Sehun’s dad caught on quite quickly that he was having another ‘attack’ and quickly makes moves to evacuate Sehun from the room. Once he was out, his mum guided her zombie-like son upstairs, back to his bedroom. Once there, he collapsed onto his bed, and cried into his pillow, his tears soaking into the fabric.

So it was to be Tao's safety for his. If he didn’t hand himself over to them, would they hurt him? Because of Sehun? Somehow he didn’t think they would hurt Sehun, they needed him too much. That was the deciding factor; he needed to somehow trade himself for Tao. He knew no one would approve, but he was absolutely certain that Tao would do the same for him in a heartbeat. 

Ok, so now the he'd decided, he needed to figure out how to do this. The cards Tao read out said that they wanted him, with all his data. Therefore he needed to somehow obtain his files from the lab, without his parents finding out, which would definitely be very difficult, considering they rarely left their lab, and when they did it was locked. He didn’t even know where they kept it all. In a filing cabinet perhaps? He would just have to search around for it, since they did other work and experiments that had nothing to do with him too.

But it could also be on the computer, which would of course mean him having to hack his dad’s account. Not that he even knew how to do that. Then he would need to figure out where they were keeping Tao, and how to contact them. The simplest way would be using the email they used to send the ransom video, but that, again, would require the use of his dad’s account. And knowledge of computing and stuff that was quite frankly beyond him.

Did he know anybody who was good at computing? He realised all of the friends he had made here were through Tao, even though he technically met Chanyeol first. Well, Chanyeol had just kind of introduced himself. That boy seemed to have endless reserves of confidence, and sometimes Sehun wish he would spare some for everyone else.

Sehun wondered if he knew anyone who might be good enough to get into his dad’s files. Then, feeling guilty, he pushed this thought away. He knew this was wrong, and his parents were going to be devastated, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He wondered what they would tell college tomorrow about Tao's absence, and whether he would have to go. Sehun was willing to bet that the story they tell the other students would be that he had an illness, it always was in these kinds of situations.

Needless to say, Sehun didn’t get much sleep that night, and when he finally did, it was all nightmares about Tao being hurt that left him sobbing into his bedsheets like a baby.

The next morning when he woke up, his eyes were puffy. He didn’t think I’ve ever cried this much before in his life, and his whole body ached from the exertion. Shouldn’t he feel all cried out now? Unfortunately that was not the case; he felt like anything could set him off again, and he was afraid to go to school, because he knew everyone would ask after him and he didn't know if he could handle the guilt, knowing it was his fault that Tao got taken.

Someone knocked on my door, softly.

“Sehun?” It was his mum. She opened the door a little, and leaned around, “are you ok for breakfast?” he shrugged and nodded at the same time, not really knowing how to say 'no I feel like my soul is missing'.

“Do I have to go downstairs?” His voice came out sounding hoarse, and hurt, which surprised him a bit, because he didn’t cry loudly, or so he thought.

“Only if you want to, but I think you should go to school today, so you need to get up pretty soon so you don't miss the bus.”

Sehun swallowed, and nodded again. He didn’t trust his voice not to crack.

“Oh, also we informed Tao's family last night, and they came over while you were in your room; I didn’t want to disturb you,” she informed him, and the floor fell out from under him, he felt like he was freefalling into nothing. How on earth was he supposed to face them, especially his sister Xiao-Xing, knowing that it was all his fault? She was going to tear him into pieces, possibly literally.

His mum left, closing the door behind her. Sehun rubbed his eyes before getting up, regretting it a moment later,-it hurt to move. He realised he was still wearing what he wore yesterday, and when he took them off, there were lines on his legs from the seams of his jeans. Not really caring, he picked up whatever was lying on the floor and in his wardrobe to wear, then slowly made his way downstairs to the kitchen, where his parents and Tao's family were waiting.

It turned out that Tao's mother had been crying too, maybe even more than Sehun; her face was red and her makeup smudged terribly in streaks that make it obvious that she'd been wiping her eyes a lot recently. Xiao-Xing was less affected, but looked very pale and fragile, like she could break at any moment. When she spotted him loitering in the doorway, her expression changed to one of resentment. It was pretty obvious she hated him, and he didn’t blame her one bit; he hated himself too.

His mother handed him a bowl, which he half filled with cereal, not really that hungry. He forced it down, and left quickly and quietly, before anyone could talk to him.

Sehun decided that he needed to put up a façade; otherwise people would start asking him unnecessary questions. He used the time during the bus journey to college to compose himself. The end result is a solid poker face, and he wasn't exactly happy with it, because he couldn’t really be happy until he knew for sure his boyfriend was safe, but satisfied seemed like an acceptable word so he was going to use that.

When he arrived at school, he wandered through the hallways in the direction of the canteen in a daze, feeling completely wrong without Tao by his side, even though he had technically not been here that long. In the canteen he sat down next to Luhan, who glanced at him, concerned, then tactfully ignored him when he didn’t say anything.

Jongin didn’t show nearly as much tact, and brazenly asked where Tao had gotten to, as they were almost always together. It hurt to lie to his best friends, but he'd been instructed to keep the whole thing hushed up, for now at least.

“He’s ill.” He told him, and winced. "He’s practically vomiting his guts up. Yeah, it’s pretty gross,” 

The rest of the day passed by monotonously. He barely paid attention to anything any of the teachers were saying, and didn't even pick up a pen, but the teachers didn't question his behaviour, seeming to sense that something was wrong. When he opened his front door, he noticed that the door to the kitchen was shut. He tilted his head. That was weird; it was almost never closed. He sidled up to it, and tried to subtly press his ear to wooden panelling.

There were voices in the room that he didn’t recognise,

“…think we know where he’s being held now, but because it’s such a large company, we believe that if they even think that we may be on to them, they will move him, or do something even more drastic.”

It must be the police, talking about Tao. And they want to... what? Wait? That was so dumb! They should just raid the s and get him back!

“We shouldn’t tell Sehun that we know this. He might try to do something stupid,”

He certainly would, but first he needed to find out that address. He listened intently for a few more minutes, feeling more alert than he had all day, trying to find out anything more about the location, but they'd moved on with the conversation, so he went quietly to his room and began to plan out how to rob his dad’s office. He wondered if he could access his dad’s files from his own account on his laptop, using the shared network. He clicked through a complicated spiderweb of folders and was not at all surprised to find that it was locked. He wasn’t really expecting to be able to get into them. Back to plan A then.

With an alarm on his phone for half past three, Sehun went to sleep feeling anxious to get his plan in motion. But when it woke him up in the wee hours of the morning, he was confused and disorientated, until he remembered his break-in scheme. He grasped at his hair, mentally chastising himself for choosing such an early time to stage this operation, and then forced himself to get up. He slapped his face in hopes of it waking him up more, as if it could be that easy to make the grogginess disappear.

Realising that he probably wasn’t going to become any less lethargic than this, he treaded softly down the stairs, taking care to avoid noisy floorboards. He opened the door to the office, and winced when it creaked. In the dark, he could barely see the filing cabinets, and when he noticed that it needed a key he let out a frustrated groan, and then slapped his hand over his mouth, hoping nobody heard him.

Sehun had absolutely no idea how to pick locks, but then it occured to him that he maybe knew where the key was. If he was right, it was in the bowl in his parents’ room, on the bedside table. The only question was: could he get it without waking them?

Stealthily as a ninja, he crept back up the stairs to their bedroom, and opened the door- luckily this one didn’t creak. He used the soft light of his phone screen to illuminate the way to the bedside table, where hopefully the key was. He nearly tripped over something on the way there, but successfully grabbed the key before silently tiptoeing back downstairs without having heard so much as a snore from either of them, though his heart was racing.

The first drawer he tried yielded nothing, it was all financial reports, water bills and other miscellaneous monetary stuff he didn’t want to understand. The second wasn’t much better; just a lot of papers with titles he also didn’t understand. And he'd thought he was good at science. He continued to flick through the folders in the hopes that something useful might be there, but there was nothing. He was about to give up and move onto the last drawer, but then he spotted his name on the file right at the very back.

Excitedly, he pulled it out and opened it. It was bigger than he expected it to be, thicker. And he had a number, ‘Experiment 09’. Maybe they'd tried it before, and it hadn't worked. He shrugged, not really caring that much, then closed the drawer, and left the office. Once upstairs, he deposited his file under his mattress, then replaced the key in the bowl so they wouldn’t be suspicious.