name: Shin Hoseok
age: 27 + MARCH 1ST, 1995
location: Paris
degree: liberal studies
BEFORE ACTIVATION.
Hoseok had always been a sickly child. His earliest memories, if he ever looked back on them, were colored in antiseptic neons of hospital rooms. A congenital heart disease had left him bed ridden for the first few years of his life, in and out of surgeries that did little more than buy time. At the age of eight it was decided by his doctors there was little else they could do but hope his heart grew stronger on it's own so further action could be taken later on in his life. Under strict observation, with a long list of medications and instructions to keep very still and be very good, Hoseok was allowed to attend school for the first time in his life.
This was a bad idea. The combination of being new, entering halfway through the fall semester, and having teachers dote on him so tenderly from the first day he arrived was a recipe for a beautiful disaster. None of his peers knew how to welcome this strange, fragile thing that had disrupted the happy monotonous chaos of their every day childhood. So they did what they thought was natural to do to the unknown - they rejected it. Hoseok was a perfect victim, offering an endless list of things to transform into daggers that children can so casually throw.
Yet he never spoke a word about it to anyone. He would come home and smile all the same to his parents, speaking soft, airy words about his days without giving away any real details. His teachers reasoned that he was simply one of those children who prefered adult company, that all that time surrounded by doctors and nurses had made him unaccostumed to dealing with kids his own age. He'd grow out of it eventually, surely. No one questioned that he spent most lunch times alone, staring at the whole world around him with an wide eyed marvel that seemed to never wear off. It was the same during reccess, when he was forced to stay inside and do something calm and safe such as coloring and reading, when everyone else got to run around. Hoseok spent those long minutes staring out of the window, making it fog up as his brown eyes traced the faraway movements of everyone running together as one.
He became convinced that all of this would stop and he'd be welcomed by his peers if only he could join them. All he had to do was show them that he was not this pale, thinly skinned and contagious thing they all made him out to be. He was just like them, but only a little different, like people have to be - because no one wants to be exactly the same, right? Or at least, that's what his mother had always told him. Hoseok had watched many animal documentaries while in the hospital and during his homeschooling, seen how animals simply had to prove themselves in some sort of battle to be accepted back into the group. He wasn't being bullied, no, they were ostracizing him for the best of the pact. And they were wrong, he would show them.
Eight became nine and summer was a thing he could taste in his mouth most days. He had seen summer happen through windows and tv screens, heard of summer and all the summer things he'd get to do when he was better. This summer would be his first summer, he knew it, he felt it inside himself, somewhere underneath the deep scar that ran down his chest. He had made a plan during a long string of rainy days that had forced the classroom to exist beside him during their precious free time. During those days of torment Hoseok knew he could not allow this to go on any longer, that the next sunny day he would sneak out when his supervising teacher left to get some coffee and he'd join in on the fun below.
So on a humid May day, he slipped away 4 minutes and 27 seconds into reccess. Hoseok had studied the halls during many uneeded bathroom breaks, learnt the quickest way to reach the almost too heavy doors that lead outside. The sun seemed too bright to stare through, air so thick he could feel it filter heavy into the blood his racing heart was already faltering to pump. His ears rang with the high pitched screaming of a game of chase he had only ever heard muffled through distance. He was there now, pulsing with so much energy the whole world seemed to stop the second he began to run towards something for the first time in his life.
He did not get very far. There are nights he remembers the look on every single one of their faces as they turned to watch him fall. Their awe and bewilderment as they held position, frozen in horror as they first saw him smile and wave and then nothing. He doesn't remember sounds after that, doesn't remember vivid anythings, not even the pain he is sure to have felt as his heart collapsed first and body second.
Hoseok was later told that it took the students far too long to call a teacher, who then called an ambulance in a panic, who then returned him to the hospital for what everyone thought would be the last time. With his heart too fragile to go through yet another surgery, he was left hooked to machines that functioned for him as they bought time to device a plan that would ensure he'd survive the summer. Yet everyone knew that him even surviving the night was improbable.
It was 4 a.m, Wednesday, May 22nd 2002 when Hoseok went into heart failure. His mother was asleep by his side and father at home because he had a very important meeting the next day he couldn't get out of. He slipped away quietly, small heart beating softer and softer until the slow rise and fall of each beep connected together into a single melodious note. The alarms seemed to ring a second too late, alerting the few staff members around of what they had thought of as the now inevitable. As the group of medical professionals rushed into the room they did not see the sad but peaceful scene of a fallen child and his grieving mother. Instead, they saw the sheer look of horror in her eyes illuminated by the soft neon blue of the rising sun.
They saw Hoseok writhing in his bed despite the flatline of the monitor, saw his chest rise as pale as the sheets and raw through the center as his gown tore away to show wires no longer hooking into his flesh but melding with it. No one ever spoke of how loudly he screamed at them all as it happened, how his hair bleached itself white with the strain of his body finding another wrong way to survive, how his blood shot eyes became two orbs of blue and red crying out for help with him. No one who was there has ever spoken to him about that moment at all. He heard weeks later from officials that his body had become intouch with a gift he has always carried within him. That now, at the core of him, no longer existed a heart more holes and tatters than muscles, but instead smooth metal with wires and pumps that would never fail him. The scar he had carried for almost a decade faded quickly, leaving only the faintest traces of blue and red covered wires that ran a little too close to the surface.
He understood then that it had never been a matter of the pact not accepting him, no. Young Hoseok understood that they were two different species, and his was far, far better.
AFTER ACTIVATION.
Wonho grew out of Hoseok fast.
jeup
junhui
yijeong
jooyoung hyung
