episode two: both of you, dance like you have no regrets dying on stage!
Zitao arrives in Seoul-3 just as the next Angel attacks a fleet of naval ships near Pohang. EXO KAI is fast, but not water-ready; EXO TAO, on the other hand, is equipped with the new Chinese Type M levitation armor for the feet. It streaks like a giant black and crimson bird across the water and ends with a perfect kick to the Angel's core. This time, the Angel explodes, coating everything in its vicinity with a bright red liquid that Baekhyun later pronounces to be a near cousin of LCL and the S.E.S. pronounces to be more than 79% identical to blood. The Technical Division dubs the hemoglobin structure Pattern Pearl, and Baekhyun jokingly programs the S.E.S. to play the riff of "Sorry, Sorry" whenever an Angel is detected.
Kyungsoo would be happy about the addition of another pilot, if the ship carrying Zitao and EXO TAO didn't also carry Park Chanyeol, now a special inspector for SME and Zitao's guardian. Kyungsoo hasn't seen Chanyeol since they broke up a year after they graduated college, but that doesn't stop Chanyeol from waving wildly at Kyungsoo from the deck of the ship and calling out, "Honey, I'm home!" in English when he descends.
"You're lucky Commander Wu gave me specific orders not to punch you in the face," Kyungsoo hisses through Chanyeol's headlock.
"Is that actually true?" Chanyeol asks, curiously peering down on Kyungsoo.
"No," Kyungsoo admits. That, too, is half a lie, since the addendum was Vice Commander Kim's, but part of growing up and no longer cohabitating-slash-fucking people who had nothing in common with you except music taste was learning that two half-lies make up something approximating a whole truth. He twists one more time against Chanyeol's arm, to get comfortable. Chanyeol smiles, all teeth, and presses his lips against Kyungsoo's cheek.
-
Zitao is Jongin's age, much taller, all sinew and jawline, and speaks a curiously accented Korean with rolling r's. He spends most of the introductory tour snuggling into Chanyeol's back, ignoring everyone, until Jongin hesitantly points at Zitao's ear. "The piercings," Jongin asks, "does your EXO pick up on them when syncing?" and Zitao gives him a look that can only be kindly described as withering.
"Give you a face full of piercings and you still can't beat my sync ratio," Zitao pronounces, before disappearing into a well-worn grey hoodie and earbuds. Behind Zitao, Chanyeol meets Kyungsoo's slightly shocked gaze, and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, don't look at me. Kyungsoo just glares.
"He did ask if we could mirror his piercings on EXO TAO," Chanyeol says. Zitao, scowling, tries to kick at Chanyeol's legs, but Chanyeol sidesteps it without even needing to look. "I told him TAO didn't have ears."
"Custom paint job, though," Baekhyun notes as he gives EXO TAO in its hangar an appreciative one-over. "And is that a Taurus sign painted on TAO's chest?"
Chanyeol grins. "Taozi's idea," he says. He tries to pinch Zitao's cheek, and Zitao kicks him again, this time only playfully. "A real brat. We spoil him silly," Chanyeol continues, slouching against Zitao.
Chanyeol has gotten older, with the beginning of wrinkles forming between his eyebrows, lines that Kyungsoo probably already has threefold. But still the same ears, too big for his face and made worse by his slicked-back hairstyle and neat suit, one shirt-tail untucked. Pressed against Zitao, Chanyeol looks almost manageable, but Kyungsoo knows that if he were to stand next to Chanyeol, pull him up so they were toe to toe, Chanyeol would still tower over him, unrepentant.
"I can't believe they let you take on a pilot," Kyungsoo tells him. "Zitao's probably already more mature than you'll ever be."
"Hey!" Chanyeol scowls. "I'm a great hyung to Zitao. You on the other hand," he says as he reaches a hand out to tousle Jongin's hair. His eyes are still trained on Kyungsoo, though, and he misses the way Jongin flinches at his touch. "You're probably cold as ice to Jongin," Chanyeol continues. "Isn't he, Jonginnie? You can be honest."
For a minute Kyungsoo considers snatching Jongin away from Chanyeol, shielding him the way Zitao makes Chanyeol shield him from the outside world, but that would be childish, and anyway, he's never made it a habit to grab at things that weren't his. "Don't you have work to do?" he snaps instead. "Surely they didn't bring you here just to criticize my interpersonal skills."
Chanyeol's hand stills on Jongin's head, slides down to his arm and rests there, above Jongin's elbow. "Chasing me out already?" he asks.
"I have work to do." When Chanyeol turns to Jongin, Kyungsoo adds, "Everyone here does."
There's an awkward half-beat, where Jongin's eyes dart between Chanyeol's hand and Kyungsoo, and Baekhyun pretends to ignore all of them, picking away at the keyboard. Finally, Zitao pops his chewing gum and takes out an earbud. "You're the bully," he tells Chanyeol, eyes half-lidded and mouth pulled back into a thin grin. "Oppa, hajima," he drawls, and dismissively turns back to his music player.
Chanyeol's laughter is surprised and, oddly, a little insincere. He stands up and straightens his tie, releasing Jongin's arm. Jongin, relieved, slinks away to perch over Baekhyun's shoulder, pretending to be absorbed in the lines of coding flashing by on Baekhyun's console. "As a matter of fact," Chanyeol says, "I actually do need to see Commander Wu about a thing. Do you know where he is?"
"Where he always is," Baekhyun snickers. "In his office with the vice commander, playing janggi while pretending to be busy."
"Take me there?" Chanyeol turns to Kyungsoo, his voice sliding into a whine.
"Get Baekhyun to print out a map," Kyungsoo retorts.
Baekhyun does, complete with bright red "You Are Here / Now Go Here" asterisks. Chanyeol leaves with surprising briskness and Zitao, unbidden, flits after him like a dark shadow. "I don't think Zitao should-" Kyungsoo begins, but Zitao has his earbuds in and doesn't hear him. By the time Kyungsoo realizes Zitao can't hear him, they're both already gone. Baekhyun's office, crowded with print-outs and model EXO parts, feels twice its size without them. Kyungsoo thinks of how long Zitao's legs are, finely jointed, just like his EXO.
"It's weird they wanted Chanyeol," Baekhyun mutters around the cap of a pen. He's doodling copies of EXO TAO's Taurus sign on an empty notepad while he waits for the specs on EXO TAO to load.
Kyungsoo collapses into a chair next to him, weirdly exhausted. "I'm sure it's good for Zitao to have something familiar," he muses. He's disciplined enough that he doesn't glance at Jongin when he says it.
"No, I meant, Commander Wu and Vice Commander Kim. He made it sound like they had an appointment, and they never see personnel unless they have to."
"Who knows," Kyungsoo says, shrugging. He reaches over for Baekhyun's pen and draws a fair copy of the logo next to Baekhyun's, then adds a little smirking face in the circle. It looks like a head with devil horns. Baekhyun grins, scribbling Yeollie with a little arrow next to it.
Since Chanyeol and Zitao left, Jongin has been pressing his face against the glass windows of Baekhyun's office, as if that would bring him closer to the two EXOs that he can see through it. "Why doesn't Zitao's unit have a special name?" he asks. "Besides Zitao's own, I mean."
Kyungsoo, taken aback, goes to stand next to Jongin. EXO TAO's name, like all the other EXOs, is emblazoned on its shoulder, like a lit-up tattoo. "It might be to differentiate models. EXO KAI is special, you know," Kyungsoo tells Jongin. "You're piloting one of the only EXOs made with a core instead of a cockpit. The other models probably all have shortened names of their pilots." Jongin nods, satisfied.
There's only one other unit like EXO KAI: EXO LAY, the M2 to KAI's M1 core, still sleeping in a hardened ocean of Bakelite down in a testing room. EXO LAY had also gone berserk after Yixing climbed into its core, just weeks before Jongin arrived. It had been why Jongin was needed, as a backup pilot and a fail-safe since Yixing had been so badly injured during the activation. So many coincidences, Kyungsoo thinks, as he tallies them up with a frown. It was good luck that Jongin just happened to arrive so soon before LEETEUK attacked, and good luck that Zitao arrived just as HEECHUL was making laser cut-outs of three Sejong the Great class destroyers. Good luck that Jongin hated his father, and good luck that Kyungsoo could empathize with that hate enough to talk Jongin back down. Good luck that Kyungsoo's father died for his work, and good luck that Kyungsoo, now, had only his work in his life and thus, in a way, only Jongin.
Good luck that he and Chanyeol had never been compatible, and good luck that Chanyeol was still such an asshole that Kyungsoo wouldn't forget.
"You and Chanyeol are old friends?" Jongin asks, suddenly and very innocently.
Behind them, Baekhyun cackles. "Shut up," Kyungsoo hisses at him, and then, quickly, to Jongin, "not you."
"Oppa, hajima," Baekhyun croons. "You never said anything like that when you were with Chanyeol, and you were actually dating him."
"You were dating?" Jongin croaks, shocked, and Kyungsoo resignedly presses his forehead against the window. As good luck went, his was probably shitty luck after all.
-
They barely beat HANKYUNG. As soon as it steps into radius EXO TAO rushes ahead without consulting anyone on the attack, and Jongin tries to follow, only to disconnect from the power cord that keeps KAI plugged into Seoul-3's grid. When Jongin makes a grab for it, the Angel notices, and the next five minutes are spent with KAI lassoed to the Angel with the cord. The Angel by itself doesn't have much offensive power, but with EXO KAI in hand, it's easy to bludgeon EXO TAO into oblivion, and Zitao spends most of the time frantically clawing at the air, always missing the umbilical cord by a hair.
Long-range combat, though, has never been Zitao's strong point. Instead he waits for the momentum of one of the Angel's swings, lets it catch him by the knees and fling him up towards the Angel. The combined force of gravity and EXO TAO's progressive knife breaks through the core. EXO KAI goes crashing to the ground a few meters away, binding EXO TAO and the Angel closer together, like the ball at the end of a chain. Zitao finishes it with his hands, wedging TAO's fingers into the crack of the Angel's core and ripping it apart. The erupting stream of Pattern Pearl blood paints EXO TAO's whole head red, almost blending in with the rest of its color scheme.
The Angel had ripped EXO KAI's power cord from its socket during the fight; so, afterwards, with no power source and a run-down battery, EXO KAI has no way of crawling out of the crater its body made on impact. "You fight your EXO. Not fighting with it," Zitao says disdainfully as EXO TAO tries to drag EXO KAI out of the crater by its arm. "It's amateur."
"If I'm such an amateur, then you can fight it yourself next time, you don't need me," Jongin shoots back, bristling, and Zitao hisses, "Maybe I will," and Kyungsoo has to remind them both that their units are still connected to the SME-wide intercom system and, especially, to Chanyeol, who is laughing so hard he's in danger of asphyxiating.
"It's my fault," Kyungsoo tells Jongin afterwards, trying not to laugh at Jongin's stormy face as he towels off after his shower. "I should have thought about a better training regimen. Let's work harder together, okay?"
"I know I can do it," Jongin says stubbornly. "I know it. EXO KAI was built for me."
Your father died for you, Commander Wu had said at the end of Kyungsoo's interview - but no, Kyungsoo shakes his head, a slight shiver running down his spine, Jongin was quoting Kyungsoo's own words back at him, and projection is a sign of a weak and selfish psyche.
"We'll make good on the promise, together," Kyungsoo says. After a great deal of thought, he very carefully cups his hand on the back of Jongin's head. Kyungsoo's hand is smaller than Chanyeol's, and in less than a year, Kyungsoo predicts that he and Jongin will be the same height. He'll never tower over Jongin like Chanyeol does. He'll never tower over anyone that way. But this time Jongin closes his eyes and leans into the pressure, like a cat accepting attention and, pleased, Kyungsoo keeps his hand there for a second longer than he had planned, fingers just barely tangling in Jongin's damp hair.
-
Kyungsoo's life is full of accidents, coincidences, convergences, all spiraling down into the eye of the storm that is SME. Jongin, untrained and untested, was a replacement for Yixing, and Zitao was brought in as his backup. It'd only be his luck, then, that just as Kyungsoo plans to train Jongin properly, Yixing is pronounced to be fit, once again, for combat.
"But the Cassiopeia Treaty says we're not allowed to have more than two active pilots in the field," Kyungsoo frets as he flips through Yixing's medical summary. "And we can't exactly send Zitao back."
"Just use the exception," Baekhyun says, shrugging. "Tell NATO that Yixing's just a trainer. It's not like we can get EXO LAY up and running anytime soon anyway, since all the spare parts are on KAI."
"A trainer? Yixing?" Kyungsoo leans back, dubious. "I'm not sure if that's the best for Jongin. Yixing's not exactly-" He gestures in the general direction of his head. When Baekhyun continues to stare at him, Kyungsoo adds, helplessly, "He's not all here, you know?"
"What, sane?"
"No, no," Kyungsoo says, embarrassed. "Just that he's not actually always paying attention."
Yixing is the oldest of the EXO pilots and, with no parents and no paper trail, the most mysterious. As far as Kyungsoo knows, Yixing has never left the country, even though he speaks Korean with the uncertainty of a taciturn foreigner. Officially, he's Commander Wu's adopted son, a fact that Kyungsoo had already found strange before Jongin's arrival. Now he founds it downright baffling. Baekhyun used to joke that Yixing was a robot, but that was before the activation of EXO LAY went south and Yixing had to trigger the emergency ejection, sending the core hurtling headlong towards the 12-layer-thick test room walls at a force equivalent to nearly 250g. The Bakelite used to freeze EXO LAY and keep it from destroying the test room had seeped, accidentally, into the M2 core, and Yixing had crashed into the quickly hardening leakage upon impact. Blunt trauma to the head, multiple broken ribs, abrasions along the neck and face, and Bakelite hardening in some of the cuts, fibers of it binding, as it was synthesized to do, with muscle, forcing the wounds to stay open. Kyungsoo remembers the blood, and the quantity, and it had seemed plenty realistic.
To Kyungsoo, Jongin is still a mystery, but only so much as any other stranger. Yixing, Kyungsoo doesn't think he can ever understand. He'd visited Yixing after his condition was stabilized and they'd chemically extracted the Bakelite pieces. "Don't worry," Kyungsoo had said, "they tell me you'll be ready to get back into the EXO in a few weeks," and Yixing had looked up at him uncomprehendingly and asked, "Why not now?"
"So I was wrong," Baekhyun had huffed afterwards, throwing up his hands. "Cyborg, not robot."
Zitao is the most accurate pilot, with a hit-to-kill ratio of almost 1:1, and Jongin the fastest adapter, the only pilot to activate and fight in an EXO on his first try, but Yixing is, in the end, the one that's spent the longest in the SME program. He molds in with EXO KAI like it, too, was built for him. It's not surprising, then, that Jongin takes to Yixing with surprising intensity. Since Jongin is a kinetic learner, Baekhyun figures out a way to program EXO KAI's core to function with both Yixing and Jongin in the cockpit. Their brainwaves cross over, overlap, with very little friction, as KAI raises both arms, flexes, fits fist in palm in one smooth motion. "If I were an online dating site," Baekhyun begins, but shakes his head. Kyungsoo, too, is at a loss for words. They watch the multi-colored sine curves twist and realign in silence until Zitao in EXO TAO mutters something in Chinese. No one understands him, but Yixing laughs on a two second delay, surprising all of them and causing the display of Jongin's wave to finally spike, dissonant, against Yixing's.
They arrange a practice fight in the afternoon, Yixing and Jongin versus Zitao in Genie simulations of their EXOs. Zitao wins with ease and, at the end, haughtily rips off his simulcast visor without waiting to be disconnected, and Baekhyun has to coax him back, saying, best two out of three, okay? But win or not, Kyungsoo can spot the immediate change in Jongin's movements. Yixing's clarity overlaid on Jongin's energy, the disciplined arc of EXO KAI's newly learned kicks, as if it were mirroring the still-silent EXO LAY. Kyungsoo blinks, and for a second he sees EXO LAY wearing EXO KAI's head. Blinks again, rapidly, to return to the present: three teenage boys lying prone, fingers twitching as they move imagined controls, the wires of the VR system extending from their bodies to the ceiling, like a cocoon.
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