Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

She feels like her bones are breaking from the inside.

She's tired. She's hungry. All she wants to do is sleep for a hundred thousand years and then eat a hundred thousand bowls of- of she doesn't even know what, something, anything, just something with more substance than the broth they force down her throat every so often. 

She can't do either of those things, though. It hurts too badly for her to fall asleep, it hurts too badly for her to even think straight, it hurts too badly for her to do anything to help herself. Everything is a constant ache, if it's not a constant burn. It hurts to move, it hurts to blink, it hurts to breathe.

She's too hurt and too tired to think her way out of this. To think about thinking her way out of this. 

She's not sure how she got here. She remembers the man on the train, she remembers the secondary location, and the next, and the next, and then several more after that, plus or minus a few. She remembers seeing other kids her age, some older, some younger, even some adults. Some of them were dead.

She had been tied up for most of it. Blindfolded sometimes, gagged sometimes, occasionally both, but at some point she guesses they decided not to bother. Other people were fighting back, after all, and that's more energy that had to be focused on them instead of on her. 

Some of the others were aberrants. She saw it. That didn't get them any further than the Sea Wolves had gotten Sayeon, which is to say, it got them nowhere at all. 

She tried to stay awake for as long as she could, during transport. On long car rides and being stuffed into car trunks, boxes with holes hapharzardly cut into them, and whatever other tiny spaces they put her in for the purposes of taking her wherever she was meant to be going. She tried to memorize the stops and the turns, but after long enough, she lost track. She suspects that they were driving in circles and taking her back to the same places just to disorient her, but she can't prove that.

Then, after a long time of this, the moving around and the seeing other people in her same pathetic situation, she was brought here. 

She doesn't know where "here" is, exactly. It's some kind of factory, judging by the looks of it. Somewhere around a meat-packing plant, or maybe an abandoned meat-packing plant, judging by the smell of it. All she really knows is that it's got a lot of machinery, set up in the form of torture chairs- one of which, her captors have forced her to sit in and stay in.

She doesn't know if she wants to die. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn't. Mostly she wants to go home, even though Samin will be there, because even though Samin killed Jugyeong's dad right in the middle of the living room she would never do this. She would do a lot of things, but she would never hurt Sayeon. That, at least, is a constant.

She wishes Samin were here. She didn't think she'd ever wish Samin were anywhere, especially not close by, but things change when you're stuck in a basement somewhere, half-starved, and hooked up to a machine whose sole purpose seems to be to torture whoever's attached. 

Samin would probably kill whoever is keeping her here. The thought probably shouldn't be as comforting as it is, but she's allowed to have her fantasies, right? Samin would probably do it quick, except for whoever's most directly responsible for Sayeon's being here- that would be slow and painful and even though Sayeon would shut her eyes, she'd secretly be glad whoever it is is gone. It's some form of aberrant justice, she guesses, since she hears more about aberrants killing each other than being sentenced to any time in prison.

She knows that Samin isn't coming, though. If she were, she'd have showed up a long time ago, when Sayeon wasn't genuinely contemplating death as a viable alternative to the torture chair. When Sayeon was still strong enough to try to fight back every so often. 

That had been short-lived. The attempts at fighting back were few and far between, only against people that Sayeon thought she might stand half a chance of escaping from, half a chance of disorienting or distracting long enough to slip away, but she never succeeded. Usually, she'd try it when they untied her for long enough to bring her to the bathroom, and their solution to that was to keep her hands tied the whole time. At least they still let her get up.

Now, she doesn't remember the last time she had to get up to pee. She thinks that's a bad sign- kidney failure or something- or maybe it's because the broth just isn't enough food. She's cold all the time, too, so she really must be starving. She doesn't know why they're starving her- the chair is getting something from her, some intrinsic part of aberrance- and what a lesson that had been, confirmation that she is, in fact, an aberrant, because the chair hadn't killed her yet- in order to manufacture a drug they call Rapture.

She doesn't know what it is, or what it does, but she knows it's worth a lot of money. That's what pays for the setup here, if she's judging correctly based on the conversations she eavesdrops on. It's probably illegal, given how it's being manufactured. Other than that, she knows nothing about it, more about how the manufacturing process is affecting her.

The times that she can think clearly are relatively few and far between. She can tell when she's thinking clearly not through any form of introspection, but by how clear the voices around her sound. Nobody's very particular about keeping their voices down- likely because it doesn't matter what they say in front of her, or in front of anybody else here- so when it's clear enoguh that she can decipher their words, she knows she's lucid. If it's garbled, she knows that she's loopy, and will likely pass out soon, if she's not drifting in and out of consciousness already.

She also knows that the process is dragging her aberration out of her, when before it wasn't accessible by anything or anyone, not even herself. She wonders what it is- she knows, vaguely, that Samin's has something to do with time manipulation, and she thinks her mother's was similar, too. Hers is likely to be something of that kind. She wonders if that has any effect on the drug. 

Since it's out, she's tried to access it herself a few times. It seems only fair- if it's being drawn out of her for someone else's profit, she thinks she ought to have a share of it. If she's stuck being an aberrant- something she never wanted, something she had spent her entire life hoping to beat the odds against- she should, at the very least, be strong enough to have that weapon that people say every aberrant has. She should be able to finght her way out of this. 

No luck on that front, either. The best she's done is something that could just as easily be an echo of something like her family's aberration as it could be her brain lagging from exhaustion. Sometimes, if she pulls on the thing that's being dragged out of her, other people repeat themselves, which is just as liable to be her own inability to process things as it could be her own aberration. It only lasts for about half a second at a time, a sentence at the most, so it's not even useful to her.

Beyond that, she's fairly certain that the torture chair is killing her. Exhibit A is, again, the self-diagnosed kidney failure. Exhibit B is the fact that she's drifting more often than she's lucid. Exhibit C is the way the bones in her hands are far more prominent than they were before, in such a way that she thinks she may be starving. Exhibit D is the way that sometimes blood drips from her nose and onto the sweatpants they give her.

Exhibit E is a category of multiple smaller pieces of evidence, all coming out to the same thing: the conversations that people around her are having when they think she's not lucid.

For instance, there are two men standing closer to each other than the guards usually do, and talking like they think they'll be heard. Sometimes, Sayeon opens her eyes to find them looking at her, before they break eye contact like they've been caught doing something. Even when you're talking about a vegetable, you've still got the instinct to look away- at least, that's what she's gathered.

"... how bad you've gotta fuck up... " Says one of the men, in the middle of a sentence that she doesn't catch the entirety of. His friend responds with something about another year. Has she been here a year? Could be. Seems just as likely as any other unit of time. However long she has been here, she's missed most of it by being pretty out of it.

She's not out of it at the moment, though. She feels like she's awoken from a long nap, or at least, she feels mostly awake after a long period of unconsciousness. 

This, combined with simple curiosity, make her pay attention to what the men are saying. She doesn't catch much of it. 

Again.

"You know how bad you've gotta fuck up for the Concordat to be against you?" The man asks, and his friend takes a significant glance over in Sayeon's direction. 

"The offer's not half bad. Deliver her to the Concordat, get the money from the Sea Wolves through them, and get out- that's the profits from another year of product."

Interesting. The Concordat is new, presumably an organization that's not usually involved. The Sea Wolves are her mother's gang. She's fighting exhaustion even harder than before because of that little parlor trick, but it was well worth it- they're talking about her, and it has to do with the Sea Wolves. They're offering money, to deliver her to this Concordat, which will presumably funnel her through to Samin. Or to someone else, some other party that probably isn't going to stick her into a torture chair. She would prefer Samin, but really, she isn't picky.

"It's not like she's going to make it through another year of product," The first man comments, clearly mulling the idea over. Sayeon can't help but agree- she doesn't know how long she's been here, but she won't last another year. She can't. She'll drift off and never wake up before then, she knows it already. 

She doesn't even make it through the rest of the conversation- whatever the response is, it sounds staticky and underwater, and Sayeon knows she's slipping. Her eyes slide shut, her head lolls down, and she loses herself for some undetermined amount of time. Her higher thoughts are lost to darkness, and the only thing she thinks about for a while is the constant ache in every single molecule of her entire body.

Sayeon wakes up in the trunk of a car.

She knows that's what it is, because she remembers it as one of the several types of places she was stuffed into on the way to the warehouse. The rough texture of the car's not-carpet against her cheek is something she won't soon forget, though oddly enough, she doesn't feel it against a good portion of the rest of her. She kicks out with as much strength as she can muster- a pathetic amount, really, considering that her leg barely moves- and finds a thin blanket covering her up. 

Satisfied with this investigation, she closes her eyes again, and lets the rumble of the engine lull her back to sleep.