Prompt: “Yes, I was a cyborg, but I had very good reasons.”

Pairing: Xiumin/Luhan

Words: ~1900

Warnings: Character death

Yixing…

Luhan flexes and rolls his wrist, eliciting small clicking sounds as the joints rotate 360 degrees, a pained tremor shooting through his upper arm. His eyes scan the room, and he presses his arm to his temple as another shoot of pain rips through his head, leaving a dull ache behind his temples. His mechanical eye zooms in too quickly, and Luhan is left staring at the rough surface of the wall closely. It will take some getting used to, Luhan supposes, but he counts himself lucky.

Oh, Yixing…

It wasn’t like he wanted that metallic arm, or the weird eye either, but really he didn’t have much of a choice.

The accident had been horrific, or so he’d been told. They had to pull him out unconscious from the burning wreckage of metal and rubber that had once been Yixing’s SUV. Three weeks in the hospital hooked up to an IV drip as the doctors tried to reassemble his now muddled organs. Another two weeks for the plastic surgeons to cover up the burns and scratches that would have left his face permanently scarred. After that, his new arm and eye had been fitted before he regained consciousness from his self-induced coma.

In the first week of consciousness, Luhan had decided that he was a freak. Whilst the world was praising the advances of technology that had allowed the amputee to not only gain back his arm but retain his perfect vision as well, Luhan had had an existential crisis of his own.

What did this make him now?

He wasn’t exactly human anymore, but he wasn’t a robot either. His arm could now lift up to 100 times his body mass, and he could use his left eye as a telescope to see almost 50km further than he used to. They had implanted a computer chip straight into his cerebral cortex so that the technology that had become a part of him worked efficiently, but that now meant that his mental processing had almost tripled in speed and the answers to mathematical equations that he would have never solved without pen and paper for working were on his lips in an instant.

Of course, Minseok had joked about the arm when Luhan was finally released from hospital. He was keen on Luhan reenacting this one part of Star Wars when Luke Skywalker clenched his cybernetic arm for the first time after his arm was severed by light saber. But Luhan had no special synthetic skin to cover up the new appendage and it made him feel revolting, like some science experiment for the world to gawk at.

The eye was no less forgiving. Although it was round, and was about the same size as his other eye, it was bright blue and had a swirl of gold around the pupil, which kept glowing when the sky darkened and left a soft but eerie ring on any surface that he was able to catch his reflection in. Luhan found himself constantly covering the arm up with gloves and parted his fringe over his new eye, but anyone who had watched the news still pointed at him like he was some animal in the zoo.

After multiple references to super heroes in comic books in every conversation, Minseok had (perhaps) slowly given up on seeing Luhan smile ever again. Nothing could pull Luhan out of the black abyss that had consumed his heart.

--

Minseok had always wanted to be a cyborg. As a teenager, he had always found mechanics an interesting subject, and was often discovered tinkering away at this or that in the garage when his parents weren’t home, leaving nuts and bolts laying all over the concrete that had (more than once) accidentally punctured a tire of his parent’s car. He liked that it was a puzzle, that the component pieces of his metal contraptions would fit together in multiple ways, and that if he took them apart he could make something new each and every time. He liked the sleekness of the design, of the cool feeling of shining silver in his hands and how the sharply defined contours of metal cogs bit into his skin if he picked them up the wrong way.

Minseok had made his own gaming laptop by the time he was thirteen, and when he hit eighteen and adulthood he had already made a name for himself hacking into old gaming consoles to rework the wires and improve their overall performance, to the point where companies were hounding his parents with letters and job opportunities that he had continuously turned down because they just weren’t challenging enough.

Growing up on superheroes with mechanics a part of the very fibre of their beings, Minseok had always thought that being a cyborg would be exciting. He loved what it represented; the advancement and intelligence of Tony Stark as Iron Man, the immortality and endless strength of Cyborg from the Teen Titans. For Minseok, however, some level of appeal for these superheroes came from the otherness of being half robotic. He connected to these souls, their physical bodies a technological landscape of their courage and power. The same otherness that he saw in these beings he saw in himself; when he was shunned for his expertise in certain subjects at school and his inability in other, more popular or ‘social’ things.

But this…

Slowly, Minseok’s mind was changing. Perhaps being a cyborg was not as cool or heroic as he had originally thought it to be. Perhaps it was more of a trial, that only those with the strongest of hearts could overcome.

--

Luhan stalked out of his bedroom, brushing his unruly fringe out of his face as he makes his way to the kitchen, mechanical eye whirling as it picks up every wall and corner that he usually wouldn’t be able to see without switching the lights on. It’s almost two in the morning, and he still can’t get to sleep. His mind is buzzing and he really, really should have tried hard to keep quiet with Minseok asleep in the other room, but instead he shuffles through the cutlery drawer for a teaspoon as he makes his morning tea. He walks into the living room blowing gently on the mug, sets it down on the table, and sinks into the couch. Luhan grabs the remote and flicks the television on, groaning as the light glows and his metallic arm flashes in the reflection.

Again, a freak.

Minseok patters down the hallway five minutes later, rubbing his eyes vigorously. He plunks himself down next to Luhan, resting his head on Luhan’s shoulder as his eyes flicker up to the television.

“Can’t sleep again?” he asks.

Luhan nods, staring into space. He can hear the buzz of his mechanical eye zooming in and out of the screen, something that bugs him every hour of the day. He’s still not used to it, three weeks later, and the involuntary shifts in his vision cause constant headaches and nausea. He makes to grab his mug with his mechanical arm and decides against it, using his other arm with a sigh. He’d already broken three glasses and two mugs, and cracked one of Minseok’s fancy white plates in half before deciding to use the plastic disposable ones.

“It must be the chip in my head,” Luhan says after a few minutes of silence. He points towards his head, and Minseok’s eyes are upon him. “Whatever they put in me must affect my brain. It just won’t shut off and I can’t sleep at all because of it.”

“You just need to close your eyes and find somewhere comfortable,” Minseok says gently, giving him a weak smile. “Or you could try some sleeping pills?”

Luhan lets out a low, sarcastic laugh.

“Just that, huh? Just that? Yeah, well how about you go get yourself in a car accident and lose your arm and eye? How about you lose your best friend in the accident? How about you go do that and tell me how you feel then, huh?” His voice rises in pitch and his face is flushed. But with one look at Minseok, and Luhan immediately regrets his words as Minseok’s eyebrows crease and tears streak his face. Minseok turns his face in stony to face the window, watching as streaks of rain brush down the windows, catching light from the street lamps outside.

“No one wanted this to happen, Luhan,” Minseok says slowly, still staring at the rain. Luhan shuffles uncomfortably on the couch, throwing glances at his friend.

“I just wish it wasn’t Yixing!” Luhan breathes.

And the tears come fast and hard.

Yixing. Why did it have to be Yixing?

Luhan only remembers pieces of it. He remembers that it was wet that day; raining hard. Yixing’s windscreen wipers were turned up to full, flashing against the windscreen quickly as rumbles of thunder rolled loudly above them. Yixing had pulled the SUV over to the side of the road and flashed his hazard lights, because he wasn’t comfortable driving in such a downpour. Lightning flashed above them as cars and trucks continued to rumble past.

It was quick. It happened so suddenly that Luhan had no time to react. He remembers the stench of burnt rubber as the truck’s tires screeched across the asphalt leaving scorch marks as it plowed across the safety lane. Yixing was gone in an instant, torn to shreds right in front of him as Luhan screamed. His arm that was clenched in Yixing’s had disappeared just as quickly as his friend had, leaving nothing more than a dull throb as his brain tried to process the pain and confusion all at once. Next came the blood in his eye, and then endless darkness tumbling around him. A flash of searing pain as the vehicle caught fire, and the inevitability of the death that very soon awaited him.

Yixing.

Yixing had deserved to live. If only Luhan had been pushier about who should drive home, then maybe Yixing would be in his place. Yixing was always the better of the pair; always kinder, always more thoughtful of others. Luhan felt better when he walked behind Yixing, residing in the shadow of the person he looked up to the most in this world, the person he loved. But now, nothing. There was no one to walk behind, no one to marvel at from the shadows. Luhan’s light was gone.

Why Yixing?

Minseok shields Luhan. He wraps his arms around Luhan’s torso and pulls him into a tight embrace, as Luhan shudders against his chest. Each breath comes out shaky and disjointed, and Minseok rubs soothing circles into the small of Luhan’s back as he holds him close. Luhan shivers, and Minseok presses his chin against the crown of Luhan’s head and sighs.

“We’ll get through this together, Luhan,” Minseok whispers into his hair.

He will slowly heal, Minseok thinks to himself. After the initial shock had passed, and Luhan had gotten used to his new body, maybe then things would change. It would take time, but Minseok would wait for him, follow him, nurture and support him.

He knew, somewhere, Yixing was looking down on him and smiling.