Chapter Text
Sayeon Lee is ten years old.
Several things have already happened in her life that should, hypothetically, have broken something in her. Maybe some of them did. She doesn't know- she just knows that she's made of poison, and she knows that Samin can't be trusted. She knows she can never have another friend like Jugyeong, and she can never go back to Jugyeong's house again.
This causes problems for where she should spend her time. Not at her own home, certainly- that's where Samin is, unless that's where she isn't, and Sayeon is alone. She doesn't much like being alone, though she's recently found it to be better than being alone with Samin. There's school- she could join a club or something- but that comes with obligations that she can't really fulfill, plus it's way more social than school is and she just established that she's made of poison, and- perhaps most importantly- it doesn't last for very long.
She can't stay at the school overnight. She's young enough that someone would get concerned again, and that would just be more blood on her hands- maybe in high school, when everyone knows that all the students are stressed all the time for the important university exams, but right now? No way. She can't act as stressed as a high schooler without, again, getting someone concerned.
So that leaves her to either stick it out at home- alone with Samin, or alone in a house that creaks sometimes and makes her feel trapped besides- or to find somewhere else. Anywhere else.
There's not a lot of 'anywhere else' that's particularly appealing at night, though, and even the few places that she would feel alright hanging around are either far away or not very welcoming to children her age once it gets dark. That leaves her in the very uncomfortable position of having nowhere to go except to wander around the city, in the dark, where anyone could be doing anything and nobody cares that she's going to be a lawyer when she's still visibly a relatively young child.
So, her grand solution is to ride the train. It goes for twenty-four hours along the same looping track, it's well-lit, and she can even do her homework while she's waiting for the hour to get late enough that she can sneak into her room unnoticed.
She gets on during rush hour, and clings onto a pole until a seat opens up naturally. Her backpack is big enough that nobody ever gets too close, and she's perfectly content with standing for a while after a long day of sitting. She refuses others' offers to take their seats, especially if those people are older, because she is supposed to be polite. There's also a part of her that says she does not deserve a seat more than anybody else on the train, even if they want her to sit, but that voice is usually pretty quiet once it's been an hour and her legs have begun to ache.
Once she's seated, her backpack remains on her lap until the train really begins to empty out. Once the seats next to her are open on both sides, she puts her backpack on the floor in front of her and starts digging out whatever textbooks and study materials she needs for her homework. The seat thing is mostly as an indicator of how crowded the train is likely to be, and how much she's likely to bother someone else by doing her homework. She doesn't want to encroach on anybody else's personal space.
Then, she works in silence for a few hours, until there are more homeless or drunk people on the train than there are regular commuters.
Not that there's anything wrong with homeless or drunk people- the train is safer than the streets, which is the entire reason she's here at all- but drunk people are unpredictable, and homeless people are desperate, aberrants, or both. By time those groups come out in force, it's a safer bet to get off the train and go home.
After long enough of doing this- after about a month or so, if it must be kept track of- she begins to recognize a few of the more common faces. It helps that she sticks to the same train car every night, so everybody else who makes a habit of staying on the train during the odd hours of the evening- those who also tend to have usual train cars- are the same people she tends to see night after night, right around when it's time for her to go.
The drunk people are generally a rotating cast. The homeless, though, those are the ones she starts to recognize from seeing day in and day out, and slowly, she relaxes a little more when she sees them. Not to the point that her guard's not up, but, well, they haven't messed with her yet, right? It stands to reason that if they were going to rob her, or attack her for no reason, they would've done so by now.
There are three people she recognizes, and though there are probably more who hang out in this train car, she still leaves early enough that she doesn't see them.
The first is a woman with scraggly, greasy hair, who sits in the corner and knits with what appear to be scraps of yarn, not even an actual yarn ball. Sayeon's not sure what she's making, but it seems like it's more work to tie each thread together than it is to actually knit whatever it is.
The other two are a pair of men, who each come in from the same station, who sit opposite each other. Sayeon's seat is inconsistent, so sometimes they're near and sometimes they're far, but when Sayeon's not on the same bench as the man who wears the beanie, he lies down and covers his face with his arm. The man without the beanie- he has a graying beard- sits in the middle of his own bench, and he usually passes the time by staring down between his knees.
None of these people speak, to each other or to Sayeon. This is perfectly acceptable to her.
She's still usually on the train when the business guys who are working overtime- and there are always men who appear to be vague office workers of some kind working overtime- are trickling to a stop. So, it's also not surprising to occasionally see a man in slacks, a white button-up, and a loosened tie either sitting on one of the empty spots, or holding onto one of the poles or the handles dangling from the ceiling.
Sometimes they get kind of close to her. She ignores them until they either get to their stop, or until the guy with the beard makes a weird noise- not a growl, per se, but the kind of thing she thinks is accompanied by a glare (she doesn't know, for sure, because she's always staring down very intently at her homework)- and they go to a different part of the car. The guy with the beard never says anything after- and, for that matter, neither does anybody else- but it at least tells Sayeon that her chances of being attacked without any intervention are probably pretty slim.
Nobody ever follows her, at least. Nobody's that persistent. She knows that she's taking a risk, by staying out this late, and being outside of the company of anybody else, and furthermore not letting anyone know where she is, but it's a risk she's willing to take. She doesn't like being in the house, she doesn't like being near Samin, and she doesn't like endangering anybody else by getting to close to them, either.
There is, technically, the protection detail that was set up when Mom died, but she and Samin both learned how to evade them a long time ago. They don't seem to get very upset when they do it, either, so she can't imagine that there's any real consequence for them for losing sight of her, and besides- they're aberrants, too.
Aberrants are dangerous. They're criminals- like the aforementioned protection detail- or they're just plain unpredictable. To have that kind of power at your fingertips is corrupting, and anybody who has it should be considered dangerous, at the very least. Even if they seem trustworthy, none of them are at their core.
Just look at how Samin turned out.
So, she has decided that the risks of being out alone in the dark are still worth the nightly journey, despite the benefits of staying near the protection detail. They catch attention, anyway; their matching suits aren't very conspicuous when surrounded by people in business casual, maybe, but she knows they're a gang uniform of some kind (she's never asked which- for the sake of plausible deniability, when she's older and a lawyer and has to prosecute these people and their associates for whatever it is they do aside from babysitting the children of their dead leaders) and she knows that, with bad enough luck, they'll be recognized by the wrong sorts of people.
She made that decision when she came up with the idea to camp out on the train in the evenings, and she continues to make that decision each time she gives them the slip in the afternoons. She's not even sure if, three months into her routine, they still bother to sit in the pickup lane for her or if they're just assuming that she's walking home from school on her own.
At least the train ride doesn't seem to impact the quality of her work- she had feared, at first, that the noise and constant movement of the train would make it more difficult to focus, would make it more difficult for her to complete work at the same rate than if she just grit her teeth and hid in her room, but so far, her grades have remained steadily perfect.
All in all, it's a flawed system, but it's functional on the whole. She just needs to make it to high school, at which point she'll be able to remain at school for much longer without getting anybody too concerned about her home life or her mental state. She might even be able to swing the later years of middle school, if she insists on trying to get into one of the more elite high schools, in which case the teachers will commend her for her grit and won't say a word about how she shouldn't be so stressed at her age.
She's thinking about the cost-benefit analysis tonight, when the sun has just finished setting and her train car is sparsely populated. She's not even sure which stop she's near, but she knows that hers is at least a few more away- when they announce it over the intercom, she'll have a better estimate of when she's getting off- and she knows that it's nearly time to start packing her things back into her backpack.
The woman in the corner is still doing her knitting, and Sayeon's half-convinced she's just unraveling it to knit it again, with how little progress seems to have been made over the past three months of seeing her work on that project; the two men on their opposite benches appear to have settled into their positions for the night; and there's the occasional drunk person or overtime-commuter or random other person doing errands, but nobody's too close to Sayeon and nobody's standing up.
The train begins slowing down, and Sayeon catches herself from leaning too far to the right; she's facing away from the doors, so her momentum keeps carrying her forward (right) while the train decreases its speed. That's important for her science homework soon, or else for the test next week- she's not sure, since the homework technically isn't due until Monday, but it never hurts to start early.
The crackly announcer tells her that she's five stops away from home, and she doesn't need to pack for another two. She may as well start that science worksheet she was thinking about a moment ago.
As she puts her literature workbook away, and pulls out her science folder (with the empty worksheet filed neatly on the left, and all her other homework for science that's not quite due yet filed in order on the right) she feels and hears the train screech to a stop. The sound of the old brakes is muffled by the train itself, but it still tells Sayeon not to focus completely on her assignment until the doors close again.
The doors to her right hiss open, and there are a few quiet footsteps as people get off and hurry home. After a few more moments, she hears a few more footsteps walking onto the train; she doesn't look up, but she does listen, and she doesn't think there's a big enough distraction in the world that could make her miss the man who sits directly next to her.
He doesn't seem particularly big or strong, nor does he seem very old- he's a bit older than Samin is, maybe, but she's not sure beyond that. He's also not one of the overtime men, considering his choice of dirty jeans and a stained shirt that advertises some kind of food stall. He's chewing on a toothpick, and occasionally he holds it between two fingers like he's holding a cigarette.
He's leaned back, looking relaxed and comfortable, and as the doors close, he leans back even more- to the point that his thigh is pressed against Sayeon's, knocking into her science folder for good measure. She stares down intently at her homework, with such unblinking tenacity that she's practically boring holes in it from her gaze alone. She tries not to give him the satisfaction of a reaction, but she doesn't think she could force herself to relax if she had all the time in the world. Her shoulders are nearly up to her ears, and her hands are trembling as they grip her paper folder.
She can feel his eyes on her- and she hopes he can feel the eyes of the bearded man. Maybe he'll actually have to intercept with more than a wordless noise- or maybe he'll decide that, if the man is tenacious enough to ignore him, then it's not his problem. Both outcomes are equally likely. The bearded man doesn't know her, and she doesn't know him.
The silence is pounding in her head, and the tension is so thick she can barely breathe. Or maybe it's just her and her own fear. She can't exactly tell the difference at this point, and she both dreads and craves the next move that somebody makes. Dreads it, because, well, isn't it obvious? But craves it, too, because at least that will be better than the anticipation and the directionless adrenaline that's doing nothing but make her tremble like a wet cat.
She doesn't recongize him. She hopes he's just drunk, despite the fact that she can't smell any alcohol on him. She already hopes she never sees him again.
"Miss Lee," he says to her, and the entire world stops. Her heart skips a beat, and then another, and then another, and then she realizes it's just going triple-time in erratic arrhythmia, and she can't tell if it's her heart or the sheer fear that's making her want to gag. She's still trembling like a jackrabbit facing down a wolf, or like a deer staring into a pair of headlights, or like some other cornered prey animal that knows it's facing something it can't hope to survive.
He stretches his arm out, like he's yawning, but ends up with his left arm wrapped loosely around her shoulders, half on the seat and half against her neck. She doesn't feel his hand, which could be either good or very, very bad.
She doesn't know him. She doesn't know his voice. If he had any good reason to know her, she would know him in return- or, at the very least, he would do her the courtesy of wearing one of those gang uniforms. She spies no blue handkerchiefs to give away a friendly- or, at the very least, familiar- signal. She can't imagine he's just talking to her because of school or something, either- this has family matter written all over it.
She wants no part in it, she never wanted a part in it, she just wants to be normal and pretend like she never knew any aberrants in her life- is that so wrong of her? Is that so impossible?
She doesn't answer him. Doesn't even look over at him, except surreptitious glances between blinks. She pretends like she doesn't hear him, or else like she doesn't know a Miss Lee- until she belatedly realizes that her name is written at the top of her papers. Stupid. Except, really, it isn't stupid, because she doesn't want to have anything left ungraded because she made the dumb mistake of forgetting to put her name on it- maybe he just read her homework. Maybe that's it. Maybe it has nothing to do with her parents' gang at all.
"The two of us are getting off this train at the next stop," he continues. "You're going to put your homework in your backpack, and you're going to bring it with us. You're not going to do anything stupid, got it?" To punctuate his statement, Sayeon hears a tiny, soft click just behind her left ear.
She's going to throw up.
"Yes, sir," she whispers, too terrified to nod. Too terrified to move. He tilts his head forward, towards her backpack, and she starts the normally-quick process of packing her things. Her hands are clumsy, though, and she's shaking too badly to grab the zipper after several attempts at it.
She finally grabs it, and starts zipping it shut. Once she does, she looks up, towards the bearded man somewhat across from her (albeit a few rows down) and stares beseechingly over at him. He's at least watching the whole exchange, which means someone else will be able to describe this man to the police. Except- except, police don't really touch aberrant business, do they? It's someone else, a different agency, one that's equally harsh on victims and perpetrators alike if they even begin to suspect that both parties might be an aberrant, and while Sayeon isn't old enough to be an aberrant, she knows genetics aren't on her side.
So there's not really much hope coming from that avenue, is there?
"Leave the kid alone," Comes a harsh growl from the other side of the train, and it takes Sayeon a moment to place the voice as belonging to the bearded man. It's the first time she's ever heard his voice, and right now is a really stupid time to be paying attention to that, but it's also the first time she's been visibly uncomfortable enough- afraid enough- for him to say something.
It takes Sayeon another long, syrupy moment to register that the bearded man's eyes are brighter than she's ever seen them. Thinking feels weird, right now, because everything is sharp and out-of-focus all at once. It's far too real, and it's a faraway fantasy. She's barely even here, and she can feel every individual molecule on her skin.
But his eyes are bright, an aggressive, electric green. Bright, like they're- of course. Of course. Mom's old protection detail wouldn't let her go that easily.
Her eyes dart over to the man in the beanie, and he's sitting upright, staring at the man next to her- his eyes are dark blue. Just as bioluminescent, just as bright, just as eerie in the fluorescent lighting of the train. Neither of them have Samin's teal, but then again, she doesn't know much about how aberrants do what they do. For all she knows, those are just their favorite colors, and that's all there is to it.
The man next to her scoffs, and doesn't seem the slightest bit fazed by the apparent show of force from the two members of Mom's old protection detail.
"Is this all the Sea Wolves could afford, for Sara Lee's precious daughter?" There goes her plausible deniability. Now she's not going to be able to prosecute on cases involving the Sea Wolves- or, for that matter, whatever group this man is a part of- due to judicial bias. Or, wait, that's judges- legal bias? Prosecutorial bias? Some kind of bias.
Distantly, she's aware that it's an objectively stupid thing to get hung up on. However, she's currently in a life-or-death situation, and if she thinks about the actual details of the actual situation too much then she's going to puke and she really doesn't think that stomach acid and half-digested rice and kimchi all over this man's lap will convince him not to shoot her.
"Besides," because apparently only a second has really passed during Sayeon's whole mental tangent, and the man with the gun to her head still isn't even finished his sentence, "I don't think you want to test your aging reflexes against mine. Unless you want to explain why her brains are spattered all over the ceiling of this train car."
Her knuckles are tight against the straps of her backpack and her eyes are squeezed shut- stupid, you need to see if his eyes are glowing, too, if he's an aberrant or if he's just got a gun, that's important for their odds against him- and there's an involuntary, low whine eking its way out of her chest.
The train chooses that moment to start slowing down again, and Sayeon steels herself against the natural right lean. She prays to every single deity she can think of, plus Samin and Mom and even Dad for good measure, that the force of the train doesn't affect this man's trigger finger. It takes an infinity before the brakes scream the train to a stop, another infinity before the doors hiss open, and a third infinity before the man pushes her into moving.
She nearly trips over herself a few times, and she glances around at the empty station as the man aggressively leads her away. She doesn't dare to turn her head to see if the Sea Wolves are following them, and the point is soon rendered moot. The moment they're up the stairs, the man covers her eyes with his free hand, and leads her blindly off to somewhere.
At least, if he's bothering to cover her eyes, he's planning on leaving her alive.