#coexistencecollab

he chuckles. "believe me, the pleasure is all mine. i know you saved my nation from calamity, so it’s the least i could do. i’m glad we could finally sit down for a proper meal.”

"yongseung, there's no need to thank me, it was the right thing to do," you say with a smile, beginning to fill your plate with various foods. “it's just nice to talk like this. i know we’re always so busy, especially you. ”

he sighs, and stares briefly at the vast expanse of hills, especially vibrant during the spring.

"sometimes i wish i weren't. thousands of years of work can be quite taxing on the soul."

the waiter stops by your table with two cups of hot tea and a kettle, and you briefly stop conversation to bow politely. you take a sip, relishing its taste. even after all this time traveling, your love for any sort of tea remains constant.

"oh, you old man! when you have the chance, you should travel the world with me—there's quite a lot to see."

yongseung raises an eyebrow. "you're quite old too, remember? but maybe i will take you up on your offer one day, if i feel comfortable to leave my nation in the hands of the people."

"sightseeing would do you some good. i feel 5,000 years young after running around all sorts of worlds! only the heavens know how long it's been since i've visited another..."

you stop yourself before you go on another one of your excited (and nostalgic) rambles. yongseung's still listening to you intently, though.

he carefully takes a sip of his own tea. "and here i thought you were just an ordinary human traveler when we first met, although i was quickly proven wrong. there is nothing ordinary about what you've been able to accomplish with your powers."

you smile amusedly while trying not to take all the jjajangmyeon noodles. he's busied himself with eating the meat, namely the pork belly.

"eh, everyone thinks so unless i tell them otherwise. you still treated me well regardless. or how should i put this, normally. i'm thankful for that. and in many ways, i'm no better than a mortal until i complete my goal on this planet."

it's a little sad, really. you miss your sibling. you've never lost sight of why you started your journey across the various nations of this world in the first place.

the god stares at you, his face containing traces of melancholy. "how selfish of me to say, but i find eternity to be a little less unbearable when you're here."

ah, what a sap. you love him, though. he's not so tough when you're around.

"then, i'm glad my time on this world has not been a waste."

at the start of your journey, you had told yourself that you wouldn't make many attachments to those you met, as it would make it harder to leave.

first and foremost, you wanted your sibling by your side so that you could traverse the galaxy together again. you just happened to help people along the way—nothing too deep.

but things were a little different with yongseung. despite being one of the gods that helped oversee korea and its people, he was someone you could now call a dear friend. the thought of saying "goodbye" to him, even if it only had to be temporarily, wasn't a fun one.

you've gotten used to encountering him every so often, studying some book or on a walk to clear his mind from all of his duties.

he smiles peacefully, and you're glad to see the expression. "i'll always remind you that your time is well spent with me."

at that, you pause to take in the rustling of the wind, the beautiful colors of sunset, the design on your napkin, and the reflective glint of yongseung's cubical necklace charm.

to think, that you might never have this exact view again. it's quite a bittersweet feeling, thinking that the day would come where you would leave earth. yongseung's well aware of this too, but logically, there was no point in thinking about it so much.

it'll be a long while before that day comes, as there are still so many questions for you to answer about this world.

so, until you have to move on again, you'll both cherish the memories you've made together. and maybe, just for a while, this can be eternity for you.

—

a/n: oh dear lord this is way overdue for @restlessmaknae's coexistence collab. i underestimated how tired this year would make me. i'm not that dissatisfied with the fic, but i wish my brain could come up with better sentences sometimes. i was thinking about how some people stay in one place their whole lives and how others move around so often, and how they would each perceive the other type of person. it's so different, isn't it? just food for thought. and also, my fantasy brainrot is too much.

When you were sedated, you sometimes dreamed of a better world. A world where there was no poverty, no desertification and no pandemics. Where there were no lives lost due to the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the global natural disasters and the many, many illnesses that were being spread without a cure in sight.

You knew the world had never been like this. Not even decades or centuries ago. For instance, even though almost everyone had technological devices they lived with these days and there was internet connection in all corners of the world, food wasn’t on the table or a roof wasn’t above their head. Some time ago, it had been the complete opposite. Yet, in 2284, it was the reality.

There wasn’t one main cause for the disaster that had fallen upon Earth; everything was interconnected. Geographical differences leading to political tension, political tension leading to economic recession, economic recession leading to rising prices and deteriorating living conditions, and these living conditions leading to the spread of unknown and brand new viruses. Even though some countries developed vaccines and supplements that might offer some relief or temporary cure, there was no end to it. The way the world was so globalised, small people’s problems reached everyone in no time.

With the many natural disasters, there came another phenomena: people being born or being struck by inhumane abilities when they lived through those disasters. There were news of people who could control water after almost being drowned in a tsunami, people who didn’t have to breathe to function properly after being swallowed by a sandstorm, people who could control thunder after being hit by one and surviving and then there were you, too: one who was able to control gravity after falling off a cliff yet surviving the crush because you had managed to float above the ground somehow.

In your dreams, you dreamed of being accepted, maybe even celebrated for who you were. Not abandoned by your parents after they had realised what you could do, not being left out on the streets as a teenager and having to survive hidden away from others, stealing food and money.

In your dreams, you were free; free to use your power and free to do what you wanted.

When you woke up, the complete opposite welcomed you.

The reality was that you were a number here, a participant in this life-changing experiment as they called it. By ‘they’, you meant the group of scientists, researchers and rich businessmen funding their project. When you had been approached by them, you hadn’t thought too much of their offer to get a job at their company since you had known that sometimes the rich had gone out of their way to fetch orphans or abandoned kids like you from the streets.

“We will give you food, a roof above your head and security. All you need to do is help us out with our project. We are hoping to make the Earth a better place to live in, and we can guarantee that humanity will thank you for your assistance one day,” they had said, and as naive as you had been, you had believed them. After all, what could you have lost? You had no one to rely on, no income, no stability or whatsoever in your life.

When you had admitted that you hadn’t finished school or you had never had a job before, they had merely smiled. They had reassured you that it wouldn’t matter, and that you would be able to do what they ask of you, and you would have plenty of time to rest as well. What had convinced you was the idea of helping out the planet. After all, what abandoned teen with an extraordinary ability she oh so well wished to hide wouldn’t want the world to look at her differently?

What you hadn’t expected was for them to work for a bioscience laboratory that had wanted to recruit you for the sole purpose of cloning you. Why? Because they had known about your ability to control gravity, and they had begun to search for people like you in hopes of making clones and re-inhabiting the Earth with such invincible people. That, of course, had come to light on your first “working day”, and there had been no escape since then. You could have cried, you could have pleaded to them to let go, you could have hit the door of your room until your hands bled, but it had been all futile. Not like you had anywhere to go, but truthfully, it was sucking the life out of you - slowly yet irreservisibly like nicotine.

You were constantly monitored, and one wrong move or word could mean that you didn’t get food for days. You had your own sterile, plain room with a simple bed and white walls and an enormous glass window that let anyone from the outside to look into your room, and you could also see the outside from inside. You had your own schedule to get into the capsule for the cloning machine, and god knows how long you were actually kept there because you always lost track of time when you were sedated. You were also forced to exercise to keep in shape and put to tests to keep your brain in shape just as well. Everything was perfectly timed, and this way, you could barely see anyone around you apart from the scientists who always assisted you, except for the times you could walk past the other rooms in the hallway and see other girls sleeping in their rooms or walking from one end of their room to the other just like you did so sometimes. No connection was made with them, it was strictly prohibited, but you wondered whether only girls were there - similarly young like you.

It was the same every time, and the more you were sedated, the more difficult it was to not sleep longer outside of the cloning phases of your days and to be able to feel normal. The thing was that sometimes when you were sedated, you had these weird images in your dream where you were fighting with another version of yourself, your mind always circulating around the idea of having another you. However, when you brought it up to the scientist who asked you about how you were feeling, they upped the dose of your sedative pill, but it just got worse and worse. Sometimes, you hallucinated that you were being followed or that you saw two versions of yourself when you looked into the mirror. It was messing with your head, quite seriously, and it was giving you intense headaches and anxiety.

It was the same until one day, things went wrong. For the first time since you had been there, there was a crack in the system: a girl collapsed in her room when you walked past it with a scientist by your side, and even though you were rushed into your own room, you could hear an unfamiliar voice saying that the girl wasn’t breathing. You kept thinking of the scene of her falling to the ground until the next time you could move out of your room, and all that welcomed you was an empty room where the girl once had been.

“What happened to the girl in there?” You asked from the woman beside you, but she glared at you, stepping closer to you and said in a hushed yet warning tone:

“You better not ask about it if you don’t want to end up like her.”

And so you didn’t. Because even though it wasn’t living when you were exploited for your own superhuman abilities, you didn’t want to die. There was a hope inside of you that maybe one day, it would all end, and you could get out of there.

What you didn’t expect was for it to happen the way it did.

It was just like any other day: get up, have breakfast, fill out the tests they gave you, exercise in the exercise room, have lunch, then go to the room with the giant cloning capsules. The capsules that were used for cloning were white with see-through glass on the top whilst the ones beside them were black with black glass on top that didn’t allow you to see through it - probably for the clones themselves, but you had never seen them for yourself. There were wires and fluid-filled sacs connecting the two, but truthfully, you didn’t know what exactly they were for and you didn’t actually want to know.

You were usually intact when you got out of the capsule, but sometimes you felt like something had stung or that your skin had been pricked, yet whenever you looked at the area you thought to be hurt, you couldn’t see anything unusual. Again, maybe you were just hallucinating or maybe they were using such high technology on you that they stopped the bleeding and healed whatever scars they caused.

Directly, you had never seen your clone. However, there were pictures of you from all angles plastered onto a white board beside the capsule you used, and it was the same for every other girl though you didn’t dare examine their pictures for too long because you knew it wouldn’t be appreciated.

Everything was normal, you were just on your way to the cloning room when suddenly, all the lights went out. Not only in the hallways but also in the rooms. The doors clicked, signalling that their locks were unlocked due to the lack of electricity, and only the dim lights of the emergency signs could provide some source of light. You could hear that some girls started coming out of their rooms, whispering about their confusion.

“Everybody, stay calm and go back to your rooms!” The woman beside you ordered them in a strict voice, and after reaching into her lab coat, she got her phone out and shined some light onto the opened doors and the frightened girls to make them back away. However, they didn’t.

You could understand them. For a moment, you also wondered whether it was possible to just leave, to run away from them. After all, all doors were the same, and even though you had never left through the back at the end of the hallway ever since you had entered from the front door some time ago, you guessed that it was currently unlocked just as well. And it was so close too, you were only a few steps away from it since your room was the closest to it. So close…

Though the moment you laid your eyes on the back door while the woman beside you was calling someone, there were weird noises coming from the cloning room. It was as if some kind of glass broke and objects were thrown around. It was odd enough since usually, only one or two scientists were already there when you needed to enter with your assigned “caretaker”, and you doubted they were so careless as to make a mess.

Then, a horrified scream could be heard from inside the room.

A second later, it was abruptly cut off.

The woman beside you froze for a moment, and you shivered, your heart hammering away. You had a terrifying feeling about it, and the sudden silence that followed the brief screaming was eerie, pricking at your skin. Your breathing became uneven, and you felt a knot forming in your throat, making it hard to breathe.

In the next moment, the door of the cloning room opened with a thud and though the emergency lights were dim, you had a feeling that the sound of it being thrown to the ground and the shadow of it could only indicate one thing: that it was a body, blood scattering the walls around it. The woman beside you shed the light on it just in time for you to look at it, and you were right…

Though you couldn’t see the person’s face, it was definitely a human body of a scientist’s, the trademark white coat painted in burgundy and the odd angles of it indicating that the person broke a few bones, too. If they even survived, that is.

You didn’t think twice. You ran to the back door as soon as possible, only glancing back to see a girl coming out of the room with bloody hands. You briefly recognised her as one of the girls in their rooms… More precisely, she was probably her clone. Which meant that all the clones were out, and god knows how developed they were to not want to kill anything or anyone that got in their way.

You never ran as fast as you did so now, and you didn’t even have time to be surprised that there was grass under your feet and a giant stadium-like building beside the one you had just come out of because the screams magnified behind you and the stadium-like building was currently in flames: itt was as if lighting was striking directly from its core.

People in white coats were running around with torches and pushing through you, boys from the other building came out running just like the girls from yours had done so. Everything was in a frenzy. No one knew where to go, what to do and what was happening, and no one listened to the staff members making orders. Whatever was going on, it was better to get away from it as soon as possible.

A guy passed by you, but it was like he was gone in a blink of an eye while a girl from behind you was throwing icicles onto the scientists who wanted to get close to her. Your power only saved you from falling head-first into the ground because you bounced back from it before you could fall down, but otherwise, it didn’t help you to run faster or see where the others were going.

You didn’t even know if there was a way to escape, but you couldn’t care less. You wanted to get away, you needed to get away.

However, when something grabbed at your arm, you had to come to a halt. When you looked down at your hand and looked up, you could see a girl smiling at you with a mischievous smile.

“Don’t be scared. I can create a water bubble around us that no one can really get through if they don’t want to drown, so you’ll be safe. Just like the others,” she bobbed her head backwards, and that’s when you could see the edges of a bubble around you and two more girls.

“Thank you,” you croaked out, but you didn’t think it was enough to express how you felt. She nodded whilst holding her hand up to the sky as if she was holding the bubble together, and she held onto a few others who got in her way, but other than that, it seemed that everyone was fighting with what they had - the girl with the icicles, a boy with flames, another boy who had thunder come out of his body, one girl who seemed to be able to create a crack between your side of the ground and the two identical buildings where the scientists and others seemed to fight with your clones.

However, in the next moment, the water bubble girl suddenly collapsed, the water around you splashing into the ground at the same time as her body reached the grass. You let out a shriek without knowing, hurrying to her side to look for any sign that she was hurting. That’s when you saw pills spilling out of her pocket, and even though you had no idea whether it was her doing or not, a foam-like liquid appeared around the edges of her lips, and her glass-like eyes stared back at you without any kind of light in them. No, this couldn’t happen! She was ready to help so many of you, and now you couldn’t do the same for her? No… This… Could… Not… Happen…

You didn’t even have time to process what had just happened because a hand dragged you, a gentle voice reaching your ears (though it sounded distant).

“Come on!” A boy prompted you, and you only turned your head to look at him briefly - his messy pitch-black locks, his similarly dark orbs with flames dancing in it and his sharp features - before he already started dragging you with him. You had no idea where you were going or why he was so sure of where to go, but when you reached a fence, you had a feeling where this was going.

You halted for a moment though, a sudden rush of fear coming over you. Even though this wasn’t the place and time to contemplate over this, and you had wanted to run away for so long, now that you were standing in front of something that might symbolise the end of your time as a lab rat, you were suddenly not so sure whether the outside world wouldn’t be more cruel to you.

The boy with flames dancing in his eyes sensed your hesitation, but still dragged you forward with him. There was already a hole in the fence when you got there, so you could crawl through it and continue running. What was surprising though was the fact that you were running in woods - literal woods. Since you had been sedated when you had been transferred here in a car, you couldn’t have seen anything before, that’s why you were surprised now to see woods and grass around and not just sand and the bare signs of mother nature’s heart still beating under your feet.

“This can’t be real…” You mumbled while you were looking around, your legs still going even though your mind was somewhere else.

“It’s not completely real. This has been planted here with modern technology,” the boy replied, his voice coming out raspy and ragged due to running and speaking at the same time.

“Wait…” You stopped dead in your tracks, only realising that he was still holding your hand when you stopped and he let go of you because of the abrupt motion, almost causing him to fall to the ground. Unbeknownst to you, you reached your hand out, stopping him in the motion and making him lean backwards instead - all with the power running through your fingers.

The boy turned to you with open eyes, not scared yet curious. Since you were used to people being afraid of you when they got to know about your power, you just blinked back at him. Remembering why you had just stopped, you cleared your throat and threw the question at him:

“How do you know how they’ve been planted? Are you with them?”

He could have been a scientist or someone working at those laboratories, but from the way he looked at you - so hurt -, you had a feeling that he wasn’t. He wasn’t even wearing a lab coat, instead, he wore a plain, pattern-less shirt and sweatpants.

Still, he shook his head and snapped his fingers: tiny, bright red sparkles born under his fingertips that gradually evolved into something brighter, something bigger: a flame.

“I’ll tell you later. Just trust me. I’ll get us to safety,” he promised as he snapped his fingers again, all the light from his hand gone.

“But what about…” You started saying and looked over your shoulder, only to see both of the buildings behind you up in flames and shambles. People were still running around, but there were less of them in the identical clothing you wore, so you had a feeling that those who had been kept here were on their way to safety.

Still, the sight of the building that had caused you so much pain being in ruins should have made you feel delighted. Instead, you remembered what happened there, and the memories tore through your flesh like small doses of lighting, hitting just in the right places to feel nauseous. The sterile smell of the cloning capsule, the feeling of the pills on your tongue, the white of the walls in your room, the version of you that appeared in your nightmares and hallucinations…

A sudden sharp ringing started in your ears and your hands flew to cup them, but to no avail; the world around you was louder than ever before. It just got worse and worse until your vision got blurry, your knees gave in, and you fell to the ground as the world around you went black with the image of your clone laughing at you.

When you regained consciousness, the first thing that you noticed was the smell. It wasn’t sterile, it wasn’t familiar, and whilst it wasn’t unbearable, you could feel the dust in the air when you sucked in a deep breath and needed to cough a few times while rubbing your eyes.

The next thing you noticed was your surroundings: furniture in multiple colours, shelves filled with books, a comfortable couch you currently laid on, the softness of the blanket that was covering you and the remains of what seemed like a living room with pictures hung on the walls yet no one there. When the thought of the previous night came to mind, you bolted up from the couch and looked around alarmed despite knowing that you had been saved. Or so, you hoped.

You could hear footsteps behind you, and immediately, your first thought was to run. The memories of anyone coming near you were linked to being dragged to the cloning rooms, and fear was injected into your veins. However, when the pitch-black haired boy from the night before emerged from the hallway with a mug in his hands, you forced your brain to stop making up escape plans.

“Hey! You’re up,” he noted in a gentle tone, and as he was walking towards you, you took in his features - in broad daylight and without the chaos around you - including the softness of his black locks, the depth of his similarly dark eyes, the elegant arch of his eyebrows, his high nose bridge and the deepened corners of his lips when he was attempting to smile at you, probably testing the waters to see how you reacted.

“Where are we?” You asked first things first, your voice coming out hoarse and definitely harsher than you had intended. The boy wasn’t taken aback though, he merely reached the mug out to you. Suspiciously, you eyed him for a few seconds, your silence prompting him to speak up first.

“You’re in safety, and I’m not going to hurt you,” he announced matter-of-factly, and even though you wanted to believe him, you needed more reason than that. “I reckon that we were in the same boat just until yesterday, being forced to be cloned and used by the laboratory. From what I could see, I guess there was a different building for boys and girls, but I have a feeling we had the same tasks to fulfil: exercising, filling out tests, complying with every step of the cloning process, not asking any questions or else we wouldn’t get food and so on. Is that right?”

His voice was firm, and you could tell he was speaking from experience, but when he looked at you with those eyes with tiny pieces of hurt swimming in them, that’s when you were even more sure that he was speaking nothing but the truth.

“Yeah,” so you replied, following his example when he lowered into an armchair and you sat back down on the couch. He took his distance from you, and you appreciated that despite what you had just discussed before. There was a moment of awkward silence lingering between the two of you before you were hit by a memory.

“You can control fire?” You inquired, remembering back to the previous night when you had seen flames coming out of his hands. And his eyes too, but maybe it was just your imagination. After all, you had been having hallucinations of your clone a lot of times, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to see something that wasn’t there.

“Yes. I’ve survived a fire when I was young, and since then, I can create flames and control fire,” he nodded as he put the mug on the table in front of him. You had a feeling that it wasn’t all he had to say, and he continued as expected. “This was my parents’ house. I’ve grown up here. Ever since I’ve come back from that incident alive, they’ve helped me to hide my power. Not because they were ashamed, but because it was a fire that only I’ve survived, and you know how people look at those with such abilities…”

“I know,” you croaked out, knowing all too well how people looked at such “superhumans”. Even before you had obtained your power, you hadn’t thought of them as evil or shameful creatures. After all, it wasn’t their fault that they got their powers! Whilst some superhumans liked to use them for illegal purposes, others could have easily used it to help people - just like you had all done so the day before, trying to save each other.

However, governments thought otherwise - they thought that people with such powers had to be contained - like a virus -, that’s why they were searching for them, and that’s why a lot of you were hiding yourself or hiding your power.

When you exchanged a glance with the pitch-black haired boy, you knew he meant this and you understood as well - the weight of bearing such a power. So with a bob of his head, he acknowledged your words and continued on with his story.

“We’ve told everyone it was a matter of luck, I didn’t have any powers, hence I’ve tried to get familiar with my power only when I was alone. My parents supported me and let me study, and so I was like a normal child until they came to offer me an internship from the laboratory.”

“The same laboratory we were at?”

“Yes. They’ve said that I would be able to work on this intelligent city project that they’ve created, one that can run on solar power and electricity and one where we can grow plants and healthy biodiversity with modern technology. That’s how I knew the woods we’ve been to weren’t real,” he explained as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. When you looked directly into his eyes, it wasn’t like the fire you had seen the day before. It was as if the flames were barely there, only flickering, and for some reason, the thought saddened you.

Even though his story was very different from yours, the biggest contrast being how his family treated him, his every act so far had proved you that he wasn’t thinking only about himself which was rare with people who came from such prestigious backgrounds. Even their house could signal that those who lived there were wealthy, and you wondered what happened to his parents since the living room looked pretty dusty as if nobody had been there for some time. Then again, since you had been practically living on the streets in a very run-down part of the country and you guessed that he had taken you to some higher tech city, you probably couldn’t know anything about his situation.

Though you had a feeling where his story would take a turn.

“It was a trick, wasn’t it? They knew about your power,” you guessed tentatively, and he looked perplexed for the first time.

“Did the same happen to you?”

You nodded, letting the past memories resurface and sting as they usually did so. You had no idea how much time had passed by, but you kept recalling that exact moment when you had first talked to the people from the laboratory, hoping that you could actually change the world. Just how naive you had been.

“I mean, I wasn’t smart like you,” you justified, feeling icky about the possibility of him thinking that you came from a similar background as he did. “My parents abandoned me when they got to know about my power, so I was basically a homeless orphan on the streets, but they’ve offered me a job, and made me believe that I could make a difference in the world if I join their project. In return, they would provide me with food, accommodation and safety.”

“Which they did, but they didn’t tell you about their project, right?” The boy put the pieces together, and it seemed that he got the hang of it pretty soon which was pretty impressive but also heartbreaking.

Instead of pondering over the memories though, you nodded and exchanged another meaningful glance with him. It seemed that you could understand each other’s pain well even without words, but words were needed to paint the background story of your lives, so you shared with him how you had gotten your power, how you had been disowned by your parents, and how you had needed to survive on the streets or in run-down ruins until the people from the laboratory had found you.

The boy - who introduced himself as Hoyoung in the meantime - had great empathy for someone who had practically grown up in luxury, but may it be because you two shared the same blessing and curse at the same time or may it be because he was different from others, but he looked like he genuinely cared when you were sharing bits and bobs about your life, your power and how you wish you could have just turned down their offer to join the company because it had been your downfall.

However, to that, the boy shook his head, something pulling at his lips when he next spoke up.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if you had said no,” he clarified, almost in a resigned state. It could be seen that he was contemplating whether or not to continue, and you were about to tell him that it was fine if he didn’t want to say more, but he cleared his throat and carried on nevertheless.

“My parents did some research on the lab, and came across some lawsuits against the company involving human trafficking and animal abuse, and told me to re-consider the internship opportunity. So when they directly came to our house to talk to me about it and I said no, they shot my parents in front of me and sedated me.”

His words struck you like lightning; it was one thing that they were basically kidnapping people for their powers and using them for their own selfish purposes, but it was another one to kill innocent people in the meantime. They probably justified that it was in the name of science or something.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” you said immediately, your heart squeezing at the thought of the boy having to lose his parents because of the people from the laboratory and ultimately because of his power.

“I couldn’t do anything, everything happened so fast and I…” Hoyoung recalled in a shaky tone, but stopped as he looked up at the ceiling, trying to hold back tears. Even though you couldn’t understand what he was going through because you had never been in his shoes and you had never been on good terms with your parents, he looked like such a good person and he had spoken so fondly of his parents, it broke your heart to see him in such a state.

“It wasn’t your fault,” you tried to reassure him as you reached for his hand to squeeze it. It came almost naturally even with you two being kind of strangers for now, and the boy didn’t yank his hand away either. He looked like he could use all kinds of comfort, and you were willing to give it to him.

After all, you owed him your life, and the least you could do was to comfort him when he was mourning the loss of his parents whom he had last seen when he had last been to this house. He had probably kept it all to himself or maybe he had wanted it to be all a bad dream, but this time, he let everything out, and you were there to help him through it.

After Hoyoung had pulled himself together, he explained to you how he had managed to get you two to safety. He had needed to steal a car because he had known that you two hadn’t had enough time to walk or run by yourself (especially with you being unconscious), and it had seemed that the whole area around the labs had been in frenzy because there had been abandoned cars everywhere (probably by the scientists and other staff members who had been trying to put out the fire and deal with the clones), so it hadn’t been that difficult.

He had also added that one of the boys in their building had caused the fire because he had been able to control lighting, and while he had been escorted to his room from a cloning session, he had walked by Hoyoung’s room, and that’s when he had practically bursted into lighting, cutting off the electricity and putting the hallway on fire. Then, it had been pretty much like how you had described your experience to him: both the staff members and the ones recruited were running around, the latter looking for a way out while the staff members were trying to control the situation. He had also mentioned that it had been bizarre to see some clones of the other boys who had probably escaped their capsules, and that’s why he hadn’t hesitated to help when he had seen you just crouching by that girl.

“I’m not sure how developed these clones are and whether they are intelligent enough to do anything reasonable without being told to do so, but they seemed quite violent, so I didn’t want you to get hurt. If I could do something to help, I wanted to,” he justified his actions, and for a moment, you could feel the ice around your heart thaw. You had built walls around yourself to not get hurt after being abandoned by your parents because if they hadn’t wanted you, then who would want to? So to have a complete stranger willingly save you… It was genuinely unbelievable to you.

“But I was just a mere stranger. You could have just let me die there.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to live with the regret then. Not after what had happened to my parents,” Hoyoung reasoned solemnly, and although you were about to say something to go against his words, you shut your mouth. After his breakdown, you didn’t have the heart to bring up anything that might cause him pain. Not to mention that he truly had a heart of gold, and instead of blaming him for risking his own life to save you, you were thankful to him - something that you couldn’t stop telling him throughout your conversations.

Not knowing how to add more to that or what to bring up again, silence was stretching on for some time before you found your voice and asked, albeit uncertain:

“Do you think they are looking for us?”

You didn’t need to specify whom you meant by ‘them’, you both knew it all too well. You also knew that he couldn’t know the answer for sure either, but you wanted to hear what he thought, so that you could come up with something.

“On one hand, I would like to think that they have enough problem with the clones, but on the other hand, I think they might want to find us, so that we wouldn’t tell anyone about what has happened at the labs,” he explained thoroughly, and you nodded, thinking the same. “That’s why we need to leave soon. If they wanted to find me, they would probably come here first,” he reasoned, his voice gentle despite the implication behind his words.

You wondered how much it hurt for him to say so because this house was probably the last thing that reminded him of his parents which was both reassuring and devastating. To leave it, it would mean that he would leave the place where he had grown up and where remains of his memories with his parents had been. On the contrary, he had already been away from the house for sometime now and it might help him to move on to be away from it.

Whatever he might have been feeling in the current moment, he didn’t let it show on his face. Instead, he was looking at you for your reaction, worried and curious at the same time, and despite the way he was looking at you, you couldn’t help but ask:

“Should we go our separate ways?”

Hoyoung was visibly taken aback by your question, almost horrified as if you had suggested something even more dangerous than you had experienced so far. He couldn’t even find the right words to say, he was just muttering for a few seconds.

“I mean… if you want to and if you don’t want my help,” he blurted out, a bit confused, and upon his nervous state, you became a bit uncertain as well.

“It’s not about that. I just think it would be safer for both of us.”

“I think it might be safer if we stayed together. For instance, if we find a place to stay at, one could go out while the other would supervise the place. Or we could just start a new life far away, having each other’s back. After all, I don’t have anyone anymore either…” His voice trailed off by the end, and he averted his eyes from your face to a picture hanging on the wall instead.

You gulped, feeling the tension blanket the two of you, your heart breaking in the meantime. This boy had really saved your life when everything had been ripped off of him: his family, his future, his dreams and the stability he had once known. Yet, instead of giving up on life altogether, he had helped others escape and he had helped you as well, taking you to safety. If you could be someone he had in this post-laboratory life, you wouldn’t want to leave him either. After all, you owed him your life.

“We’ll stay together,” you announced, your voice not leaving room for any doubt. When you broke the silence, Hoyoung looked back at you, and you couldn’t exactly pinpoint what his face displayed: relief, gratitude or something completely different, but you knew one thing: that you would want to protect him as much as he had done so already.

It wasn’t easy, of course. Two youngsters with supernatural abilities after escaping a laboratory where they had been cloned meant that you were practically on the run even though you had nothing to be ashamed of, and you weren’t the bad guys in this story. However, you knew that the government wouldn’t care because news hadn’t come out regarding the laboratory and what they had done so, only news of two of its buildings burning to the ground due to “technical errors”.

You had no one else you could count on either apart from each other, but at least you had somewhere to start from when Hoyoung opened up the vault in his parents’ basement and found some saved up jewellery and cash. That was enough to get you going, and after that, you planned to leave the country to start a new life, but whether that would be feasible, it was all uncertain. Your clones and others’ clones might have been on the run too, the lab staff looking for them and maybe even looking for you two, so you needed to be as careful as possible, moving quickly and unpredictably. You had a feeling that the company behind the lab had the money and resources to track down anything they wanted to, so you had to avoid public spaces with cameras which just made things harder.

Despite everything, you had each other, and when you had frequently recurring nightmares of being stuck in the laboratory again, Hoyoung was there to soothe you, gently talking to you until you could fall asleep again, and when the boy had something that reminded him of his parents, you were the one he could hold onto, anchoring him to reality.

Despite everything that had happened and everything that was about to come, you had each other, and in a world of uncertainty, that was more powerful than any other weapon could be.

A/N: Thank you so much for reading my story! Let me know what you’ve thought of it! I hope you’ve enjoyed it. ❤️

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