Kyungsoo sat in her room, considering the words of Researcher Lee. 

The walls around her where a matte cream, just beige enough to make it feel like she was trapped in a personless room rather than her own bedroom. She had no effects from her previous life, no pictures or songs or memories. She only kept her phone, disconnected from a provider, and its charger. On it, she had a small music library, a small picture library and a list of contacts - old contacts, now - that she had kept as a just-in-case. As the years passed her by, she slowly came to understand that even if she ever would have possessed the desire to leave this place, the place itself was designed to out enough humanity to keep her here forever. And, she was not ashamed to admit, it would have worked perfectly should she not have been assigned to Ward Epsilon. Indeed, it seemed that every other researcher had been reduced to a procedural science robot - no other researchers of scientists interacted with their subjects to any degree, as far as she knew. Only she had maintained herself somewhat. She wondered how long ago she would have stopped listening to music had she not caught Baekhyun and Jongdae harmonizing to the lyrics of Really I Didn't Know. She didn't put it past herself to be a merciless droid - it was likely that very kind of ruthless mantality that got her a job here in the first place. So, no, she hadn't brought anything here. It was the same way she'd gotten it - completely beige and entirely lacklustre. 

But there had to be a reason Lee had approached her. Kyungsoo was the manager of the researchers of this project, so if he knew something she didn't, it was likely she was in a lot of trouble. That in itself wasn't hard to believe - places like this were the kind of places where getting killed wouldn't stretch someone's imagination - but what she didn't understand was what she did to bring this about. The only thing she could think of was her closeness to her subjects. But that didn't make sense, because they'd taken years to get to where they are now and her results were leaps and bounds ahead of her coworkers, bringing up side effects and issues that they would have never admitted otherwise and likely would have caused not only fatalities, but faulty results and above all, she knew that that was utterly unacceptable. 

She fell back onto her bed, uncharacteristicly unsettled. Researcher Lee had made a point of addressing her personally and she couldn't shake the feeling that she was being set up, that someting was innately wrong. 

Her door swished open. "Are you home, Kyungsoo?"

She sat up, back ramrod straight. "Taemin?"

The blonde man poked his head into the room, face lighting up in toothy smile. "Ah. I was hoping you would be awake. It's been a long time since we seen each other last. Rumours are starting around that we've broken up."

"Of course not." She spit out automatically. "We've said no such thing."

His smile fell some, but he hid whatever emotion passed through him away. "I just wanted to confirm."

She gave a forced smile and a false laugh. "Well, confirmed, then."

Taemin leaned against her door jam. "Why are you always so quick to want me gone when I come around, Kyungsoo?"

"I'm busy. As you know, the stages of the experiment are progressing and while you get the summarized report at the end of the week, there is a lot of informatio that needs to be observed and complled before you get it."

HIs smile vanished. "Is that so?"

"It is."

He sighed, anger lancing across his handsome features. "That's not all it is, is it? You've got someone else, don't you?"

She hadn't exactly expected him to jump to that conclusion, considering he had been her only friend when this thing had gotten started and her social circles hadn't gotten any bigger. "You know that's not true."

"Do I?" he locked eyes with her. "I'm fully aware of how much time you have and how much work you do witht he subjects. More than the rest of your shift combined. But out of all those hours you pour into this project, you can't take any time out to be with me?"

"I don't understand."

"Kyungsoo, the rest of your shift bags off after a couple of hours writing reports and theories. They go and talk, eat, drink and more often than not have with each other. You can't take a moment out of your day to come down and see me, maybe invite me back here, make me feel like you still love me?"

"You just said it. I am pretty mucht he sole reason you know any of the effects your experiments are having and what happens if I stop doing that?"

"I'm not asking you to stop entirely-"

"Not now you're not." She interrupted. "When we started this, you had no problem with doing things the way I wanted them to go, at a pace I needed them to be at. But then you got too impatient with me not wanting PDA, even in private. So I swallowed down my own desires and gave into you. After that, you didn't want to wait for me to want to have with you. You pushed and pushed and pushed. You got upset when I didn't want to meet any of your coworkers, got even worse when I told yoou I didn't know any of mine enough to introduce you to them. If I give into you here, you'll start to expect it from me and I'm sorry, but I'm not compromising my job. If you're that desperate for time with me, you can come here like you have now, visit me in my worktime with the subjects. You're the lead scientist ont he project, Taemin. It can't be that hard to make up an excuse to come down and see me if you want my company that badly."

"I'm pushy? Kyungsoo, you don't want to do anything. And you always wait for me to come to you. Can't you ever dos oemthing for me? Treat me like you care about me, even just a little."

"I do care about you. But I am here for a job." She could see him start to vibrate. "And that had to and will always come first. I would expect no different form you."

Taemin rolled his eyes. "You're impossible.

"Maybe." She shrugged. "But yoou know that going in and you still accepted. That's your issue."

"Are you serious right now?" He snapped. 

She straightened her spine. "As serious as I always am."

He calmed down. "Look, I don't know what's gotten into you over this last couple of years, but I'm telling you now that it has to stop. You need to fix this. You're hurting us and you're hurting me." He turned to walk away.

"Imagine how I feel, knowing you only come here when you're and desperate." She lobbed back, face an immovable mask of apathy. "You never come for anything else. Don't forget that you're not in a place full of stupid people and air-headed girls. 

His face and countenace were tight and short. "I most certainly won't forget about this conversation."

"I hope you don't. I like you, Taemin, I really do. But this job is my life and you're only an addition. Maybe once the project is done there can be more of us, or an actual us, but I told you then and I'll tell you now: I don't have more for you than this."

"Right. Because I'm not worth the same amount of time and effort than those eleven test rats down on Level 3." He nodded stiffly. "It's good to know."

The door shut behind him and she fell onto her back again, letting herself sink into the bare mattress.

"You don't look like you've slept at all." Yifan commented as she dragged her stool over into the centre of the room. The glare she set on him made his jaw snap back together with an audible click. "Right. Sorry."

"Seriously though, what happened?" Junmyeon asked, leaning against the glass, her brows creased in worry. 

Kyungsoo just shook her head. "My boyfriend's an ."

"You have a boyfriend?!" Baekhyun jumped in. "How come this is the first time I'm hearing of it?"

"Because it's none of your business." Minseok retorted. "She's allowed do what she wants without having to report it to you."

"Said who? We're all prisoners here, so that means she has to share any thing good that's happened to her, like human contact."

"You don't have to say anything." Yixing piped up. "Not all of us are so ravenous as to try snd live vicariously through you."

"I take offence, sir!"

"Come over here and take your vengeance. Look, I won't even move."

Baekhyun pouted. "Touche, good sir."

Jongin and Sehun rolled their eyes before they turned their gazes back on each other, communicating apparently through the raising of their eyebrows. 

"Are you sure you don't need to talk about it?" Chanyeol asked, his dorky face all wrong. He didn't look good with worry lines. 

"Even if I did, you guys aren't the kind of people I should tell. You've got more than your own fair share of problems and my own are dismally worthless comparatively." Kyungsoo replied. "Anyways, I need your symptoms now."

Junmyeon frowned as she watched Kyungsoo work. It felt so wrong to let Kyungsoo take care of them but not be able to return the favour.

When the room was set into it's circular shape, from left to right, they contained Sehun, Baekhyun, Jongdae, Junmyeon, Xiumin, Yifan, Luhan, Zitao, Chanyeol, Yixing then Jongin. That meant Yifan's cage was the end of the hallway when the room was rectangular. Kyungsoo was sitting with her back braced against Yifan's door, a medical textbook spread over her knees. 

It had been a long time since she'd actually read one and despite her high proficiency and incedible memory, there was nothing banked there that helped her make sense of what was happening wiwth her boys. It didn't make sense to her how Yifan kept managing to grow or why Chanyeol's hair pigment - and only his hair pigment - changed colour. Even if she could get that, she had no idea how to explain how his hair went such an unnatural red. She imagined that the scientists would have a better idea of what did it than she could hope to find out in these books, but she was going to find out how it happened internally, even if she didn't know what mixture of narcotics and chemicals actually made the change. 

"You certainly do work a lot, don't you?" 

Kyungsoo looked up to one of the beta shift researchers. "Hello to you too."

She waved. "I just wanted to see the face of the woman who's research keeps outshining the rest of the team. If I didn't know better, I'd say that you were a robot."

"I have a very well-formed work ethic."

The woman flinched. "I want to know how little Do Kyungsoo actually managed to get all the results she has. After all, if nineteen other people haven't gotten them, you have to be fabricating at least some of it."

The subjects shifted restlessly around them. The woman walked deeper into the room, looking amongst the men and women in cages like she'd look at beetles and spiders preserved in glass. Nothing more than something to study. 

"Maybe your work suffers because you make too many incorrect assumptions."

The woman's flinch was more visible this time, but so was her anger. "Maybe there are some of us, statistically incorrect as they are, that are only here at the mercy of how well they the lead scientist's ."

"Honey, there's only one person in this room who for profit." Sehun snarked, leaning on her door with a bored expression on. Luhan and Baekhyun snickered non-too-subtly.

She looked to Kyungsoo like she expected the other woman to do something, but Kyungsoo only raised an eyebrow. "Don't have a comeback, Rebecca?"

Rebecca's back straightened. "Can't even keep control of your brood?" She walked to the control desk, searching for the tablet usually in the desk.

"Don't presume yourself to be so mighty as to get to decide on my shift if my subjects will get disciplined." 

"Have you decided the whole Ward is under your control?"

"No. It was just too much work to get up to go to the tablet every time I wanted to do something."

"Too lazy? I wonder if that's the motto of your life."

Baekhyun cackled. "Okay there, Error 404. Her boss doesn't come in and havea to supervise her doing work to make sure that it gets done."

"Shut your ing mouth, 5."

Baehyun rolled her eyes. "Oh yeah, because you scare me sooo much." She punched the glass, startling the others in the room with the force of the hit. There was a dark gleam in her eyes. "Electrocute the out of me next shift. I dare you to. , it happens so much, I'm surprised I even still feel it. But Id on't suggest you open this door because you won't last a ing second if there wasn't this fragile little sheet of glass between us."

"Give me the tablet, Kyungsoo."

Kyungsoo put it in her lab coat. "You're very funny, Rebecca."

"Give it to me, Kyungsoo, or I will tell Taemin about your practises here."

Kyungsoo closed her textbook and set it gently on the ground next to her chair. She stood, perfect and poised. Her face shifted and she stalked towards the other woman, backing her up into the desk  and caging her in with her arms and the terrifying slam of her hands onto the oak tabletop.

"You've got a lot of courage, presuming to come in here and bark orders at me." Kyungsoo purred in a voice dark and sinister enough to raise the hair on the back of everyone's neck. "I find it comical that you believe yourself to be such an authority as to come in and critize my work when you, yourself, have offered nothing to this team and have even less to offer as a researcher. You speak of going to Scientist Lee, as if the complaints of a mouse will matter to a lion. I am the lead alpha shift researcher and you can't claim to even be that of beta shift. Don't forget, either, that I am the lead of the entire research team for Ward Epsilon. I am your boss, your superior, and your administrator on this project. If your time is so free, maybe now would be a good time to learn how to speak within your pay grade." She turned away and walked back to her wheelie stool and sat back down, piking up the book and opening it once more. "But if you feel that my performance is sub-standard, I encourage you to go to Scientist Lee and petition to take my place and recieve his critique on your capability to do my job."

Rebecca was quick to leave. 

"I didn't know you could be that scary." Jongin commented quietly.

Kyungsoo was back to normal when she looked up from the text once more, giving him a soft smile. "Only when the times call for it."

"That was pretty frightening." Yifan agreed from behind her, a gummy smile breaking out on his face. "I'm happy you're with us."

"Of course. Like I said, you guys are my care. No second-rate know-nothing is going to take that from me and neither will Taemin."