Work Text:
Intro
The hideout is dirty and cluttered. It squats in the landfill, drawing in trash, filtering out for itself what’s useful or beautiful or just interesting. The things pile up and up and up; it’s easy to lose track of what’s there. Sculptures, old recording equipment, half of a paper book. Things that make less sense: a ladle, a broken vacuum, an empty catbox. Hard to reason out why someone brought them in, rather than letting them bake slowly into dust outside.
Yeosang sits on an ottoman, flanked on each side by a huge old painting, mostly intact, and a towering file cabinet full of knickknacks. He is still and quiet. He’s been still and quiet since the other Seonghwa brought him to them, like that last burst of energy when he was rescued was it, was all he had left after an eternity in a glass box. And now he’s just another thing to be absorbed by the building, to rest unseen in the dim light, waiting for nothing.
1: Fear.
The others are all talking with Left Eye. Yeosang listens. Their counterparts have given them this mission: wake up the world. They’re talking about how to do it.
“We can broadcast music just like they did,” Wooyoung is saying, high-pitched and animated. “Make them feel.”
“That hasn’t worked, though,” Jongho objects. “It’s what got them captured in the first place. We don’t want to all end up in boxes.”
Yeosang shivers, the smallest twitch, but Jongho sees, somehow. He winces. “Sorry, Yeosang. Sorry.”
The shiver doesn’t go away. He can still feel it in his stomach, cold and dark; and again, in his shoulders, taut and tingling. The others keep talking: broadcasts. Missions. Sabotage.
“Yeosang’s good with machines,” Jongho says loudly at one point, and Yeosang jolts back to paying attention. “Maybe he could work with Left Eye. I bet you could help a lot with figuring those chips out, right?”
Yeosang nods. He could.
“Great. You be our guy here at the base. Hold down the fort.” Jongho claps him on the shoulder, squeezes. “You deserve a break, right?”
Hold down the fort, so he doesn’t get put in a box again. But the seven of them will be out there, in danger. The shiver gets stronger.
2: Loneliness.
He works on the chips with Left Eye. Left Eye doesn’t talk much, which is fine with Yeosang, who also doesn’t talk much. They work separately, most of the time; there’s too much to do. Chips, and broadcast equipment, and Black Link maintenance, and keeping them hidden from the Guardians. Always something to do.
The others have plenty to do, also. They’re in and out, looking for places to infiltrate, locations where they could do a demonstration and be gone before any Guardians got on the scene. Or they’re here, but they’re working on music, or flyers.
Sometimes they stop in to talk to Left Eye, and they always talk to Yeosang, too. But he never knows what to say back. He can tell them how the work is going, but if they ask, How are you? or Found anything fun in all this junk? then his mind goes blank. He’ll just say, Fine, or Not really, and then…they don’t know what to say either.
One day, Left Eye is away, looking into a glitch in their security grid, and Seonghwa stops by.
“He’s out,” Yeosang says.
“I know.” Seonghwa drops down on the couch next to Yeosang’s little ottoman. “I wanted to see you.”
“Why?” Maybe he wants Yeosang’s perspective on how the chip disruptor is going?
“I miss you,” Seonghwa says, and Yeosang’s thoughts stutter to a stop.
“We see each other every day,” he says finally, because they do.
“Well,” Seonghwa says after a second, “it’s not enough. I want to see you more. Okay?”
“Okay,” Yeosang says, because it’s all he can think of.
After that, Seonghwa does come in every day. Usually when Left Eye is gone, though not always. He sits on the couch, and he asks Yeosang questions about what he’s working on, and he tells Yeosang that it’s interesting and that Yeosang is smart.
Then he tells Yeosang about going out into the world, about some of the other resistance members that Yeosang hasn’t talked to. He tells him the story about meeting the dancing girl, which Yeosang remembers hearing back in their warehouse, a long time ago. But Seonghwa never told it to just him before.
“No one here, no one in this world, has ever known what she knew,” Seonghwa tells him seriously. “They never had the opportunity to learn. I want to be her. For them.”
Yeosang doesn’t understand it, exactly, but he tells Seonghwa that it’s interesting, and that Seonghwa is smart, because it is and he is.
Then one day, Seonghwa says, “I’m out all day tomorrow—Wooyoung and I are going to leave first thing in the morning, and we’ll probably have to stay away overnight. So I won’t see you. But I’ll come right after we get back. Okay?”
“Okay,” Yeosang says, because once again it’s all he’s got. He feels the shiver again, rising up from the pit of his stomach.
“We’ll be fine,” Seonghwa says, smiling gently. His hand lands softly in Yeosang’s hair. “See you in a couple of days.”
The next day, Yeosang gets up, eats breakfast, and goes to the office. Seonghwa isn’t going to come today, he reminds himself.
The thought keeps happening throughout the day. Seonghwa isn’t going to come. No Seonghwa today. Once, Left Eye goes out for a bit, and Yeosang finds himself expecting Seonghwa any second, even though he knows he’s gone for the day.
Near dinnertime, Jongho pokes his head in. “Hi, Yeosang,” he says. “Want to come have dinner now?”
Usually they eat whenever they have time. Yeosang often doesn’t leave the office. “Is something wrong?”
Jongho shakes his head. “We just thought it’d be nice to have everyone together, since Seonghwa and Wooyoung are gone.”
Yeosang slowly sets his notebook aside. “…okay.”
This one actually is okay, he thinks, as he walks alongside Jongho to the dinner hall. He goes in and sits with everyone, and they all eat and talk about what Seonghwa and Wooyoung are doing, and where they probably are right now, and if they’re driving each other crazy or getting along.
And it’s…better. Better than sitting alone in the workshop, reminding himself that Seonghwa isn’t going to be there.
Wooyoung doesn’t come in as often as some of the others, but when he does he’s loud and bright, laughing at all of Left Eye’s tchotchkes, dancing his way around the piles of things. Yeosang can remember watching him, back at home in the warehouse, and wanting…something. To have some of what he had, somehow.
If Wooyoung came in every day too, he thinks, that would be…okay.
Next to him, Jongho starts in on a very long explanation for why a plan of Yunho’s for evading the Guardians isn’t going to work, and Yeosang leans closer to listen.
The next day, Seonghwa comes to the workshop. Earlier than usual, early in the morning.
“Hi,” he says, smiling. “Did you miss me?”
“Yes,” Yeosang says, and Seonghwa’s smile grows to a grin.
3: Surprise.
After that, he leaves the workshop more often, to eat with the others. To sit near them while they talk to each other. He still doesn’t know what to say when they ask him things, unless they’re direct questions about how the work is going, but he likes listening to them.
Not everyone’s there every night; they’ve all got things they’re doing, things that don’t stick to a schedule. One night, it’s just him and Mingi.
They eat in silence at first. Mingi isn’t great at talking, either; Yeosang knows this, so he doesn’t expect it. He doesn’t mind sitting quietly. He can remember lying flopped on the couches at the warehouse together, marveling to himself at how much space Mingi could take up, long limbs sprawling everywhere. He seemed to give off endless warmth, like he had some kind of energy-producing furnace inside him. Yeosang always feels cold.
“Hey,” Mingi says abruptly, as they’re finishing their mostly-tasteless rations.
Yeosang looks up. “Hm?”
“Do you still want to dance?”
Yeosang blinks.
“It’s just, uh, Hongjoong’s almost finished with this song, and Wooyoung and San and Yunho have been starting to work on putting a dance together. You…you used to really like to dance.”
Yeosang—he’d forgotten.
Or, no. He’d remembered that he used to dance. That he used to like it, to want to.
But somehow, he forgot that he might still be able to do it. To want to do it.
“Or not, I mean—if you don’t want to—if you’re not ready—” Mingi’s trailing off into an awkward mumble.
“I want to,” he hears himself say.
“Yeah?” Mingi’s face breaks into a big, genuine smile.
“Will you show me?” he tries. “Some of the dance?”
“Yeah—yeah!” Mingi scrambles to get rid of their dishes, starts pushing chairs out of the way. “Come on, let’s do it.”
Yeosang gets up, feeling his fingertips tingle, his body start to remember what it was like to move just for the experience of moving.
Mingi’s smile stays big and excited as he starts showing Yeosang the first steps. Yeosang hadn’t realized it would be so easy to make someone this happy.
4: Sadness.
“Hey, Yeosang?”
It’s late. Everyone’s either still working (Hongjoong, Yeosang) or asleep (everyone else, Yeosang thought). But Yunho’s poking his head into the workshop.
“Hi,” Yeosang says curiously, setting aside the defective chip he was working on.
“Are you busy?” Yunho’s hovering by the door. “I can come back later.”
Yeosang shakes his head. “I was about to stop.”
“Okay.” Yunho takes a breath, comes inside. Closes the door. “I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay?” Yeosang watches as Yunho hovers just inside the door, hands twisting together. “What is it?”
He’s starting to feel that little shiver again, cold creeping up his chest. Yunho looks upset. Is it something bad? Has something happened? Is something going to happen?
“It’s about when you were captured,” Yunho says in a rush, and Yeosang blinks.
“What about when I was captured?”
“I—I didn’t—I wasn’t going to come and rescue you,” he says, and then bites his lip.
He’s crying, Yeosang realizes blankly. Those are tears in his eyes.
“My brother was still alive,” Yunho says, and his voice breaks, and he starts to explain.
Yeosang had heard the story before, of course. They’d told him all about it: transported back to their world, but back in time somehow, finding the Cromer at the museum, the standoff. He hadn’t heard about this part.
Yunho had told them about his brother back at the warehouse, haltingly, in bits and pieces. His grief had always defined him, somehow. Hyung would have liked this or hyung used to say that…
Now Yunho tells him what they’d left out about the museum story, that Yunho arrived late because he wasn’t ready to leave a world with his brother still in it, and then his brother was killed anyway.
“Because of me,” Yeosang says, the coldness rising up in his chest again. “If you’d stuck to what you decided—stayed home anyway—”
“No!” Yunho comes forward, finally, dropping down into a crouch in front of Yeosang. “I think it had to happen. He died at exactly the same day, exactly the same time as before. It couldn’t have been because of you. Because of any of us. He had to die then.”
Yeosang thinks about that, the coldness receding a little. “Then you had to be there then,” he points out. “Not before. So you had to decide not to come, before. There’s no point in being guilty about it.”
“What was it like, in the box?” Yunho asks him, as though he didn’t hear. “Were you awake? Did you know what was happening?”
Yeosang hesitates. He doesn’t like to think about it. It brings the coldness higher. “Yes.”
Yunho closes his eyes. “And—you were just—there? Waiting? Were they doing anything to you?”
Yeosang hesitates. He finds he doesn’t want to say, not just because he doesn’t want to remember, but because he doesn’t want to hurt Yunho more.
“Tell me,” Yunho insists.
“They were—draining my energy. It, um. It hurt.” He bites his lip.
“Yeosang.” Yunho’s crying for real, now, and Yeosang…he remembers once, back at the warehouse, when Yunho had cried for his brother. San and Wooyoung had piled on him immediately, and the rest of them had followed, more slowly, but all wanting to make it better, somehow.
So he reaches out, hesitant. Yunho grabs his hand right away, clutching it tight. “I’m sorry you got taken,” he says, his voice high-pitched and wet. “I’m sorry you were—” he chokes, “—you were hurt.”
“It’s not your fault,” Yeosang insists.
Yunho shakes his head hard. “It doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault for it to be sad. For someone to be sorry.”
Yeosang squeezes Yunho’s hand. Something else is rising in his chest now, something other than coldness. It’s—still painful, but softer. Yeosang says, “I’m sorry about your brother. I’m sorry you had to see him die again.”
The painful feeling is up in his throat, now, and it catches his voice. Yunho pulls him into a hug. It’s awkward, Yeosang leaning down from his chair, Yunho still kneeling on the floor, their arms all tangled around each other. But he doesn’t want it to end.
5: Anger.
Yeosang wakes up with a gasp. His feet hit the floor beside his bunk, and he runs to the bathroom.
When he comes out, San is there with a cup of water. He holds it out.
Yeosang takes it, sips carefully. It stays down.
“Are you sick?” San asks quietly.
Yeosang shakes his head. “It was. I had a dream.”
The Guardians, huge and white and faceless, dragging him away. The Grimes siblings, their energy leaving their bodies. The destroyed gallery.
San leans against the wall next to him. “Want to talk about it? It helps sometimes.”
“Does it?” Yeosang asks curiously. Even before they came here, he never told anyone about his dreams. Wooyoung used to come charging in, excited to talk about some crazy conglomeration of weirdnesses that he’d dreamed about the night before. Yeosang’s dreams were always boring.
San nods. “I have this nightmare sometimes, where I had to leave all of you guys, and I’m waking up somewhere new, and I’m all alone, it’s all empty, and I don’t know how to get back to you.” He quirks a little smile. “It sucks. So when I have it, I go tell Wooyoung. And he tells off my subconscious for not trusting him to run after me and find me no matter what. And I feel better.”
“Oh.” Yeosang wouldn’t have thought that San of all people would feel like that. Everyone likes San, and San likes everyone. That’s been a given from the start.
San slides down the wall to sit on the floor, and after a second, Yeosang follows him. Now they’re side-by-side, not looking at each other, and somehow it’s easier to say, “I dreamed about the Guardians.”
San makes a noise in the back of his throat. Yeosang looks over, but San just motions at him to keep going.
“I dreamed about how—how—evil they are,” he says, surprised by how vehemently it comes out. “How they don’t care about anyone. You’re all alone in a box, and your whole self is being sucked away, and it’s nothing to them. They just walk around like you’re not even there. And you’re so small, and they’re so big, so it’s like—like you’re nothing.”
“Fuck them,” San says, and Yeosang startles. When he looks over, San is looking right back at him, mouth set in a firm line.
“You’re not nothing. And these fucking people—” San’s mouth twists. “Anyone who would create the Guardians, anyone who treats people like they’re nothing but fuel—that’s what we’re all fighting against. Okay? We’re going to show them who’s nothing.”
Yeosang can’t look away. The way San’s voice grates, his eyes flash, his fists clench—it seems to burn away the sick feeling inside him. When he woke up, it was like those silent white figures were still standing over him. Now, they feel far, far away from this moment, the dark hallway, San’s shoulder pressed against his.
That shoulder nudges hard against him. “You get it, Yeosang?”
He nods. “I got it.”
6: Hope.
Yeosang is outside with Wooyoung.
He doesn’t go out very much. Jongho was firm from the beginning that he shouldn’t have to, and Yeosang was relieved at first. But then he slowly started to pay attention to how all the rest of them would go out, in twos or small groups, on missions to set up broadcast equipment, sabotage security procedures, or otherwise make it easier for the resistance to do their work.
And he knows he’s contributing, working with Left Eye on the chips—that’s one of the most important missions of all, and he isn’t about to lose sight of that.
But he’s been wanting to…at least see. He hardly had a chance to see this world at all, before he got captured. He’s never seen one of the cities, never seen the people under Z’s influence. So he asked Wooyoung to take him along, this time.
Wooyoung agreed much faster than Yeosang had expected, and now they’re out, away from the base, heading off to the city to do a security sweep on one of the sectors that still needs it.
“We mark all the cameras we can see,” Wooyoung tells him on the way. “Take note of any security personnel, any Guardians patrolling. What exits there are, how many big open spaces, what kind of buildings, that sort of thing. It’s fun.” He flashes Yeosang a grin.
Yeosang tries a smile back, but he isn’t sure if it worked. Wooyoung just continues, though: “It’s so great you want to go out again! I miss hanging out with you. We’re going to kick some serious ass as a team, I bet. We’ll get it done in record time, c’mon.”
He leads Yeosang easily into the city, evading attention without any trouble at all; Wooyoung is good at looking like he belongs wherever he is. Yeosang has to work a little harder, because he wants to stare at everything. The glass, the chrome, the enormous screens, the blackened windows. The people.
So many people, all walking purposefully, not looking around, not pausing, not chatting with each other. The silence is eerie. Yeosang thinks about a crowded street like this back at home, in their Seoul, and how loud it would be. How full of life.
He sees a little kid walking past. Too young to be going that quickly, that single-mindedly, all alone, no parents.
“Kids, too?” he whispers to Wooyoung.
Wooyoung nods. “Talk later,” he murmurs back, and so Yeosang just lets it simmer in the back of his mind as they mark down camera locations, count patrols, assess exit routes.
Twice, they see Guardians. Yeosang shivers each time, and can feel the bands of fear, the remains of his nightmare, slithering up to envelop him. But each time he leans in close to Wooyoung, holds onto his warmth and brightness, his energy, how opposite it is from the silent stillness of the gallery.
Each time, Wooyoung squeezes his elbow hard until the Guardians go away, and Yeosang is able to breathe freely again.
It takes several hours for them to finish, but once Wooyoung is satisfied with their notes, they turn and head out of the city again, and Yeosang is surprised by the thrill of accomplishment he feels. He hardly did anything—just tagged along with Wooyoung and paid attention, made notes when Wooyoung told him to—but it feels like it means something.
Especially given what they’re fighting against.
Once they’re away from the city, Yeosang says, “It’s so…brutal.”
Wooyoung nods, looking back over his shoulder. “They’re all under Z’s control. All of them. Even the kids. It’s terrifying.”
That little kid, walking so straight and alone…Yeosang feels his hands clenching, a warmth flushing through his body.
“We’re going to stop them,” he says. It’s maybe more of a test than a statement, but Wooyoung nods immediately.
“We’re going to fucking stop them.” Wooyoung grins at him, and Yeosang finds his mouth twitching upward in response. “They don’t stand a chance. They’ve forgotten how to feel. Well, we haven’t, and we know that what they’re doing is fucking wrong. And it means they’ve got to suppress the thing that makes humans who they are! It can’t last. It’s a house of cards. And we’re here to run right through it.” He bursts out laughing, and starts to run.
Yeosang is taken aback for a second, but Wooyoung looks over his shoulder, still laughing, and Yeosang starts to run after him.
And while his body is moving, his breath panting in and out, his heartbeat fast in his ears, he thinks to himself, We’re going to fucking stop them.
7: Love.
“Hey, Yeosang.”
It’s Hongjoong. Yeosang gets up from where he was sitting, just outside the compound, looking out over the sandy expanse of wasteland. “What is it?”
“I wanted to show you something.”
Curiously, Yeosang follows Hongjoong inside, through the winding passages of the compound to his studio. It’s a mess of wires and microphones and headphones and arcane recording equipment.
“I finished the song,” Hongjoong says.
“Oh,” Yeosang says quietly.
Hongjoong’s been working on it for—Yeosang doesn’t know how long. Since before he was rescued. Maybe since before he was captured. He knows it’s born of Hongjoong’s anger, his drive, his need to do something about the world they’re living in now.
“I wanted you to be the first to hear the final version,” Hongjoong says, and Yeosang turns to him in surprise.
“Me? Why?” He would’ve guessed that Hongjoong would’ve played it for…well, any of the others, really; they’ve all been more involved in the song than Yeosang has. Mingi’s helped with the words, Yunho with the dance. Yeosang’s only heard tiny little snippets here and there, but everyone else talks to Hongjoong about specific lines or beats sometimes, over dinner or before they go to bed.
Yeosang, like usual, just listens.
“I started writing this song when you were captured,” Hongjoong says. He’s sitting at his recording station, looking up at Yeosang with serious eyes.
“I didn’t—I didn’t know that,” Yeosang says. It makes him feel…weird, to hear that. He can’t tell if it’s a good weird or a bad weird.
Hongjoong nods. “You were so fucking brave. It wasn’t fair. And I was so angry that they’d taken you, and so afraid we wouldn’t get you back, and I just needed—I needed to say something about it. And so I started noting stuff down, just here and there. And it’s become something…bigger, about everyone, all the world,” his hands describe a large circle, then come down to a little point, fingers pinched together, “but it started with you. So. I want you to be the first to hear it.”
Yeosang looks at the tiny space between Hongjoong’s fingertips, imagines himself fitting in there. Held softly by that little grip. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” Hongjoong says. He looks nervous. “Here it is.” He presses play.
Yeosang listens. It’s a powerful song, an angry song. A wailing, wild song, full of movement and desire for change. Needy. Furious. He can feel it in his chest, even deep in the pit of his stomach where fear usually crowds everything else out. He presses his nails into his palms as he listens.
“You felt like this?” he asks when it’s done. “About me?”
Hongjoong nods once. “I did.”
Hongjoong isn’t very loud, doesn’t have the kind of wild expression of feelings that Wooyoung or Mingi or Jongho does. It’s sometimes hard to tell what he’s thinking, what he wants. Yeosang remembers, back in the warehouse, spending a long time unsure whether Hongjoong really wanted him there or not. Whether he was tolerating Yeosang because his father was powerful enough to shut the whole thing down.
That had faded away, eventually, but he’d never known—
He wouldn’t have thought it was like this.
“Yeosang,” Hongjoong says, and Yeosang looks at him. “We all did. All of us. Okay? We were ready to die to get you back. Just like you were ready to die for us.”
Yeosang has to breathe for a minute. Just breathe. It feels harsh. But not bad. How can something be painful, but good? But it is.
When he can talk again, he says, “Will you play it again?”
Hongjoong does.
8: Joy.
Yeosang’s in the middle of the group, Jongho on his left, San on his right. They’re moving together like a wave, a swell of water, and coming down sharp like something breaking.
It feels like nothing he’s ever experienced. It’s not even the same as when they danced together back at the warehouse, those tentative experiments at having a body that did something bold and wild, a mind that wanted to be free from its cage.
This is more. Bigger. Maybe because he knows what it’s like to really be caged. Maybe because it’s for something bigger than just the eight of them, snatching their moments in their warehouse.
They come together into the last formation, sharp and intense, and the music snaps off. Yeosang’s ears ring for a second, and then all he can hear is their breath, panting together, a unison pulse of exhilarated triumph.
Then there’s a yell. Wooyoung. “We nailed it!” He grabs two shoulders—Jongho and Yeosang—and bounces up and down. “That was it! That was perfect. Guys!”
His face is bright; his grip is excited on Yeosang’s shoulder. They come together around him, and Yeosang lets himself relax into the others’ crowd, caught up in their movement, their noise. He realizes he’s smiling.
Outro
Left Eye says, “Kid, that’s it. That’s it.”
He’s holding up the latest experiment. It winks in the light, a beautiful little glass cube. Below it, the dead chip, its light gone out under the cube’s interference.
“We did it,” Left Eye says. “We can turn them off. We can turn them all off.”
Slowly, Yeosang reaches out and takes it. Holds it in his hand. It’s mostly Left Eye’s creation, but he helped a little, and he can feel this wild swelling inside him, something he’s too small to contain.
“Can I—can I show the others?” he asks.
“Go on,” Left Eye says. “Bring them here.”
Yeosang smiles—he’s been doing it more and more; it doesn’t even make his cheeks stiff anymore. He stands up, and heads for the door, and as he goes, the feeling in his chest swells further, makes him smile bigger, move faster.
By the time he gets to the hall, he’s running.