Cho Kyuhyun, patient number thirty-seven in the psychiatric ward, had always loved, and loved only, one thing in his life. In a sense it wasn't love. It was need. He breathed in it. He lived in it. He fed on it.

His family and those who called themselves friends were point existences in a universe parallel to his own, a one-dimensional one which operated on chaos, so far enshrouded in their clouds of white noise that it was hard for Kyuhyun to see them. And what he couldn't see, he couldn't remember. What he couldn't remember, he couldn't care for. Care for. 

Kyuhyun, caring for...? Quite the slovenly joke.  

Kyuhyun’s universe was composed of dots and segments and lines and planes, where the highest honor was dying an insane, frenzied, lost god. Dying not as a mathematician, but an artist above all else. Mathematical reasoning was the supreme and ultimate language of life. To Kyuhyun it manifested the blood in all lesser forms of expression: art, music, dance, philosophy, et cetera.

Imaginary, it's imaginary, nearly imaginary, it must be nearly imaginary. Imaginary quadratic, Gussian integers. Jugendtraum. Ants. Leaves. Destruction, wanderlust, the real deal, the whole sha-bang, the menu A combo; now we're talking.  

Yet at the same time, Kyuhyun despised mathematics. It was an obsessive stalker who had gotten out of control. It appeared in his dreams, called him over and over again at all hours of the day. Every time he opened his eyes there were equations scrawled across the sky, on his hands, over his arms. Disgusting and horrifying. Everything he touched transformed into sets and calculations. He could wave a finger through the air and a ripple of Latin phrases would follow.

Ad infinitum. A fortiori. A posteriori. A priori. Exempli gratia. Nota bene. Per impossibile. Quod erat demonstrandum, faciendum. Ipso facto.

It was mad. It was driving him mad, but others feasted in and ravished the leftovers of his scattered thoughts like scavengers. His name was known throughout the corners of the globe. Cho Kyuhyun, synonym for incomparable genius, prestige, Field's, Princeton, Oxford, Harvard, fame for a thousand years. A thousand years' fame for ten years' work of a teenage mad—

But he wasn't mad just yet. He wasn’t anti-social. He wasn’t stupid. He was entangled in a diabolical, eternal struggle with theorems and principles and questions, but they didn’t feed him and he recognized that. He knew his place as a pet of society, a doll on its windowsill. He was one who must eat out of others’ hands and feed off their amusement, whose life wasn’t his own. The moment he had touched face with this side of fame, he had lost his identity. He was what they wanted him to be.

And they wanted him to be Cho Kyuhyun. The mathematician, Cho Kyuhyun, and not the artist, Cho Kyuhyun. If rumors said that Cho Kyuhyun was a mad scientist, with eyes ablaze and a streak for arson and , then Kyuhyun would go and blow up a physics lab and then his mentor’s cat. If rumors pronounced him a sociable Oscar Wilde, he would hold house parties every other weekend and roll in the laps of the elite. Right now rumors had it that he was a non-conformist, manipulative predator. And so he was a predator.

“So, nausea, insomnia, and abdominal pain,” The doctor glanced over his chart, “Cho Kyuhyun—the Cho Kyuhyun? The Set Game Theory’s Cho Kyuhyun?”

“Yes.” But the thing about being termed a predator was that it was relatively hard to define. It wasn’t like math, where one was one and two was two and it was either there, almost there, or would never be there. A predator had too loose an interpretation. It gave Kyuhyun too much artistic freedom and he didn’t appreciate the extra work.

“Wow. Wow, well... wow, that’s amazing,” The man muttered, quickly adjusting the collar of his lab coat, “I actually majored in abstract math back when I was in Princeton. I’m still reading those columns you have in the paper. Your proofs are simply divine! Gorgeous, really. Absolutely astounding, if I might say so mysel—” 

“They aren’t proofs,” Kyuhyun muttered, scooting up his thick-rimmed glasses with the black of his hand.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Of course. They’re conjectures, right? Or empirical arguments? Inductive arguments?”

“No. No, they aren’t proofs, they aren’t conjectures or empirical arguments or... , INDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS? ARE YOU ING WITH ME?” Kyuhyun actually quite liked his interpretation. It was better than his last role, which was attention-deprived madman, “They’re trash, that’s what. T. R. A. S. H.”

“So, nausea, insomnia, and abdominal pain, was it?” The doctor proceeded as if he had heard nothing. The same greasy, sleek smile was plastered over his face, “That’s all?”

“Yes. I know. That’s all. You’re going to tell me that it’s all in my head, that I’m imagining it all and just need to relax, take a vacation, that it’s all my wondrous brain going on overdrive, that it’s just delusions or hallucinations or whatever the else you quacks like to spew and then I'll argue a little and you'll call the ing security on me and…” Kyuhyun let his incessant ramblings trail off because a ray of light caught his attention. 

The ray of light didn't actually catch his attention. He pretended it did since that was what the doctor wanted to see. He pretended that the light had a strange angle of refraction, which it did not, because nothing in the world was strange. Everything had been done before. He had been there, done it before. But he pretended that he had not.  

Started, it's started, nearly started, it must be nearly started. Curtains.

He let the world distance itself from him. Familiar rows of chalk-white, invisible alphanumeric text began scampering before his eyes. A black cloud of ants, each carrying a little poster of questions in old Greek, emerged at his feet. One by one they crawled up his pant legs, crawled under his t-shirt in neat spirals. They marched into his parted lips and devoured his innards, his bones and tendons and blood and fat, until they filled him up and reborn him as a surging, liquid existence. Liquid black. Kyuhyun disappeared.  

The university bell tolled in the distance. It was noon. Kyuhyun met the doctor's eye again. Inaudible applause filled the background as he made his last act, “Prescribe me some Prozac and I’ll be outta your hair in a jiffy.” 

“Of course.”

As Kyuhyun walked out of the doctor’s office, a smile floated onto his face. He thought that he made for a pretty good show inside the doctor’s office. It was enough to feed the gossip machine for another week, so he could lie low and finally get on that two-column proof he had been nursing for months. That was usually what his life amounted to; his real occupation was playing the role they’d assigned him once or twice a week.

The stronger his performance, the longer he could avoid stepping on the stage. He liked to compare his position to that of the dark horse. He was the expected twist in every thriller, the expected in every drama, the expected faerie godmother or three-legged pirate or miracle of god in every scene of every act of every play. He was what everyone wanted to see, which was not himself, but a predator. Preferably non-conformist.

Kyuhyun had always known that, per chance another actor stepped on that stage of his, he would have to do overtime. He might even have to live his life on the stage, to take his hollow shell to be reality and life to be fantasy. The thought never worried him, though, since he knew that the probability of that was relatively low; geniuses of his kind existed once every century—I. Newton, J. Gauss, A. Einstein, K. Cho. To Kyuhyun there was no chance two minds of his caliber could exist in the same room at the same time. It was like saying Schrodinger's cat was dead and alive at the same time, the thought of which would drive half of the planet's physicists to explode, implode, kajing, ka-bam, wu-pah, and declare an apocalyse.

Kyuhyun deducted that the option of meeting his likes did not exist, which was the first time that he was wrong.

Of course he didn’t quite know it then, when he saw the boy sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with a bloody shirt and dozens of red gashes on his wrist. He was only aware of some peculiar sensation the moment this boy with a tall frame, limbs free and gangly, and eyes sharper than steel, looked up. It was as if he had been impaled with some unspeakable fright…

No, no. Not fright. Shock. Excitement. Hilarity. 

The boy had been crying. His eyes were red and glassy with old tears. There were splatters of acrylic paint over his knees and his nails were stuffed with the familiar color of graphite. He hunched over and retrieved a retractable razor blade from his backpack. Kyuhyun stood, unmoving, to stare. He’d never cared much for madhouse escapees since he’d grown up as one, after all.

But this one wasn’t mad. This one was more rational than anyone out there. Kyuhyun knew because madhouse escapees never had such sharp eyes. Eyes which penetrated. He wondered if the boy was there to murder him and if he ought to run. But there was nothing to be done. He didn’t want to run, so he would have to be killed. At least that would be one hell of a finisher to his play.

Currently, this very rational person stood up from his seat, shaking and quavering and looking as if the slightest whisper of wind would knock him over. Wiping off his tears and snot carelessly, he approached Kyuhyun with meek steps and placed the blade in Kyuhyun's hands. 

His words wiped the smile off of Kyuhyun’s lips: “Kill me.”

Cho Kyuhyun does not move. Curtain. 

¹Ipso Facto was chosen to be the title of this chapter from the phrase, "to be condemned ipso facto," or "to be condemned by that very fact."

²"Imaginary, it's imaginary, nearly imaginary, it must be nearly imaginary..." alludes to the line, "finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished" from Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

³"Cho Kyuhyun does not move. Curtains." to "They do not move. Curtains" from Beckett's Waiting for Godot.