almost withdrawn youth that captured Kyuhyun's attention.
When their eyes met, those lips that he couldn't help but stare at quirked into the faintest of smiles, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, his heart felt like it skipped a beat. Curiosity was a powerful motivator in Kyuhyun, if the only payment they could offer him was a chance to be around the smaller man, he decided he would take it. Kyuhyun wanted to know what made him smile like he did that day. He wanted to know how someone could have such a piercing and captivating gaze, while seem so uneasy if anyone took notice.
What began as a diversion to pass the time, started to become something else. Instead of being driven to think of what only was best for himself while occasionally thinking of others, his thoughts began to think of other peoples' best interests before his own. Especially when it came to the man he had developed feelings for that he had yet to completely comprehend. He had never had a family, at least a family that he could completely remember, and he never had anyone to love or want to protect. Until Eeteuk brought Ryeowook and the rest of their family into his life.
****
It would have been a beautiful sunset if it wasn't for the bone-chilling wind, or the thick clouds forming overhead. Ryeowook could swear that he could taste the water in the air. It was cold outside, and he knew it was only going to get colder once the clouds broke and buried the city in snow. Unlike other twelve year olds, Ryeowook hated the snow. Snow was enjoyable for kids who had homes and warm beds to take shelter in. Being stuck on the street with nothing but the clothes on his back, snow was yet another dangerous thing to deal with. Because of the holiday, the usual places he knew he could go to take refuge were closed. So he walked further into the Bottoms, down streets he had been too scared to travel before.
He knew how dangerous it could be at night. The people he usually encountered were either nice, not so nice, or very mean to him. The men who found him that night were not nice or even not so nice, but as long as they let him live, he wouldn't mind.
Ever since Yesung pointed out the four men causing him trouble, the memory was stuck on repeat in Ryeowook's mind. Vivid as if it was still happening, it preoccupied his thoughts to the point that the line between then and the present blurred. He was back to being twelve without anywhere to go, starving, and in pain. Back to the fear and despair of being beaten to death just for existing.
Something had to be done. He'd never be able to sleep knowing they were out there, hurting others, hurting him. They were police, more corrupt than the ones that could be tolerated. The police were supposed to help the people and protect them. Instead they hurt defenseless people for fun. They'd kill Yesung if they had the chance, kill any of the people he cared about, kill him. He decided that they had to go.
All it would take was a few phone calls.
***
The open space between walls lured him there, he had wandered the streets aimlessly for hours. The sky was growing dark, if his plan was successful, it would have already been carried out by now. Ryeowook didn't know for sure, he had left his cellphone at home. If it didn't work, he would simply have to think of a new plan.
"It worked." Kyuhyun said once Ryeowook appeared in the doorway, as if he knew what was on the smaller man's mind.
"I left my phone at home." Ryeowook explained as he walked over to the corner of the warehouse Kyuhyun was sitting. It was the only area in the large space that didn't have any furniture. The furniture that did exist in Kyuhyun's space were brought by the others who minded that someone so young could live in such a large space alone without even a chair to relax on.
Ryeowook never minded. He understood. Chairs and beds were for people who never learned to find comfort on the ground.
"I know." Kyuhyun looked up at Ryeowook and smiled at him.
"I know you know. Maybe that's why I left it." Ryeowook returned the smile.
"You forgot it," Kyuhyun guessed with a smirk. "More important things to think about."
Kyuhyun was right, as he often was. Ryeowook was never sure if it was because of the younger man's augmented brain, or his unique perception of other people. With a sigh he nodded and sat down on the floor next to Kyuhyun. "They deserved it."
"I know." Kyuhyun nodded firmly. "Feel any better?"
"What else did I miss?" Ryeowook asked quietly with a yawn.
"Things." Kyuhyun answered evasively and tugged off his jacket to drape it over Ryeowook's shoulders.
"Anything important?" Ryeowook pressed, it was rare that Kyuhyun kept anything from him.
"Depends on what is important to you." A shrug.
"Kyuhyun-" Ryeowook whined even as the other reached over and pulled him close.
"I'll tell you later. Promise." Kyuhyun said instead of telling Ryeowook the events of the day. Of Eunhyuk's paralyzed form in the other room. All telling him would do was get Ryeowook preoccupied with fixing everything.
It was better to allow him some reprieve.