it felt like everything was falling apart around him. insoo was used to change, had learned to adapt as a kid because it was a necessity for survival. he'd learned to talk and make friends, learned to survive away from the city, learned to become independent when he'd had to leave his family behind in order to live, and learned to heal both himself and others. he was no stranger to change but the amount he was going through now felt like he was on a small plank in an angry river, not being able to see what was coming up ahead and not knowing if there was ever going to be a place to dock.
first it had been the personal losses with cheng and some others, then he'd dealt with the overall agency losses. his realizations concerning juwon had come not too long after, something clicking into place after the scare they'd had during the last big mission. god, he was just so exhausted, sleep never seemed enough to work through anything. the biggest thing to deal with now was the knowledge that had been placed in his care. there were spies in meia and they were closer than he had originally assumed. insoo wouldn't have expected it of his friend, but little things now made sense. he wouldn't worry too much since juwon had been easy to convince to speak to the head agents, nothing coming to head- no fighting. the only thing about it that stressed him was juwon's enforced radio silence until the move-- the move itself being a greater stress on him. he didn't want to leave the little home he'd made himself in his assigned room- he didn't want to go back to living on the move as he had with his parents, insoo had left that for a reason. it was out of his control, he told himself again, it was for the best and he trusted the head agents and their plan.
all of their duties were still scheduled until their departure so insoo found himself packing and bagging necessary supplies for each agent and bigger bags for the medics of each team. there was so much to do it was getting stressful, becoming a senior and leader had only added more responsibility to his plate and he had to learn to adjust to it. he wasn't expecting visitors and was even more surprised to see suhwan's familiar form when the sound of the doors opening reached him.
"hi starshine," he hadn't been able to use his usual greeting in quite a while, their physical therapy sessions being put on hold a while ago. insoo hadn't seen much of the other agent since then and it was nice to finally do so when not running on a mission. "what brings you in? there's no emergency right, i'm all ran out today-- it'll be more of a jog if i'm needed at the moment."
jj doesn’t train much anymore. he uses becoming a tech agent as an excuse now, because really, jj is inherently lazy, and what’s the point when he’s just going to stay in the agency making cool shit anyway?
alistair is making him train this time, though. he can’t get too complacent, he said. you never know when you might actually need to fight. okay, jj gets it. he’s probably right, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. maybe part of it is him getting punished for being so annoying, too. alistair (and haneul, even) probably needs a break from his endless questions, and he can respect that enough to listen. this time.
it’s the middle of the night, because jj just finished a big project and the weird adrenaline of it is still wearing off. he isn’t ready to go to sleep yet, so training it is, he supposes, because he feels a little restless anyway.
when he enters the training area he has his mind set on, however, he isn’t alone. that’s fine for him, really. he’ll either just mind his business or have someone new to pester but– something about this guy doesn’t look right.
he realizes it’s suhwan within a couple of moments, and after that, processes how...off everything about him looks. his attacks are desperate and inaccurate and not like him.
admittedly, jj hasn’t been a very good friend to suhwan lately, but he could say the same about suhwan. it’s not fair of him to blame him, though. a demon nearly killed him. that probably takes mental recovery time outside of the physical time, and jj only visited the med wing to see him one time, and aside from wanting to crawl out of his skin, seoyun was also there, so he couldn’t manage to stay for long.
he’s not sure he can make it up to him now or anything like that. part of him wants to just turn around and leave, because he feels so distant from him now and it...hurts a little. suhwan was probably the first friend he made when he came to meia, and he was overwhelmed with the reality of everything he didn’t remember. suhwan was new to meia just like he was, also there before like he was, even if suhwan remembered and jj didn’t. they had so much in common back then, and...he doesn’t really know what happened.
maybe it was suhwan and seoyun getting closer. seoyun, his ex-whatever and suhwan, his good friend. it’s just felt weird ever since, and jj has never been the best at sorting out his emotions. he wants to learn the why behind everything else, but somehow, when it comes to what he feels, he’d rather ignore it.
this moment could be a chance to make things better or ruin everything, but he figures it would be a dick move to just leave when suhwan looks so unwell. to be fair, jj is a dick, but he doesn’t really want to be right now. “hey, suhwan,” he calls, hoping he doesn’t startle him. “are you...okay?”
E N T E R I N G C O D E N A M E . . . AGENT WISP
YOUR IDENTITY HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. . . ERROR . . .
WELCOME HOME, AGENT.
Agent WISP has been assigned to team SPARROW.
ACTION REQUIRED ; Please follow and welcome your fellow agent.
A demon has you and your team cornered. Your medic is down and you’re running out of energy. You notice that there is a way to escape but it would mean leaving your team. What do you do? Be honest. (Agent answered all three, following two are in the text)
RESPONSE RECORDED BELOW.
They told him he would be safe now, the faces he recognized through clouds of dust and memory, the ones who pulled him from the remnants of what might have been a flower shop or a convenience store, who patched up his wounds and poured fresh water down his throat and carried him out of terrifying, overwhelming solitude. But this feels just as intimidating as traversing treacherous terrain to outrun blood-hungry demons. At least when he was scaling ruins and fleeing monsters on his own, he could cower in corners until nothing could see him anymore. Here, he is a frightened child, sat in front of a woman with a clipboard, unable to escape staring eyes and unfathomable scrutiny.
She has already taken him through the basics. What is your name? How old are you? Where is your family? Where are you from? How did you end up here? How did you survive all this time on your own? Hwang Suhwan. Eighteen. Dead. Seaside. I ran. I ran. These are the easy questions, the last bits of reality and identity he can cling to, while the rest of him works on scabbing up fresh cuts and healing broken bones.
They move on to the harder questions. Her expression is still unreadable and unforgiving, not like the agents who rescued him, who greeted him with warm, pitying smiles and kind hands. He is hyper aware of the gun at her hip, the one she adjusted when she sat down to question him. He misses his flower shop. There were no guns there.
“A demon has you and your team cornered,” she rattles the scenario off of her clipboard with a solemn air before glancing back up at him expectantly, eyes still cold and guarded, “Your medic is down and you’re running out of energy. You notice that there is a way to escape but it would mean leaving your team. What do you do?”
He hasn’t had a team in years, but before, when he was too young to train, when nothing felt frightening, he had his family. He plays these games with himself too, because it’s better to convince himself of the lies first. It erases the line between them, and the truth. He would never leave his family behind. Why escape death just to leave behind the only thing worth living for?
“I would stay. There’s no point leaving if I have to leave anyone behind. Can…can the medic still talk? Maybe he can give me instructions. I’ve patched myself up a few times. I can help,” he remembers the weapon at the woman’s hip and adds, “If we’re armed, we can take the demon down with us…”
He can’t tell what she thinks of his answer when she jots it down on her clipboard with a quirked brow. He knows it doesn’t matter. She’s a lackey. It isn’t her job to decide. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. His arm aches in his makeshift sling, made from an old, useless t-shirt. They said he couldn’t receive proper care until he proved himself trustworthy. The risk is too great.
“Is…Is that right?”
She glances up at him with no response, before continuing her line of questioning.
“You caught a fellow agent sneaking around areas they shouldn’t be in. This agent is a long time friend of yours and they haven’t done anything suspicious before this. Jinx has always said to report something like this though. What do you do?”
“Jinx?” He knows who Jinx is. But a boy lost in chaos alone for years would not. It’s an easy name to lose to memories shrouded in blood. He can feel a sheen of sweat poking through the skin of his good hand. There are more eyes and ears on him than the pairs sat before him, he can feel it, “I’d report it. I have to. I know my friend would do the same. They’d understand. I’d take them with me, just so they know we’re still friends, ‘til the end.” It’s surprisingly easy to play the version of himself who didn’t know the truth, who spent his days in naïve reverence of senior agents and the remarkable enhanced. It’s a safe place to cocoon his own truths.
His own smiles falters, because still her expression does not budge. She’s awfully cocky for a paperwork mover. He almost asks her again, if that’s right, or if he’s said something wrong. But she moves on to the next question before he has the chance.
“While hanging around in an area you are not authorized to be in, you overhear vital information that a higher up should hear,” Is it really that easy? Are they really so careless with classified information that it’s become an entry-level interview question? He is wide-eyed at the thought, almost pouting in disbelief that anyone would ever find themselves in this situation, as if he can’t possibly fathom there’d be someone who would break such a simple rule.
“This would also mean admitting you were in the wrong place. What do you do?”
“I’d…take the proper punishment. Or…discipline?” What is the proper terminology, his eyes say, the agency is a distant blip of my past, they say, I am a lost son of Seaside and all I want is safety, and guidance, and the chance to help, “It’s more important that the right information gets to the people who should hear it. ‘The needs of the many…’ I remember my dad used to say that.”
And then he died, he thinks as she scribbles down another answer, his expression still weary and wide-eyed, his arm still aching against his chest, and then you killed him.
of course, he called jj, makeshift repairman of his dorm, to come over and fix it. how he dropped the toaster oven is a complete mystery to him. sometimes jj asks a lot of questions, but when it comes to how doyun broke something, he doesn't anymore. instead, he fixes it as requested, then usually ends up hanging around for a while later doing nothing in particular.
especially if suhwan is home, like today.
he and suhwan have known each other for a while, apparently, but he can say that about a lot of people. for the fall of seaside and the ensuing war being so brutal by all accounts he's heard, there sure are a lot of people in this agency that remember him from before it did.
suhwan is different though, in that he's known him for a while that he can remember, too. well, it's been a year; he met lots of people he still sees often in his early days at meia, or upon returning to meia-- whatever. he thinks suhwan can understand him a little better though, because they endured the medical wing together, and the confusion of coming home after a while away. suhwan kept his memories, and just ran away when seaside fell. jj...well, he still doesn't know what he did yet.
he survived the fall of seaside. he knows that. he was there at the beginning of meia's rebuild, but no one knows what happened to him, and even after a year in the agency, he is no closer to knowing than he was the first day he arrived.
even after a year in the agency it's still just as frustrating as it was the first day he arrived, too. part of why he agreed to come to meia was the belief that it might help him learn something about himself and his memories, but that hasn't been the case. he's learned other things, so he guesses that's fine, but sometimes he still wonders if he would've been better off if he stayed out there. they're all doomed to die anyway, right? so what does it matter?
then he reminds himself that if he didn't come to meia he wouldn't be able to watch game of thrones. and he also wouldn't have met suhwan, but game of thrones is what's most important.
he sits in a chair in suhwan's room now, leaned back, staring up at the ceiling as he tosses a hand-made hacky sack up in the air over and over.
he thinks about the day he met suhwan in the med wing, and how he wanted to crawl out of his skin. the tiles and the white coats and the needles and pills. he told juhyuk once-- that the med wing weirded him out. juhyuk told him he was always fine with it before.
sometimes that haunts him, just like the recurring dreams he has, and it's always in his head, whether it's at the forefront or in the background. what does it mean? what does it mean? he still doesn't know if they're memories or just some weird consistent metaphorical manifestation of some subconscious fear.
it's not every night. he has different dreams, but one is so frequent: the one where he's in a white room staring at a door, full of dread. he can hear muffled voices on the other side, see movement in the small crack under the door. they are right there, and he is always so terrified, but he always wakes up before they come in.
it used to be a terrifying nightmare. he would wake up with his heartbeat pounding in his ears, struggling to breathe. now, it's happened so many times that he usually just wakes up frustrated. if he just stayed in the dream a little longer, maybe he would know who was on the other side of that door. he doesn't care how bad it is anymore; he doesn't care that dream jj probably has good reason to feel terror so strong it makes him shake. he wants to know.
he throws the hacky sack in the air again. "hey suhwan. do you ever get like...weird dreams? or just...dreams that keep coming back?"
forcing words out when they didn't come naturally to him was always a strain on insoo. some days were easier than others, he'd be able to communicate with his teams in training, the other medic agents in the labs, his superiors that had one-off questions for him. some days he felt like he was attempting the impossible task of detaching his lungs and coughing them out of his throats with how stubborn his words were being. it was embarrassing even if most people didn't even notice his silence.
he wasn't sure when exactly it started to get so hard. he had been a shy kid already, silent when sent out of the home to play, silent in his classes unless asked a question, silent until he made a few friends and learned to share his thoughts. even then, his shyness remained. there were no physical limitations, nothing to explain why-- he just didn't know what to say, or how to explain things, or thought that people even cared to hear what he said. his parents sure didn't care when they packed up his and inyoung's essential belongings and pulled them from their shared bed in the middle of the night. he'd cried and asked why they had to leave, his parents shocked at the outburst their son was suddenly having. he didn't want to leave the small life he'd made for himself at such a young age; he was shushed, hand over mouth, and snuck out all without a difference made. maybe that was what taught him that he was right, his words didn't matter, didn't make a difference.
that was long in the past now, but it held the same weight now. here insoo was, in meia as a medic agent- a junior, and his parents and brother were out there somewhere without him. they no longer quieted him, yet his words were still hard to come by. it was all the same to him, whether he spoke or not, he could do his job just like the rest of them. he'd give his reports after missions, treat people fine, comfort them as he stitched their skin back together after bad days.
there were people that made it easier, a few agents he thought upon fondly. hwang suhwan was one of them. wisp was a baby agent under team sparrow, one of the teams he supported alongside seoyun. he enjoyed being around the younger agent and he knew others around the agency like him as well. insoo didn't have trouble talking around him, something about suhwan relaxed him.
it was unfortunate how the boy arrived to meia, in a sorry state with his arm settled in a way that insoo could tell at first sight was not healed right. he'd had to rebreak the poor kids arm and set it with seoyun, his enhancement working to the best of his ability at the time. since then, suhwan had been scheduled for regular check ins that insoo was usually assigned to. less and less was to be done every resulting appointment aside from the physical therapy. in their line of work it was important that they didn’t lose any motor function or dexterity.
it was around the time suhwan was scheduled so insoo made sure he was in the usual lab, everything set in place to check him out. as much as he liked the other agent’s presence, he didn’t want to waste his time with trying to find everything and insoo had a habit of losing at least one thing at all times.
he heard the doors open to the right and looked over, greeting the other boy with a small wave. “starshine, hello!”
To take the first step.
To reach for the ledge.
To pull yourself up
and over the edge.
( @miawisp )
he watches a scene play out before him that causes a heavy feeling to settle over his shoulders. two kids ( because one is nearly ten years his junior and boy if that doesn’t make him feel old ) forced to grow up in this world where nothing is kind and every corner rests another cruelty to tears them down. he should be watching them discuss relationship dramas or play sports and take up hobbies like those he has seen in old videos of the days before.
not spending every day wondering if they or someone they love is going to die.
not moving through life as if they have the weight of the world on their shoulders.
daesu knows he’s being a hypocrite and for anyone watching him they would see the way his shoulders slump with the heaviness of their reality. but he thinks im a senior. im a leader. and he knows he rather be the one to lift the stones than force his youngers to do it for him.
“suhwan, did you miss my message?” he calls out when he sees the teens have broke apart. his eyes trail after the younger of the two before settling on his team member. the youngest in his team and the one he worries for the most. the twins are juniors, and capable--though he does wonder where jinseo’s head is half the time as his impulsiveness is going to get him hurt one day.
his hand raises and comes to rest on suhwan’s shoulder, a smile pulling on his lips and eyes reflecting it to hopefully offer some kindness to the younger agent. he second guesses himself often when it comes to his team and the other agents in MEIA. he wonders if he has done anything good for any of them. if he has been able to offer them a safe space or a partner to train with. does his kids know his stays awake at night worrying if they’re sleeping alright? do they know when they ask him to train with him it makes him feel all kinds of proud and warm inside? he wonders if they can see how much he cares, of if that gets lost behind his airs of a man lost in the clouds. a persona built to shield himself from the very cruelty he wished he could erase.
for now all he can do is offer a hand and a word or two to hopefully lift some of the weight he can see resting on suhwan’s shoulders. “come on, i think we need to have a talk.”
