Work Text:
Thursday. 12 February, 2021.
Wild birds of nondiscript plummage sing out in song as they head home, flying through streets and over concrete rooftops. A middle-aged lady mutters a string of curses as one flies low enough to graze the curls on her head.
Behind her, the sky is a burst of pink on light beige. Gentle pastels to wind down the day.
It’s been a day of work for most. Some have typed away at their desks, some have written on papers as the hours drag on. Others still have hoisted heavy weights atop broad shoulders.
Now it is dusk. Those who have typed push aside their keyboards, those who have written put down their pens. More heavy loads wait patiently in trucks, or in warehouses, or beside streets, for their turn to be lifted high into the air, brought to a faraway place, their contents to be emptied and their purpose, fulfilled.
Perhaps it’s been a day of learning for students, in their assigned seats in neat classrooms. Or maybe it’s a day of fun. Children, running by the beach, laughter and giddy shouts trailing behind. For some it’s been a day of fulfilment. Beginnings. Ends unknown and ends known.
For Park Jisung, it’s been none of these.
Instead, he stands alone in an empty stairwell in a foreign part of town, the colours of the sky blazing against his pupils as he inhales gasp after gasp of crisp seaside air, and wonders if the ground will take him first, or the mob will.
---
In the year of 2001, two seemingly distinct, unrelated events occur in the month of May.
The first is purely biological: an egg, fertilised by a sperm, has formed a blastocyst that embeds itself securely into the thickened walls of a womb. Cells fulfilling instructions in the DNA. A species executing the functions of life. The building blocks of humanity’s will to live.
The second is not biological by any means, and yet it is, for it is by a human vector that its beginning was made.
It begins with a young Korean girl. Or so they say.
Years later someone will uncover the psychiatrist’s report and note the by-then common signs and symptoms. Regular, painful pickaxe headaches about a minute apart. Nausea about ten minutes in, together with the feeling of falling through a tight, narrow vortex. Finally the images will come. So vivid you don’t know if you can’t mistake it for a dream. And that feeling in the gut. Tugging, pulling, insisting that it’s right.
There, on the bottom of the last page of the papers - the first prophecy. An apt occurance in a month that shares a name with possibility.
Of course - this term was coined with the benefit of hindsight. Since then it’s spread like a wildfire, people all over the globe coming forth with similar visions, all of them predicting an event in the future, some sounding more plausible than others before, inevitably, they would all come true.
The month also shares a name with permission, which no one seems to remember giving, to which others have retorted that the authority doesn’t lie with people. Though when the enormity of this development, by stroke of luck or otherwise, is recognised, no one gives anything but.
The papers containing the first prophecy were hurriedly unearth after that. The girl had been young - four, or maybe it was five years old. Her speech hadn’t been all too clear. The psychiatrist, it seemed from the notes, hadn’t been too convinced, took to the report-writing like a particularly tedious chore. He hadn’t moved to clarify further, and later when asked the girl herself had long forgotten whatever it had been.
The blue hair is the chosen one.
As a result, no one really knew if the events had come to pass.
---
In 2002, a baby is born completely bald.
Tests are run. Numbers in columns next to acronyms birthed from algorithms. The couple is assured that hair will grow in time, that there is nothing else the worry about the otherwise healthy baby boy.
They go home.
Two months later, the mother is rocking the baby to sleep when she runs her hand lovingly over the crown of his head. It’s soft. She almost cries.
Another two weeks after that, it’s undisputable to both husband and wife. The baby’s hair shimmers blue.
---
The baby’s name is Jisung and his family name, Park. Park Jisung. An ordinary name for an ordinary boy. For he is most certainly an ordinary boy under the wig he’s learned to wear at all times outside of the house.
As he grows each day, new cells replacing the old at astonishing rate, so does the city. In a matter of years the side-alleys of Seoul are packed with those who claim to be able to see the future. It’s a booming business. Anyone who’s worth their salt knows that for as many hacks as there are, there are as many with the real thing down those alleys, if you know where to ask. Or who to ask. Or how much to pay. Sometimes they’re all the same thing.
Fortune-telling isn’t relegated to alleys or backend shops. Seeking the future as a practice has made it’s way into the nook and crannies of the high-rise offices throughout the world. They would never admit it, but every business that wants to even think of surviving past the year has a dedicated Seer (as they’ve come to be known) just for them. The really good ones go for exorbitant costs.
No one knows what gives the Seers the power to do what they do. Not all Seers are equal, though. Some go through elabourate routines in order to channel it. Others can perform it in the blink of an eye, zero in on a query like a high definition picture on a holopad. The girl who’d uttered her first prophecy at four, or maybe it had been five years old, had long since uttered her last.
An enormous gift, people would say. An enormous responsibility. The greates revolution the world has seen in the century and maybe even the millenial.
If you asked the elderly, though, the world was still largely the same. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The world, the economy, all the systems maintained by the ones who built it for themselves, except this time, they make each move with more certainty, greater glee.
It is them, especially, who remember the first prophecy. Them and the people of the street who live their days squeezed into one-room apartments, never knowing where their next meal might come from.
Both of them remember the first prophecy with an equal mixture of trepidation and curiosity, because it is them who know right down to their bone marrow that the society is sick. Sick and rotting, decaying and dying.
The chosen one. Each hoping he or she will be for their own purposes.
There have been many in academia who have come forth to quell the murmurs. On television they’d list any manner of social ill and suggest a myriad of possibilities that seem duller than having a ‘prophecy’ makes it out to be. Perhaps this person would be a scientist who finds a literal cure for a certain disease. Maybe they’d eradicate the common flu.
Hardly anyone pays them mind. They’ve already probably been paid enough.
Conspiracy theorists continue to lurk in the recesses of the internet where the censorship doesn’t reach. Some suggest a further development of superpowers, maybe the coming of an all-powerful Seer the likes of which nobody has heard of before.
A lone user pipes up. Perhaps they will be an artist who will become a true advocate for the people, use art as a weapon.
The user is quickly hushed. Someone says something mean about his sentence structuring, how the grammar is half-wrong.
Amidst the voices of the city played out through the television or the internet, amidst the growth of the hacks and the genuine, some things remain constant. The sun rises from the East and falls in the West. Shadows are cast when light has been interrupted. People work. People study. People laugh. There are beginnings, and there are ends both known and unknown.
Some people sing. Music is made that grows and evolves, the people that make it stepping in time with the social beat of the day for as long as they can before they cannot and step away, leave the floor for the next new wave.
The boy, Jisung, learns to love music. So he starts to dance because people laugh, people sing, and people dance, too.
In some other part of the world, another seemingly distinct, unrelated prophecy is spoken in a different tongue.
---
It all begins with an accident.
Jisung is sitting alone at the lecture hall. His pen and notebook sit untouched on the bench, the whiteboard empty and waiting. His headphones are playing a tune. His toes are tapping along to the beat when someone bumps into him.
“Sorry,” that someone says, “I didn’t mean to -”
That someone falls silent. Silence preceeds destruction by building up on itself, so maybe Jisung should have expected it. Stayed still.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jisung says instead as he turns around. “Accidents happen…”
His voice trails of. He looks into the wide eyes of that someone, feels the heat of their gaze as it bores into a spot just above his left eyebrow.
Self-consciously, Jisung reaches a hand up. His wig is not where it is supposed to be.
“Holy shit,” is what he hears. Then all hell breaks loose.
The rest is a blur. Sometime after he hears someone say ‘holy shit’, he’s grabbed his bag and lept from his seat. Jisung has all but vaulted over the table before the class full of people move as one. Hands and finger grab at his clothes and his bag. Somehow, he makes it outside.
As he dashes out the glass doors, a hand reaches out and pulls his wig free.
The whole university square stares.
Jisung runs.
---
His parents are not home. His father is overseas for a conference, his mother visiting a relative in Jeju. His parents, who have taught him since young to keep the wig on securely.
There hadn’t been another way. The dye, if regular hair dye would ever worked on him, would damage his scalp beyond repair. He’s tried, god knows he’s tried. The bleach would sting his scalp but he’d endure it so he wouldn’t have to sweat it out underneath the wig, but no. Once the bleach came off his hair would greet him in the mirror, blue as always.
Jisung slams the door shut behind him. His heart feels like it’ll jump out of his ribcage at any moment, consciousness on the verge of losing grip.
Outside, the mob pounds at the gates.
There’s no one else to defend him. He peeks out from the blinds and the lower-level neighbours have all joined in. They know where he lives. The door won’t hold against so many.
So Jisung empties his school bag and lets the stationary clatter to the floor. He grabs a bottle of water and any food he can find, and waits for the swarm downstairs to flood into the building. Once most of them are in, he lets himself out by the window and scales the fire exit.
---
Thursday, 12 February 2021.
It’s been three days. Three days of running and hiding wherever he thinks he won’t be found but always is. If he’s lucky he’ll have had time to scarf down food, refill his water bottle. Once he was even able to take a three hour nap before he heard the footsteps coming, louder and louder each time. Then he had to run again. Hide.
On the morning of the second day with his hoodie pulled tight, Jisung had bought a pair of scissors and a razor from a convenience store. In a public bathroom he’d locked the door. Pulled off his his hood. Raised the scissors.
The hairs would not fall. No matter how he tried, they would not go down a shorter length than what his parents would cut for him at home. They just won’t.
Jisung almost cried with frustration. He’d settled with hurling the mangled scissors into the bin with as much force as he could manage.
It’s been three days of running and hiding, and running again. Jisung’s phone has long since run out of battery. His portable charger’s long been drained too. His parents wouldn’t be back yet, anyway.
His parents. They told him about the prophecy in middle school, and have always been there to talk through what it may mean with him. Jisung knows if it weren’t for the Interpol ban on a global manhunt things might have been much, much worse for him. He knows the whispers of what goes on in dark streets. It had been widely speculated that gangs have been working with the government to capture and check if they have suspicions.
Jisung used to be scared of it all. So scared he could never sleep at night, crying as he pictured being taken away from his home.
His parents never bought into the social frenzy. They saw him as their son, their son who was a child like any other and would be treated as such. Given a life with all the opportunities he could have. The chance to pursue what he loved. To choose his own path.
He was ready to do just that. Live his own life. Who cared about a prophecy from ages ago, right?
The public did. They see his blue hair, and think of the blue to be the sea, water. A life-giving source.
They were promised something, and they would get it, give life to their own purposes.
Jisung gulps down the last of his water, feels the droplets roll down his parched throat. His legs feel heavier than he’s ever felt. The backpack’s light, all food eaten, but his back feels like it’ll give way any time.
He wonders where he is. In the air, he can smell salt. It must be near the sea.
In the distance, footsteps. Steady, pounding, insistent. Here to get their due.
Jisung feels it again. The same hopeless frustration that bubbled up as he held up the ruined scissors, in a dirty bathroom in a town he couldn’t name.
He forces it down. If he cries, it’ll all be over. He’d dehydrate and collapse on the street, and they’d take him away. He can’t go down that way.
Yet - Jisung blinks with those heavy eyelids of his that haven’t slept more than a continuous three hours in the past thirty. Absently, he registers the sway of the ground and knows that it’s his feet. There’s a blister on his left toe. It feels like fire.
He can’t give up now.
With one last glance down the road, Jisung drags himself to the nearest building. One last chance. One last attempt.
Jisung staggers up the stairs. Each step makes his head swim and by the time he’s made it up the second flight, the nausea is overwhelming. He looks up at the rest of the stairs and decides to take his chance. He pushes open the doors. Totters down the corridor.
Behind him, the sounds of the mob.
Jisung almost trips as his grip on the wall slips under the sweat of his palm. The walls are swaying. The floor is swaying. Jisung sways straight into the wall and breathes. In, out.
They’re coming. The door to the stairwell below crashes open.
He takes one last step. Finds himself at a door. Weakly, hoping against a futile hope, Jisung leans into the white wood.
It swings open. He steps in. It swings shut.
Another door opens, and thunderous footsteps sound down the corridor, turn the corner. Jisung slumps down into a squat and fights to keep his eyes open.
The apartment is modest, but neat. Clean. White walls and decorated tastefully with yellows and beige. There’s a white couch right in front of him. Most importantly, it’s empty.
Jisung summons the last of his strength. He pushes himself to his feet and leans his weight on the door. Starts to count to three to use momentum to carry himself across the distance. One, two…
“Hello?”
Jisung whips his head around and glares, curls into himself.
A stranger stands alone in the room. He must’ve come from a different room, padded footsteps from fluffy slippers hiding his presence until he called out. He’s about Jisung’s height, maybe around his age, too. A slender, black-haired young man dressed in loose-fitting pyjamas.
Jisung closes his eyes and braces himself.
“Hey, are you okay?”
The stranger has taken a single step forward. His two hands are outstretched, palms up, like he’s trying to show Jisung there’s nothing in them, and that he wants to help.
Jisung laughs. Help.
“Don’t - don’t you know who I am?” he rasps out weakly, each syllable grating on his throat.
The stranger smiles a gentle, knowing smile. It’s so different from the smiles at the lecture hall, the university square, the neighbours. They’d smiled like they’d found a diamond someone else dropped in the mud. To bring home and use for themselves.
This one’s different. It’s a smile for him, not for himself.
“Give me a moment.”
The stranger turns and walks away. Jisung can’t help but stare. As soon as he leaves, the boy returns with a few items in hand.
“Drink, Renjun hyung said you’d be thirsty,” the stranger says matter-of-factly as he pushes a mug into Jisung’s hands. It doesn’t occur to Jisung that the liquid inside could be anything else he gulps it down so fast, instincts completely taking over. “He said you’ll need this, too.”
There’s a gentle pressure around his head as the stranger fits a beenie over Jisung’s hair.
Jisung looks up at those kind eyes. The ones that are smiling for him, not for himself. “Who - who are you?”
“I’m Chenle,” comes the reply. “My cousin’s a Seer, and he told me that on 12 February 2021, someone would come by needing help, and to prepare water, something to hide this person’s hair, and the guest room to rest in. He said things would fall into place naturally after that, that it was very important stuff, ‘cause we’re going to change the world with this message we’ll get in the future though I, uh, fell asleep waiting, but I found you in the end, right?”
“Your door was unlocked,” Jisung says. He understands none of what Chenle had said. It sounds important. Is it?
“I - oh.” Chenle blushes. Scratches his head before he starts to speak again and that accent, Jisung’s heard it before. Chenle’s Chinese, he realises. Maybe that’s why he’s not as enamoured by the prophecy as Korean youth. “Well, you got here in the end. That means tomorrow you’ll get news that you passed your audition.”
Jisung stares. He hasn’t told anyone about it, not even his parents. “How -”
“That’s ‘cause I’ll get the same news too.” Chenle has an impish grin on his face. “Me and Renjun hyung - that’s my cousin by the way - and these people called Mark hyung, Jaemin hyung, Jeno hyung, and Donghyuckie hyung. All of us together and wow, I’m not supposed to tell you this right now but you’ll hear it eventually, we've got big things to do and we'll help a lot of people, so isn’t it the coolest?”
“Who - what…?” Jisung is completely lost. His mind won’t focus no matter how hard he tries, and the more he tries, the more the floor starts to sway. “How…?”
Chenle seems to notice his state, and his expression is quickly replaced with concern. “No, nevermind. Ignore everything I just said, okay? That can all wait for tomorrow. For now, you need rest. You’ll be safe here. I promise.”
Gently, Chenle places an arm around Jisung and guides him into the house. Jisung’s too tired to protest when he finds himself lying on a soft mattress as Chenle pulls a thick blanket over his shivering body.
“You’ll be safe here.” Jisung thinks he hears Chenle say. “You have to be, to rest before we take on the world.”
Right before he falls asleep, he finds himself thinking he can believe it.