my youth is yours

“no,” he rasps. “no, i need you here.”

he’s forcefully handicapped to her assistance. needing her almost feels like an understatement. 

“it’s just…” he chews on the inside of his cheek. it’s to stall. “you’re very attentive to my needs, aren’t you?” a dry laugh chokes out from his lips. it turns into a cough he excuses into his shoulder. “god, you know me so well, it’s perplexing sometimes.” i just don’t understand how.

yani breathes, for the first time all night it feels like. breathes in the picture of him safe and sound - or at least, as safe as anyone is in this situation. at least, in the end, he’s here. here where she is, here where she can take care of him. protect him. as if she ever could - she who has eschewed most augmentations, walks without weapon through these streets, with a level of naivete that borders perhaps on gross negligence for her own personal safety. she’s never worried, particularly, about death or about dying. she’s always accepted it, as something waiting around the corner. some menacing spectre with opening arms,  waiting for her. for how early she had been left to fate, she had been living so long on borrowed time already, on the luck that let her survive, that it was foolish to think anything else. 

but meeting sungki, that had given her a drive. some distant goal to look forward too, the thought of an ever after to match the ‘happily’. not,  she’d imagined then, that either of them were meant to live long. certainly not sungki, with tired eyes and all the weight of the world on his shoulders. how could she expect that of him, in his circumstances?  in all his valiant foolishness, he had never promised her what he couldn’t deliver, never promised an ever after longer than until death, and such a death, bloody and brutal, seemed so terribly immediate each time he stepped into the ring. 

that was the lot of elysium, yani knew. she had seen many friends die, by now, more than had made it with her to adulthood. perhaps that was why the bond between she and gun and fei ran so deep and so strong - the last ones standing must band together, surely, in memory of the lost. 

it’s like he hears her,  that desperate scream from the center of her chest, and she melts. hands curving to the cut of his jaw when he speaks. “then i’ll be here.” she tells him, a promise made as easily as breathing, words rushing instinctively and earnestly from her lips. she wants to cry, wants to scream, wants to tell him, we have always been so much more than this. from the moment i met you, we were so much more. 

Two governmental officers were couped up in one of the backrooms of Elysium, having the night of their life, perhaps more than night if they played their cards right.  It usually took a bit of bribing, but, as long as another one of government’s inspections will be favorable for his club, it was worth it. He slid open his phone and tried calling again. He straighten when Yani picked up. “I need you here.“ The “here” part was obvious, the “need you” part, however, he explained. “Bring something special, something that’ll blow a guy’s brains out, metaphorically speaking. And some uppers while you at it. Make it double. It’s an emergency, sort of.” After all, he aimed to please. With the bribe, both in drugs and money, hopefully, there won’t be any more “inspections” for the remainder of the year.  

sporadic,  unexpected, after dark phone calls are part and parcel in her business. she gets that. signing up with jinsol had meant shackling herself to a bizarre timeclock and being on call, to ferry their concoctions around the city at a moments notice. and, obviously to be handsomely paid for it. 

and that’s all well and good, but the problem of it all is that at heart yani is as much biologist, as much witch, as much horticultural enthusiast as she is drug runner. and that means that sometimes, she’s pouring over books and notes and does not feel like answering her phone, even when it is elysium’s premier business owner on the other end. so she lets it go to voice mail once, maybe twice, okay it could have been about four times. 

eventually she sets the book aside with a reluctant pinch to the bridge of her nose. there’s a headache coming on. she finishes her tea and sets it to the side, finally answering this next call. “hey honey what is it?” she drawls, as sardonic as ever she can be, humming noncommitaly. she enjoys a non-specific challenge, like this. she’s tired of people calling her up and asking, bliss, 10mg increments, pink pills that will photograph cutely, or whatever other nonsense they need. she likes the challenge of a custom blend. “double uppers and psychedelics, got it.” she replies easily, “for how many?” she waits for the reply, nodding along as he gives her the last of the details, humming to herself. “afterlife? i’ll see you in ten.” 

it’s more like fifteen. 

she spends, perhaps, a little bit too long fussing over the blends, the powders, the exact perfect concoction. maybe she goes off book a little bit, tries her hand at a blend that hasn’t yet been strictly approved. it’s extra potent and jinsol always worries about things like that, but jinkyu had wanted blown out brains and yani is nothing if not eager to deliver on an order - right? besides, it’s as good a test run as any. for the sake of scientific progress,  clearly. 

there’s a tangle of words forming in his head, but jinsol isn’t sure how to glue those fractured pieces together in any way that makes sense. it’s just a mass of anger, indignation, confusion, and self-hatred. so he swallows it down instead, lets him choke him into quiet. “we’re not together anymore.” he reminds her, his voice stiff. it sounds like a door closing. if he could throw the deadbolt, he would. but yani often has a key, is willing to yank things open and disturb his attempts at seclusion.

she’ll never admit it. it’s not something to say outloud, after all, but sometimes she finds jinsol’s approach to love - and to rua, by extension - absurd. how utterly foolish, to have something one wants so terribly (because yani, in her infinite hours of observation, has come to know so intensely how desperately jinsol wants to be loved) and to push it away, to play with it, to run from it. how anyone could run from something they want so badly is bizarre to her, to a girl who wants nothing more than to run back into the midst of a lost love. 

this is the problem, you see, yani has twice had love stolen from her. once that she is yet unaware of and the second of which, the full details elude. she can still remember it, how warm those afternoons had been, how full her heart had been. how it had felt then; fingers through her hair and on her cheek, the ferocity with which he’d looked at her, the insistence in his gaze when he’d told her he’d loved her. 

it had been something like another world, to her. one that she feels fade further from her grip each day. one that she seeks to reform, remake. she puts it together in bits and pieces, in bottles and vials and quiet moments. like she can make him remember. like she can make him fall in love again. maybe she sees in jinsol her own foolishness - to wait at the side of someone who can’t or won’t feel the way that you do, any more. but yani has always been tenacious. yani has always been a survivor. and a survivor can’t just give up, can’t just let go. 

maybe she’s annoyed with jinsol because of that similarity between them. she can’t let go of sungki and he won’t let go of rua. even if, the ever biased girl would be quick to point out that the situation with sungki was different, that rua was just making cruel choices, that she and jinsol fought seemingly for the sake of it. 

she doesn’t expect yani to get so momentarily to the point, but perhaps that’s what she admires about her the most. there’s no need to dance around the subject, no need to sugarcoat the bitter reality. however, it’s harder to face your own demons when the day’s just starting. at night, they’re less scary. “um, i um, i’ve been having some troubles with my current mixture of your products. almost like i’m experiencing strange side effects or i don’t experience anything at all. is that supposed to happen? i respect you and jinsol and everything is cool, but i also can’t keep on taking this. i need more.” i need more or i’ll die. if i don’t take more, i’m going to die. i’m sure of it. 

raon peruses the bar with the dedicated focus of someone trying very hard not to focus on something else. yani can respect that; she’s an engineer of escapism in her own right, after all. who is she to fault someone for an alcohol problem? she’s got no leg to stand on there. she watches as two glasses are set to the bar and as raon selects a slender neon pink bottle that yani know tastes delectably of passion fruit and strawberries. she sets it aside, going for the older, grander, far less palatable (in her own opinion) drink behind it, and yani’s nose scrunches. she reaches out to cover the second glass as raon fills the first, pulls it closer to herself still empty. “hand me the pink one,” she grins out, shrugging when the other levels her a look. there are those who stand on formalities about liquors and expense and whiskeys and barrels and aging, and yani isn’t one of them. she’d never had the luxury of developing expensive taste, as as a result had only ever bothered with bottom shelf bullshit. as a result, she’d learned to love fruit mixers to make the rubbing-alcohol-esque liquors manageable, and it was a habit hard to shake now.  she sips the infused vodka with a delighted sigh, sloshes in some sprite for good measure and is sure she is quite out of the trends for the action, though she can’t manage to mind. 

in her characteristic fashion, yani figures beating around the bush isn’t worth the time it takes, and she prefers to get to the point of things, especially where business is concerned. it’s tricky, though, when your business involves something so very fundamental to a person’s life as addiction, as the synthetic lifeblood to stimulate absent emotions or desires. it makes the whole thing intensely personal, in the end, and yani isn’t sure she always likes that. 

“if you want, i can show you a few pieces? they’re all on mannequins in my spare bedroom. don’t feel pressured to say yes, though. i wouldn’t want you to feel mind-numbingly bored.”

it’s somehow funny, the idea that they are still both fundamentally so similar. the idea that chaesol still considers them to be cut from the same cloth. yani’s not sure how she feels about that, except perhaps like she’s falling short. four steps behind in a race to a distant finish. after all, what does she have to compare with fine china and a wide, right apartment, rooms and workshops. selling garments with a cost that yani can barely fathom, much less wrap her head around spending that much on something to wear. chaesol has never once made her feel poor or low class, but yani knows the truth is closer to that than perhaps either of them want to admit. she’d been a gutter rat after all, left out on the streets to fend for herself, without the blessed luck of someone to take pity on her. yani’s proud of what she’s done, how she’s survived, how far she has come, but she’s not exactly proud of the circumstance itself. in elysium it’s easy to forget, but sometimes it feels like chaesol bridges between elysium and olympus enough that yani must feel a little self conscious despite herself. 

“are they that bad? i haven’t met many olympians. what are they like?” she questions, almost despite herself. it seems such a distant place and it’s members so strange to her. her closest interaction is with jinsol’s sometimes paramor and her general opinion there is that she’s more trouble than she’s worth. maybe most olympians are like that in the end. chaesol laughs in the old way she did once, louder and wider, mouth open and eyes scrunched closed, a bit less practiced and poised than she seems so often. yani likes that more, relaxes a little more, a laugh when the other puts on airs once more, the flutter of a foreign language from her lips and yani smirks, as if she’d understood it, when she hadn’t. she gets the gist, anyway. “how much are we talking, because i could make it happen,” she drawls in turn, wryly eager to match the other’s sincerity blow for blow. after all, what harm would be the extra won? 

“what’s trendy right now anyway?’ she asks, as if she has any capacity for all of this. but she likes it, the idea of getting a window into another world, the idea of an expertise so foreign from her own. “I guess it makes sense though, if it’s a personal order, to want something really specific,” she reasons, lips pursing in thought. “but i can see how it’d be a shame. i don’t like making the same things over and over either, but jinsol’s always letting me try new things out in my free time, at least.” and maybe a little bit on clients he didn’t really like so much, too. all on the downlow of course. 

sungki bows his head to catch her stare again. she looks like she’s going a hundred miles an hour, and there are some things reflected in her dark orbs that he doesn’t wish to dig into. still, he allows himself this slight indulgence and ponders out loud the meaning behind it all.  

“why are you here, yani?” 

he looks at her like this sometimes. like he’s trying to read some answer in her eyes, like there’s the answer to a riddle somewhere inside her. at times like this she wonders if he might remember, someday, what they’ve been. what they could be again. but what was it gun had said? memory is tricky. it’s best to leave the past the past. but how could she? 

he slips between her fingers like a dream. flutters away at the edge of waking. 

he looks tonight like he once did. a vulnerable creature. just a boy on the brink of brutality. fragile. he looks like something she can touch, and she does, feels his skin warm where it stretches over gaunt cheeks, fits to the contour of his jaw and the arch of his cheekbones. his eyes are sadder now than they were then, but just like before, each look sinks into her chest, dives between her ribs to nestle deep into her. 

he’s a physical thing. a weight that bears down on the core of her, saddles her soul like atlas’s shoulders bore up the world. she carries the weight of the once we were and the now we aren’t and the what will we be if anything, and she carries them alone and it doesn’t seem fair, to her. but what, in elysium, is fair? 

she combs his hair back out of his eyes, tucking the longer strands behind an ear, though they don’t remain there. stubborn just like him. 

“i’m here to help you,” she tells him, “because i knew you would need it.” i know so much about you, she wants to tell him. i ache to know you again, this person you are now, this boy who has grown so far away from me. it had always seemed such an impossible and unfathomable thing, this separation, this wall that lives between them, this gulf that stretches wider. she wants to close that gap. she wants back what she had. or she wants a reconstruction. a bridge built, sand to fill it in. his lips on hers. recognition in his eyes. 

instead she has this and the dependence she has cultivated in him, because the thought of a full loss had been far too much to bear. the longer she thinks of it, of herself, the more disgust blooms. what a pathetic thing, to love a ghost. 

as he pushes through, he bumps a little too hard into someone and curses as the liquid sloshes violently in his glass, threatening to fall out. “sorry,” he mumbles a little too aggressively for an apology, stress evident in his voice. “oh, yani. hey, sorry,” he repeats, much lighter now when he meets yani’s eyes, “too many damn people here.” noeul smiles, small but there. yani has that effect on him, comforting. easy. the ramming against his chest slows because of it, and he jokes, “looks like we all had the same idea, i don’t know what to think about that.”

yani loses herself in the crowd because the idea of being alone, in the midst of technological disconnect, is startling and stark. it’s like being walled off in a little glass box, frustratingly unable to interact int he ways she has come to rely on. the world is funny like that, to funnel so much of the human experience through wires and screens. she almost wonders if those purists in their cults and sanctuaries had it right all along, to eschew all these mad and wild things they’ve all come to depend up on. 

regardless, she’s as tethered as anyone else, or at least she is enough to be affected. she fits the little straw to her lips and drains the cranberry vodka like her life depends on it. she’s making money tonight, everyone eager to escape the worry of the situation. to pretend everything is normal, pretend everything is just fine. obviously it isn’t.  they all know that.

noeul seems to know in particular, swearing as he half slams into her. she anchors herself with a hand on his arm, glancing up at the other as he snaps a strained apology, brows pulling together momentarily, lips pursing. “hey, yeah,” she replies, pats at his arm as he apologizes again, lighter. softer. more relaxed. she could guess why. “yeah i think everyone is kinda freaking out.” she admits, threading her hand through her hair out of habit. the strands settle back into place but tousle strangely in waves that don’t fall quite right.  “you look stressed,” she tells him, fits a hand to his cheek and sweeps her thumb in an arc against it. “you need anything to take the edge off?” 

“you might want to try it yourself if your setup doesn’t start back up soon, you know, watering and caring for the plants individually?” he teases, a useless suggestion while his finger idly traces the edge of a leaf.

“it’d probably be nice if you flattered me like, at least sometimes,”  she points out, eyes rolling as she flicks her hair back behind her shoulder. “just as a general note.” something seems to be lurking, at the edges of her consciousness, some promise of something she can’t quite pin down. some memory long escaped. why does she always do this - beg attention from him, affection? does a friendship mean that much to her? it’s an impulse she lacks around jinsol, for example. 

“oh well look at you, the sick god of the streets,” she teases, with the soft scratch of her pencil over the paper. for a moment it’s the only distraction in the quiet of the room,  the subtle shift and drag of lead over the paper. there’s a strange tension that lingers around him. something in the way that he looks at her, sideways and intent, as if he’s reading some secrets in the backs of her eyes, written into her bones. 

“we’re so far gone. all of us.”

he stares at her then, honestly this time as his head rests against the frame; the weight of his inhumanity dragging his defenses down. “i can’t feel your hand in mine.”

her heart breaks for him. in the silence and in the quiet, she takes his hands into hers and feels them cold. she passes a disaster of shattered ceramic in the living room and she kneels at his side. he’s cold and his voice is colder, the distant hum of the city brought down to a quiet whisper, without the buzz of lights or the rush of cars and motorcycles. the world is too still now and too dark, even with the quiet smattering of distant stars above them. she sighs with the wish to wave a wand, to fix all of this. 

to fix sungki. 

to fix them. 

there had been so much more once. soft hands, warm on her skin, at her cheek. there had been that smile, that impossible smile like the goddamn sun that had cut through her. there had been love where yani hadn’t had any before, a sense of safety for a girl that hadn’t known security in her life. yani had built herself up from nothing, from neglect and solitude, and sungki had brought her strength and safety and light. 

but elysium never let such things stay. 

his eyes stay trained on hers, still searching, half hoping for any semblance of what used to be there before the indifference he inflicted on himself. nothing there, of course. but he fishes anyway, questions casually, “but i guess you don’t feel any different, huh?” 

sometimes yani has dreams that don’t feel like dreams. sometimes deja vu intrudes on her waking memory in a way that baffles, a sudden crash into her consciousness. it makes little sense, so often, and her head spins in a lack of understanding. whispers of something she can no longer pinpoint, smoke between her fingers, hard to grasp, impossible to pin down. like a dream right as she opens her eyes to blink away sleep. 

she has that feeling now, when gun comes slamming into her presence with wild eyes and tousled hair, chest heaving and hand son her shoulders. she lets him examine her for a tense and silent moment. she almost squirms beneath the intensity of that gaze, like a bug beneath a microscope, she fidgets. a flush starts to dust over her nose and it scrunches, brows arching as she watches the other shift, breathe, loosen, sigh. 

“weirdo.” she tells him, flicking her hand back through her hair, and cocking her head to the side. she’s abotu to ask him what it is about a little bit of darkness that has him so uppity when he mentions the cybernetics. had he been afraid of walking in here to a girl with blood leaking out of her ears? she’s almost appreciative for the worry. she grins,  reaches up to flick his forehead in an old, familiar gesture. “and you worried about me, huh?” she teases, a grin slanting lopsided onto her lips. “well aren’t i flattered. i guess keisuke’s shit really works.” she scratches at the barest incision scar, where it hides under her hair. 

“so, you mentioned that you’re hungry, yeah? what should we eat?” she queried, asking that question not only to yani, but to herself, too. “i’m always in the mood for carbs, and spicy food. what about you?”

yani hesitates over the thought that someone would go out of their way to impress her. it’s not something she’d weighed as consideration before - not out of some self pitiable nature nor woe as me attitude, but out of a simple lack of consideration. how could it be that someone would be that fussed over her, after all? elysium is, at it’s core, a chaotically practical place. those who would put forth extra effort without a clear reward or benefit in view are few and far between. so chaesol’s words take a moment to sink in and she lingers over them. it’s a flattering kind of feeling, she’ll admit. “mm, is that so?” she ponders aloud as she raises the cup to her lips. it’s sweet and floral, the tang of the orange notes present on her tongue. it tastes like a forest or a fairy’s garden, in a way that seems so strangely out of place for the city. it seems perfectly suitable, however, to chaesol; this delicate thing that flowered despite the muck and darkness.

what had yani done? for all her plans and hydroponics and seed packets and proprietary blends, for all her books and magic, she was not hardly a flower. a weed perhaps, a dandelion - fierce and stubborn,  taking root in rock and gravel. pretty, still, she comforts herself. a little reassurance. “it’s nice,” she reiterates, “somehow it suits you.” she offers the other girl a grin as she sets the cup down, toes wiggling. the way chaesol continues, yani nods along, pushing a hand back through haphazardly arranged hair. she’d been in the greenhouse all morning and it had brought out the wave and curl of her hair, in some unruly dance. “our belated tea party is quite nice,” she assures the other. yani of the past might have scoffed at the idea of a tea party. she’d been a relentlessly rough little thing, eager to eschew anything expected simply for the sake of being contrary. she’d softened over time, learned that being herself didn’t have to mean being the diametric opposite of anything ever suggested to her. as a child she’d been a creature of absolutes: love, hate. good, evil. starved, full. perhaps it was the nature of a single minded focus on survival - lacking the luxury of the grayscale thought processes that life had afforded her later.