Chapter 12

Sungjae~

It happened again. 

The people tasked to keep the lives of South Korean's citizens safe and whole failed to do exactly that. 

SungHoon was another case of such injustice. 

He was simply a third-year resident at a prestigious university hospital when he was given the opportunity to work for the NIS. He became a member of the Biological Evaluations Unit, which oddly was a unit I had never heard of. But then SungHoon explained that the unit was kept under wraps except for cooperation assignments. That was how he met SoHyun. Their units teamed up for a biological terror case and they grew close. 

SungHoon focused solely on his breathing until he closed his eyes shut and confessed. “She actually came to my office one night and asked for a favor. Me being a neuroscience major, SoHyun wanted to know if it was possible to condition herself to unlearn responses.” 

“What does that mean?” I leaned toward him on his black leather sofa, gripping my slightly trembling hands. 

“She only revealed to me when actually progress began, but she desperately attempted to unlearn conditioned responses from enduring her father’s indirect abuse. From a young age, she learned in order to reduce the violence her father inflicted on her mother that she should not show any reaction or divulge any emotional response, for it only angered her father more. You know what that led to.” 

I covered my agape mouth from my hand, gasping at what I learned. What I first thought was a frustrating lack of trust in allowing SoHyun to express her true emotions turned out to be a direct result of the domestic violence that conditioned her to refrain from emotional responses. Who would have thought? The recently uncovered truth was too astonishing to even stomach. 

But that was not the end of SungHoon’s disclosure. He was assigned an undercover task as a human subject in a medical experiment. He disguised himself as a homeless man to be taken off the street by medical staff to be experimented on by doctors for over a span of a whole year. 

“I went to hell and back and I don’t know what they did to me, but I’m dying because of them. I expected the NIS to pull me out, but then I lost hope and when the BAU got to me I wasn’t the same again. I didn’t even know how long I was in there for. I tried to escape multiple times, but they always brought me back. I didn’t know I was gone for a whole year. I was a human lab rat. What you’re going through right now is exactly what SoHyun went through when she waited for me to come back alive.” 

“You were once engaged. Is that why you broke it off?” 

“I wanted to spare SoHyun from seeing another person she loved tortured by something she had no control over. She suffered enough with her mom and I couldn’t bare to be the cause of any more emotional turmoil.” The leather seat crinkled underneath my sweaty grip and I clenched my jaw before approaching the topic of the affair. 

“And yet you two continued to see each other…” 

“Look you can beat me up for all I care, but I have absolutely nothing to lose.” The corners of his lips lifted into a sly smirk. I shook my lowered head. I lent sympathy towards SungHoon, but his indifference was nonetheless infuriating. My hands were crumpled into fists, but I didn’t dare swing a throw. He didn’t question himself before aiming a gun towards anyone, while I only wielded violence when it was absolutely necessary for dealing with belligerent criminals. 

Tugging on my tie, I loosened its grip from around my throat and then allowed a scream to burst through my vocal chords. I plopped onto the dirty pavement of the NIS rooftop, breathing heavily. 

The soft hues of pink spread across the sky against the darkening blue, spurring a memory. With paper cups of black coffee warm in our hands, SoHyun and I stood on top of the rooftop to sneak some time in before pulling all nighters for our task operations. I remembered being comforted by such a beautiful sight when I glanced over to see SoHyun staring blankly at her scuffed black leather shoes. 

"Isn't it pretty to you?" I asked her, wondering why she wasn't taking in the serene sight. It was a moment of calm and beauty that healed my soul from the heinous crimes I witnessed on a daily basis. She remained silent. Her eyes turned into crescent moons as she simply stood there, smiling at m