“I am taking you to a hospital!” Damien said that after Sooha lowered the barrier, his wounds were still present but not as severe.

“No, take me home.”

“But… you’re…” Damien was at a loss for words as his mind raced.

“I said. Take me home!”

Sooha said, pushing Damien away, “You have to form the team for the mission anyway. You don’t have time for this.”

He doesn’t want to even look at me now… Damien thought.

So he let it be.

He put up a hand towards the cab driver as he told his own to take Sooha to the Kim residence.

As Sooha arrived home, he entered, but there was no one there as he looked around.

The smell of cinnamon and vanilla was the only thing that greeted him.

The familiarity of it felt warm, even as his body ached from all the punches he had taken, the bruises still burning beneath his skin.

After stumbling into his room, he sprawled himself atop the bed.

The staff had changed the old pillows and sheets; he breathed in the fresh detergent, grounding himself.

But that did not help the empty feeling within him.

The helplessness he had there, just kneeling and taking punches.

And even worse than him being completely powerless was the fact that Damien was just the same.

How could I ever blame her…

Memory of all the hatred he had for his mother surged; he thought that just because she was a councilor, she had the same power as these evil men did.

But then, as his gaze faltered from the ceiling, something caught his eye.

A box, with an old drawing display and small ballet shoes, sat by the table…

He hadn’t even noticed it yesterday.

All of the memories those two items resembled came flooding back.

It reminded him of all the sketches he had made over these ten years… the mutants held in captivity that he tried to decipher their origin, portraits of his family in a futile attempt to remember their faces, of Luke ever since he had the slightest crush on him.

His art never left him, but he had left his art.

Because after all, it was just a luxury no one cared about outside of Elysium…

And ballet too; he remembers dancing for Luke a few times, but it was horrible. Yet, they still enjoyed it and laughed before they made out for hours after that.

His fingers grazed his bloody and bruised lip.

It tasted metallic, sour; it made him think of Luke, of his last seconds here.

Of the fact that he hadn’t cherished their last kiss as much as he would have.

Oh, he missed him; he wanted to be in his arms once more and feel safe again.

He remembered all the lessons he had taken for both art and ballet; even at eleven, he had known both of those dreams for years, just for them to be ripped away.

His jaw tightened.

He sat up on the bed and pulled the box with the things towards him.

The drawing display was already ancient tech with how fast Elysium started progressing lately. Even though the development of sentient technology was forbidden, it still flourished in other areas of this illusion of a utopia.

And the ballet shoes he had long overgrown reminded him of his variant.

The Swan.

Once his parents got the info about it, they thought it symbolic to enroll him in ballet.

Kids who have abilities all have their variants, even if some don’t display the physical characteristics, there is a portion of DNA that is a match.

The variant comes out at around the age of three, and then the powers start showing around two years later.

At first, everyone thought Sooha was a simple healer, which fit the theme of such a gentle and loyal variant.

But they were wrong.

One day, when he was given a golden necklace as a gift for his seventh birthday, he did not like the fact that it was golden, and with a bit of focus, the metal shifted, reshaped itself, and became silver.

Molecular manipulation, or so they called it.

With some training, it quickly progressed to the point where he was able to form solid walls and spheres out of oxygen.

Therefore, once the government needed resources, a variant child with a possibility to reverse mutant genes fetched such a price from Syntrum that it fixed Elysium’s economic crisis.

So after everything that happened, for the last ten years and counting, he had loathed his variant and ability alike… they had ruined his family, friends, and stripped him of the life he could’ve had had he not been born ‘special’.

With the edge of his suit, he wiped the single tear that slid down his cheek in remembrance.

But then he just took the whole box and threw everything into a bag before he left it outside his room.

It was time to flip over a new sheet.

A blank page that he would hopefully fill on his own terms.

Not far away, a piano wept played a haunting melody reeking of loneliness and misery, recalling the days when the young wolf played while the swanling swayed.