Being born had been…a trial, or at least that’s what he thinks he remembers. Momma had said that no one remembers being born, so maybe he didn’t really remember it. Maybe his mind had simply created a memory to deal with the blank spot there.

But then Taemin does remember the look of absolute wonder and love on his momma’s face, and the proud smile his father flashed everywhere. He remembers the large contraption of a video camera, the high pitched tone it made as it worked.

He remembers as the machine had slowly begun to dissolve into a slippery wet substance. He remembers as it ran pink and viscous down his father’s arm and as the nurse and his momma both shrieked in alarm.

He also remembers being three months old and his milk bottle never needing to be refilled. He remembers his mother worrying that he wasn’t eating, that he had trouble . He remembers her bewildered expression as the bottle she’d dumped down the drain only moments before was full once again.

He remembers being six when the power rangers woke up under his Christmas tree on Christmas morning; he remembers as the bewildered actors shouted and flailed and as his mother screamed and his father searched for the baseball bat.

He remembers the bully in fifth grade beating himself to a pulp, completely bewildered and terrified. He remembers the monitors running over, and he remembers as everyone stood and watched Kim Cheoji give himself a black eye, split lip and a broken finger.

He remembers wishing, just the minute before that Cheoji could have a taste of his own medicine.

Taemin remembers other weird things, things like his bed turning into a pool of water, his bibimbap growing limbs and fish swimming in the kitchen sink under the suds of dish soap.  He remembers the characters from the TV marching along his living room floor. He remembers the wall by the kitchen table, where there had never been anything, one day sprouting a door that lead to the washrooms at his school.

Taemin remembers ever moment of his life. Every unexplainable event, and every boring moment of sleeplessness at night, every lecture from his momma, and every line of every movie he’d ever left on in the background.

He remembers the moment his family learned what he was, he remembers his father’s intake of breath, the flutter of his eyelashes and the nervous movement of his momma’s hands. He remembers the way the doctor looked at him with utmost sympathy.

Controllable, great potential, secretive, government classified.

Give up your dreams Lee Taemin, you’re about to lose every ounce of control over your life.

He remembers every needle, every probe, every sensor sticker they stuck to his body, he remembers the things they’d asked him to do, and how he’d never managed to get the results they wanted, and yet,  how everything he tried to do only proved his great power, his uselessness.

Unpredictable, loose cannon, useless, uncontrollable, waste, refuse, scheduled for deletion.

He wasn’t fit for them, wasn’t fit for anything.

He hadn’t seen his momma or father in ten months, three weeks, four days, sixteen hours, three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.  Twenty eight seconds.

-scheduled for deletion-

Not good enough, not even good enough to let live. He was useless to the government, and therefore deemed useless as an entity, entirely undesirable.

Would they shoot him? No, too likely his power would turn the bullets into flowers, or the gun into a cat, or the gunner into a snowman.

Perhaps lethal injection? Would he turn the syringe into a bird? Would the poison inside become milk? The technician suddenly unable to stop laughing? Unable to stop spinning?

Incineration then; unless the flames turned into happily dancing bears, or perhaps it would rain inside, or he’d grow skin like diamonds.

Or.

Or he could just walk out of here now, through the stone archway that took up most of what had used to be the one-way-mirrored wall. He could walk through the arch that opened up to what appeared to be a communal bath house styled after ancient roman bath houses.

And maybe, as he walked through, the side in the government facility would simply dissolve one again onto the mirrored wall it was supposed to be.

And maybe, just maybe.

He was free.

Except, this seemed to be the female side of the bathhouse.