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First Iteration: A monstrous wonderland
They call it Wonderland – not that Baekyun sees anything particularly wondrous about the table strewn with broken dishware in front of him. How many times has he sat here?
No one ever says anything. They just sit and scowl at one another out of heavily lined eyes.
Baekhyun tries to remember the flavor of food.
He can smell cordite and hear shouts. The scent and sound of every day. They’re always fighting something – things without faces, mostly, as if they live in some kind of dream. Is that what “Wonderland” means?
No. There’s nothing wondrous at all. Just endless fighting, and three of their mirror-selves already gone.
His own mirror-self sitting at the table, looking away from everyone.
Why had they ever agreed to send half of themselves through the looking-glass to that other world? None of them would ever say what happened to them over there. But first Kris’s eyes turned, then Luhan’s, and they never came out of the maze, stuck forever in the Red Kingdom.
How did any of them survive Sehun’s grief when Tao's eyes went red?
“You’re late,” Suho’s voice rolls across the empty room.
The question is: how late is he?
Second iteration: Lucky it’s not worse
D.O.’s always watching. He’s never quite in the same space they are. He’s up on a pole, or set to one side. Eyes always on Chen, watching for that telltale flash of red.
Baekhyun remembers before the mirror, when Chen was Jongdae. Jongdae used to laugh, a loud, braying giggle, and the clasp of his hand was always warm.
The white room is the worst place. On this level of time, Baekhyun thinks the red-masked nurses must know something, from the way they shoot him up with a substance that burns in his veins, leaves him passive, limbs as loose as noodles. He can’t do more than stand next to Chanyeol and worry about the red of his hair, the red of his flames. A glass box separates him from even himself, so Baekhyun has to trust that D.O.’s watching Chen, that Suho has Xiumin in hand. That Lay’s eyes remain brown.
“God, why are you late?” Suho says when they make it outside.
Suho counts them: their number is the same as it was when they started this level. Baekhyun sighs.
Third iteration: Somebody hit something, but it ain’t the lotto
There’s a girl, and Chanyeol can’t let it go.
“She was surrounded by wolves, Baek. Three wolves,” he says.
His hair has faded to a less-upsetting orange, but there’s red on his lip, his eye.
“Three. Maybe it means something, right? Maybe it’s Kr – maybe they’re our people.”
D.O. watches. Films them. The light all around them is red. Xiumin grins from behind bars, and Chen stares over a glass of red wine.
Something faceless looms close, and Baekhyun hits it; the pain in his knuckles is easier to focus on than his fear.
For a minute, it seems like a couple of them might actually escape for once: Chanyeol, Sehunnie, maybe even Kai. But they’re caught. The light’s red, so of course they’re caught. Chanyeol’s girl turns out to be nothing but paper, a low-value playing card bluffing at a better hand.
Suho smashes the car window when Channie won’t stop screaming.
“Too late,” he growls. “As usual.”
Fourth iteration: I don’t think we’re doing this right
It starts with destruction instead of ending. Is that better? Red light still washes over them.
Baekhyun wonders whether the people controlling them are trying to wear them down with pettiness. He keeps stepping on dice. The food’s all too salty or not salty enough, and Baekhyun feels a weird sensation in his gut, like he’s supposed to know that story, and there ought to be a “right” version somewhere, that if they could get the food right, win the game, achieve the mission, get comfortable, they would be free of all this jumping around, all this red light.
There’s a hard reset every 10 minutes on this level: are they on a field or in a diner? Chen and Xiumin make a universe of two: they talk on the phone, they disappear into the woods, come back through a fog with mud on their shoes and leaves in their hair. Baekhyun peers into their faces, looking for traces of red, but how can he tell? The light around them is as red as it ever was.
They hold each other’s hands, at least. They were Jongdae and Minseok once. They held hands then, too. Maybe it’s all right.
Somehow, with every reset, Baekhyun is alone. He looks up once to see Xiumin watching him through a mirror.
Baekhyun feels tired, like he hasn’t stopped running in years. Maybe it’s the light. Maybe it’s never knowing what comes next. Where is Lay?
“No time to linger,” Suho says.
Fifth iteration: Control is an illusion
Did anybody even see him go?
One minute, Lay was in the mix, one of nine sweaty men cheering a victory they didn’t understand in reeking plastic pads.
And the next?
The roar of a car engine. Absence.
His eyes must’ve turned red.
Baekhyun understands Chanyeol’s craziness a little better now. Sehun’s silence and the way Kai can’t stay in one place anymore, won’t answer to Jongin.
To lose one’s mirror-self is to feel too big for one’s own body. Grief makes them huge, and then small again.
Grief makes even basic conversation seem like an insoluble logic puzzle.
Fifth iteration: I think I don’t like it
Is it his turn next? Baekhyun finds his hair red, maybe he’s on his way to the Red Kingdom.
Whoever controls them doesn’t even try to make this level believable. Cars careen back and forth, Kai floats away, and what even is going on with Chanyeol’s pants.
This time it’s D.O. in the woods with Chen. Baekhyun wonders what he sees, that would make him follow Chen so closely.
For one moment, all the mayhem recedes around him, and Baekhyun turns his face to the sun.
Sometimes he thinks he remembers a tree, and warm hands gripping his own. Sometimes he thinks he remembers music, and what his face would feel like if he smiled.
Is that what peace is? If they can find a place with no red light in it, can they live this way?
But no. Chen shoves D.O. backwards, and his head splits the ground open, exposing red. The sky erupts into red light.
“This was important,” Suho says. “Did we miss it?”
Sixth iteration: Nobody has any power here
Someone has told the Red Kingdom. It has to be – otherwise, why would Baekhyun have been separated from them?
Chanyeol has one red eye. But it’s only one, right? Maybe there’s still time to save him.
Baekhyun presses against glass and watches the robot with its red eye try to kill his companions. They’re so brave. He wishes he could tell them how brave they are, how beautiful. How, when he holds up a shield that’s all shades of blue, Chen looks more like Jongdae than ever.
They win. Oh, for once, it’s a victory, it’s triumph, and Baekhyun throws himself at the control panel before any of the red-masked forms can stop him. He mashes every button he can see, in case they might help.
He’s caught.
He falls.
He falls forever, it feels like.
“Baekhyun,” he hears, as if from far away.
Suho’s voice.
“Where are you?
You’re late.”
Seventh iteration: The fine line between electric and shocking
It’s so much worse.
This must be his fault. What happened after he fell?
He remembers water – he wakes up wearing red.
None of the younger ones can hold onto reality, flickering where they stand.
“Cut here,” D.O. says, pointing to his neck. “Please.”
It’s so dark. But a red darkness. D.O.’s watching has bound him up in something sticky and blank. Xiumin is the watcher now, camera in hand, legs swinging back and forth while he pans from D.O.’s lolling head to Suho in his glass coffin to Kai and Chanyeol twitching under red lights.
Dread flows like a current in Baekhyun’s gut.
Chen turns with a weird red-faced model in his arms that he kisses, over and over.
“Finally,” he says. “Finally, Min.”
He looks up, and his lips stretch into something that no one would call a smile, not under those unfocused eyes.
“Baek, we’re so happy,” he says.
Baekhyun shudders and looks for Xiumin. Sees him from far off, watching, his face as impassive as the model’s. Watching Chen kiss that plastic thing and call it by his name.
“We can’t wait anymore,” Suho calls, his voice echoing as if from the bottom of a well.
Eighth iteration: Everything is so messed up
They’re in the Red Kingdom now. The light doesn’t pretend to be anything other than red. And Baekhyun’s still kept away from them. Now he has to watch again.
So he sees it, the way Xiumin stands in the space filled with red flowers, waiting for D.O. He sees how together they make a device that turns white light to red.
Baekhyun tries to call out, to warn D.O., but his voice can’t be heard over the roar of engines or Kai’s piano. In the space of a blink, D.O. is strewn across the flowers, and Xiumin is gone.
Chanyeol’s eyes have reverted to blue, but Baekhyun can see how Sehun observes him, how Chen questions him, why can’t they see it right there, Xiumin in the red. Xiumin turning, backed by red, to stare back at Baekhyun.
Baekhyun almost makes it. Suho’s able to pull him down from the watcher’s position, they inhabit the same space again.
“Time’s counting down,” Suho says, and Baekhyun opens his mouth to shout.
Lay returns.
Oh, it’s just a flash, but he’s there. He’s solid and dark-eyed and present and real, and Baekhyun can feel the absence in his heart filled up by Lay’s sheer presence, surely everything will be all right, if one of them can return from the Red Kingdom they all can, he can be whole now, and Lay will help them, they can get free –
But then he’s gone.
To feel Lay’s absence a second time is infinitely worse, because Baekhyun knows the hollow ache never goes away. Every word is stolen from Baekhyun’s throat.
He can only stand before the glowing red, and stare. And despair.
“God, it’s so late,” Suho says.
Ninth iteration: Someone’s getting shot, and not by the god of love
Now that he has watched, Baekhyun can see, and he wishes for the days of blindness.
“Don’t be late,” Suho says while he holds the red liquid in his hands.
It’s already late. Baekhyun sets his expectations low.
So many tricky moments.
They’re all holding hearts. That’s bad enough, because hearts are red, but Baekhyun suspects that it’s worse than that. That he holds one of their actual hearts in his hand, embedded in waxy paper between his fingers, more fragile than anything. Whose heart is it? He doesn’t want to break any of them.
Kai shows up all in red, and for a minute Baekhyun quails at the sight. When was there time? But the red melts away to darker colors once Sehun and Chanyeol are close.
They sit in a red theater, watching the other iterations on a screen. Baekhyun grips the armrests of his seat. Watches them watch their history, blank-faced. Except for the way Xiumin watches Chen, watches Chen drink from a glass that contains a red rose.
The red iteration plays, Xiumin and D.O. building the red cube, and Suho shields Chen’s eyes.
“Keep an eye on the time,” Suho hisses when he passes Baekhyun on the way out of the theater. “You can’t be late.”
It’s guns again. They haven’t had guns in a while. Baekhyun sits next to Xiumin with a gun in one hand and a playing card in the other.
“How much do you see, Baekhyunnie?” Xiumin asks.
Baekhyun throws his card in the flames.
So maybe Xiumin expects it, after the gunfire and the shouting, after they’ve stood back to back, the two of them and Chen, to fight off yet another round of faceless somethings.
He doesn’t look surprised, anyhow, when he pulls off the mask that Baekhyun doesn’t remember him wearing.
“What are you doing, Baek?” Chen asks when Baekhyun lifts his gun.
Or maybe it’s Jongdae, in that moment. Baekhyun hasn’t heard that tone of voice in a long time.
“Pour it out,” D.O. says. “All this red. It’s unhealthy.”
“You can’t be late,” Suho says.
“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun says.
“Oh yeah?”
Xiumin’s comment is almost lost under Chen’s shout.
But Chen is held back by the SKY, each of them taller than ever, hunched over against the ceiling, Chen so small in their hands, and Baekhyun closes his eyes as his finger moves. He lets Chen scream for him.
Chen will be all alone now, the last of the mirror-selves.
When Xiumin falls, it’s not blood that flows from him, but rose petals and playing cards. Hearts.
“I’ll kill you,” Jongdae screams behind Sehun’s arm.
Baekhyun nods.
First iteration’2: We may be one, but are any of us lucky?
He wakes in the white room, with a red-masked nurse bent over him.
It’s not the same as the last time: Chen’s hair is still blond, Xiumin’s red, Chanyeol’s dark.
Baekhyun almost falls back onto the bed with relief to see Xiumin.
He does fall back when he realizes Lay isn't there.
Baekhyun feels the thrum in his eardrums that means D.O.’s power rising. They’ll try their escape again, as they have more times than he can remember.
He watches Chen stare at Xiumin. Understands the danger in Xiumin’s glare at himself. They’ve all flirted with red, and some of them have come back from the brink. Some of them have not.
Maybe their other halves never really came back from the other side of the looking-glass.
The windows around their beds shatter.
How long do they have to do this?
Baekhyun doesn’t even remember what it means to be free.
“Time to get moving,” Suho says, “we can’t be late.”