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Sunwoo thinks he understands the appeal of hatred when he gets pushed down, with force, his head ringing where it makes contact with the wooden floor. He thinks he understands, it chills your spine and makes your heart race and turns you into someone else.
He can’t tell hatred apart from fear.
“Which part of ‘I’ll slit your throat’ do you not understand?” Changmin asks, his hands on Sunwoo’s throat. They’re not knives. They can cut.
“I’m not afraid,” he gives a non-answer. He spits in Changmin’s face and droplets of spit fall back onto him, and Changmin’s eyes can’t be more fiery than they already are.
“You have a death wish,” it’s a statement more than it is a question and Sunwoo would laugh out his answers, if he wasn’t being choked.
It feels good. It feels clear, to go under, to wrap his fingers around Changmin’s wrists and hope he doesn’t push further, it almost feels like love, the way his head is spinning and his world is growing smaller. When he closes his eyes, it’s almost like he’s not there, and it’s a delight. It’s ecstasy. Is that what death is like? Does he have a death wish?
“Fuck you,” Changmin smashes his head down, still grabbing him by the neck, but it’s different. He can breathe. His head no longer rings.
Wood is expensive. No one uses wood anymore. Dying on wood would be a fun way to go.
Sunwoo can taste blood on his teeth. Where did it come from?
“He’s already gone,” he laughs. When air fills his lungs, it’s all wrong. Changmin’s legs should be crushing him. Changmin’s arms should be crushing him. “He’s gone, he’s got the drive and he’s gone.”
Changmin should be more surprised about that, Sunwoo thinks as he watches the man through his lashes, through his half closed lids. He should be angrier, he thinks, as Changmin topples a cabinet and sends all the papers flying.
It lands next to Sunwoo with a thud. He laughs more.
“I’ll kill him next,” comes an empty promise. Sunwoo thinks he’s going to fold over himself, fold in half and disappear when he laughs.
“You have to kill me first.”
Changmin doesn’t even pull out a gun. He knows how useless it’d be.
Sunwoo can’t remember how he gets out.
~~~~
“Give me the money,” Chanhee begs, and his voice is sweeter than usual. It’s almost like a charm, or like a curse, when he breathes on Sunwoo’s ear, neck, jaw. “Give it to me.”
“I already gave you all,” Sunwoo lies. He wants Chanhee to beg more. “I don’t have any.”
Chanhee begs. “I know you do.” He squirms, undignified. Unlike himself. Needy. “Please.”
Sunwoo can’t remember where he put it. It’s a stack, it’s a stash, it’s wires, all things Chanhee wants. Sunwoo can’t remember the last time he felt any excitement looking at the gold. “Why?”
“I need to see it. Please,” he’s going to spend it all, Sunwoo knows, then smoke it, then lay in it and watch the colors in the sky. Then sit in Sunwoo’s lap and beg again.
“Where’s the hard drive?” is a conversation they’ve already had.
“I already gave it to you,” is a dance they’ve danced a hundred times already.
Sunwoo starts thinking he might get tired of this, one day. Unlike he loves the chase. Unlike he loves the runaway car. Unlike he loves the blood on his teeth. “Did you trade it in?”
Chanhee giggles. It’s a foul sound. “Maybe.”
Sunwoo lets him know it’s not a joke anymore. Sunwoo presses his fingernails into Chanhee’s wrists and waits for Chanhee to squirm, to wince, waits for him to open his eyes. Sunwoo wonders if his right hand ever presses harder than his left.
They’re so magnetizing Sunwoo can’t breathe. Not until Chanhee speaks.
“It’s in the fucking safe. I’m not an idiot.”
“I know,” it’s not a lie. Sunwoo knows, he just forgot. “Go grab it.”
“No,” Chanhee insists. The fingernail marks no longer burn him. “Give me the money.”
Sunwoo gives him everything he has. He’s never been good at resisting, anyway. He watches Chanhee rub the blue dust into his gums and he watches Chanhee’s eyes roll back in pleasure. He watches so closely he will never be able to forget the way Chanhee’s lip twitches.
When they kiss, it’s empty. Sunwoo wonders what love feels like. He used to know, before he died.
~~~~
Sometimes, Sunwoo thinks nothing exists permanently. He can’t remember the hatred, he can’t remember the fear. Nothing feels real when it’s not in front of him, not even himself.
He doesn’t even feel real when he looks into the mirror.
The heat of his blaster stopped being real long ago. The plasma no longer feels like tar when it spills out of his hands when he loads his gun. When did it stop burning? Why does it burn? Why does he shoot?
It’s an easy job, it was an easy job in theory, it was an easy job before the rain got to him, seeped into his veins, stripped him of his humanity. He’s just a nerve again, his hand is on the sterile table again. It’s all about money, he thinks.
It’s just money.
“Give me your chipcard,” he feels himself flip the safety of his gun. “And no one will be hurt.”
The man trembles when he hands over the device, his wallet, too, but Sunwoo tosses that to the side. He won’t be needing that. He should let the man keep it, but instead he blasts it and pretends the neon glow doesn’t hurt his eyes.
“Good. Now walk away,” he commands, and the man does. The only person who ever listens to him, the victim.
He almost feels bad about shooting him dead. Almost.
The rain washes all of his emotions away, anyway. It’s all just a purple glow, in the end.
~~~~
There’s never any light near Jacob, and Sunwoo has learned not to wonder why.
“Good job,” he holds the devices in his hands and hums. Sunwoo doesn’t understand why he’d need them. He doesn’t understand why he had to get them.
But then again, he stopped trying to understand anything.
“You wouldn’t be holding anything from me, would you?” He asks, as if he doesn’t know the answer.
“No, sir,” Sunwoo wonders if his pupils dilate when he lies. He thinks about all the money Chanhee sleeps on. He thinks about the blue dust. “Never.”
“Good,” Jacob reads straight through him. He always does. “How’s the hand doing?”
Immediately, all of his five fingers ache, as if there’s no blood in them, as if there was ever blood in them. As if they haven’t been absent for so long he forgot they aren’t really there. He almost doesn’t have the willpower necessary to unfurl his fist.
“Perfect, sir. No problems.” That’s true. There’s none, not with the hand. The problems are not the hand’s fault.
Jacob tilts his chin up, but doesn’t break eye contact. Sunwoo wonders if he can feel his pain. “No problems, huh?”
“None.”
Finally, Jacob drops his gaze. Sunwoo’s fingers burn and clench. “Good. Would hate it if it malfunctioned, after all this trouble.”
The silence is overwhelming when it rings in the room. Sunwoo feels small in it, almost as small as he feels in Changmin’s hands. This time, he doesn’t want to close his eyes and drift away. He can’t be lost, he knows where he is. It’s the middle of the purple glow, and he's the neon.
“That’s all.”
Sunwoo breathes again when he leaves the office. He opens and closes the door with his left hand. He breathes on the clock, second after second, and thinks he understands fear.
It tastes bitter, and it’s in his stomach, and it turns him inside out with an unborn scream.
He can’t tell fear from regret.
~~~~
When he finds Chanhee again, he’s not sure how much of him is real, and how much is just a hallucination, blue smoke and mirrors.
“You've been gone so long I almost worried,” his eyes look almost lucid, sparkling. “I have more intel.”
Sunwoo can’t latch on either of those threads. He’s heavier than the earth when he sinks to the floor. Sometimes he thinks he can’t function off of air, water, food. Sometimes he feels like he needs something else, maybe the purple glow of his blaster, maybe the wet cement. Maybe skin on skin on skin and the haze of neurons firing. He can't be wrong about somethimg he doesn't know about.
“You okay?” The words sound so foreign Sunwoo can’t register them. He doesn’t know what his answer is.
“When’s the last time you slept?” Sunwoo can’t answer.
When Chanhee drags him by the wrists, he lets it happen. It’s always his hands, he thinks. His wrists and fingers and palms and he dies between them. A separate being, attached to his forearms, elbows, shoulders. Who is he when the neurons fire?
Skin on skin, he thinks, for how claustrophobic the embrace is, he feels safe. It’s stupid. They were never like that.
They were always like that, just a little.
He thinks Chanhee sings him to sleep. It feels like the city singing, the timbre of the rain and whisper of wind. Only howling, never rustling.
The city always loved him, he thinks. On the rooftops, on the streets. In the gutters. He never wants to leave the city again.
When he falls asleep, he doesn’t dream. Finally, he’s free. He almost can’t feel his right palm clench into a ball. He almost can feel himself as he used to be, just a person, just flesh.
He thinks it might just be Chanhee’s heartbeat instead.
~~~~
Something about their confrontation is easier when Sunwoo knows he’s no longer a formidable enemy. Changmin has him on the end of his gun, the laser tracked on his heart. Sunwoo drops his gun. It was only ever for show, anyway.
“She told me to kill you,” Changmin states. “I should have, ages ago.”
“I’m not the one you want, anyway,” this way of washing his hands was so natural it almost made Sunwoo feel like he’s lying. “You know I’m just a distraction. Why do you always go for me?”
“I don’t,” Changmin’s jaw clenches, and Sunwoo catches every detail of it.
That’s hatred, he thinks again, and he’s wrong, that’s hatred making him raw and white and frozen.
“Do you want me to tell you where Chanhee is?”
Changmin almost considers, but then he grips his sniper better. Adjusts his target, as if it’s not perfectly tracked. “As if I’d fall for that.”
“Look, I can tell you. If I’m wrong, you’ll just kill me next time.” Sunwoo’s arms fall to his sides, he no longer feels like keeping them up. He no longer wants to feel their weight.
Changmin can’t kill him anyway. Not that he wouldn’t try to.
“Do you ever miss the old days?” He asks when Changmin remains quiet. He can’t stand the silence. He misses the pain. “When we used to be on the same side?”
“We still would have been, if you weren’t fucking stupid.”
It’s a lie, and they both know it. It’s a lie, and Sunwoo wants to think Changmin’s lying. He doesn’t want to call it stupidity. He wants to call it desperation, fear, bravery. He wants to call it anything but his own fault.
The pain is back, but not how he wanted it. He misses Changmin’s knuckles on his jaw.
“You know it’s not that easy.”
“It’s not,” the pain feels right for a moment. For just a moment. “But it used to be. You fucked it up.”
Sunwoo wonders what he misses more, Changmin’s hands on his throat or Changmin’s laughter. Most of all, he misses not breathing.
“Shoot me, like she told you to.”
Changmin doesn’t fall for that. “What’s your trick?”
“There’s none.” There is none.
“Yeah.”
Changmin’s earpiece never lights up. No one ever informs him of a broken window, of a blown up wing. Chanhee’s escape isn’t grand. Sunwoo knows he’s made it, he always does.
Chanhee hasn’t fucked up a day in his life, so he says. Sunwoo doesn’t agree. Sunwoo pretends to believe him.
“Join me?” Sunwoo jokes. He grabs his gun from his holster and Changmin doesn’t even try to stop him.
“I’d rather die.” It’s sincere.
The pain is back, Sunwoo thinks. He welcomes it. It overpowers the purple glow, it overpowers the ringing in his ears, it overpowers the guilt he feels when he knows it’s not the last time he’s hurt Changmin.
Something grips his heart and tears it in half. He pretends he doesn’t know it’s regret.
~~~~
Chanhee keeps his blue dust in a heart shaped crystal dish. Sunwoo has never seen crystal before, not even in his past life. Not even through the glass walls.
“Can I?” He asks before opening it, before dipping his finger in. Chanhee only answers with a gesture, his gaze glued to the holograms and monitors in front of him. It rotates slowly, it reflects on the screens, it flashes blue against Chanhee’s eyes. It’s more interesting than Sunwoo thinks he’ll ever be.
He’s had blue dust before, many times. Somehow, when he rubs it into his gums this time, it feels wrong. He can tell, immediately.
It feels how entering Jacob’s office feels.
Chanhee isn’t there to peel him off the bathroom floor, and he prefers it that way. No one has to watch him puke acid all over the wash basin. No one has to watch his hands tremble as he tries and fails to turn on the cleaning.
His humiliation is his own, and it makes him feel like more of a person. Maybe there’s some dignity left, deep within his flesh, where it brushes against his dishonor and the parts of him that are no longer his.
If he tries hard enough, he wonders, would he be able to scrape himself raw? There must be parts that can be saved. His hand trembles when he reaches for the back of his neck, looks for the jack. He tells himself he can’t feel it under his fingers.
Maybe he can’t feel anything. Maybe he shouldn’t feel anything. Maybe it’s worth it, if it means starting over. Maybe Changmin was right.
It’s a thought he’s had more times than he can count, but it’s the first time he reaches for a knife.
He doesn’t realize how far he’s crawled until his head hits glass.
“Get a hold of yourself,” comes Chanhee’s voice. It’s so far away Sunwoo can barely register it. It’s right in his ear.
Sunwoo pries his fingers open easily. It’s the left hand. It’s always been the weaker hand. It doesn’t have to be.
“Let me get it off,” he begs, but it’s undignified against the glass cabinet. He wants to fall to the floor, but Chanhee won’t let him. He’s holding him by the arm. It’s always his hands.
“I thought you won’t be like this.”
Sunwoo doesn’t have it in him to tell Chanhee he’s always like this. Chanhee just doesn’t notice most of the time.
“I want to cut it off,” he repeats, but the knife is far outside of his reach. He doesn’t know where Chanhee put it.
It’s a terrible sensation, one that he can’t lie to himself he can’t feel. He feels it when Chanhee’s eyes are closed and when they’re open, digging holes right into Sunwoo’s. He feels every single kiss that Chanhee places on his fingertips, on the back of his hand, in the middle of his palm.
Sunwoo wants to close his fist. Something urges him to hurt Chanhee for touching that one part of him everyone is supposed to hate. That one foreign object. That parasite.
He just cries, instead.
~~~~
If Sunwoo closed his eyes, he’d swear he’s upside down, underwater, but his eyes are open and he knows he’s just in Jacob’s office.
“It’s going to be the last one I give you,” his tone is solemn. Sunwoo thinks he should fake being happy.
“I’m glad, sir.”
A flyship passes by outside and it briefly illuminates Jacob’s face orange. He looks like his eyes are full of blood. He looks like he hasn’t laughed a day in his life, but he’s smiling.
“After that, you’re not going to be a head unit anymore.”
Sunwoo is drowning. He’s upside down and he’s drowning, rock at his throat, feet frozen.
“Sir?” He doesn’t even know how to ask. What to ask. It’s not what they agreed on.
“You’re under-performing, to put it simply,” Jacob explains and then his words blur into one nightmare. Sunwoo can’t hear them, Jacob is miles of water above him. Sunwoo can’t breathe.
“Yes,” there goes the last of his oxygen. When he next speaks, he’s dead, again, deader than he’s ever been.”I’m sorry, sir.”
“You’ll be assigned a new partner, too.”
Sunwoo would care more about losing Chanhee if he wasn’t a bloated corpse drifting through the ocean.
“Then how long until…?” He wants to ask, but nothing even akin to money can be placed in his mouth. He doesn’t know repayment. He’s never heard of obligation.
Jacob winces. An ugly sight. “We’ll talk about it again if you improve.”
Sunwoo understands fear. He wishes he didn’t.
~~~~
It’s the same feeling again, when it happens, the world slipping from under his feet as he walks. It smells like bile on cold tiles. It smells like a dark room and wooden floors. It smells like wires.
Sunwoo knew that the world ends all at once, but it never meant anything, it was just words, until it happened.
Chanhee stood tall and dark by Changmin’s side, more regal than Sunwoo’s ever seen him. He looked like smoke, but no longer blue.
“I’m sorry,” he seemed to say, but the words held absolutely no meaning. Sunwoo might have just as well imagined them.
Sunwoo wants to be threatened. He wants to be told he’s going to die. He even wonders how Chanhee would sound, saying that, too. Not like it matters.
“Is this why you never had to go looking for him?” Sunwoo puts the pieces together, he knows he does, because Changmin’s grip on his knife tightens. Finally, a weapon that suits him.
The knife hums when Changmin flips it. It glows red. Sunwoo wonders what it means.
“I wish you didn’t have to find out like this,” finally Chanhee sounds sincere. Finally, Sunwoo knows what to do.
He laughs.
“Please, kill me.” He’s never said that before. He never wished for that before.
“Fuck you,” Changmin spits at him. He grips his knife harder, and Sunwoo wants to get lost in his eyes. “You still don’t get it.”
“Changmin, don’t,” Chanhee places his hand on Changmin’s chest and Changmin calms down and it’s everything Sunwoo never imagined, could not have imagined, it’s beyond drowning.
He understands hatred, he realizes. He understands heartbreak. They’re the same thing.
He’s wrong.
“I’ll,” Changmin starts, but then looks to the side. Sunwoo wonders if he regrets, too, if his head ever rings like his does. “I’ll never forgive you.”
There’s no strength left in Sunwoo when he speaks. He’s so small. He used to love feeling small. “For what? This?”
“For who you’ve become.”
Sunwoo shrinks until he can’t see himself. Sunwoo shrinks until he can only see his eyelids and until his eyelids flip inside out along with the rest of the world.
~~~~
The glass cabinets are empty when Sunwoo returns. The monitors are off. The safe is empty.
Sunwoo starts to understand when he finds a crystal jar full of blue dust.
He was never lied to, he was never betrayed, he was never turned on. It was always the plan. He was just a byproduct.
~~~~
Blue dust can’t kill. Sunwoo knows that. Blue dust can’t kill people.
Sunwoo wonders if he’s people.
There are exposed wires on his right wrist and he can no longer do anything about it. He is an exposed wire, he thinks, as he rolls out onto the street, as he drags his body through the concrete prison. He’s just a malfunctioning chip. He stopped being human long ago.
Straight through his spinal column, a long needle, he remembers the words. He doesn’t know how he remembers them. By the cerebellum. Down his right arm.
He’s never felt human again, not since then. He doesn’t think he ever will, no matter how many times he tries to overclock and burn and destroy. He can’t, not without dying.
He’s already died once. It didn’t do much.
Sometimes he wonders if being a puppet wouldn’t be all that bad. If he should just lose the rest of what’s left, sign it away. Maybe that’s the closest to death things like him have. Maybe it’s a virus he can install onto himself.
Rain soaks him wet. It’s numb on his skin, but a numbness that tingles and runs and shivers, unlike the floor tiles. Unlike wash basins. Unlike glass cabinets. He wonders where he should drag his lifeless body next, but there’s nowhere to go.
Maybe he’s not people, he thinks again, maybe that was Chanhee’s last gift. A crystal heart and a way out.
There are ghosts in the shadows when he crawls inside. He wants to call the place home. He wants to throw up.
A ghost in the shadows speak up before Sunwoo can pray for them both to be fake.
“I know you want it off you,” his voice sounds wrong when he speaks. It sounds right. It sounds wrong for this life, Sunwoo shouldn’t be hearing it, Sunwoo shouldn’t be allowed to listen to it again. “I don’t know if I can remove it, but I can try.”
Sunwoo didn’t realize he can run until he runs to fall at Changmin’s feet. He doesn’t know how to touch Changmin without violence. He wants to remember.
“I understand now,” he begs. He doesn’t know what else to say. He’s said it all to the blue smoke and mirrors and now there’s nothing left in him, just this regret. Just this fire. “I don’t care. Please take it off me.”
There are hands on his back, hands so gentle he could never mistake the touch. He doesn’t mind the finger against the jack. Maybe he would have, in a past life. He thinks he died twice, now.
“Jacob won’t like it if I take you,” Chanhee’s voice is crystal. “But then again, he doesn’t like anything.”
Sunwoo believes in miracles when he looks up. Maybe he can believe for long enough that his head will break the surface of the water. “Jacob won’t save me. I want to be human again”
He feels more than sees Changmin shake his head. “You said you understood.”
“I do,” Sunwoo wants to scream. There’s not enough left of him.
Chanhee helps him up. He forgets how his feet work until Chanhee makes them move.
Changmin grasps his limp wrist, inspects the wires. Inspects the tendons, raw muscle and metal, rubber. Nothing. His face is tense, but Sunwoo can take tense. He can’t take the gentleness of the touch. Can’t take Chanhee’s whisper.
“You’ve been human all along.”
He can’t breathe.
“You still have your freedom,” Changmin doesn’t whisper, if he did, Sunwoo knows he’d never breathe again. “You have to take it. This is my only offer.”
Chanhee has only begged when convenient. To hear his voice crack, cracks Sunwoo’s lungs, too. “Please.”
Sunwoo forgets hatred. Sunwoo forgets fear.
He can never forget heartbreak, he thinks, and this is why. Hatred is in his veins and fear is in his bones, and they can be purged, replaced, restored.
He is his heart. Heartbreak is in him.
He beats on.
He’s right.