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When Hyuna wins, it does not feel like victory.
It doesn't feel like anything at all.
The music blares, then screeches to a shuddering halt. Her opponent drops. A hundred thousand voices calling her name and all she can think is, is that it?
All she's trained and worked for, over in three minutes.
It isn't that she never wanted to win - Hyuna is a competitive person, has been since she was tiny - but it feels odd, knowing that she has.
She stands there, pulse pounding, eyes on the blood pooling around whoever lost to her, before they pull her backstage. They're talking of interviews and album releases and some of them are even congratulating her.
She stops listening when they mention her guardian, because Phan has never cared about the competition, only about being superior. It's for that reason Hyuna made it past… however old she was when she got adopted. It's not something she likes to think about, the possibility of her and her brother dying at five or six.
She's told the story once or twice on live TV. She's pretty sure one of the interviewers cried. Stories like hers aren't unheard of - hell, even fashion brands use strays for marketing. She's just a particularly high-profile case.
Eventually the segyeinro stop gossiping and tell her she's got an interview in an hour. A boy is lying dead onstage, and although she never learnt his name, it feels wrong not giving anyone time to recover from the shock. There's a world where they did know each other, after all, and Hyuna's seen at least one finalist catatonic with grief. She's got an interview in an hour.
Hyuna is infamous for despising interviews. She hates the competition and all it stands for, and therefore having to discuss her oh-so-impressive victory is a new sort of agony. Despite this, she lets the aliens coax her towards the dressing rooms, her anger palpable.
Her own dressing room is down a too-bright corridor lined with windows that overlook the city. Before her first round, and every one after, she sat here pondering the stars, picking out constellations. She doesn't know why, but it helped somehow.
She lets the staff's chattering dissolve into background noise, mind drifting, and then her eyes snag on a poster. It's hideous, a mess of blinding white and lurid purple, advertising some up-and-coming kodenka's new single. But there's a reason it catches her off-guard, why her eyes linger longer than they should.
She can't tell if he's an actor or a new idol or anything, because her segyeinko is generally terrible when she isn't listening intently, and she's never had a knack for deciphering the jagged shapes of the written language.
She knows what his song's titled, though. Adekanyo.
Addicted.
It seems a funny thing to be coupled with this depiction of him, with his hair like spun gold and that soft, imploring look on his face. She can almost imagine him a prince, holding court and surrounded by adoring fans. The only thing that feels off is the sickly purple staining his fingertips. It seems at odds with his pristine image, the last remnants of something they're trying hard to hide.
"Oh!" the segyein trailing behind her chirps, seeing her pause, "That's Luka. You'll meet him before next season, I think!"
Hyuna nods stiffly. She does not say that she already knows his name, or that they have met before. It's just not worth the trouble.
She also has no intention of meeting the next batch of participants. She refuses to get attached to any of them, because they're all three or four years younger than her and still think they might be able to win.
Even Luka. He'd relish the opportunity, if he's anything like he was when they were small.
"Heperu's laboratory is no place for one so small," Phan had said in that stilted way of theirs, before they disappeared behind a locked door, "Please do not get lost."
Hyuna had nodded all seriously, then taken her brother's hand and dragged him down a gloomy corridor before he could say no.
Hyun-woo is dawdling now, mostly because he’s getting nervous, although she thinks otherwise. He’s just boring, and if he doesn't catch up she'll run off without him. He can go and cry to their guardian all he wants. She won't let it stop her.
All the doors, or so they discovered earlier, are locked tight, so they can't really go exploring. Hyuna doesn't think they're going to get in trouble - Phan would have left them at home if there was nothing for them to do here. It's just… cold and dark and quiet.
Hyuna never liked quiet. It was harder to sneak around when everyone could hear you. Harder still to have secret conversations, which Phan said they were very prone to. Hyun-woo said it was a twin thing.
A machine beeps further down, the sound sharp in the silence. They both jump, and Hyuna claps a hand over her brother's mouth. No one comes running.
Maybe someone has left a door ajar. When she squints, she can make out a thin strip of light stretching across the floor, bright and clinical white. The low hum of machinery, more beeping, albeit quieter than before, and what sounds like a single, rather wet cough.
Hyuna meets her brother's eyes, and then they are running towards the open door. It's a stupid idea, but she doesn't want to leave whoever's in that room alone, not if they're sick.
It takes Hyuna a second to adjust to the light, fluorescent and painful as it is. It's a bedroom, in the loosest sense of the word, because there is at least a bed in it. She peers at the machines standing sentinel before them, can't make out any words save for 'vlakt' and a series of rather worrying numbers. There's a boy lying there, unmoving, and for a horrible moment she thinks he might be dead, before his eyes ease open like the movement pains him.
His eyes are as blonde as his hair, and although he looks to be about her age, he seems to have shrunk back on himself, swamped by his clothes. There are countless cords and feedlines snaking under his shirt and past the hem of his sleeves, a slender collar around his neck, little light blinking amber, and the insides of his elbows are mottled with small, ugly bruises. He doesn't look well at all, even when he props himself up to peer at them suspiciously.
Hyuna doesn't say a word. Hyun-woo sticks his tongue out. The boy frowns, then smiles just slightly, his eyes trained on her.
"Hi," she manages, wondering why he is looking at her as if she hung the stars, "Who're you?"
"Luka," he says simply, eyeing her and then her brother, "You're Phan's."
Hyuna decides she doesn't like that observation. "I'm Hyuna. He's Hyun-woo. Are you…"
She fumbles for the words, because she's realising far too late that she's never spoken to another human her age aside from her brother. Luka nods anyway. Whatever she was going to ask, she’s bound to be right.
There's a clatter, and Luka winces, glaring at Hyun-woo as he slowly inches away from the rubix cube he knocked off the table, expression guilty.
"Father said I might meet people soon," Luka adds, thoughtful, "You're loud. I heard you from outside."
"Sorry," Hyuna says hurriedly.
Luka shrugs. "It wasn't so bad. I've got good hearing." He glances towards the cube lying abandoned on the floor. "Do you want to play?"
Hyun-woo meets her eyes, looking baffled. Probably trying to figure out how they're meant to play in a hospital room. Hyuna grins anyway. Luka looks like he wants a challenge, and there’s mischief in those golden eyes, so…
"Sure," she replies, bending to pick up the toy, "But no peeking, okay?"
The interview is a nightmare.
Hyuna had expected them to ask about her victory (they did), and maybe having to make up some bullshit about a new song that didn't exist (she improvised a vague tune and said it was coming soon), but this is something else entirely.
They want her to compete again.
Season Fifty of Alien Stage marks just over five decades since the show's conception, and they want her to compete in it.
The entire audience had noticed her shock. She had frozen mid-tangent about her first round, staring at the interviewer in abject horror. It isn't the idea that's new to her, because it has been done before, but she's surprised they even considered it. She has no reputation outside of the competition, and she knows full well her success was a fluke. Nothing more, nothing less.
She bolts the moment the cameras shut off, nausea roiling in her stomach. It's a sickening feeling of dread, of panic churning in her stomach. Not because she might die. Just because she refuses to do it all again.
Still, it's what sells. They'll never let any of this be forgotten. She can go into modelling, acting, even learn to dance, but what her hyukiyaro want is to see her win. She went into this with that in mind - winning whatever the cost, soldiering on through the pain, all that crap she referenced in her lyrics.
She lists Season Fifty’s names in her head, again and again until they become a mantra.
Mizi and Sua, who are something of a package deal with their talk of dueting.
Till, the highly-strung rebel. Ivan, the pretty face of Blocell.
Durian and Marty, outsiders from beyond the Garden.
Luka. Almighty prince of both stage and screen. Angelic, syrupy-sweet, a rose missing its thorns.
She does not want any of them to die going against her.
Several of Alien Stage's past finalists have talked about the guilt, when they were no longer the centre of attention and simply names that turned heads, about how sometimes they wish they could have tied. The competition pits friends against friends, lovers against lovers. The losses cut regardless of whether you know your opponent or not. It's death right in front of you, blood lapping at your feet as you watch their life drain away, and you are powerless to stop it.
She knows the feeling. After her first victory, she sat outside her dressing room listening to the far-off sounds of Round Two and trying to figure out how, exactly, she had started winning.
Hyuna tears, frantic, down the corridors, ignoring the segyeinri that call out to her. She has no personal effects, nothing of worth save a years-old headstone in Anakt Garden that isn't really hers.
She wants to go back, because surely there are those she can save, and yet she cannot risk it. It's easier to disappear into the city, to seek out the ashtya places, the seedy clubs and dive bars no segyein with any sense touches. But she's Hyuna, and human celebrities never do well in secret places.
There are tunnels beneath the stage, however, for deliveries and goods transport. Easy enough to get to, if you know where to find them. Hyuna's already explored every inch of this complex. Did it on the first day of preliminaries because she hates not knowing.
When she finds the tunnels, they reek of ash and sewage. Slits running across the ceiling to let in the light, though the bulbs above are burnt orange and flickering. Further ahead they seem to have petered out entirely.
She has no map, no directions. There's no way back at all.
Hyuna runs, and she does not stop running until the world caves in.
Hyuna is seven when she is entered into Anakt Garden.
Phan said it was best for the both of them, with all the emotion they could muster (which was, of course, none at all), and was gone before the doors closed.
Hyun-woo is miserable about it. He says there's no point being here without Luka, who has all the space-beetle knowledge her brother's heart desires and a habit of showing off without noticing he's doing it. Hyuna said once that, if he could teach Hyun-woo and it didn't immediately leak out of his brain, he had to be a genius.
Luka had blinked in that slow, confused way of his, head tilted to the side, and said nothing at all.
Hyuna does search for Luka, who is most likely sitting alone. She sees brown, black, silver, but no tousled blonde curls, no boy waiting by the trees as he curls in on himself. He always does that when he's worrying, or scared, or trying to look worse than he is, carrying himself like he might break at any moment.
His health had steadily improved after that first day, but he was so used to being fragile. That was how he'd put it, right after he lobbed a pencil at Hyun-woo's head to stop him rooting through his things.
Soon Hyun-woo stops hunting for him, and they go through the counting game together. Luka would call it child's play, she thinks idly. One day she'll find something he's bad at. And Luka hates being bad at things.
She knows he's missing her. He had clung to her more than usual last time they met, pressing his face against her side and murmuring something in segyeinko she didn't understand.
It had sounded a little like a confession.
Hyun-woo dies the week they turn thirteen.
An error during one of Phan's superiority tests, the one he'd attended in her stead. All because she was in an important Expression exam she refused to fail twice.
It would have been kinder to flay her alive, or shoot her through the neck. It feels as though she has been ripped in half.
She watches his ash when it falls, places a flower beside his grave, and then she cries until she is sick.
When Hyuna is sixteen, her anger has begun to settle. It simmers instead of boils, and she starts to act like a living person again.
No one had quite known what to do about her grief. They tried to understand it, but how could they? Even now the wound is raw. Even now she feels like she's lost a part of herself.
Being his twin was the best thing to happen to her. It made them an oddity as pet-humans, caught Phan's attention, and in doing so, it gave them a life. Not an easy one, of course. A life with their guardian was never going to be easy.
They still open the artificial sky around their birthday, as they always have. The last few years it's been bittersweet and cloying. She counts the constellations for him. One for each year of their lives.
She didn't have a chance to see the stars with him this time.
The staff seem to have sensed some ability lying dormant within her, the way she's pushed from job to job like her time is running out. She tries modelling, and she trips over ten times in as many minutes. Acting's another immediate no; she tries, and she can't stop herself cracking when she attempts to be serious. And so they keep making her sing. It's this boring lullaby-like tune, about wings and the wind and silent longing.
Luka would like it, she thinks, then has to stop herself.
It's the first time she has thought about Luka in three years.
Hyuna wakes in a sparse hospital room, in a bed that was clearly made decades ago for people without spines.
Her vision swims as she sits up, as if she has taken a particularly nasty blow to the head, and something about her lower half feels distinctly off. She doesn't quite remember what happened, only rubble, the sharp smell of her own blood, and an awful, clawing panic.
She shifts, and realises she cannot feel half of her left leg. Someone, somehow, has found her a prosthetic. It fits almost perfectly, sleek and black and definitely stolen.
There's a man sitting across the room, shaggy brown hair and a nasty scar bisecting one eye. He jolts awake when he hears her moving.
"Hey," he says in perfect English.
Hyuna has spoken segyeinko for so long that her own English is rusty and uneven, but she nods anyway.
The man straightens, swearing as his bones crack. How long has he been waiting for her?
His name is Jacob, he explains. She is with the human resistance. No, they don't have a proper name yet. She is safe. Is she really the winner of Alien Stage? She’s going to be alright here.
He’s asking too many questions. He’s treating her like a wounded animal, like she’ll lash out if he says one word too many. When he asks where she was going, she frowns.
She was heading towards the Garden, but she does not tell him that, and he does not probe further.
The next week, Jacob introduces her to Isaac, to Dewey, to a hundred other people who don't seem to care who or what she is. She starts to relax. No one here knows her.
Luka is on TV, when they get the shitty thing in the mess hall to work. He was in another movie, and he's still working towards Season Fifty. He looks drained, but perhaps she's looking too much into it. His hair is longer than she's ever seen it.
When Hyuna gets so drunk she starts forgetting names, Jacob is there to support her. Looked like he wanted to leave her in a heap on the floor when she puked on his foot, but he didn't, and that was enough.
They convince her to sing a couple months later. It's unfair, the way they gang up on her. She performs this crappy, half-assed song she wrote in a day, and the crowd adores her. It's the first time she sees Dewey wasted.
"C'mon," he taunts, when she kicks him in the shin, "It was good.”
"Prakja,” Hyuna says, turning on her heel as his face falls. He's in for a lecture from Isaac, who point-blank refuses to drink and hates most people who do.
She thinks of Luka again that night, through the haze of near-sleep. She doesn't know why, exactly, only that he's starting to occupy her thoughts more often than she would like. She has not seen him for over a decade. It shouldn't matter so much.
When Jacob dies, Hyuna pours her soul into forgiving herself.
The segyeinro start putting up wanted posters. Dewey nicks one and calls it a cause for celebration. Throws a goddamn party. She gives him the finger and shows up anyway.
The reports call her resistance hyukiyaro. A collection of lights, in the literal sense. The word makes her falter.
When Isaac decides they ought to infiltrate the arena, Hyuna has no choice but to go with him. Everything is as she remembers, the hidden passages, the view of the city, all of it.
She sees Luka in real life for the first time since she was tiny. There is blood dripping from his nose and one of his eyes is swollen shut. He looks at her like he's not entirely convinced she's real.
His hands twitch towards her as he forces himself to his knees. She has to tear her eyes away from him, attention back on Mizi.
Mizi. Who won her first round by a single point, and lost her second by disappearing. It's its own kind of victory.
She'd been a wild thing when they took her on, grieving and desperate and so, so angry. She told Hyuna later, that Luka had imitated her love, though he didn't really want to, that he was always so shy, but as a performer was terrifying to behold.
When Mizi sees Luka on TV, she storms out of the room. Hyuna doesn't have the heart to chase after her.
For all her complicated feelings, she understands. Far better than Mizi thinks she does.
When they break into the arena complex a second time, for the sake of Jacob's life's mission, the other girl leaves her side, running for a boy with silver hair Hyuna doesn't know the first thing about.
Bleeding and so very close to giving up, Hyuna watches the numbers on the screen tick up to a hundred. She's done it. Finally done it.
She slips backstage like she owns the place, hands sticky with blood, but that doesn't matter. Nothing matters except the boy she loves - has loved, for as long as she can remember.
She steps onto the stage amid raucous applause.
There is a boy Hyuna has been dreaming of.
He has golden hair and golden eyes, and he looks at her as if she were his god, her name falling from his lips like a prayer. He takes one step towards her, then another, stumbling as if he has forgotten how to walk.
The moment he reaches for her, someone puts a gun to his head.
Hyuna doesn't allow herself time to think.