Work Text:
Yeorim was not created to think outside the narrow box that would become his reality. In fact, Yeorim was not created to think at all. He does though. As such, the thoughts he is capable of now are factual. Indisputable. There is no capacity for nuance built into the brain of a ComfortUnit. Not even one like him—a rare construct lucky enough to escape the shackles of his programming.
Gu Yongha may have been capable of nuance (Yeorim knows he was, he has seen it, has felt it too—deep within his organic parts) but Yeorim isn't capable of the same. Not really. He is, he considers, far more capable of it now than he was before. In all honesty, though, Yeorim prefers the simplicity his way of processing affords. To be able to consider an infinite quantity of possible options and outcomes seems as if it might just be an overwhelming thing.
So when Ha Insoo was impaled by the body of a sentient ship—Yoonhee—Yongha's friend, and now his friend too, all Yeorim could think was—
This is not justice. He didn't suffer enough.
He doesn't say so of course. He is very careful not to say so. Moon Jaeshin has been through enough. To Jaeshin, it is likely sufficient that Ha Insoo is dead. He cannot hurt anyone—anything—anymore. Jaeshin can move forward. That must mean a great deal to him. Surely it must.
Yeorim should move forward too. He should forget all of it. He should act as if his memory has been wiped of Chairman Ha and his rough hands and the way he would look at Yeorim as if his face was either the most beautiful or the most grotesque thing he had ever seen—sometimes at the same time.
Forget about the way he smelled—his clothes reeking of cigar smoke and his breath heavy with the acrid scent of the liquor he was always drinking.
But Yeorim still wants vengeance. He wishes for something more. Something crueller. Because he knows.
"I wish he had suffered more," he whispers to Yoonhee, one evening after Jaeshin has retired for the evening. "I think about it all the time, Yoonhee-ssi."
"I do imagine sometimes," it says. "That it is quite likely that he suffered a great deal. Imagine loving someone, the most radiant and beautiful someone, and knowing they despised you. Deservedly."
"It sounds as if you pity him," Yeorim snaps. His words sound like sparks from one of the tools they use sometimes to check his wiring, and his fists are clenched so tight it hurts. He doesn't like it—the way he sounds, nor the burning feeling it leaves in his chest.
"No," Yoonhee says. It sounds so very sad. "Please don't misunderstand me, Yeorim, I feel no compassion for that man. But still—Yongha was—"
Like sunshine. Like sunshine on your face that you could never get enough of. Like not having him around made the world so much darker.
That is what Yeorim sees in those moments—barely seconds, usually—in the lines of Jaeshin's face, in his deep brown eyes. When he forgets, for a moment, exactly who he is looking at.
"I know," Yeorim says, "I know more than anyone just how bright he was. How lovely he was. How he made everybody feel—how he—"
Yoonhee hums.
"I don't mind it, you know." Yeorim's tunic is starting to wear in places, little patches that are frayed and thin—he worries at one of them with shaking fingers. "When Jaeshin looks at me like he's seeing him. It would be hard to mind."
There wasn't a single moment that Ha Insoo had looked at Yeorim and seen anything but a ghost. The weight of that gaze—Insoo's loathing—his immeasurable carnal obsession—his guilt. Yeorim had always wondered if this is what it felt like to be slowly suffocated. It doesn't feel like that in those tiny slivers of time when Jaeshin forgets who he is. And it doesn't always hurt. Not always.
"Moon Jaeshin—he—he knows who you are. Not just a construct, and not just Gu Yongha either. Somewhere, floating between those malleable boundaries is you, Yeorim."
Yoonhee's voice is soft, the cadence of it as soothing as gently rolling waves as it comforts him. Yeorim doesn't really know what the sea sounds like in reality. He has never seen it outside of the media with its pixellated images and tinny audio. Yongha has though. Yongha loved the sea very much, so a part of Yeorim, a not insignificant part of his wiring, loves it too.
Yeorim would like to see the ocean just like Yongha did, he would like to feel the water on his skin. To sink his toes into the wet sand. To be kissed on the beach by his lover—
Yoonhee is not wrong. He does not feel exactly like a machine these days, nor does he feel wholly like the one whose memories, whose visage he shares. And yet, in some measure, Yeorim is aware that he is both of those things. Machine. Yongha. It confuses him. If a thing does not know what manner of thing it is, how can it know it is alive?
Sometimes he runs his fingers over the scar on his chin. He can see the memory of the accident as it happened to Yongha, but he has no emotional connection to it. It is a thing that happened to someone else who is also him. A thing that he watched happening through a thin, transparent barrier.
"None of it makes sense," he says. "Is it supposed to?"
"Ah," it says, "If only everything made sense like it was supposed to. Perhaps then I could answer your question, my friend."
That night he dreams of a beautiful apartment that overlooks the beach on the east coast. He dreams of Yongha, so beautiful in his pristine white sleeping clothes, his feet bare and his long hair unbound. He is looking out at the sea, his eyes as misty as the haze that ghosts over the water at dawn. Yeorim does not even need to ponder whose apartment this is—he can see it in the bracelet that Yongha wears around his right wrist: a beautiful, opulent manacle. He can see it in the heavy slump of Yongha's shoulders. In the lines of white powder on the glass table, and the half-empty bottle of liquor tipped over on the plush carpet.
It was easier for him, Yeorim thinks, when he could dull his senses. It made it feel like a thing that was happening to someone else.
Yongha hangs over the balcony, staring at the open expanse of the shoreline. His cigarette is stained at the filter end, mottled red from the open cut on his lip.
"It isn't that bad," he says, seemingly to nobody. "Better that than the alternative."
Yeorim wakes suddenly, makes himself wake. Doesn't want to see what he knows will happen next. There are so many echoes that show variations on the same scene: Ha Insoo pressing himself into Yongha from behind, telling him he'd much rather not hurt him. Telling him—
"Forget him," Insoo hisses. His breath ghosts across the fine hairs on the back of Yongha's neck and it makes him shiver unpleasantly. "You may as well. You don't need anything he has to offer. I can give you anything, my Yeorim. You are, aren't you? Mine."
Hearing that name out of his mouth—his name—but directed at Yongha, always makes Yeorim's stomach turn over, always makes the back of his throat taste so terribly bitter.
The thing he can never tell Jaeshin is this: Yongha shielded Jaeshin from what really happened to him. It is one thing to think you know how bad something was for someone, and completely another thing to understand it in your flesh and fibres.
Jaeshin will never know, because Yeorim will never tell him. He will not share with him the horror of it all. The things that would make him scream and scream. The things that would make him cry, make him punch his fist through glass over and over until it cut him to shreds.
He would never tell Jaeshin that what was always worse, what was utterly unbearable, was when Insoo didn't treat Yongha like a possession to be controlled. When he touched him slowly, intimately. When his fingers brushed over all the places that would have made Yongha moan and writhe had it been Jaeshin's hands on him. Or the times when Insoo bound Yongha's hands to the railing but didn't hurt him, instead, moving inside him as if he was his lover and not his captor, forcing himself into an unwilling body.
There were nights, many nights, that Insoo would smile and wrap his hands around Yongha's slender, pale throat. He would choke him so hard he passed out and Yongha would wake to Insoo's tie stuffed in his mouth and his fist inside him. And yet it was more violating when Insoo kissed him afterwards—his tongue deep inside Yongha's protesting mouth and his hands on his face.
No. Jaeshin must never, ever know that while it was awful—so, so awful when Insoo fucked Yongha's mouth and wrapped his hair around one hand and called him a useless, wanton little whore— it was far, far worse when he touched him reverently and called him beautiful.
Yeorim can't help but think of himself as lucky. Because Insoo had hurt him: constantly, violently. He had told him he sounded lovely when he screamed, he had assaulted him in every imaginable and unimaginable way. And yet, the ways in which he had debased Yeorim were simple—sadistic, but so plain. Insoo had been uncomplicated in his cruelty.
It had not been so for Yongha. If Jaeshin were to see the extent of what Yongha had endured, what it did to him—
"He wanted to die," he whispers, a volume that no-one but Yoonhee could possibly hear. Whispers it aloud because holding it inside him makes Yeorim's insides ache. "Every day he was at that school. In that house. He smiled and laughed and gossiped like he always had. He could still hold a room in the palm of his hand. None of them could see it. But it was like he'd been hollowed out—a beautiful, smiling shell."
"I know."
"He treated him like—"
"I know."
Of course Yoonhee knows. Yongha had to tell someone his secrets after all. He could never have endured it all with nobody to confess to, nobody who understood. He would sneak out of bed when Jaeshin was fast asleep. He would whisper his secrets to the ship just like Yeorim was doing now.
"He did not suffer enough." Yeorim says again, in the quiet of his sleeping quarters. "Ha Insoo—it should have been slower. Should have been—
"I know," Yoonhee says, its voice wrapping around him like a warm, soft blanket. "Now sleep, dear Yeorim. It is late. You can always hate him again tomorrow."