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He woke up. Alone. Even back at the facility, where staff watched as he went through their endless checklists, he was never alone.
No eyes were watching him now.
His room lacked a clock, not a single thing to track time. Suho sometimes got to play with Jongin’s mobile phone. Minseok gave Suho a calendar without request, but insisted on keeping it outside his bedroom.
But there was always the sun. And the moon.
Nearly two moons ago:
He witnessed a disagreement between his assigned guardians. Jongin, the last to wake, insisted the bed not ‘get made’ upon leaving it.
This insistence upset Minseok, who barely showed anger.
Anger was familiar. One of many emotions on the ‘emotions list’ he’d gotten from therapy. At the facility, anger was common; in observing his guardians here, in this new life, ‘anger’ seemed uncommon. In their disagreement, Minseok and Jongin pressed on him instead of directly confronting each other. Gave him a choice. The power to decide.
Jongin said to him, “Minseok-hyung. The only person in the world who vacuums his bed.”
Minseok said to him, “You and Jongin can help me lead the world to cleaner beds.”
Their sleeping arrangement would change mere weeks later. From sleeping in separate rooms to all three of them in his room. He wondered at himself for wanting this sleep arrangement to continue indefinitely.
In the past, his waking hours were irregular. Those times in the facility felt like ‘a past life’; a phrase he’d picked up from therapy too. He’d never observed clouds, sky, nor appreciated sunlight until this life.
Today, x-Suhø was the last person to wake. He had sat up, thoughts a watery grey, and squinted in the light shining directly on him through the window.
He was alone until Jongin came to check on him. For the first time, he woke to daylight.
“You can stay.” Jongin said. “A lot of people stay in bed for a while after waking up.”
Jongin walked away, leaving the door ajar
So he lay there, and turned on his side. He stared out the window, past the round amulet dangling in the middle. It was glass: dark transparent blue with a smaller opaque white circle in it, and within that, a small black dot in the center. The charm reminded him of the eyes that watched over them all, with their restraints, clipboards, and red visors. Eyes of his past life.
On the second day of waking up in this place, he had asked what it was, the glass thing hanging in the room. Jongin explained that he had picked it up on his travels, and he turned toward the window. Thus the x-Kāi clone exposed his back to him, to x-Suhø.
x-Suhø: Captured weapon, current candidate for rehabilitation.
Minseok, with his feet planted shoulders-width apart, stared x-Suhø down. Jongin didn’t seem to realize his mistake until Minseok snapped his fingers.
Their brown eyes weren’t like that of the Red Force, nor of Kāi and Xiumin’s mismatched irises. But he was still being watched all the same. From one cage to another.
“A protection charm,” he said aloud to himself. Jongin had sprinkled this bit of wisdom on him too: talking to oneself was okay. He was alone, and repeated what he’d remembered of Kāi’s words.
No. Jongin.
“I’m Jongin, not x-Kāi,” was the gentle, patient response when he’d called Jongin the wrong name, early on. Then the three of them would practice introductions again with Suhø. No. he wasn’t x-Suhø. Nor was he ɴᴜᴍʙᴇʀ ᴏɴᴇ.
He was Suho, now. Just Suho.
It was difficult for Suho to trust these men he’d been programmed to attack, maim, kill. They wouldn’t confirm what their powers were, only claimed they no longer had any. If Jongin and Minseok were like Kāi and Xiumin, then he agreed with the evaluation, with whomever was in-charge: teleportation and ice were best for parrying his control over water.
He remembered hunting Kāi and Xiumin. He remembered being hunted in return. The absolute stun of ice. The irrepressible vibrations that kept water from his grasp. Or worse, his own body pulled away to another space-time. It was likely that these two specialty forces combined had ultimately captured him.
Suho had not exchanged a single word with his own clone, Junmyeon. It was only through Jongin he’d learned that name, after the third time the clone’s eyes met his through the interrogation window.
Not even when he’d taunted his parallel water-controller during their fight did they talk. He knew that Junmyeon knew about blood manipulation, now, thanks to him.
He honed his mental focus on his clone beyond the glass.
Nothing happened.
Last time, he’d sent a chair through the observation window. They quickly overpowered him and he was tranquilized. In those few moments of eye contact with Junmyeon, before losing consciousness, he felt his body respond to an outside force.
The other man retained control over water.
Now Suho spent his days performing mundane tasks:
walking,
cooking,
cleaning,
learning to become a reader.
Becoming an artist.
Becoming himself.
Being watched over.
Watching water move without any response to his will: rain, rivers, reservoirs.
They slept next to him, this Kāi who called himself Jongin, and this Xiumin who called himself Minseok. He didn’t know what happened to the rest of his side. The rest of the ‘specialty’ users like him. Their facility days were spent training together, or at rest in isolation. Yet Suho felt he did know them, however briefly, before the facility was destroyed and the ‘field’ simply became the world.
In the past two months, he learned personal things about them. Jongin was afraid of things such as bugs and heights, but laughed at his own fears and scary films. Minseok enjoyed making jokes, and also explaining each one. Jongin said Minseok wasn’t funny, yet he grinned at Minseok anyway.
In spite of the jokes, Minseok seemed far more guarded. Enough to compensate for Jongin. To the point where Suho felt envy. Xiumin had never displayed such fierce protectiveness over any of his cohorts.
After a month of restless sleep, the contents of his dreams were coaxed out of Suho and deemed ‘bad’.
It was Jongin who’d chosen to share beds first. That same night, Minseok dragged in a plush chair and pushed it right up against the bed. Jongin lay down with his own blanket by the window, next to Suho. In the crosshair of Minseok’s watchful eye and the nazar in the window, Suho was effectively surrounded.
Several times throughout the last month, they would wake him up. His face would be wet with tears, and his heart would be thumping so hard, overwhelming him with the rush of blood through his body, surging through his organs and brain. Blood, full of water that was beyond the reach of his mental manipulation.
Eventually, they moved Jongin’s bed to his room. With the mattresses pushed together, all three of them fit, and he’d woken up several times to a sleeping Jongin embracing him. Only once did he wake up to Minseok’s arms being pulled from around his middle.
Today.
Suho sat up again. He listened to the water of the shower flow through mechanical pressure, freefalling, without any of his interference. The sound carved in him a void, a kind of keening ache.
The sunlight had moved from the bed to the wall. When he looked up at the open door as footsteps neared, he saw Minseok leaning on the frame.
“Yesterday. What you said. Sounds to me like you lost a limb. The way you described them taking away your power.” Minseok flexed the fingers of his right hand. “That’s how I felt too, after the separation procedure.”
If Minseok was lying about losing his power, it was a very bold lie. Minseok and Jongin still hadn’t confirmed to Suho what their respective powers were.
By this time, a pale image of the nazar was cast by the sunlight onto the opposing wall; its deep azure was watery because of its glassy composition. A hand was reaching toward him.
It was Minseok’s hand, shrouded in that blue light, with a glass of water.
“For me, having water always helps ease me into a new day.”
Their hands touched as Minseok made sure Suho had fully grasped the glass. Jongin made physical contact with him far more often than Minseok.
“I’ll teach you about folding fitted sheets later today, when we remake the beds together.”