Chapter Text
Ivy is running.
As far back as some of the earliest moments that his memories still retain, he's been running. He has nowhere to go, no home or even a place to stay. So when they start chasing him, he can run freely, not caring where he goes as long as he gets away. And he always gets away.
"I'll shoot you!" The leader of his pursuers hollers.
Ivy doesn't care. He wonders if they know the metal plating that forms his skin is bullet repellent. Maybe the government hasn't issued that information to the general population yet.
His eyes register a narrow, unoccupied space under a staircase that runs up the side of a red-brick building that has long ago lost most of its red color. Boxes are piled beside the stairs. The space is just big enough for a grown man to hide in.
He turns the corner, out of their sight, and ducks into the hiding spot quickly. His pursuers thunder past without a glance. Ivy closes his eyes in relief.
He waits only a brief moment before slipping out from behind the boxes and heading off at a brisk pace in a different direction from the chasers. He pulls his hood over his face, shoves both hands into his pockets. Hiding himself, hiding the metallic glint of his skin and the electric blue glow of his eyes. Best to at least pretend to be human.
"That was a pretty good tactic you used."
Ivy keeps walking. He's not startled by the voice; his sensors picked up on the individual shadowing him the second he had defected from the group, but he wasn't expecting the man to openly reveal himself. "Didn't work, apparently."
"I'm a special case," the stranger says cheerfully. Now that startles Ivy. He isn't used to people sounding cheerful in this city.
"Are you?" He says, feigning indifference.
The stranger seems perfectly unaffected by his disinterest in the conversation. "You got a place to stay?"
Ivy turns and looks him in the eye, gaze level. "No, I don't. Can you get lost?"
"I don't want to get lost!" The man declares. "This city is a terrible place to get lost in! I have a place to stay. And I've been watching you, I know you could use a home. Come stay with me."
Ivy sizes him up. He's in his mid to late twenties, possibly about twenty-six, and is thin but sturdily built, average height, brown hair and brown eyes, open expression. He's objectively rather handsome, and his body language suggests an outgoing personality. Ivy's sensors aren't picking up any hostility or even a hint of dishonest intentions. He weighs the pros and cons.
"Won't hurt to check it out," he decides.
The stranger's face lights up. "Really? That quickly? You're not going to, like, suspect me of being a potential murderer trying to lure in a victim or something?"
Ivy raised his eyebrows. "Do you want me to?"
"It might be interesting," says the man thoughtfully.
He's different. Ivy likes it. "I have sensors in my eyes and brain that can read human emotions. It's not foolproof, but it's nine out of ten. I didn't sense anything bad from you."
He waits for the disgust, for the sensors in question to pick up on fear and rejection. It doesn't come. He supposes that someone who knew what he was and still readily offered him a home must not be too bothered by his existence.
"That is actually so cool," says the stranger in a voice of genuine awe.
Ivy scans his face and image searches it in his brain. He comes up with no results. He frowns; this is an unusual twist.
"Before I just walk into your house and potentially fall into your well-laid trap for your murder victims," he says thoughtfully, "I think I ought to know who you are."
The stranger stops walking. For the first time, Ivy senses something different from him, a darker emotion; sadness. He smiles softly. "I'm nobody," he says. "And nothing. But you can call me Changgu."
...
When Ivy opened his eyes for the first time in his memory, he was lying alone in a field of dried-out grass that swayed in the icy wind of an unusually bitter winter, and staring up at a bleak grey sky. He had no idea who he was and how he had gotten there, and nothing to identify himself but the oversized, threadbare blue hooded sweatshirt he was wearing, printed with the letters I V Y. No tags left on his clothes, no marks on his metallic skin, no memories in his head. He was Ivy from that day on, a cyborg human with no identity and no purpose. Nobody and nothing.
That was ten years ago. Nothing has really changed.
"My apartment is in this house," Changgu says, gesturing at the red-brick building Ivy had hidden by. That ought to surprise him, but it doesn't. "Don't worry about the people here, they won't care. They're all shady and most of them probably can't see anyway."
He leads Ivy down a cramped hallway on the second floor, and starts to open the door marked with the number 16. "My place."
"Don't you lock it?" Ivy asks, studying the worn-out wood of the doorframe.
"Why?"
"Thieves," Ivy says, wondering why he cares. "And... stuff."
Changgu grins at him and swings the door open. "Got nothing in here worth stealing."
He's right; he's barely got anything at all. Ivy takes in the faded purple of the carpet, the stark bare walls, the deflated couch with a missing cushion, the two broken wooden chairs, the ironing board in the corner. Next to it is a basket only half full of clothes. Ivy finds himself feeling curious as to whether Changgu has any other clothes but those and the ones he's wearing.
"It's not Buckingham palace," Changgu says, sounding rather proud.
"Do you have a bathroom?"
"No running water in the building. You need to piss, you go outside. The building next door has one, though, if you need to go number two. Hey, do cyborgs shit?"
"You sure don't sugarcoat your words, do you," Ivy mumbles. "Can't speak for all of us, but I wouldn't be asking about the bathroom if I wasn't going to need it."
"Technology is crazy," Changgu says admiringly.
Ivy crosses the room to the clothes basket and snorts. "I'm not all cyborg, you know."
He picks up a pair of cargo pants with a hole in the knee and a stained white T-shirt. Changgu watches him with curiosity. "Which parts are cyborg and which ones aren't?"
"Arms, entire left leg, all of my right leg below the knee, both eyes, shoulder blades, inner right ear, tongue," Ivy says bitterly. "And I have a computer behind my brain."
"Is it synced to your computer eyes?"
"My eyes are not computers. Yeah, it's synced to all of 'em. Otherwise I couldn't move my cyborg parts."
"I guess," Changgu agrees. "You're kind of good looking."
"Oh, really."
"You could use a shower, though," Changgu decides. "Or at least you need to wash your face. They've got a shower next door too. The water isn't hot though. You could just wash your face in the sink."
"I'll do that," Ivy says. He starts taking his clothes off.
"You could do that in the bedroom," offers Changgu casually.
Ivy, shirtless, narrows his eyes. "There's a bedroom?"
Changgu crosses his arms and looks defensive. "I'm poor, but I'm not that poor, cyborg man. If things got that bad I would just kill myself."
"Ivy," says Ivy.
"Eh?"
"My name."
"It's a girl's name," Changgu says.
Ivy shrugs.
A bright smile creeps slowly onto Changgu's face. "Yeah, like I care. Come on, I'll show you the bedroom."
...
Jinho rests his hands on his knees and lets his lungs fill with the dirty, musty air of the city. Again. Again. His pounding heartbeat slows to normal. He stays bent over, still breathing hard.
"It- I mean- he lost us," he says at last.
Yanan is leaning his back on the wall of the warehouse building. The graffiti over his head spells "You can't chase out the devil in me," which Jinho thinks is appropriate. His companion blows a puff of cigarette smoke into the air and watches it rise. "Good for him."
His voice is high and soft, but cold. It reminds Jinho of the city itself. He thinks that if the city as he knows it were a person, it would look and sound a lot like Yanan. He sighs. "I just wanted to ask."
"Maybe you'll never get an answer," Yanan says flatly. "Maybe nobody even knows. Why do you always have to ask?"
Jinho fixes him with what he hopes is a burning glare. Yanan merely looks thoughtful. He raises his cigarette to his lips again.
"Give me that." Jinho takes a puff and shoves it back in Yanan's mouth, blowing smoke. "Of course I don't know if I'll ever find anything out. But I've got to ask. I'll keep asking until I either find out or die."
"You're good at being human," Yanan says.
Jinho hates when he says things like that. Sometimes he thinks he just hates Yanan.
"Nothing else I've got left to be good at," he mumbles. He wipes the dirt off his palms and straightens up. "That cig's not going to last you much longer. C'mon, let's go home."
Yanan follows silently. He's nearly always silent. Jinho listens to the soft tread of his footsteps and wonders how such a giant of a man was able to master walking so lightly.
He hears Yanan grinding out his cigarette in the dirt. He even does that quietly. They're alone in the streets now, the group they'd run with long gone, and Jinho idly thinks that if Yanan cared enough about anything to want to kill him, he could probably do it now.
"He was hiding under the stairs," he finds himself saying.
They walk through the cold alleys without another word for what feels like an eternity. Yanan has lit another cigarette, God knows where he got it from, and is blowing smoke to the heavens again. He quickens his pace and walks alongside Jinho for a while. Then he says in his soft, empty voice, "I know."
"Someone broke off from the group behind us. They might've already killed him. Or the other way around."
"I know."
In the silence that follows, Jinho imagines he can hear the beats of Yanan's mechanical heart. Like the ticking off a clock.
"Does it hurt you?" he asks softly.
Yanan's hand twitches toward his chest ever so slightly. He raised it to the cigarette between his lips instead. "Every day."
"I'm sorry," Jinho whispers.
Yanan hands him the cigarette and brushes his fingertips over his chest, bare under his halfway unzipped jacket. Under the skin is an abomination. He shouldn't even be alive. He says the two words again, the two words Jinho hears more often than any others. "I know."
Sometimes, Jinho thinks, surviving is the best we can hope for. To live is a luxury not everyone can afford.
...
Ivy waits to say it until he's been living in Changgu's apartment for nearly a week. "Did you know your house sucks?"
They're sitting on the carpet in the living room, ironing clothes. Ivy wants to point out that that's what the ironing board is for, but be suspects he'll just get hit over the head and told to mind his own business.
"Then you can go back outside and be homeless again and die."
Changgu forcefully shoves another folded shirt back into the basket. His ears are red.
"Sorry," Ivy says.
Changgu looks sheepish. "I know it sucks. It's the best I could get. I don't have a job."
"I don't either," Ivy says, then snorts at his own words.
"I figured," Changgu says, his voice dry. "Let's go get something to eat."
"How?"
"Steal," says Changgu promptly. "Do you even need to eat?"
"I told you, I'm not entirely cyborg," Ivy mutters. "Of course I need to eat."
"Then let's go steal some food. You can just wear sunglasses and no one will know your eyes are computers. Here, put your hoodie on."
"They're not computers." He puts the hoodie on. Changgu sets the last folded shirt in the basket. "What do you like, fruits or vegetables?"
"Which is easier to get?"
"Fruit."
"Then let's go with vegetables," Ivy says firmly, and Changgu grins. "You're smart."
They step out of the apartment and down the hall. Don't lock the door behind them.
...
Jinho nudges Yanan hard in the side. "Over there."
His companion scans the area, which Jinho knows is just for show, because there are only about twenty people at the vegetable market. "Guy in the hoodie? What about him?"
"That's the guy we were chasing last week! Did you forget already?"
"He's stealing vegetables," Yanan says.
Jinho rolls his eyes. "Yeah? So are we."
"At present I am not stealing vegetables," Yanan observes. "I'm smoking."
"And I'm stealing your cigarette. You go get us some vegetables."
"Yes, sir," Yanan answers. He hoists himself off the ground and slips away on cat feet towards the vegetable carts, and Jinho watches him go with a wistful feeling wrapping itself around his heart. Then he starts walking as easily and normally as he can in the direction of the cyborg vegetable thief.
...
Changgu stands by a cart of cabbage and feels distasteful.
Vegetables are the better option, he knows, because the competition is always thinner. That doesn't make him like them. He squints, searching for at least one cabbage that doesn't look wilted, and when he spots one, he reaches for it as casually as he can manage. Best to try not to make it obvious he's stealing just yet.
But to his shock, another hand reaches it first; a large, pale, long-fingered hand. It picks up the cabbage and pulls it out of Changgu's reach. His jaw drops.
"Hey! That was my...."
He freezes, his sentence trailing off into nothing. He's raised his eyes to study the owner of the hand, to memorize the features of a new enemy, but he's looking into the most beautiful face he's ever seen.
It's nearly hidden under a hood and a veil of jaw-length black hair, but it's a face like none other he's ever seen in this God-forsaken city. He takes in the strong forehead and dark eyebrows, piercing eyes framed by long, thick lashes, sharp jaw and rosebud lips, and swallows all the complaints rising on his tongue. "Hey, uh... who are you?"
"The devil," the man snarls, and jerks the cabbage away.
Changgu stands still as a post, his ears ringing. The stranger's soft yet cold voice echoes in his head. He thinks he caught sight of a silver piercing in his tongue when he spoke. The devil, huh? And he'd been stealing cabbage at a vegetable market in the slums of the world's worst city.
"Guess even Satan himself falls on rough days sometimes," Changgu remarks to thin air, and realizes that he's smiling.
...
Jinho trails the cyborg for nearly an hour before the man stops in his tracks and says outright, "Just what is it that you want?"
He jumps. He's never been caught while stalking before, not by anyone but Yanan. "I just want to ask you something."
"Keep it short," the man snaps.
"My family," Jinho breathes. "The cyborg experiments. I mean- my family got taken for the experiments. Their name is Jo. A man, woman, two young girls. You wouldn't- happen to know...?"
His voice trails off as the man turns around. The glowing blue of his eyes is like a dagger.
"I don't even know who I am, much less what happened to your family," he says coldly. "Sorry to break your heart, Mr. Jo, but you'll have to ask somebody else."
"Right," Jinho whispers, as something inside him shatters. Amnesia. This cyborg man has amnesia. He's heard the rumors that they're robbed of their memories, all recollection of their human lives. Here is a near confirmation that it's true. His family might not even remember that he exists.
Then, to his shock, the cyborg's face softens into a gentler expression. "I hope you find them. I really do."
Jinho doesn't trust himself to say more than a shaky, "Thank you."
He turns and leaves. The cyborg keeps walking, heading in the opposite direction. Their lives will continue as though nothing happened. Jinho grabs a leek out of a cart as he passes by.
He finds Yanan in the alley, tangled up with a strange woman, locked in a kiss that looks painful. He sighs. Without breaking the embrace, Yanan jerks his thumb in the direction of the basket his stolen vegetables are in, and Jinho picks it up and sets off towards home. Another star has fallen out of his sky tonight and died.
...
Yanan leaves the stranger in the alley wanting more, and heads home.
On the way, he stops at a public restroom to rinse the taste out of his mouth. Then he smokes a cigarette. Might as well be thorough about it.
He thinks of the odd cabbage thief in the market earlier and almost smiles. He suspects he wouldn't have cut things off so early if it had been that man in his arms in the alleyway, but Yanan prefers to waste his time with people he has no particular attraction to. It prevents him from caring so much when they leave. Or when he does.
He stops, picks up a broken-off piece of a brick, and flings it with all his strength at the farthest wall. It shatters. He grits his teeth as the man-made heart in his chest pulses too hard, too fast. He's exerting himself. Going too far.
"Damn it!" he exclaims, and picks up another brick.
...
30.
29.
28.
27.
26.
Yuto opens his eyes to whiteness again.
"Jesus," he tries to say. His voice comes out as a croak.
"Unit 97 is responding," a whiny voice drones, seemingly magnified by some kind of speaker. "Repeat: Unit 97 is responding. Shows signs of being awake. Brain waves undisturbed. Unit 97 is responding."
Yuto flips off the room in general. He's getting sick of this. The capsule is uncomfortable and his cyborg hand and eye don't respond to his brain's signals. He clears his throat and yells, "Fuck you and your whole family."
"Unit 97 appears agitated..."
Yuto starts to laugh. It hurts. He doesn't care. He flexes his human hand, rolls his human eyeball. They can't take over his body; they can't control his mind. Their brainwashing doesn't work on him. He flips them off again.
"Unit 97 appears to be communicating through both words and hand signals. Repeat: Unit 97-" Do they have to take everything so seriously?
Yuto gives up. "Can you guys sedate me again? This is really boring, and I might as well be asleep."
"Unit 97 is requesting sedation." A brief pause. "Denied."
He sighs.
"Unit 85 appears to be responding," the voice whines, and Yuto perks up, suddenly curious. He can see 85's capsule, but not the person inside of it. He waits for further updates from the speaker.
Instead, he hears 85 speaking, a female voice faint from lack of use. "Where am I?"
"Unit 85 appears disoriented. Repeat-"
Yuto leans back against the wall of his capsule, no longer interested. Another success. Another brainwashed military puppet. Every day they wake up with no memories, with only shells of their personalities. No longer really human. The government's pets. Every day they are carted off and replaced with the newest victims. The cycle will never end.
"Unit 97 is requesting sedation..."