#42:The God Gene (Part III)
Continuity:Right after #41
I got something like 43 comments on the last chapter, and this pleases me greatly even if I didn’t have a chance to respond to all of you <3

Xiumin thought Yixing might actually die of a heart attack if Suho or Kris didn’t say something soon. He was sitting on their bed with his knees drawn up to his chest looking like a child expecting a harsh scolding, and he didn’t deserve to feel like that—he’d done nothing wrong. As it was though, Suho and Kris were a little too stunned to be of much help. They were staring at Kyungsoo as if he’d grown a second head.

“So…” Kris said at last, “Can you…go over that again?”

Xiumin growled under his breath. “For the love of the Tree!” He snapped, pointing at Yixing, “I think you have bigger problems—worry about understanding how you missed this after you tell Yixing that he’s not in trouble.”

“What?” Suho gasped, finally looking at Yixing. “Why do you think you’re in trouble?!”

Kyungsoo rolled his eyes. “Did you miss the part where he brought a kitten back to life?”

Kris gave Yixing a shocked look. “I think we have bigger problems to worry about than a kitten you accidentally saved, Xing-xing.”

Yixing’s lower lip quivered and he started to cry. “I shouldn’t have done it…” he whimpered.

“Are you going to break down in tears every time we tell this story?” Kyungsoo sighed.

Yixing nodded and Kris went from utterly shocked to caring leader in under .5 seconds flat, hastily moving to sit next to Yixing and put an arm around his shoulder.

“Xing, you did nothing wrong,” he said gently as Yixing started sobbing.

“I never want to do that again,” he gasped. “I was so scared, I didn’t know what would happen, I thought I’d created a monster—I thought…I thought she would be like a robot, that she wouldn’t have a soul…it was so awful…” he buried his face in Kris’ shoulder and sobbed even harder.

“But that didn’t happen,” Kris reminded him, rubbing his back soothingly. “Chanyeol’s been taking great care of her, she’s a good kitten. Yixing, it’s not like you did this on purpose or even with any malicious intent—you were upset and emotional, and if you want to blame someone then you can blame me. I shouldn’t have let you go off into the forest by yourself, I should have seen that you were hurting.”

But Yixing shook his head. “No, I can’t blame you,” he cried. “You have your own problems, you can’t watch all of us all the time…”

“We’re not here to play the blame game!” Kyungsoo exploded, making everyone jump. “We’re here to talk about this influx of power and how it’s going to affect us!”

Suho looked around the room. Tao had been sent out, and it was just the five of them in the room. “Can we keep this between us?”

Kris gaped at him over Yixing’s head. “What, you want to lie to everyone?”

“It’s not lying,” Suho argued, “We’re just not telling them something.”

“That’s dumb,” Xiumin said. “They need to know—before they find out on their own and freak out like Yixing did.”

“How is that going to happen though?” Yixing asked in a small voice. “Nobody noticed it yet.”

“How could we not notice?” Suho muttered, starting to pace around the room. “How could we not feel ourselves getting stronger? We all felt it when we reached Maturity, why didn’t we feel this?”

“It’s probably been building up for a long time,” Xiumin mused. “We’ve also not really been using our abilities like we used to, we’re not pushing ourselves, we have no reason to.”

“Or had,” Kris muttered.

“What had?” Kyungsoo asked, eyes narrowing. “What are we going to do now? Get Kai to teleport us everywhere? Have Xiumin create snow when we’re too hot?”

“We should start training again,” Kris said excitedly, forgetting that he had his arms full of Yixing and trying to stand up. He realized halfway through that Yixing was all dead weight and flopped back on the bed, but his enthusiasm didn’t waver. “If we’re getting stronger, it must mean that we’re getting closer to being able to fight off the Darkness!”

Suho’s eyes widened and he nodded. “The Tree did say that we were one of the most powerful generations in history…the marks that you and Chanyeol have are evidence of that!”

“Exactly!” Kris said, “Maybe we can beat it on our own. Maybe we don’t need to wait for another generation, maybe…”

“Maybe you need to hold your horses,” Kyungsoo said coldly, “And think for one second about what you’re saying.”

A tense silence fell over the five of them, broken only by Yixing’s sniffles.

“What are you talking about?” Kris asked at last. “This is our job, Kyungsoo…”

“I know,” Kyungsoo snapped. “But you’re going off on your own little hero speech and meanwhile there’s seven other people out there who have no idea about what’s happening to them!”

Kris’ eyes narrowed at ‘hero speech’ but he didn’t comment on it. “Alright, fair point,” he conceded. “Looks like we have to call a group meeting.”

“Leave me out of it!” Yixing begged, “I don’t want to see their faces when…I can’t do this again, I just can’t!”

“Don’t be a baby,” Kyungsoo snapped. “For the Tree’s sake Yixing, we all love you and we know you didn’t do anything wrong, stop being a whiny little kid!”

“Hey!” Kris yelled, pinning Kyungsoo with a glare. “Don’t you talk to him that way, I think you need to remember how caring Yixing was to you when your powers were first repressed.”

“This is different!” Kyungsoo screamed. “Don’t you realize what this means for us? Don’t you see that we have bigger problems to think about?! It’s not just Yixing who’s playing God you know, it’s all of us!”

An uncomfortable silence fell as everyone realized that he was right. This kind of power would come with a price, even though they didn’t know what that price might be.

Kris and Suho gathered everyone together to give them the news. Everyone reacted differently—Lu Han barely showed any emotion, Sehun looked like he’d just seen a god, Kai grabbed hold of Chen and hugged him very tightly, burying his face in his husband’s neck, and Chanyeol, Tao and Baekhyun just looked confused.

“How did this happen?” Baekhyun asked over and over. “How did we not know?”

Chanyeol suddenly leapt up. “Everybody stand back,” he said, rolling up his sleeves, “I’m going to try—”

“No way!” Kris yelled at once. Everyone fell silent (not that they had been talking much) but Kris continued to shout. “Nobody is trying anything right now, do you understand me? This is a whole new ballpark, we don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with! The last thing we need is someone accidentally setting off an explosion, creating a massive tornado, flipping everything upside down or blinding us all! Got it?”

Everyone nodded quickly.

“We’re going to do this slowly and carefully,” Kris said, his voice slightly lower but no less fierce. “We have no teachers and no experience to go on, so we need to be very, very careful about how we use our Gifts from here on out. We don’t want any accidents.”

“And we don’t want any misunderstandings like the one Yixing had,” Suho added, nodding to where Yixing was curled up on the ground, desperately trying to avoid looking at the kitten that was pawing continuously at his leg.

As the days went on there was a new unrest in the group. People were too quiet or too loud, everyone seemed to be too snappy or too clingy, with no in between. Sometimes they could barely look at one another, sometimes they all forwent splitting off at night and slept together under one roof, piled together in the largest room they could find. Everyone was getting whiplash and nobody could figure out what exactly was wrong—or if they knew, they weren’t saying it.

Xiumin didn’t realize what was wrong until a few weeks later. They were staying in a small city and one night they decided to cook outside. They were near a river, and it allowed Suho to practice his gift—he was actually able to trap fish in spheres of water and bring them to the shore. They all got stick and cooked the fish over the fire, sitting in a circle in the dirt and watching the sun go down. It would have been nice, but there was that lingering tension that set them all on edge. Just as the sun was about to set, Kai stood up and asked Chen to go for a walk with him. It seemed as though Xiumin was the only one paying attention to them, and the only one who seemed to notice the flash of reluctance in Chen’s eyes as he stood up. Xiumin really debated the morality of it, but after only a few seconds he decided to follow them.

“I’m going for a walk too,” he said, and a few of his group mates nodded or waved, but most didn’t seem to be paying attention. He didn’t go off in the same direction as Kai and Chen, but eventually looped around to find them, following the sounds of their voices. They were far enough away from the group where even in this echoing city they wouldn’t be overheard, but from twenty feet away and hiding around the corner, Xiumin could hear them just fine.

“This is the wrong time,” Chen was saying. “We’re still dealing with this information, we haven’t even practiced using our abilities, we don’t know what we can do.”

“But we’re so strong, Jongdae!” Kai said, and Xiumin was startled at the usage of Chen’s real name. “I’m not saying we have to do anything about it right now, but this is the time to talk about it, this is the time to see where we stand!”

“I don’t like it,” Chen said bluntly. “You don’t know what we’re up against.”

“I do,” Kai disagreed. “I know how strong I am, I…”

“You what?” Chen prompted after a moment.

“I teleported,” Kai blurted, “Across the planet, I wound up in a city called New York, I was thousands of  miles away, thousands!”

“Kim Jongin,” Chen hissed, “When did you teleport to New York?”

When Kai spoke again, he sounded sheepish. “Last week, after you fell asleep.”

Xiumin didn’t have to look to know that Chen was absolutely livid. He heard a scuffling of feet, a thump and Kai grunted—Xiumin imagined that Chen had grabbed Kai and thrown him against a wall.

“I can’t believe you,” Chen hissed, and Xiumin could picture it all too clearly—Chen with fistfuls of Kai’s shirt, pinning him against a building with not only his strong grip but his powerful gaze.

“How could you be so damn selfish, Jongin?!” Chen demanded. “You heard what Kris said, how did you know you wouldn’t land in the middle of the ocean, or be ripped apart, or disappear forever?!” His voice rose with every word, Xiumin was almost worried that the rest of the group would hear him.

“I just knew,” Kai said, and he sounded like he was pleading. “I wasn’t trying to teleport across a solar system, I knew I could do this safely!”

“You’ve never gone more than a hundred miles!” Chen screamed. “How could you know this?!”

“But Jongdae, I’m okay!” Kai reminded him. “Look at me, I’m fine, I’m in one piece! I did it!” Now he sounded close to tears. “I did this all on my own, with no help at all—I figured it out, I set a new record for myself. Don’t you know what that means to me? Aren’t you happy for me at all?”

“Don’t you dare start,” Chen growled. “You could have…you didn’t even tell me! What if something had happened to you?”

“But that’s the point,” Kai said gently. “I’m so powerful now, I’ll never be hurt—not as long as I remember to keep my head and not be too dangerous.”

“And that wasn’t dangerous?” Chen asked mockingly.

“No, it wasn’t,” Kai said. “Jongdae…I had to do it. I could feel this energy building up inside of me, I had to let it out, I had to know…and I know I can go further but I didn’t. I could probably go to the moon right now, maybe I could cross into a different universe someday, but I won’t, because I know that’s too much. I do know my limitations, and I stick to them because I know how much it would hurt you if anything happened to me. I don’t want us to end up like Lu Han and Sehun, you have to know that…after seeing that, after living with that for eight years I would know…I love you too much to hurt you like that.”

Chen didn’t answer for a long time, but finally he sighed. “You have a way of making me not want to be angry at you.”

“You shouldn’t be,” Kai said. “In fact, you should be really happy. Do you know what this means for us? Not just you and me, but everyone?”

“What does it mean?” Chen asked hesitantly.

“It means that together, we’re unstoppable,” Kai breathed. “Nobody can touch us, nobody can hurt us ever again. We can go home, we can go back there and defeat this evil thing and then we can make everyone bend to our will. We can make them pay for what they did to us—we can go after whoever sabotaged our ship and put them on trial for attempted murder, we can find whoever it was that tried to poison Kris and punish them. We can get back at everyone who ever hurt us, who made us feel isolated, everyone who didn’t care or belittled us. We can change those stuffy old traditions, we can make sure that no Guardian, no child, ever has to suffer the way we did.”

Xiumin felt like he might be sick. What Kai was talking about…it was like he was already playing God. He waited anxiously for Chen’s response, but Kai wasn’t done.

“Jongdae, love, look at me,” he said firmly. “Think about what they did to us. They ignored us for years, they never made any attempt to teach us or get to know who we were—not the Guardians, not the masters…”

“But half those people are dead,” Chen whispered.

“No,” Kai said vehemently. “They’re alive, Jongdae. Mama doesn’t have any interest in life or death, I bet you that everything on that planet is exactly as it was when we left—I bet all our so-called parents are still alive. Don’t you want to go home and find your mom and dad, show them what you became, show them that you weren’t bad? Don’t you want to go to Baekhyun’s village and watch the looks on those people’s faces when they see the boy they tried to use as a pawn, all grown up and ready to take them on? We’ve suffered enough, isn’t it our time to show everyone that we’re done with being their punching bag, that we mean something and we deserve respect?”

Kai was breathing heavily, and it seemed like Chen was too.

“You make it sound so easy,” Chen said.

“It will be,” Kai promised. “We can take our home back, Jongdae, make into everything we always wanted to. We can make it safe, we can make it progressive even! No more divide between the halves of our planet, no renaming ceremonies, no more hiding things from the people, no more children who have to grow up without love, with only each other to lean on! No more five year olds who suddenly have to become parents to a bunch of kids with unbelievable gifts…you know how much Suho wanted to change that, especially.”

“I do,” Chen whispered. “And…and I want it. I want all of it. I do want them to pay for what they did to us, for not caring enough to stop this thing before it took over…it’s not fair that we have to be the ones to clean up their mess!”

Xiumin had to lean against the building to stay upright. His knees felt weak, he wanted to throw up. This was wrong, this was so wrong and yet…there was a part of Xiumin’s brain that was imagining it. Showing up on their home planet, the place they’d never been welcome, and defeating the darkness. Going to the home of the Guardians and forcing them to admit that they were weak, weak to have allowed themselves to be overtaken and for sticking to old traditions. He imagined throwing out every rule, making it so that the next Generation of Guardians was raised with adults like them—happy, well-adjusted adults who had normal lives and could be examples to these young kids that it would all turn out okay.

Xiumin thought of Suho’s childhood, his memories of being taken away from his mother’s lifeless body and dumped in a snowstorm, left for dead without a care in the world. Xiumin wondered if anyone felt regret for that—his village had to have thought that Suho had died, they couldn’t have known that he was now a Guardian. Xiumin thought about how his brother told him to hide his gift, how he had at least, on some level, been blamed for his mother’s abandonment of their family. His blood boiled as he thought of punishing those who hurt his fellow Guardians, who made them feel like they weren’t worthy of love or family. No child should ever have to feel that.

But then the more rational side of Xiumin took over and reminded him that it was not his job to punish, but to protect. He wasn’t supposed to sink to that level—if he went around hurting other people, that would just make him the bully. As satisfying as it would be to watch Suho’s entire village kneel to the boy they tried to kill (and Xiumin felt very strongly about that, seeing as Suho was his first and dearest friend to this day), he knew that it might be a satisfying image but it wouldn’t heal the years of psychological damage. It wouldn’t give Suho any peace, it wouldn’t give him his family back, it would only make him feared, make them all feared, and that was not what Xiumin wanted to be as a Guardian.

Chen and Kai were still talking, but Xiumin had heard enough. He was confused and more upset than he’d been in years. He didn’t want to think about this right now, but from the way that Kai and Chen had been talking it sounded like they were about to make an announcement about this soon. Xiumin knew that this was going to mean a divide, just like what had happened when Kyungsoo thought the Tree of Life was lying, but worse. This was a question of power, human power, and how much of it they had a right to. This was going to get messy, and Xiumin honestly didn’t know who would be on either side of this battle line, nor where he would be standing himself.

Ugh I haven’t updated in 87 years =______= Okay no it's only been 15 days but it feels longer!!

The problem isn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted to do—I wrote this thing in about four hours, the problem is sitting down and writing it. This is actually turning out to be longer than I first expected, I might need two or three more parts to wrap it up, we’ll have to see. But I think this kind of slow build is really working for the situation, like you have to understand why this increase in power is so wonderful and so dangerous at the same time. I think this is kind of the of that tension, next chapter is the fallout where you see the “battle lines,” I don’t know how long it’ll be before I can bring myself to write that monstrosity, but it should be before the end of the month…I want that part done before I go back to school.

So what do you think of this power struggle and the idea of the Guardians using their strengths for revenge?

PS OMG I DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE THAT THIS WAS CHAPTER 50!!! WOW THIS THING IS BECOMING A MONSTER ASKLDGJRPOH