an argument against constructionism
sehun/lu han, pg
3289 words
sehun has an identity crisis.
a remix of this town ain't big enough! by the amazing colorfunk for loveismix.
The trainees have heard about this so often that it’s kind of almost an urban legend, some kind of folklore amongst the newbies in SME. Years ago, one of the senior enforcement officers, Oh Sehun, nearly ran away with a criminal. Of course, as with all kinds of urban legends, which are really just highly advanced forms of gossip, it seems to have been derived from multiple sources and has multiple incarnations. For example, in one particular version, he was lured away by her feminine charms. In another, he was kidnapped, and didn’t have any intention of actually escaping from the Academy. In yet another one, he was actually acting undercover. When asked about it, all he does is to either laugh or roll his eyes, or both.
“It was so long ago,” he’d say to the brave few who approached him about it, shrugging, “I don’t even remember what he looks like now.”
But that has to be a lie, according to Kim Jongin, another senior enforcement officer. “Yeah, it happened like ten years ago, but the rate they were going out, you’d have thought they were dating,” he told the trainees when they brought it up during practice sessions. “What did we call them, playdates? Yeah, playdates. He has to remember. Even I remember.”
He remained tight-lipped, however, when prodded further. “Sehun’s my friend, I’m not just gonna rat him out like that. But I can tell you I did play a part in talking him out of it,” he bragged, looking triumphant. “It’s not hard to find out who, he’s already retired anyway, and hasn’t been part of the scene for some time. And honestly, if you guys can afford to be so nosy about this, maybe you could spend more time working on your aiming.”
Sooner or later someone ransacked the database and discovered who it was. Lu Han was going to turn thirty-three next year, owned a small art gallery in Insadong, and was a telekinetic. But nobody was going to guess, just looking at his face, that he’d pulled off twenty major heists and a string of smaller thefts within six years, that he was an expert in grand larceny, that he was once a registered class 2B criminal and had his own file with SME. Working in art seemed to suit him better; that childish-looking, impish face was the face of an adult who didn’t quite want to grow up, the face of someone who couldn’t care much about pragmatism, moral or immoral, and the dire consequences it brought.
The first time they met, it was by accident. They were tracking down a bunch of mutants who were involved in some sort of smuggling activity, and word had it that they were using the money to finance a coup d’état. Sehun’s unit was instructed to round up some key members, who were said to be meeting at a restaurant in one of Gangnam’s seedier areas one evening. As luck would have it, Lu Han was there, having dinner with fellow hardened criminal, Huang Zitao, even if neither of them was what SME had ordered.
“We weren’t after you,” Sehun said later in the backseat of a tiny, nondescript van, hands and feet bound together by invisible shackles. “We were after the three guys sitting behind you.”
“Oh,” Lu Han replied, starting the engine. “Well, Zitao does tend to have knee jerk reactions all the time.”
“I can tell,” Sehun said sarcastically. One of Huang’s throwing knives had missed his face by inches during the exchange of blows. Worse, their targets made a move to flee immediately after they realised that it was a team from SME. Worse still, Lu Han grabbed Sehun and led him out the back door amidst all the chaos, probably thinking that he’d be a good hostage, and now Sehun didn’t know what his team was doing and where they were. He’d lost his communicator during the mess.
Lu Han squinted at him through the rear view mirror as he struggled. “You seem pretty young. Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“Turning eighteen next month,” Sehun said automatically, and then bit his tongue. All that training about not speaking casually to criminals was apparently all for nothing, but Lu Han seemed so amiable that the words just spilled out of his mouth. He didn’t fit the typical profile of a thug.
“I didn’t peg SME to be the type of organisation that dealt in teenagers. But that’s beside the point; I didn’t get to have my dumplings before you guys crashed that place. Wanna get some takeout?”
Sehun had known about Lu Han beforehand. Back when he was still a trainee at the Specialised Mutant Enforcement Academy, he’d written a paper about the types of powers that were able to move things, matter or non-matter. Telekinesis was one of them, obviously, and Lu Han was probably the most infamous crook out there to use it. He didn’t use it to entertain any power trips or to wreck widespread havoc, like most mutants tended to do; his methods had more practical origins, which was money. In a way it was the lesser of two evils, but in any case everything Sehun had read about Lu Han presented him in such a morally corrupt, bloodthirsty light that there was a bit of cognitive dissonance when he finally met Lu Han in person.
For such a purportedly heartless human being, Lu Han resembled an average citizen way too much. They talked over jjajangmyun and mandu at a regular family restaurant by the roadside, and Sehun was, to be a little honest, somewhat awestruck at meeting him in person. Studying a criminal made him a figment of your imagination; meeting him made him real.
“I know you,” Sehun blurted out, skewering a dumpling with his chopstick, “I mean, I’ve read about you, and the stuff you’ve done. I just didn’t think …”
“Villains need to eat too,” Lu Han said then, grinning, as if reading his mind. “We’re human, just like you.” It was then that Sehun realised that he’d drawn a strict distinction between whoever was in SME and whoever was on the other side. To be fair, Lu Han was the first criminal to talk to him as if he wasn’t an agent, as if he was some kid Lu Han got to know at an arcade or a manhwa rental bookstore.
Becoming an officer at SME was a lifeline. “You could join our criminal investigation units,” one of the higher-ups told him, after a few preliminary meetings. He certainly seemed benevolent enough. “But if you don’t want to, we would appreciate it very much if you stayed and assisted in our research efforts. We need all the help we can get in promoting awareness.” Sehun doesn’t know what possessed his fourteen-year-old self to accept, but looking back, it was a ticket out of an alternative destiny of becoming a glorified lab rat, or knowing that he’d be monitored by some agency for his whole life, thanks to his gift.
They met up a couple more times after that. Lu Han had such austere tastes for someone who didn’t steal anything worth less than an average of USD 3.2 million at any one time - bubble tea shops, Myeongdong malls, batting centres, movie theatres. There was only one rule, and that was that they didn’t use their powers while out with each other.
“That would make everything so pointless,” Lu Han said, stepping up to the mount and swinging his bat, waiting for the machine to spit out another baseball.
“Yeah, like, you could just cheat or something,” Sehun replied, and deflected the approaching ball with a small breeze, whereupon it fell to the ground with a dull thud, a couple metres away. Lu Han gave him an annoyed glare.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I keep you around,” he said, but Sehun thought he almost sounded fond.
It was a trying period for SME. Two weeks prior, the “coup d’état” mutants, as Junmyeon called them, were discovered to be smuggling body parts. Initially, they thought that those were smuggled to facilitate illegal organ transplants, although that didn’t make the situation any less gruesome. A few days later, they found out that those were no ordinary body parts. They were body parts of other mutants. Not organ transplants, but transplants of mutant abilities. Although there was no scientific evidence to back it up, someone had clearly found a way to do it. So now they just called them “bodysnatchers”. Just last night, Jongin ripped off someone’s newly-attached arm, which seemingly gave him the ability to summon lightning. Watching that, Sehun had two reactions: he wanted to vomit, and he thought, it could have been any of them. Chanyeol, from Team 2, who was always setting stuff on fire; Baekhyun, who liked to make people laugh. Junmyeon, who never failed to protect his subordinates first. Or it could have been himself.
“How long have you been doing this stuff?” Lu Han asked him later as they stood in front of a snack bar, looking for their next purchases.
“About four years, give or take.”
“Same,” Lu Han said, “but I think you’ve seen much more than I have.” He looked sorry.
“Don’t try to read my mind, it creeps me the hell out,” Sehun lied.
“You’ve been hanging out a lot with that guy lately,” Kyungsoo began, eyeing Sehun warily, and Jongin prodded Sehun with his big toe from where he was sitting on the couch. “Yeah, care to explain that? You wanna run away or something?”
“What are you talking about,” Sehun muttered under his breath.
They were both given suspensions for a week for the arm-ripping incident - Kyungsoo for not minding his team members properly, and Jongin for acting outside of orders. Sehun was just visiting.
“You know SME keeps a close eye on everyone here,” Kyungsoo reminded him, “so don’t go doing something silly.”
Lu Han had talked to Sehun about his many ambitions before. “When I was ten I wanted to be a ballerina,” he said once, when they were tucked away in one of his safehouses in Shinchon - a minimally decorated apartment, but feeling more like home than a hideout. “But I also wanted to be a lot of other things. Like, it would be cool to be a rocket scientist. Or an artist. Or an international football star. I love Manchester United,” he ended wistfully.
“You’re none of these things now, though,” Sehun said, eyes still glued to the TV.
“Yeah, I guess this is what I’m good for, ultimately,” Lu Han sighed.
(They bought some booze to go with dinner that evening, and being the complete lightweight that his underaged self was, Sehun got tipsy after going through three quarters of a can. If he recalls correctly, they were watching a music program special, the TV a little fuzzy from the lack of good reception.
“Pop stars,” Lu Han said regrettably, after humming the chorus of one song in full, “I wanted to be one too.” He didn’t sound too shabby. Maybe he could have become one.
The curve between Lu Han’s shoulder and neck was just the right fit for Sehun’s head. He laid closer, pressing his side to Lu Han’s own, so they fit snugly together like two pieces of a puzzle. “You could be one,” he mumbled sleepily, eyes slowly closing of their own volition. The screen was becoming a hazy blur. “I think I’d like to be one too. Let’s go audition.”
“What? You’re not serious, right.”
“I am,” Sehun continued, shifting so that his face fit more comfortably against the crook of Lu Han’s neck. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time. We should go somewhere. You can be your pop star or your rocket scientist, and I can figure out what I actually want to do. I mean, I don’t know what I’m actually good at, other than making it windy as hell when I like it, but crimefighting is not an attractive career to me. There’s just too much going on.”
“You’re drunk,” Lu Han said finally, but because Sehun’s face was busy being stuck to Lu Han’s sweater, he couldn’t see what Lu Han’s face looked like. “You total lightweight.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Sehun agreed after a while, then pretended to fall asleep.
The truth was, Sehun always thought, little that he knew about Lu Han, that they were both the same kind of similar, so he expected some sort of reciprocration. Rejection in any form stings, but thinking back, that was pretty much just a crazy move on his part, formed entirely from assumptions and spurred on by a laughably pathetic bit of alcohol. But that’s how it is; everybody makes mistakes and errors of judgment, including teenagers. Especially teenagers.)
Their last outing was at an aquarium. It was raining outside anyway, so staying indoors was a good idea. Lu Han was disguised extra heavily - a dark coat with a hood over a black cap. Weeks ago there was a break-in at a luxury chain in Gangnam, and millions’ worth of goods were stolen, including several collector’s edition items. Naturally, with a theft that was of this scale, Lu Han was the prime suspect. “I appreciate you taking the risk,” Sehun told him, and he replied, not missing a beat, “You can just whisk me out of here with a tornado if they ever try to arrest me.”
“So, how much are these sharks worth?” Sehun asked as they walked down the tunnel, pointing at the glass ceiling overhead and the fishes swimming across without a care in the world, and Lu Han replied instantly, “A good investor would pay about a million each, I think. In USD. Want one?”
They parted ways for real at a Botero exhibition, a mere four months since they first met. Lu Han was aiming to steal the chubby Mona Lisa, and Sehun’s team was babysitting a government official. Sehun told Lu Han of his plans to stay with SME, and Lu Han told Sehun of his plans to retire. “I’m a free spirit, after all, I can’t do one thing for long,” he said, eyes twinkling and head probably already full of plans, and Sehun replied, rolling his eyes in jest, “That’s disgusting, coming from you.”
That was the last time either of them saw each other, at least in person. Later Lu Han would flee to Florence for a while, where the Rose Trellis was stolen by a mystery thief at a Fabergé showcase. No camera footage, no fingerprints, nothing. Even circumstantial evidence couldn’t explain it away. It was the perfect crime. Eight years after, when the statute of limitations on his last formal charge of theft expired, Lu Han returned to Seoul as an artist specialising in telekinetic painting techniques. It was quite the novelty. One TV station even invited him to be a guest on a variety show. All in all, a good new start to a good new life.
Sehun remained at SME, fighting alongside Jongin and Kyungsoo in Team 3, until Kyungsoo got his own team in a promotion everyone saw coming right from the beginning, and the remaining two of them were given the authority to lead independent enquiries as free agents working with other departments. Occasionally they’d also supervise the trainees - wide-eyed, overly ambitious, with a healthy amount of naïveté that came with being a newbie in the field. The downs were more catastrophic than the ups were exhilarating, given the nature of their line of work, but generally there were a lot more ups than there were downs, and Sehun didn’t see much reason to complain.
This is the difference between TK and the power to control wind:
Telekinesis requires, above all, the ability to concentrate. It’s about control. This one time, Sehun persuaded Lu Han to show him what he could really do with his TK, and after copious amounts of bugging, Lu Han obliged. “Don’t blink,” he said, and conjured up a miniature city in the palm of his hand, brick by brick, dust particle by dust particle. Sehun watched, for ten minutes, each particle lined up carefully to catch the light streaming in from the window, this time in a motel room in Hongdae. Then, just as the entire sculpture was almost completed, it collapsed.
“Sorry, I spaced out for a moment there,” Lu Han grinned apologetically. “But that was cool, wasn’t it?” He shared how he would filch his targets every time; most of it was brain work, to be honest, and the bigger the object, the harder it’ll be. Sometimes, he said, he’d just stand in the middle of a darkened museum at three in the morning, staring at a heavy statue for minutes upon minutes, starting from the corner, until he had all of it in his grasp. It felt almost overwhelmingly physical. None of what Sehun had read about Lu Han described this, probably because none of the writers had the privilege of ever talking to Lu Han in person. Books can only do so much.
Creating moving air currents, however, is all about summoning internal energy, at least for Sehun. Sometimes mere emotion is all that is required to activate the power, which is how Sehun found out about his ability anyway, when he was twelve and nearly took out his entire neighbourhood just because he didn’t want to go to school. Think of something powerful, something strong, they told him at the beginning, teaching him how to activate it when he simply couldn’t produce the slightest hint of a breeze. The first few times he’d created gales that threatened to blow the doors right off the simulation labs. Then rein it in, focus it, they said, teaching him how to scale it down to whatever he wanted to create. During the evaluation tests, they set up intricate mazes and instructed him to knock down certain targets without disturbing any others in the immediate area, or to knock down half of them at once. Each target differed in size and weight, the lightest being a lone feather, the heaviest being an actual cottage that the lab techs constructed. What mattered was the precision with which he could control the energy that he was using. It was both physically and mentally tiring, and before he learnt how not to rely on his feelings to generate wind, it was also emotionally draining.
What drew Sehun to studying TK for his final thesis was the similarity between the two types of powers, and what drew him to finding similarities between the two, in the first place, was his trying to figure out exactly what he was good for. It seemed, in the beginning, that the more he found out about TK and how sophisticated and complicated it was, the more his own ability seemed like a sad subset of TK, something entirely instinctual and unruly, something that could be potentially catastrophic if you didn’t do it right. TK, on the other hand, didn’t seem to come with that much a capacity for destruction. You could start small. You could start easy.
Or at least, that was what he thought at first, and hindsight is always 20/20. How heavily mutants identified with their own powers, to the extent of becoming walking personifications of them, could fill up the contents of an entire book, and in any case, Sehun isn’t interested in finding out. These days, he can say for sure, by himself and for himself, that powers are what they are, just powers, and they don’t say anything about the person who uses them, potent or not, destructive or not.
3289 words
sehun has an identity crisis.
a remix of this town ain't big enough! by the amazing colorfunk for loveismix.
The trainees have heard about this so often that it’s kind of almost an urban legend, some kind of folklore amongst the newbies in SME. Years ago, one of the senior enforcement officers, Oh Sehun, nearly ran away with a criminal. Of course, as with all kinds of urban legends, which are really just highly advanced forms of gossip, it seems to have been derived from multiple sources and has multiple incarnations. For example, in one particular version, he was lured away by her feminine charms. In another, he was kidnapped, and didn’t have any intention of actually escaping from the Academy. In yet another one, he was actually acting undercover. When asked about it, all he does is to either laugh or roll his eyes, or both.
“It was so long ago,” he’d say to the brave few who approached him about it, shrugging, “I don’t even remember what he looks like now.”
But that has to be a lie, according to Kim Jongin, another senior enforcement officer. “Yeah, it happened like ten years ago, but the rate they were going out, you’d have thought they were dating,” he told the trainees when they brought it up during practice sessions. “What did we call them, playdates? Yeah, playdates. He has to remember. Even I remember.”
He remained tight-lipped, however, when prodded further. “Sehun’s my friend, I’m not just gonna rat him out like that. But I can tell you I did play a part in talking him out of it,” he bragged, looking triumphant. “It’s not hard to find out who, he’s already retired anyway, and hasn’t been part of the scene for some time. And honestly, if you guys can afford to be so nosy about this, maybe you could spend more time working on your aiming.”
Sooner or later someone ransacked the database and discovered who it was. Lu Han was going to turn thirty-three next year, owned a small art gallery in Insadong, and was a telekinetic. But nobody was going to guess, just looking at his face, that he’d pulled off twenty major heists and a string of smaller thefts within six years, that he was an expert in grand larceny, that he was once a registered class 2B criminal and had his own file with SME. Working in art seemed to suit him better; that childish-looking, impish face was the face of an adult who didn’t quite want to grow up, the face of someone who couldn’t care much about pragmatism, moral or immoral, and the dire consequences it brought.
The first time they met, it was by accident. They were tracking down a bunch of mutants who were involved in some sort of smuggling activity, and word had it that they were using the money to finance a coup d’état. Sehun’s unit was instructed to round up some key members, who were said to be meeting at a restaurant in one of Gangnam’s seedier areas one evening. As luck would have it, Lu Han was there, having dinner with fellow hardened criminal, Huang Zitao, even if neither of them was what SME had ordered.
“We weren’t after you,” Sehun said later in the backseat of a tiny, nondescript van, hands and feet bound together by invisible shackles. “We were after the three guys sitting behind you.”
“Oh,” Lu Han replied, starting the engine. “Well, Zitao does tend to have knee jerk reactions all the time.”
“I can tell,” Sehun said sarcastically. One of Huang’s throwing knives had missed his face by inches during the exchange of blows. Worse, their targets made a move to flee immediately after they realised that it was a team from SME. Worse still, Lu Han grabbed Sehun and led him out the back door amidst all the chaos, probably thinking that he’d be a good hostage, and now Sehun didn’t know what his team was doing and where they were. He’d lost his communicator during the mess.
Lu Han squinted at him through the rear view mirror as he struggled. “You seem pretty young. Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“Turning eighteen next month,” Sehun said automatically, and then bit his tongue. All that training about not speaking casually to criminals was apparently all for nothing, but Lu Han seemed so amiable that the words just spilled out of his mouth. He didn’t fit the typical profile of a thug.
“I didn’t peg SME to be the type of organisation that dealt in teenagers. But that’s beside the point; I didn’t get to have my dumplings before you guys crashed that place. Wanna get some takeout?”
Sehun had known about Lu Han beforehand. Back when he was still a trainee at the Specialised Mutant Enforcement Academy, he’d written a paper about the types of powers that were able to move things, matter or non-matter. Telekinesis was one of them, obviously, and Lu Han was probably the most infamous crook out there to use it. He didn’t use it to entertain any power trips or to wreck widespread havoc, like most mutants tended to do; his methods had more practical origins, which was money. In a way it was the lesser of two evils, but in any case everything Sehun had read about Lu Han presented him in such a morally corrupt, bloodthirsty light that there was a bit of cognitive dissonance when he finally met Lu Han in person.
For such a purportedly heartless human being, Lu Han resembled an average citizen way too much. They talked over jjajangmyun and mandu at a regular family restaurant by the roadside, and Sehun was, to be a little honest, somewhat awestruck at meeting him in person. Studying a criminal made him a figment of your imagination; meeting him made him real.
“I know you,” Sehun blurted out, skewering a dumpling with his chopstick, “I mean, I’ve read about you, and the stuff you’ve done. I just didn’t think …”
“Villains need to eat too,” Lu Han said then, grinning, as if reading his mind. “We’re human, just like you.” It was then that Sehun realised that he’d drawn a strict distinction between whoever was in SME and whoever was on the other side. To be fair, Lu Han was the first criminal to talk to him as if he wasn’t an agent, as if he was some kid Lu Han got to know at an arcade or a manhwa rental bookstore.
Becoming an officer at SME was a lifeline. “You could join our criminal investigation units,” one of the higher-ups told him, after a few preliminary meetings. He certainly seemed benevolent enough. “But if you don’t want to, we would appreciate it very much if you stayed and assisted in our research efforts. We need all the help we can get in promoting awareness.” Sehun doesn’t know what possessed his fourteen-year-old self to accept, but looking back, it was a ticket out of an alternative destiny of becoming a glorified lab rat, or knowing that he’d be monitored by some agency for his whole life, thanks to his gift.
They met up a couple more times after that. Lu Han had such austere tastes for someone who didn’t steal anything worth less than an average of USD 3.2 million at any one time - bubble tea shops, Myeongdong malls, batting centres, movie theatres. There was only one rule, and that was that they didn’t use their powers while out with each other.
“That would make everything so pointless,” Lu Han said, stepping up to the mount and swinging his bat, waiting for the machine to spit out another baseball.
“Yeah, like, you could just cheat or something,” Sehun replied, and deflected the approaching ball with a small breeze, whereupon it fell to the ground with a dull thud, a couple metres away. Lu Han gave him an annoyed glare.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I keep you around,” he said, but Sehun thought he almost sounded fond.
It was a trying period for SME. Two weeks prior, the “coup d’état” mutants, as Junmyeon called them, were discovered to be smuggling body parts. Initially, they thought that those were smuggled to facilitate illegal organ transplants, although that didn’t make the situation any less gruesome. A few days later, they found out that those were no ordinary body parts. They were body parts of other mutants. Not organ transplants, but transplants of mutant abilities. Although there was no scientific evidence to back it up, someone had clearly found a way to do it. So now they just called them “bodysnatchers”. Just last night, Jongin ripped off someone’s newly-attached arm, which seemingly gave him the ability to summon lightning. Watching that, Sehun had two reactions: he wanted to vomit, and he thought, it could have been any of them. Chanyeol, from Team 2, who was always setting stuff on fire; Baekhyun, who liked to make people laugh. Junmyeon, who never failed to protect his subordinates first. Or it could have been himself.
“How long have you been doing this stuff?” Lu Han asked him later as they stood in front of a snack bar, looking for their next purchases.
“About four years, give or take.”
“Same,” Lu Han said, “but I think you’ve seen much more than I have.” He looked sorry.
“Don’t try to read my mind, it creeps me the hell out,” Sehun lied.
“You’ve been hanging out a lot with that guy lately,” Kyungsoo began, eyeing Sehun warily, and Jongin prodded Sehun with his big toe from where he was sitting on the couch. “Yeah, care to explain that? You wanna run away or something?”
“What are you talking about,” Sehun muttered under his breath.
They were both given suspensions for a week for the arm-ripping incident - Kyungsoo for not minding his team members properly, and Jongin for acting outside of orders. Sehun was just visiting.
“You know SME keeps a close eye on everyone here,” Kyungsoo reminded him, “so don’t go doing something silly.”
Lu Han had talked to Sehun about his many ambitions before. “When I was ten I wanted to be a ballerina,” he said once, when they were tucked away in one of his safehouses in Shinchon - a minimally decorated apartment, but feeling more like home than a hideout. “But I also wanted to be a lot of other things. Like, it would be cool to be a rocket scientist. Or an artist. Or an international football star. I love Manchester United,” he ended wistfully.
“You’re none of these things now, though,” Sehun said, eyes still glued to the TV.
“Yeah, I guess this is what I’m good for, ultimately,” Lu Han sighed.
(They bought some booze to go with dinner that evening, and being the complete lightweight that his underaged self was, Sehun got tipsy after going through three quarters of a can. If he recalls correctly, they were watching a music program special, the TV a little fuzzy from the lack of good reception.
“Pop stars,” Lu Han said regrettably, after humming the chorus of one song in full, “I wanted to be one too.” He didn’t sound too shabby. Maybe he could have become one.
The curve between Lu Han’s shoulder and neck was just the right fit for Sehun’s head. He laid closer, pressing his side to Lu Han’s own, so they fit snugly together like two pieces of a puzzle. “You could be one,” he mumbled sleepily, eyes slowly closing of their own volition. The screen was becoming a hazy blur. “I think I’d like to be one too. Let’s go audition.”
“What? You’re not serious, right.”
“I am,” Sehun continued, shifting so that his face fit more comfortably against the crook of Lu Han’s neck. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time. We should go somewhere. You can be your pop star or your rocket scientist, and I can figure out what I actually want to do. I mean, I don’t know what I’m actually good at, other than making it windy as hell when I like it, but crimefighting is not an attractive career to me. There’s just too much going on.”
“You’re drunk,” Lu Han said finally, but because Sehun’s face was busy being stuck to Lu Han’s sweater, he couldn’t see what Lu Han’s face looked like. “You total lightweight.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Sehun agreed after a while, then pretended to fall asleep.
The truth was, Sehun always thought, little that he knew about Lu Han, that they were both the same kind of similar, so he expected some sort of reciprocration. Rejection in any form stings, but thinking back, that was pretty much just a crazy move on his part, formed entirely from assumptions and spurred on by a laughably pathetic bit of alcohol. But that’s how it is; everybody makes mistakes and errors of judgment, including teenagers. Especially teenagers.)
Their last outing was at an aquarium. It was raining outside anyway, so staying indoors was a good idea. Lu Han was disguised extra heavily - a dark coat with a hood over a black cap. Weeks ago there was a break-in at a luxury chain in Gangnam, and millions’ worth of goods were stolen, including several collector’s edition items. Naturally, with a theft that was of this scale, Lu Han was the prime suspect. “I appreciate you taking the risk,” Sehun told him, and he replied, not missing a beat, “You can just whisk me out of here with a tornado if they ever try to arrest me.”
“So, how much are these sharks worth?” Sehun asked as they walked down the tunnel, pointing at the glass ceiling overhead and the fishes swimming across without a care in the world, and Lu Han replied instantly, “A good investor would pay about a million each, I think. In USD. Want one?”
They parted ways for real at a Botero exhibition, a mere four months since they first met. Lu Han was aiming to steal the chubby Mona Lisa, and Sehun’s team was babysitting a government official. Sehun told Lu Han of his plans to stay with SME, and Lu Han told Sehun of his plans to retire. “I’m a free spirit, after all, I can’t do one thing for long,” he said, eyes twinkling and head probably already full of plans, and Sehun replied, rolling his eyes in jest, “That’s disgusting, coming from you.”
That was the last time either of them saw each other, at least in person. Later Lu Han would flee to Florence for a while, where the Rose Trellis was stolen by a mystery thief at a Fabergé showcase. No camera footage, no fingerprints, nothing. Even circumstantial evidence couldn’t explain it away. It was the perfect crime. Eight years after, when the statute of limitations on his last formal charge of theft expired, Lu Han returned to Seoul as an artist specialising in telekinetic painting techniques. It was quite the novelty. One TV station even invited him to be a guest on a variety show. All in all, a good new start to a good new life.
Sehun remained at SME, fighting alongside Jongin and Kyungsoo in Team 3, until Kyungsoo got his own team in a promotion everyone saw coming right from the beginning, and the remaining two of them were given the authority to lead independent enquiries as free agents working with other departments. Occasionally they’d also supervise the trainees - wide-eyed, overly ambitious, with a healthy amount of naïveté that came with being a newbie in the field. The downs were more catastrophic than the ups were exhilarating, given the nature of their line of work, but generally there were a lot more ups than there were downs, and Sehun didn’t see much reason to complain.
This is the difference between TK and the power to control wind:
Telekinesis requires, above all, the ability to concentrate. It’s about control. This one time, Sehun persuaded Lu Han to show him what he could really do with his TK, and after copious amounts of bugging, Lu Han obliged. “Don’t blink,” he said, and conjured up a miniature city in the palm of his hand, brick by brick, dust particle by dust particle. Sehun watched, for ten minutes, each particle lined up carefully to catch the light streaming in from the window, this time in a motel room in Hongdae. Then, just as the entire sculpture was almost completed, it collapsed.
“Sorry, I spaced out for a moment there,” Lu Han grinned apologetically. “But that was cool, wasn’t it?” He shared how he would filch his targets every time; most of it was brain work, to be honest, and the bigger the object, the harder it’ll be. Sometimes, he said, he’d just stand in the middle of a darkened museum at three in the morning, staring at a heavy statue for minutes upon minutes, starting from the corner, until he had all of it in his grasp. It felt almost overwhelmingly physical. None of what Sehun had read about Lu Han described this, probably because none of the writers had the privilege of ever talking to Lu Han in person. Books can only do so much.
Creating moving air currents, however, is all about summoning internal energy, at least for Sehun. Sometimes mere emotion is all that is required to activate the power, which is how Sehun found out about his ability anyway, when he was twelve and nearly took out his entire neighbourhood just because he didn’t want to go to school. Think of something powerful, something strong, they told him at the beginning, teaching him how to activate it when he simply couldn’t produce the slightest hint of a breeze. The first few times he’d created gales that threatened to blow the doors right off the simulation labs. Then rein it in, focus it, they said, teaching him how to scale it down to whatever he wanted to create. During the evaluation tests, they set up intricate mazes and instructed him to knock down certain targets without disturbing any others in the immediate area, or to knock down half of them at once. Each target differed in size and weight, the lightest being a lone feather, the heaviest being an actual cottage that the lab techs constructed. What mattered was the precision with which he could control the energy that he was using. It was both physically and mentally tiring, and before he learnt how not to rely on his feelings to generate wind, it was also emotionally draining.
What drew Sehun to studying TK for his final thesis was the similarity between the two types of powers, and what drew him to finding similarities between the two, in the first place, was his trying to figure out exactly what he was good for. It seemed, in the beginning, that the more he found out about TK and how sophisticated and complicated it was, the more his own ability seemed like a sad subset of TK, something entirely instinctual and unruly, something that could be potentially catastrophic if you didn’t do it right. TK, on the other hand, didn’t seem to come with that much a capacity for destruction. You could start small. You could start easy.
Or at least, that was what he thought at first, and hindsight is always 20/20. How heavily mutants identified with their own powers, to the extent of becoming walking personifications of them, could fill up the contents of an entire book, and in any case, Sehun isn’t interested in finding out. These days, he can say for sure, by himself and for himself, that powers are what they are, just powers, and they don’t say anything about the person who uses them, potent or not, destructive or not.