Work Text:
Amber remembers pictures, bright and happy ones of smiles and summers long forgotten mixed up with crying and the color of blood tainting white walls. She doesn’t know how to differentiate between fake and real anymore, she’s been here too long for that, but it’s a comforting contrast to the wall in front of her that stays metallic and grey, no matter what. Her memories are a pathetic way for her to momentarily forget where she is, but it’s all she has, and she’ll take it any day. The physical prison is ten times easier to accept and recognize than the mental one, even though she has tried and failed many times to keep the mental one at bay; locked away under a false pretense that everything is going to be okay the next morning. But then she wakes up to metallic walls and pictures of blood on a summer’s day, and despite the sound of her awaiting doom getting closer tries to go back to sleep.
Soojung remembers facts, cold and hard like the eyes that stare back at her when she looks in the mirror, shielding any emotion behind a wall constructed for the sake of her survival. She has seen too much of her new life and remembered too little about her old, but she doesn’t dare taking the chance of breaking that wall down in fear of something unplanned popping up to destroy everything she has worked so hard to establish. It’s been too many years and they have been too hard, but she has nothing else than this high-profit job, and so she leaves the prison every day to go home to her own private one disguised as a penthouse in a part of the city she wishes she’d never gotten to see in the first place. Her day is made out of routines and fixed frames, schedules that are designed in a way that leaves her no spare time for thinking and remembering, going through stacks of paperwork - stacks of people - and label them according to a system she sometimes feels just as trapped in as the people she goes through each day. But she’s happy, she tells herself, because things could be much, much worse.
Her case number is 55-C. She knows because that’s what they call her, the brute voices that wake her up in the morning or the calloused hands that take her to the showers once every three days, and she has learned to respond when the sound of their boots hitting the concrete floor signals the wake-up call. She doesn’t talk to the others - her only reassurance that there are others is the fact that other numbers than hers are being called out - but if she did she would introduce herself as 55-C. Nobody knows who Amber is, and she would like to keep it that way.
‘Amber’ is something reserved only for her; it’s the word she whispers to deaf ears when she feels as though the world is ending, and it’s the only substantial thing she has left from her old life. They can strip her of her dignity, reduce her to a mark on a dusty folder, but she finds comfort in the fact that they can never take her name. It makes her smile, and she’s lucky there’s no one around to see it. Because if there was, they would just take that from her too.
They call her Colonel Jung or ma’am. They look at her with something she hopes isn’t fear and knows isn’t quite respect, and she’s pretty sure that not one of her colleagues knows her first name. Of course, having a first name means having an identity, and as far as Soojung’s concerned an identity equals a weakness - and if there is one thing this business won’t stand, it’s weaknesses, so she leaves Soojung at home and pretends to be someone else. It’s a defense mechanism, she remembers that from her university years. To disguise oneself from the truth by pretending not to be a real person, belittling oneself to a robot - it’s a pile of scientific crap, but at least it works, and Soojung no longer has sleepless nights where pictures of screaming people and gunfire dance across her eyelids. It’s not that she isn’t aware of the questionable moral code behind her job. She knows, deep inside, that what she’s doing - what she’s ordering people to do - is wrong, and had she been another person living in another world she would be the one in jail. But it’s not, and she’s still Soojung somehow, and so she keeps on looking through case files, crossing over the picture of a subject so she doesn’t have to go through remembering anything more than strictly necessary; case name, age, crime. Then it’s up to her to decide the punishment. Not that there’s a lot to choose from, it’s either death by working camps or direct shooting, but she’s a part of a system, and even the system sees the missing logic in sending a disabled person to a working camp. It’s faster and much more humane to just shoot him on the spot. It’s highly immoral and she could do without having to order a hundred executions a day, but it is nevertheless a logic she, in a way, can see sense in. Oh, the irony.
It’s on day 5 in the new month and Soojung has made it through the first 50 case files of the day when she spots something that catches her eye.
With something the real Soojung would once upon a time have classified as regret or grief, she places case file 55-C in the pile for shooting. The picture clasped to the file is in black and white, but when Soojung blinks momentarily she sees a flash of burning red hair and a fond smile, and for a moment she thinks that that’s worse than what is usually on her mind. She has her pen in her hand and draws a big, fat cross over the picture, standard procedure, but makes sure to write down the file number on a piece of paper before handing the stack of case files to a new administrative trainee. She’s young, doe-eyed and naïve, and Soojung feels pity for her because she looks downright terrified when she discovers the things she has to do to earn her paycheck, but also because it’s slowly starting to dawn upon her that she doesn’t ever get the opportunity to say ‘no’ to any of it. Soojung reckons that not many weeks will go by before the doe-eyed girl will have turned into a robot, just as it didn’t take many weeks before Soojung herself was able to put her humanity under lock and key.
After a shower whose running time messes up every schedule Soojung has for the forthcoming evening, and precisely thirty minutes of watching the government censored news, she still has 55-C vividly on her mind. It annoys her as much as it scares her, because she knows that she’s better than this. She knows she can stop thinking about certain red hair and a certain smile that once upon a time made all evil in the world go away, but the problem is that she won’t. It pains her that after all these years the two of them have not been physically closer, but there are at least a thousand mental barriers between what Soojung has and what she wants. And it’s ironic - oh how ironic it is - because she had everything once. Granted, it was better times, in all aspects of the word, but sometimes she wonders if she would have still been the same if she had acted differently.
She won’t say that she misses her, that would be a display of weakness she really can’t afford, but she’ll admit that her luxury apartment would feel ten times more luxurious if she didn’t have to spend every moment in it alone.
Her favorite dream is the one where she wakes up to the sound of running water and a radio that plays a tune she doesn’t know the name of. The radio is old and only works half the time, but she keeps it because of the emotional value. She knows this scenario by heart and her lips curl upwards when the bed dips and somebody who smells like flowers wakes her up, just as she always used to do.
She looks up to find soft eyes staring lovingly at her, and dark brown strands of hair that tickle her collarbones when she leans down to press their lips together, and in that very moment Amber feels so happy she’s afraid she’s going to blow up, turn into a thousand colorful sparks to dissipate and vanish into thin air, because what she’s feeling right then and there is way too good to be true. She doesn’t deserve this kind of happiness, she thinks, and the fact that there’s still brown hair and perfect smiles to wake up to any morning is a serious stroke of luck.
Amber works as a computer engineer during the day, and even though she isn’t happy to see her leave every morning, Soojung knows that Amber will be fine. She always is, coming home just when the sun starts its daily project of turning the sky into a pastel canvas, with a tired smile and a warm embrace Soojung relishes in until the older of the two comments on something that smells really nice and the former runs to the kitchen to make sure nothing is burning down (again). They’re living small; they don’t own a dining table and never pays their electricity bills on time, but they get by anyway on small smiles and holding hands, and if any of them had told them what their future would look like back then, they would’ve laughed.
At one point, Amber doesn’t precisely know where, the dream turns into a darker shade, and the long walk home from work turns into a full blown sprint to reach the apartment complex before the curfew sets in, tightly shut blinds because she’s afraid of looking out on the real world, and the constant feeling of being watched. Soojung still wakes her up in the morning, but it’s before the moon has set for the night as a form of protection for the both of them - Amber wishes she could say that it doesn’t matter, that they still have each other, but even if she does, she knows Soojung doesn’t completely believe her.
Soojung runs through the crowd with quick steps, holding the strands of a duffel bag as if it’s the only thing that can help her - them - survive. There’s a train coming in as she runs down the stairs and she speeds up, desperately moving through the never ending mass of people who seemingly walk and fare in slowmotion. They’re going to meet, she’s promised. As soon as the worst things blow over they’ll meet, and no matter what they’re going to get through whatever this turns out to be together. Amber had seemed so certain when she’d said it that Soojung didn’t have the heart to tell her that survival wasn’t a privilege they were considered worthy of anymore.
As things turn out, Soojung does have that privilege. She walks and talks in the right way, says the right things to the right people, and she adapts to an environment she tells herself she doesn’t want to be in but nevertheless does nothing to break out of. And before she knows it she dyes her hair blonde and starts wearing suits over expensive underwear nobody ever gets to see but her, pretending to read the censored newspaper the driver of her car fetches for her every morning as she’s transported into the place, Soojung in all honesty would describe as Hell on earth.
Amber, however, does not, and she tries to accept the fact that she’s now in the risk zone, waking up every morning to a day that may or may not be her last. She cuts her hair because whenever it touches her collarbones and shoulders she’s reminded of a time where being happy was not yet a crime and saying goodbye on a train by running along the tracks for as far as her legs could carry her.
The people she lives with are nice, but the problem is that none of them are Soojung. They say they understand, and she knows she’s not the only one who’s lost someone, but more often than not she wishes that they would just leave her to do her work and not try to make her forget what brought her to where she is. Most of their work takes place in silence at night, where the only light they would want to see is the blueish shine from their screens, and the only sounds are the small clicks of computer mice and letters on keyboards being pressed down in complicated codes and orders.
They’re careful never to write anything down and never stay on the same site for more than five minutes at a time. Their rota system helps to make sure nothing looks too much of the same, and has probably saved their lives more than once, even though congratulatory words of encouragement are just about as rare as two moons in august.
And yet, no matter how careful they are, it’s an inevitable unwritten rule that sooner or later, the card house is going to collapse and take them all down with it. Amber knows this, everybody gathered around their little broken table knows this, it’s just that none of them knows it’s going to happen so soon.
In their profession, when things go wrong it’s a definite game over, complete with neon green letters flashing above their heads like in video games, except there’s no reset button here. For them, it’s been both do and die, and Amber guesses that in reality all of them know how it’s all going to end, even Bambam who doesn’t seem old or tough enough to live in a world like this, but proves everyone wrong when he gets in front of a screen and starts typing. The kid’s thinking in binary codes, Youngjae’s words and not hers, and he’s so painstakingly brilliant that Amber manages to feel more sorry for him than for herself when the clock strikes four and the sound of shouting reaches all five of them. Himchan emerges from the kitchen, and all five of them share a look because they know - they know what this means, know what’s going to happen in two seconds, and they know that this is the last they’re going to see of each other, probably for a lifetime. But of course, if that lifetime is going to be radically shortened, the time for feeling loss is also cut off, and that’s got to count for something.
Youngjae dies that morning; he refuses to put his hands up, and nameless soldier number one puts a bullet in his chest. He breaks the table in the fall, and shortly after lies on the floor, staring up at the ceiling with empty eyes and a shirt slowly changing color from blue to deep purple. Bambam tries to get to his best friend and caretaker, but Himchan’s holding him back with force, and continues doing so even as they’re being taken away alongside Amber and Heechul, who has been surprisingly quiet and calm under the whole ordeal.
She doesn’t see them again.
The thing about the compound – Soojung has stopped calling it her office – is that nobody has no idea of knowing what time of day it is, or how the outside world looks. It’s still dark when her car rolls into the parking lot, and the sun is slowly setting in the horizon when she’s let out again, and it never fails to disorient her whenever she goes from dark grey walls to a blue and pink sunset that’s actually surprisingly beautiful – and heartbreakingly familiar – to look at. She feels like a blind mole most of the time, relying solely on the routines she knows and the manuals she follows to a tee, and it’s no wonder her sudden entering back into the real world leaves her dizzy, because there’s no plan for the real world. It changes, and it just lies there and waits for Soojung to change along with it, but she’s too afraid to.
She sometimes wonders if the people – the others, the public, the innocent – know what’s going on at her workplace. She wonders if they know what the government has started, and how they’re statistically ruling out the people who are not worthy of the privileges of a proper life – or any life, for that matter. What happens to their wives, husbands, sons and daughters when they discover that their family isn’t coming back? Do they cry? Curse? Soojung wants to know, and yet, she’s afraid of the answer.
Soojung doesn’t remember the last time she cried. It’s a memory buried deep down in the oldest part of her subconscious that she keeps under lock and key, because if she lets it surface she knows she isn’t going to be able to lock it down again. She doesn’t remember the feeling of wet tears running down her face, and tries to forget the times said tears could disappear down into a shirt that smelled so much like home Soojung had to physically reach out and touch it to make sure that it’s actually there and not just a pigment of an, at times, all too vivid imagination.
Sometimes she wakes up at night and half expects Amber to be there; to either roll over on her side and ask what’s wrong in that sleepy voice Soojung adores too much, or to emit from the kitchen and crawl into bed with a tired grin that she also loves too much. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things about Amber that one could and most certainly does love and find adorable. Her eyes, her smile, her person, her drive – the list is long, and Soojung still remembers all of it, even though she has erased all physical evidence that Amber ever existed. It doesn’t help that much, though, when the mental evidence is still there, coming back almost every time she closes her eyes.
She misses her. That’s the realization that dawns upon her a little week later, and it feels like there’s a knot in her stomach that makes it hard to breathe, and she is more out of it than ever when her driver opens the door for her. She doesn’t know if it’s because he doesn’t notice or if it’s because he’s known her for so long, but he doesn’t ask any questions. He just closes the door and sends her a pitiful look that’s camouflaged by the toned window of the black vehicle, thinking that this poor woman is too young to experience such a part of the world, even though he knows that she doesn’t have a choice. All of this isn’t something he actually says to her, oh no. He’s just Leeteuk the driver, after all. He doesn’t have the right. But something about the empty eyes and the heavy atmosphere that hangs around his employer like chains on a criminal makes him wish that he does.
The knot is taking over her life. It’s what wakes her up in the morning and makes her skip her lunch, and it’s what nearly makes Soojung cry out in anguish when she wakes up at night and the bed is still empty, save for herself.
She likes to think that it is also the knot that makes her stand up from her desk at precisely noon thirty with a small piece of paper in her hand, even though she knows that she can’t know for sure it isn’t a fragment of the old Soojung that has fought its way through her layers of self-protection and now goes on a spree of fucking everything up as a thank you for all the years it has spent staring into nothing.
No matter what the truth is, she nevertheless walks out of the office and past the intern who, in the meantime, seems to have lost some of her glow, and pretends she doesn’t hear when the latter ask where she’s going.
The halls are so alike, Soojung thinks it’s a miracle nobody has gotten lost yet. The only indication that she’s going in the right direction are the black markings on the walls and the increasing amount of fluorescent lights as she descends further and further down into what seems like a depressing, never ending spiral of hopelessness. She feels like a mouse in a very big labyrinth, and suddenly, just in the spur of the moment, she thinks she knows what their prisoners must feel like.
When she reaches the bottom floor, she is met by a guard that looks more like a bear than a human, and he asks to see some ID. Kind of stupid, since the only ones allowed on these floors are top officials and other guards, but Soojung guesses it’s the only contact the guy’s bound to get for a whole day, and if it helps him get through his boring and mundane life she’ll gladly show him her badge. She outdraws it from her pocket and watches him as his eyes grow wider, because the only time someone like her is down on his level is when something bad is going on, and if something bad is going on, it’s his head on the block. She retracts her card and doesn’t wait for the guard’s permission before she moves forward and turns left down yet another hall, entering cell block P with a quick swipe of her card through a reader placed on the wall.
The whole ordeal is ridiculously simple down here on these levels, but it’s probably because the people who are here aren’t making any plans of escaping, either because they know it’s a fruitless harvest, or because they’re waiting to die. Perhaps, she thinks, it’s a bit of both.
Amber wakes up when there’s knocking on her door. This is one of the good days; she has managed doze of a couple of time, staring into the wall, getting some well needed peace and quiet, even if just for a minute. She sits up in her bed when the door opens and a guard steps in.”55-C, ma’am. I’ll be right outside.” And then he leaves Amber alone with the best and worst part of every dream, good or bad, Amber has had for the past year without so much as a fair warning. Jung Soojung is standing approximately three feet away from her, looking as pristine and Soojung-like as ever, with the only exception being that her hair is blonde and the fact that she looks just about as dead as Amber feels.
They stare at each other for a good minute, and the tension is so thick Soojung would be able to cut it with a knife and serve it on a silver platter. She doesn’t know what to say and Amber doesn’t know what to reply, because it’s been so long since she’s held a conversation with another human being she isn’t quite sure if she still has a voice.
“55-C?”
“That’s me”
“Why?”
Yes, why? Because she’s breaking the law, simply by existing? Because she refuses to give in? Amber has asked herself the very same question many times. She doesn’t know the answer and no one wants to tell her anything, other than what time it is and what she’s being led to whenever there’s a guard grabbing her arms and cuffing her.
“How long have you known I’ve been down here?” she asks, and the blonde doesn’t waver from her position an inch. “A week. By coincidence.”
“So I’m a coincidence now?” Soojung sighs. It hurts her feelings far more than she’d like to admit to see Amber – her Amber – in a place like this. Her hair, once probably flaming red, is messy and dull, and she has scabs on her arms and around her nose and lips. Her one wrist is swollen – Soojung reckons it’s either twisted or broken, but it’s not unusual that nobody has been around to check up on it. Amber doesn’t seem to mind it too much. She manages to lock their eyes together, two shades of brown that once used to know the other and would recognize it as a twin, now distant and cold, scarred and blown away by the cruelty of the world they’re forced to be a part of. Soojung wants to cry, and Amber does too, even though the latter doesn’t have any more tears to shed. They’ve been used far too soon, on far more insignificant matters.
“I’m scared. Isn’t that crazy? After everything that’s happened, now I get scared” Amber says, too low for it to be an open question, but loud enough for Soojung to hear and act upon it.
She’s scared as well, and she doesn’t know what to do about it, because there’s nowhere to run. There’s no parent to make all the big and bad monsters to go away, because Soojung is one of them, and she’s tried so hard to protect herself that she doesn’t know what the old Soojung, what Amber’s Soojung would do in a time like this. This Soojung wants to rip off her hat and break the heels off of her shoes and scream until her legs give out under her and she’s left to rot. She wants to stay in here, make everything better and apologize in a hundred different languages, until Amber stops being broken and the older of the two can help her fix herself, just like she always does.
It’s a selfish thought, and she feels terrible about thinking of herself prior to the nearly dead person in the bed in front of her, but she can’t help it. She wants it. She wants normal back.
“I’m sorry” Soojung says, and for a few seconds she sees something alive flicker in the depths of Amber’s eyes, perhaps a hope that this is just a fever dream and that she’ll wake up tomorrow and be okay again, and then she pulls off her hat and bows. Soojung has never bowed before, but she goes down almost low enough for the tips of her bleached hair to touch the dirty floor. She stays there, hat clutched in her hands and tears welling up in her eyes, and for the first time in three years she lets them.
When she looks up, Amber’s eyes are blank as well. “So am I” she says hoarsely, and Soojung turns on her heel and walks out of the cell with quick steps. Just before the guard closes the door behind her, she hears a sob that makes her heart shatter into a million jagged pieces, and it’s a pure stroke of luck she doesn’t turn around and run back in.
A week later, Amber is presented with proper food. The smell makes her stomach scream and her throat run dry, because she knows what it means. She doesn’t eat it, doesn’t touch her wine either, and stares into the wall until there’s a guard over her, putting her in cuffs as if she’s expected to knock out the guard and run away. It’s such a peculiar thought it almost makes her laugh.
She follows him silently, counting the amount of stairs she’s walking up until she’s out in what she gathers is the final destination – 213 steps, to be precise, of cold, hard concrete that feels weird under her bare feet. She can’t tell if she’s freezing or not.
It all happens very slowly, almost as if God has slowed the world down to half speed until it’s all over, to give her the privilege of actually deciphering what’s going on around her before she’s set to leave. A kind gesture, she has to admit that, though extremely unwelcome. She’s cuffed to the white wall, hands above her head, head facing the front where several pieces of shooters are aligned. In the balcony seats, she sees faces as tired and worn out as hers, staring down at her with empty eyes that are supposed to show her pity. They know what’s going to happen, and yet they have to watch. Even the children.
When the annihilation team lines up next to their assigned guns, Amber sees a flash of blonde hair and sharp, cat-like eyes. She’s sitting in the prime seat next to a bunch of suits with no personality, hands folded neatly in her lap and eyes trained directly on Amber. The team is securing their weapons.
Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come.
They’re aiming. Amber looks at Soojung.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Soojung sits on the tribune and looks down. She feels like throwing up.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Amber closes her eyes and sees sunshine and smells flowers and home, humming along to the tune of an old, broken radio she once had. She smiles.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Soojung feels tears running down her cheeks when the order is barked out, and she wants to look away when a color redder than Amber’s hair splatters out across the white wall and the body slumps forward, but she can’t. And she cries.
Amen.