Future!AU
I may or may not continue this. Meh. Hence why I didn't give it a title. If I continue, I'll give this a name and crosspost, but for now I'm leaving it here.
During the first year of the economy’s downturn, the President had taken several occasions to reassure the public that it was only temporary. As long as there were honest hardworking people, there would be a government working hard to support them.
It was around 7 years later, when unemployment reached 50%, that a new illegal activity entered the scene: human experimentation. The scientific community no longer needed to run their experiments on animals with the amount of people who were begging to participate for compensation. The government tried their best to squash this practice, but as participation in the misdeed increased, law officials turned a blind eye to the matter.
As the economy declined, so did the country’s overall health. Sanitary waste management was hard to come by in those days, leading to widespread deaths as a result of tainted water. Those who survived crawled to human experimenters who held promises of health care, food, clean water, and housing in return for use of their bodies.
In 2082, the government legalized human experimentation, evening going as far to take control of all the facilities, joined them as one powerhouse renamed as The Advantage Program. The program became very popular among those who had lost everything and wanted their children to escape the outstanding poverty. It became a common occurrence to see children around the company with scars and burns from testing.
By 2114, with government help, Advantage’s technology had improved immensely to the point of creating successful humanoid robots. The first round had successfully replaced schoolteachers and professors, resulting in a wave of people losing their jobs.
People like Lee Sungmin’s father.
For his entire life, all he heard about how Advantage was just bringing the nation closer to a communistic society with more of “those damn robots” instead of actual humans. But no matter how much it hated the company, it became apparent to Sungmin’s parents that their son was growing sicker and sicker without medical care they couldn’t provide. So, at age 16, Sungmin took his first train to the Advantage headquarters in Incheon.
After Sungmin recovered from his sickness, he tried to contact his parents to express his wishes to return home and help provide for the family.
But the company told him the one thing the government managed to keep quiet since Advantage’s reformation: Nobody leaves The Advantage Program; his life and body had been signed away.
*~*~*~*~*
Beads of sweat stick to Sungmin’s skin as he collapses onto his hard cot after another exhausting day in the chamber. The experimenters never really bothered to tell their (un)willing participants the purpose of their experiments, but Sungmin had no idea why putting him in a 115 degree room for hours at a time would advance science.
After tiring days like these, he can’t help but let his mind drift to his previous life where the only thing that mattered was what he and Hyukjae would do for the day.
Hyukjae had been his everything back at home. He had been the only one to stand up to the kids who bullied Sungmin for looking like a girl. The two bonded so fast that Sungmin could barely recall the moment where he was sure Hyukjae was his friend.
At age 14, both of the boys were at the stage of being interested in dating. Sungmin remembers not being able to look his best friend in the eye when he confessed that he might be gay. They shared the first of many kisses that night, sitting on the stoop of Sungmin’s porch.
Their first time having sex was far from romantic, occurring hastily in Sungmin’s bed while his parents were down the hall in the living room. Sungmin had to bite down on his arm to keep from whimpering from the pain.
Only 2 weeks before Sungmin joined The Advantage Program, Hyukjae had told Sungmin that he loved him. Sungmin easily said it back, kissing his boyfriend and thinking that it was just the beginning of a happy life.
Three years later, he wonders if Hyukjae had ever moved on. If he had gotten over his first love because Sungmin certainly hasn’t. Now he thinks he would have gladly fought to get well at home if he knew he wouldn’t see Hyukjae again.
There’s a loud banging on the door to the tiny, plain room. He does nothing more than turn his head towards the sound because he knows that he has no real right to his privacy; they knock just to warn the inhabitants.
The door is opened and a body is harshly shoved inside before the door snaps shut again. The stranger falls to the ground and begins to protest, but his words trail off as he looks over at the man on the cot.
‘Hello…” he shyly speaks, no longer possessing the venom he had a few seconds ago. His eyes are almost black, but there’s a spark of innocence in them that tells Sungmin he’s dealing with a new arrival. His hair is a mop of shaggy, burgundy hair with the natural black roots starting to peek out. For a second, his stomach tightens as he suddenly thinks of Hyukjae. “I was told there were no more empty rooms at the moment, so I’ll be rooming with you for now. I’m Kyuhyun.”
Sungmin shrugs and turns his head towards the wall. This isn’t the first time a roommate had been forced upon him due to overcrowding. Eventually someone would succumb to an experiment, freeing up a room. It’s not good to get attached in this world.
“Hyung? Your name?” Kyuhyun stares at his roommate hopefully, but when he sees he’s not getting a response anytime soon, he starts to nervously ramble. “I was in a bad accident about half a year ago, so my parents sent me here because they couldn’t afford the hospital bills. I figure I’ll stay until I’m completely healed and then head back… I really miss my noona.” Sungmin has to keep himself from scoffing; he doesn’t want to be the one to tell Kyuhyun he’ll probably never see his sister again.
The new prisoner continues rambling for a while, talking about anything and everything while sitting much too close to the cot. Sungmin’s not sure if he’s just naturally talkative or if he feels a need to fill the silence. Either way, he’s tired of it and feels no remorse when he sits up on his cot long enough to deliver a hard slap on the younger’s cheek.
That keeps Kyuhyun quiet for the rest of the night as he curls up on the cold floor, not daring to ask his roommate if they could share the only cot and blanket.
-
The next few weeks are more of the same routine for Sungmin, except for the presence of Kyuhyun. The young man seems almost afraid of him, which doesn’t bother him in the least. But for some reason he can’t shake off how his roommate sits alone at meal times or how the scar across his stomach is healing much slower than it should, probably something to do with electricity tests he was going through.
When Sungmin first arrived, he had spent only 1 day in electrical testing, but it was something he feared even now. The experimenters had stuck large needles into various places in his body, attaching them to a machine that dealt out electrical currents. In those days, before he lost all hope, he used to scream at the pain, and he had lost his voice within the first 20 minutes.
Sometimes after heading back from his testing, Sungmin’s prepared to let Kyuhyun have the cot, but when Kyuhyun comes into the room in tears and collapses onto the ground, he can only stare.
The light is leaving Kyuhyun’s eyes day by day as he realizes that no one is coming for him, just like Sungmin realized 3 years ago.
“Kyuhyun?” Sungmin questions one night as he’s listening to the young man’s sniveling. He had seen Kyuhyun limp into the room, sore from head to toe, and knew that it must be highly uncomfortable to sleep on the hard concrete floor. The crying stops and the room is silent. “You can sleep up here tonight. We can switch places.” He turns on his side and peers down on the ground. In the dark room, he can barely see the outline of the still boy.
Kyuhyun doesn’t move or reply, scared of being reprimanded by his hyung. He can’t hold back his yelp when Sungmin moves off the cot and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, go on up.” The boy is still scared, but he hesitantly sits on the bed and stares at Sungmin as if he’s waiting to be pulled back down. “If you keep staring, I’ll change my mind.” That gets Kyuhyun to lie down.
“Can I ask you a question, Hyung?” Kyuhyun whispers a few minutes later as Sungmin’s still trying to get comfortable on the floor. Sungmin hums as a response and sits up. “How old are you?”
Sungmin considers the question for a moment. “I’m not really sure… what day was it when you entered?”
“Maybe mid-January, 2117.”
“Ah… I believe I’m 19 then. How old are you, Kyuhyun-ah?” Sungmin scoots back until he’s resting against the wall. Maybe he’ll be able to sleep sitting up.
“Today was my 17th birthday...” he replies sadly. “Noona promised to take me to see a movie if we had enough money.”
Sungmin feels a twinge of sympathy, but for some reason he can’t think of any words to soothe the boy’s mind. “Don’t think about home too much. The memories will fade, and Advantage will become your life.”
“Don’t you ever wish you could go home? Do you really want to spend your whole life here?” Kyuhyun still sounds hopeful of escape, and a part of Sungmin hates how he can speak of the outside world as if it’s an option. “I’d like to hang on to my memories to hold me over until-“
In a small fit of rage, Sungmin stands up and pulls Kyuhyun back onto the ground, hovering over him. “We’re all going to die here. You’re never getting out, so don’t even start to dream about home. You’ll only make staying here worse.” For good measure he not-so-gently nudges Kyuhyun to the other side of the room and reclaims his place on the cot.
He’s already reserved to the fact that he’ll die stuck here; he doesn’t need some kid (albeit he’s not much older) filling him with thoughts of freedom.
-
The pair falls into an awkward silence for the next few days, avoiding each other’s eyes and sleeping as far apart as they could in the bathroom-sized room. It’s funny how Sungmin dreamt about having a friend the whole time he had been there, but all he could muster towards Kyuhyun was hostility.
Having another person so close all the time has his mind drifting by to Hyukjae. There wasn’t a day when they were apart after becoming best friends. Even with Sungmin was too sick to attend school, the gummy-smiled man was sure to hurry over to visit right after school let out.
Thinking about it made his chest constrict painfully, but he liked thinking about the fact that he had been in love and loved back, something most people don’t really find until their 30s. Maybe dying within the program wasn’t so bad since his last memories of freedom were of being deep in love.
The dreams of his old boyfriend come back in full force, and he tries his best not to cry so loud when he wakes up to face his reality. What had he done in his previous life to end up like this?
A few days after the confrontation, Sungmin wakes up to Kyuhyun staring at him oddly. From day one, he’d been avoiding eye contact so Sungmin’s caught quite off-guard and looks eyes with him.
“Hyung, who’s Hyukjae?”
A lump forms in Sungmin’s throat when he hears the name coming from someone else. He’s embarrassed that the name gets him so flustered and the fact that he must have called out the boy’s name in his sleep. “Just… someone.”
“Was he your friend?” Kyuhyun seems to be much braver this morning than he usually is.
“Something like that.” He’s not readily about to admit his sexual preference to someone he has to room with for possibly the rest of his life. He couldn’t even tell his parents because of the fear of what they would think.
Kyuhyun speaks up again, describing someone who very much sounded like Sungmin’s first love. “That’s what Hyukjae looks like, right, Hyung?” Sungmin can only nod dumbly and continue staring at his roommate. “He was my… good friend back at home,” he continues, answering the unspoken question of how he knew Hyukjae.
“Did… Did he ever mention me?” His voice is desperate, but he can’t really bring himself to care at the moment. “Lee Sungmin,” he adds, realizing that in the month they’ve been roommates, he had never provided his name.
“No, never.” Kyuhyun shakes his head and stares down at the ground. He misses Sungmin’s look of total devastation when he realizes that Hyukjae had moved on, maybe even forgotten him. All the memories of being in love seem distorted and only a glimmer of happiness in a life of misfortune. For him, there was no reason to look back on his life and smile.
“He was my boyfriend,” Kyuhyun shyly continues. A blush is starting to creep up his cheeks. “I-I know you may think that it’s gross and unnatural, but when I heard his name I was just curious how you knew him.”
A yell rips through Sungmin as he launches himself at Kyuhyun, hardly aware of his body movements. Everything seems to be an out of body experience as his lands a punch to Kyuhyun’s gut. Something stops him though before he can hit the young man’s face, wanting to finally put that innocent look to rest. Since when had he been the type to hit someone harmless? Was he really resulting to this because an old boyfriend had moved on years after he left? He was being stupid.
Unfortunately, his yell was heard by the patrolling security guards who burst into the room as Sungmin still had his fist pulled back ready to punch. He barely registers the pain of fingernails digging into his nails as they pull him off Kyuhyun and drag him out of the room and drag him through a maze of corridors to an unmarked room. Before his eyes are blindfolded, he catches a quick glimpse of a long metal cylinder; long enough to hold a person, but it didn’t seem quite big enough for said person to lie comfortably inside.
Several seconds later he’s stripped of his clothes and shoved into the cylinder, and he’s not happy to find out that he was right about a person not being able to fit comfortably. The walls of the tube are painfully squeezing his shoulders and breathing has become difficult, as his chest was partially restricted from expanding.
He’s never acted out while he’s been in the program, but he imagines that any kind of violence within the program led to punishment. They would probably leave him in the tube for a few hours until his limbs were too cramped to move. It could be worse he thinks, even though his shoulders hurt and the cylinder’s a bit warm.
Okay, it was getting a little too warm.
The metal tube was heating up at an alarming rate, and there was nothing Sungmin could do to relieve himself from the burning sensation in his skin. He starts to claw at the tube, thinking that maybe if he begs they’ll let him off with a warning as it was his first offense. But even when he starts howling at the pain, no one comes to his aid.
Half an hour later, he’s sure he’s about to pass out from the pain when he hears a voice speaking to him. The voice echoes inside the tube and he has to focus harder than usual to make out what’s being said.
“We haven’t had any problems with you in the past, so it could have been worse. Next time I won’t go so easy on you.” He shivers at the voice, despite the suffocating heat. The general rule around the facility was to not get in trouble on Doctor Kim’s shift. Some people didn’t survive the punishment.
Sungmin cries out in relief when the heat starts to disappear from the tube. He hears Doctor’s Kim cold, empty laugh and is told that he shouldn’t expect anyone to help him back to his room. He ends up sleeping inside the tube, muscles cramped and eyes still blindfolded.
In the morning, he wiggles out of the cylinder and tumbles to the ground from the sleep and exhaustion that’s still leaving his body. He stumbles around blindly, searching for his clothes and trying to find something to grip onto before he realizes that he could easily remove the blindfold. Luckily, he’s just a few feet from the door, and he dresses before quickly exiting the room, having absolutely no desire to look back into the room.
Surprisingly, Kyuhyun’s not in the room, so Sungmin allows himself to moan in pain as he lowers himself onto the cot. Maybe a lifetime of being constantly sick would have been better than being well and not really owning his body.
Kyuhyun enters when Sungmin’s half asleep, dropping what sounds like books the second he closes the door. Sungmin opens an eye and looks over. Yes, books. “I see you finally found the community center.” He never ventured further than his room or wherever he happened to be having an experiment performed on him. The Advantage Program advertised plenty of recreational activities during free time, but Sungmin wanted to always be reminded of what the program really was: a prison. Having fun in this place would distort his thinking, make him believe that since he was having fun, being trapped here forever didn’t seem so bad.
“You look awful,” Kyuhyun blurts out. His eyes are wide and his jaw is slacked as he takes in his roommate’s blistering skin.
Sungmin lets out a humorless laugh and closes his eyes. “Yeah, because that’s the first thing you say to someone who hates you.” Kyuhyun shrugs and kneels down to pick up his books, apparently unfazed that the person he just might be living with for the rest of his life hates him.
“Did you know that there’s a library here? There’s not really due dates since we can’t leave, but you can take as many books as you want!” Kyuhyun seems to be a different person than the one who could hardly look Sungmin in the eye. His eyes are still filled with the childlike innocence Sungmin wants to squash.
“You finally understand that we’re stuck here?”
“Mmm, but I’m trying to not let it get me down. Why should I always be depressed about something that I can’t change?” Sungmin can feel Kyuhyun’s eyes on him with the statement.
Sungmin opens an eye and extends his middle finger at the younger boy. “If I didn’t feel like shit and if I wouldn’t get punished, I would kick your ass right now.” He hopes the threat is enough to shut Kyuhyun up for a little while.
“I don’t really think you hate me, Hyung,” Kyuhyun says lowly. I can tell that you’re actually really nice, but you’re mad that you’re here.” The room falls into a tense silence, so Kyuhyun continues. “I know you want to be left alone, but I think I’d like to be your friend, if that’s alright.”
“I don’t want friends.” The words sound forced and painful to say.
The younger man shrugs and picks up a book to start reading. “If you change your mind, I’m here.”
During the first year of the economy’s downturn, the President had taken several occasions to reassure the public that it was only temporary. As long as there were honest hardworking people, there would be a government working hard to support them.
It was around 7 years later, when unemployment reached 50%, that a new illegal activity entered the scene: human experimentation. The scientific community no longer needed to run their experiments on animals with the amount of people who were begging to participate for compensation. The government tried their best to squash this practice, but as participation in the misdeed increased, law officials turned a blind eye to the matter.
As the economy declined, so did the country’s overall health. Sanitary waste management was hard to come by in those days, leading to widespread deaths as a result of tainted water. Those who survived crawled to human experimenters who held promises of health care, food, clean water, and housing in return for use of their bodies.
In 2082, the government legalized human experimentation, evening going as far to take control of all the facilities, joined them as one powerhouse renamed as The Advantage Program. The program became very popular among those who had lost everything and wanted their children to escape the outstanding poverty. It became a common occurrence to see children around the company with scars and burns from testing.
By 2114, with government help, Advantage’s technology had improved immensely to the point of creating successful humanoid robots. The first round had successfully replaced schoolteachers and professors, resulting in a wave of people losing their jobs.
People like Lee Sungmin’s father.
For his entire life, all he heard about how Advantage was just bringing the nation closer to a communistic society with more of “those damn robots” instead of actual humans. But no matter how much it hated the company, it became apparent to Sungmin’s parents that their son was growing sicker and sicker without medical care they couldn’t provide. So, at age 16, Sungmin took his first train to the Advantage headquarters in Incheon.
After Sungmin recovered from his sickness, he tried to contact his parents to express his wishes to return home and help provide for the family.
But the company told him the one thing the government managed to keep quiet since Advantage’s reformation: Nobody leaves The Advantage Program; his life and body had been signed away.
*~*~*~*~*
Beads of sweat stick to Sungmin’s skin as he collapses onto his hard cot after another exhausting day in the chamber. The experimenters never really bothered to tell their (un)willing participants the purpose of their experiments, but Sungmin had no idea why putting him in a 115 degree room for hours at a time would advance science.
After tiring days like these, he can’t help but let his mind drift to his previous life where the only thing that mattered was what he and Hyukjae would do for the day.
Hyukjae had been his everything back at home. He had been the only one to stand up to the kids who bullied Sungmin for looking like a girl. The two bonded so fast that Sungmin could barely recall the moment where he was sure Hyukjae was his friend.
At age 14, both of the boys were at the stage of being interested in dating. Sungmin remembers not being able to look his best friend in the eye when he confessed that he might be gay. They shared the first of many kisses that night, sitting on the stoop of Sungmin’s porch.
Their first time having sex was far from romantic, occurring hastily in Sungmin’s bed while his parents were down the hall in the living room. Sungmin had to bite down on his arm to keep from whimpering from the pain.
Only 2 weeks before Sungmin joined The Advantage Program, Hyukjae had told Sungmin that he loved him. Sungmin easily said it back, kissing his boyfriend and thinking that it was just the beginning of a happy life.
Three years later, he wonders if Hyukjae had ever moved on. If he had gotten over his first love because Sungmin certainly hasn’t. Now he thinks he would have gladly fought to get well at home if he knew he wouldn’t see Hyukjae again.
There’s a loud banging on the door to the tiny, plain room. He does nothing more than turn his head towards the sound because he knows that he has no real right to his privacy; they knock just to warn the inhabitants.
The door is opened and a body is harshly shoved inside before the door snaps shut again. The stranger falls to the ground and begins to protest, but his words trail off as he looks over at the man on the cot.
‘Hello…” he shyly speaks, no longer possessing the venom he had a few seconds ago. His eyes are almost black, but there’s a spark of innocence in them that tells Sungmin he’s dealing with a new arrival. His hair is a mop of shaggy, burgundy hair with the natural black roots starting to peek out. For a second, his stomach tightens as he suddenly thinks of Hyukjae. “I was told there were no more empty rooms at the moment, so I’ll be rooming with you for now. I’m Kyuhyun.”
Sungmin shrugs and turns his head towards the wall. This isn’t the first time a roommate had been forced upon him due to overcrowding. Eventually someone would succumb to an experiment, freeing up a room. It’s not good to get attached in this world.
“Hyung? Your name?” Kyuhyun stares at his roommate hopefully, but when he sees he’s not getting a response anytime soon, he starts to nervously ramble. “I was in a bad accident about half a year ago, so my parents sent me here because they couldn’t afford the hospital bills. I figure I’ll stay until I’m completely healed and then head back… I really miss my noona.” Sungmin has to keep himself from scoffing; he doesn’t want to be the one to tell Kyuhyun he’ll probably never see his sister again.
The new prisoner continues rambling for a while, talking about anything and everything while sitting much too close to the cot. Sungmin’s not sure if he’s just naturally talkative or if he feels a need to fill the silence. Either way, he’s tired of it and feels no remorse when he sits up on his cot long enough to deliver a hard slap on the younger’s cheek.
That keeps Kyuhyun quiet for the rest of the night as he curls up on the cold floor, not daring to ask his roommate if they could share the only cot and blanket.
-
The next few weeks are more of the same routine for Sungmin, except for the presence of Kyuhyun. The young man seems almost afraid of him, which doesn’t bother him in the least. But for some reason he can’t shake off how his roommate sits alone at meal times or how the scar across his stomach is healing much slower than it should, probably something to do with electricity tests he was going through.
When Sungmin first arrived, he had spent only 1 day in electrical testing, but it was something he feared even now. The experimenters had stuck large needles into various places in his body, attaching them to a machine that dealt out electrical currents. In those days, before he lost all hope, he used to scream at the pain, and he had lost his voice within the first 20 minutes.
Sometimes after heading back from his testing, Sungmin’s prepared to let Kyuhyun have the cot, but when Kyuhyun comes into the room in tears and collapses onto the ground, he can only stare.
The light is leaving Kyuhyun’s eyes day by day as he realizes that no one is coming for him, just like Sungmin realized 3 years ago.
“Kyuhyun?” Sungmin questions one night as he’s listening to the young man’s sniveling. He had seen Kyuhyun limp into the room, sore from head to toe, and knew that it must be highly uncomfortable to sleep on the hard concrete floor. The crying stops and the room is silent. “You can sleep up here tonight. We can switch places.” He turns on his side and peers down on the ground. In the dark room, he can barely see the outline of the still boy.
Kyuhyun doesn’t move or reply, scared of being reprimanded by his hyung. He can’t hold back his yelp when Sungmin moves off the cot and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, go on up.” The boy is still scared, but he hesitantly sits on the bed and stares at Sungmin as if he’s waiting to be pulled back down. “If you keep staring, I’ll change my mind.” That gets Kyuhyun to lie down.
“Can I ask you a question, Hyung?” Kyuhyun whispers a few minutes later as Sungmin’s still trying to get comfortable on the floor. Sungmin hums as a response and sits up. “How old are you?”
Sungmin considers the question for a moment. “I’m not really sure… what day was it when you entered?”
“Maybe mid-January, 2117.”
“Ah… I believe I’m 19 then. How old are you, Kyuhyun-ah?” Sungmin scoots back until he’s resting against the wall. Maybe he’ll be able to sleep sitting up.
“Today was my 17th birthday...” he replies sadly. “Noona promised to take me to see a movie if we had enough money.”
Sungmin feels a twinge of sympathy, but for some reason he can’t think of any words to soothe the boy’s mind. “Don’t think about home too much. The memories will fade, and Advantage will become your life.”
“Don’t you ever wish you could go home? Do you really want to spend your whole life here?” Kyuhyun still sounds hopeful of escape, and a part of Sungmin hates how he can speak of the outside world as if it’s an option. “I’d like to hang on to my memories to hold me over until-“
In a small fit of rage, Sungmin stands up and pulls Kyuhyun back onto the ground, hovering over him. “We’re all going to die here. You’re never getting out, so don’t even start to dream about home. You’ll only make staying here worse.” For good measure he not-so-gently nudges Kyuhyun to the other side of the room and reclaims his place on the cot.
He’s already reserved to the fact that he’ll die stuck here; he doesn’t need some kid (albeit he’s not much older) filling him with thoughts of freedom.
-
The pair falls into an awkward silence for the next few days, avoiding each other’s eyes and sleeping as far apart as they could in the bathroom-sized room. It’s funny how Sungmin dreamt about having a friend the whole time he had been there, but all he could muster towards Kyuhyun was hostility.
Having another person so close all the time has his mind drifting by to Hyukjae. There wasn’t a day when they were apart after becoming best friends. Even with Sungmin was too sick to attend school, the gummy-smiled man was sure to hurry over to visit right after school let out.
Thinking about it made his chest constrict painfully, but he liked thinking about the fact that he had been in love and loved back, something most people don’t really find until their 30s. Maybe dying within the program wasn’t so bad since his last memories of freedom were of being deep in love.
The dreams of his old boyfriend come back in full force, and he tries his best not to cry so loud when he wakes up to face his reality. What had he done in his previous life to end up like this?
A few days after the confrontation, Sungmin wakes up to Kyuhyun staring at him oddly. From day one, he’d been avoiding eye contact so Sungmin’s caught quite off-guard and looks eyes with him.
“Hyung, who’s Hyukjae?”
A lump forms in Sungmin’s throat when he hears the name coming from someone else. He’s embarrassed that the name gets him so flustered and the fact that he must have called out the boy’s name in his sleep. “Just… someone.”
“Was he your friend?” Kyuhyun seems to be much braver this morning than he usually is.
“Something like that.” He’s not readily about to admit his sexual preference to someone he has to room with for possibly the rest of his life. He couldn’t even tell his parents because of the fear of what they would think.
Kyuhyun speaks up again, describing someone who very much sounded like Sungmin’s first love. “That’s what Hyukjae looks like, right, Hyung?” Sungmin can only nod dumbly and continue staring at his roommate. “He was my… good friend back at home,” he continues, answering the unspoken question of how he knew Hyukjae.
“Did… Did he ever mention me?” His voice is desperate, but he can’t really bring himself to care at the moment. “Lee Sungmin,” he adds, realizing that in the month they’ve been roommates, he had never provided his name.
“No, never.” Kyuhyun shakes his head and stares down at the ground. He misses Sungmin’s look of total devastation when he realizes that Hyukjae had moved on, maybe even forgotten him. All the memories of being in love seem distorted and only a glimmer of happiness in a life of misfortune. For him, there was no reason to look back on his life and smile.
“He was my boyfriend,” Kyuhyun shyly continues. A blush is starting to creep up his cheeks. “I-I know you may think that it’s gross and unnatural, but when I heard his name I was just curious how you knew him.”
A yell rips through Sungmin as he launches himself at Kyuhyun, hardly aware of his body movements. Everything seems to be an out of body experience as his lands a punch to Kyuhyun’s gut. Something stops him though before he can hit the young man’s face, wanting to finally put that innocent look to rest. Since when had he been the type to hit someone harmless? Was he really resulting to this because an old boyfriend had moved on years after he left? He was being stupid.
Unfortunately, his yell was heard by the patrolling security guards who burst into the room as Sungmin still had his fist pulled back ready to punch. He barely registers the pain of fingernails digging into his nails as they pull him off Kyuhyun and drag him out of the room and drag him through a maze of corridors to an unmarked room. Before his eyes are blindfolded, he catches a quick glimpse of a long metal cylinder; long enough to hold a person, but it didn’t seem quite big enough for said person to lie comfortably inside.
Several seconds later he’s stripped of his clothes and shoved into the cylinder, and he’s not happy to find out that he was right about a person not being able to fit comfortably. The walls of the tube are painfully squeezing his shoulders and breathing has become difficult, as his chest was partially restricted from expanding.
He’s never acted out while he’s been in the program, but he imagines that any kind of violence within the program led to punishment. They would probably leave him in the tube for a few hours until his limbs were too cramped to move. It could be worse he thinks, even though his shoulders hurt and the cylinder’s a bit warm.
Okay, it was getting a little too warm.
The metal tube was heating up at an alarming rate, and there was nothing Sungmin could do to relieve himself from the burning sensation in his skin. He starts to claw at the tube, thinking that maybe if he begs they’ll let him off with a warning as it was his first offense. But even when he starts howling at the pain, no one comes to his aid.
Half an hour later, he’s sure he’s about to pass out from the pain when he hears a voice speaking to him. The voice echoes inside the tube and he has to focus harder than usual to make out what’s being said.
“We haven’t had any problems with you in the past, so it could have been worse. Next time I won’t go so easy on you.” He shivers at the voice, despite the suffocating heat. The general rule around the facility was to not get in trouble on Doctor Kim’s shift. Some people didn’t survive the punishment.
Sungmin cries out in relief when the heat starts to disappear from the tube. He hears Doctor’s Kim cold, empty laugh and is told that he shouldn’t expect anyone to help him back to his room. He ends up sleeping inside the tube, muscles cramped and eyes still blindfolded.
In the morning, he wiggles out of the cylinder and tumbles to the ground from the sleep and exhaustion that’s still leaving his body. He stumbles around blindly, searching for his clothes and trying to find something to grip onto before he realizes that he could easily remove the blindfold. Luckily, he’s just a few feet from the door, and he dresses before quickly exiting the room, having absolutely no desire to look back into the room.
Surprisingly, Kyuhyun’s not in the room, so Sungmin allows himself to moan in pain as he lowers himself onto the cot. Maybe a lifetime of being constantly sick would have been better than being well and not really owning his body.
Kyuhyun enters when Sungmin’s half asleep, dropping what sounds like books the second he closes the door. Sungmin opens an eye and looks over. Yes, books. “I see you finally found the community center.” He never ventured further than his room or wherever he happened to be having an experiment performed on him. The Advantage Program advertised plenty of recreational activities during free time, but Sungmin wanted to always be reminded of what the program really was: a prison. Having fun in this place would distort his thinking, make him believe that since he was having fun, being trapped here forever didn’t seem so bad.
“You look awful,” Kyuhyun blurts out. His eyes are wide and his jaw is slacked as he takes in his roommate’s blistering skin.
Sungmin lets out a humorless laugh and closes his eyes. “Yeah, because that’s the first thing you say to someone who hates you.” Kyuhyun shrugs and kneels down to pick up his books, apparently unfazed that the person he just might be living with for the rest of his life hates him.
“Did you know that there’s a library here? There’s not really due dates since we can’t leave, but you can take as many books as you want!” Kyuhyun seems to be a different person than the one who could hardly look Sungmin in the eye. His eyes are still filled with the childlike innocence Sungmin wants to squash.
“You finally understand that we’re stuck here?”
“Mmm, but I’m trying to not let it get me down. Why should I always be depressed about something that I can’t change?” Sungmin can feel Kyuhyun’s eyes on him with the statement.
Sungmin opens an eye and extends his middle finger at the younger boy. “If I didn’t feel like shit and if I wouldn’t get punished, I would kick your ass right now.” He hopes the threat is enough to shut Kyuhyun up for a little while.
“I don’t really think you hate me, Hyung,” Kyuhyun says lowly. I can tell that you’re actually really nice, but you’re mad that you’re here.” The room falls into a tense silence, so Kyuhyun continues. “I know you want to be left alone, but I think I’d like to be your friend, if that’s alright.”
“I don’t want friends.” The words sound forced and painful to say.
The younger man shrugs and picks up a book to start reading. “If you change your mind, I’m here.”