Her anger, her frustration, and ultimately, her vehemence of his actions was to be expected. Her feelings were justified. The intensity with which she felt them was justified. And as he now laid open to blame for the decisions made by himself and his brethren, he saw no reason to not claim them as his own.

"How long has this been kept from me?" The way she paced around the room was so familiar, the width of her strides so oddly wide and encompassing, the fingers of one of her hands which rubbed across her lower lip over and over again, tugging and pulling, so enthralling, that he didn’t answer her right away. He didn’t answer her at all until she asked him again, taking his silence as a sign of rebellion, "How long, Luhan?"

She hadn’t chosen the most secluded of places for their conversation to take place. They were not currently in her room. Not in the training room. Not in the lounge. But, in the Main Hall of the Guardians, twelve pillars buzzing lowly with life all around them, white lights splaying across each and every inch of the stone ceiling. Well, more like around her.

He remained shielded behind the safety of his abilities, that same translucent orb floating there in front of her, leveling off just where her shoulders began. Just where his height would be if he were physically there. Because he was bowing slightly. Because she had been reprimanding him in a public place like a child for the past ten minutes now.

And, justifiably so, he felt like a child.

Useless. Ignorant. Weak. Convinced he was anything but. Knowing deep down that that’s all he really was.

He had messed up.

Royally. Irreversibly. All those adjectives and more because all he had were words. All he had were excuses he didn’t want to give but that came out of his mouth in response to the weight of her dull eyes through the medium he watched her through, darkness surrounding him on all sides, providing him no escape, anyway.

"The Council first gave us the task of keeping tabs on the Rebel group, the Board, over three years ago. We have been operating without their knowledge since then, even after being released from their charge."

She scoffed, nodding her head as she continued to mar the floor with the circular path her feet retraced over and over and over again, "Without my knowledge as well, mind you."

Luhan let another sentence fumble from between his lips, his voice speaking before his mind had enough to time to filter it. To figure it out if that was the best, most reasonable, thing he could have said at this point in time. "We did not wish to raise alarm where there was no threat."

Her pacing stopped. Her hands fell from her face and her arm, balling tightly into fists. So tightly her knuckles whitened. So fiercely, he thought she would shatter that which he spoke to her through. So unfamiliar, he was able to regain his senses at her next utterance, "And now Tao must deal with the consequences of your collective decision. The one you made without my permission."

"I ask that you calm yourself, Cera." Luhan reasoned, despite knowing she had reached a point past reason. Or, perhaps, a point where reason and logic were so concentrated that sentimentalities and the excuses of a child only stocked the fire of her temper with more dry fuel. "Kai has just brought Tao back from Sector E. Lay is currently watching over him and his condition is stable. He'll be up in a matter of days."

She shook her head, taking a steady step towards him, her pure white nightgown dragging across the floor, staining itself at the ends in gray dust, "He should have never fallen in the first place, Luhan." 

To her, the time for calm and patience had long since passed. She was finished waiting for them to accept her as she was. She was finished accepting everything about them in return: the good and the bad, the compliments with the insults, the smiles with the scowls. She was finished pretending with them; the urge to play house with twelve children, how she presently viewed them, simply twelve troublesome, untrusting children who believed they could handle everything and anything on their own, no longer something she had to resist.

And this is when Cera made a decision, no matter what that voice shouted at her from the depths of her subconscious. No matter how much it pleaded or begged or attempted to “reason” with her, she no longer saw white.

She saw white stained with gray. That which she kept closest, that which she adorned herself, was merely white stained with gray. A corrupted force that, in it’s own naïve selfishness, had fallen from the pedestal she once raised them upon.

Twelve children who ran around, doing as they wished, keeping secrets as they willed, rejecting her as they pleased. Not twelve Guardians upon whose shoulders lay the fate of Exo Planet.

"Tell me about them." She resigned to at last, quelling her anger for now beneath her appetite for knowledge regarding that which left her starving, "Since you seem to know so much concerning their activities, Luhan, make a formal report to me. As you should have done before you and I ever met."

And so he did, the tone of her voice telling him it wasn’t merely a request she was making of him. It was an order. A direct order. Something he had never received from her highness before. Something that he would receive again that very same night. Except, that order would be much harder to fill. That order would be one that asked more of him than what he did now.

“The Board is a rebel group that formed almost seventeen years ago, around the time of the People’s riot. It was merely a small protest group then who advocated the complete dissolving of the governing political power that came out on top as a result of the 4814 People’s Riot just aforementioned: the Council. At the time, the group itself had little to no backing when it came to public support and thus their activities were small in scale and nominal in intrigue for fourteen years. As their end goal was unclear and indefinable then, this lack of support was to be expected.

“However, three or so years ago, disturbances in Sector E reported that the group was making great strides when it came to amassing public appeal. Due to the drop in the Council’s approval rating as of late, the Boards have taken advantage of the unease in the minds of Exotians in order to rise in influence and power. The Council thus asked us, the Guardians, then without our Seeress, to watch over their activities in Sector E as well as how deep their ideals had penetrated into the main core of the city, where we are located: Sector A.

“Recently, after the return of the Seeress of Exo was announced to Exo Planet, they have begun to take on militaristic tendencies and have formed, or perhaps, it was already formed long before then, their own forces to counter the Council’s own. They have taken a volatile stance with regards to the representative body that is the Seeress of Exo and are looking to spread this attitude further inwards from the outskirts of the city that is Sector E.

“This, without a doubt, explains the action of the woman who approached you earlier today, Cera. However, she disappeared into Sector E right after, which, due to its severe lack of surveillance cameras and the like, I am unable to trace her into. The sector itself is too far out of my range and as a result, I have no idea what goes on there without the help of my fellow Guardians.”

“Which is why Tao was there today.” She concluded, pursing her lips, taking in everything he was saying so quickly it were as though she had two minds with which to process it with, “And why at least one Guardian goes missing every morning, not a single indication or explanation of why supplied to me.”

“Tao was scheduled to report in at the sixth hour after twelve this afternoon,” Luhan finished, seeing no need to declare that he had, as she was quick enough to catch onto that fact.

Six hours. Six gongs of that eerie clock shrouded in black. At the sixth hour, Lay would no longer be able to fix that which was broken. To raise Tao from his fallen state. He would have died.

Tao could have died.

Tao should have died.

And the blame for that was not something she was pushing onto Luhan.

Rather, undertaking it herself, while much more difficult to deal with, while much more painful in hindsight, was the most reasonable decision she could have made regarding the entire, ill-boding ordeal.

With weak breaths, he watched as those he saved disappeared into the cracks, the shadows, and the buildings of cement that surrounded him. He had told them to run. He had protected them at the expense of his own safety. And, he didn’t regret it.

As the dim streetlights casted their glow down onto the s of those whose bullets pierced through his skin, silver emblems of a familiar design etched into thick black gleaming under the night sky like fallen stars, he didn’t regret it.

Slowing time behind the group which had been chasing him this entire time. Providing them with time he wouldn’t have after the fact, after he let those bullets go flying. Yelling at them with a hoarse voice, he got his point across quite aptly and within seconds, they had all evacuated into the windows of buildings and up fire escapes. The man in red was the last to leave, providing him, unnecessarily, with the grim details of his fate due to what he had just done, due to what he was doing, before fading into the black and the grey.

He remembers laughing.

Because the group of men, the Board, who sought to do the same thing as those who had snuck up on all of them expressed lamenting regret in the face of the act they were going to commit.

Because this is what he was born to do.

Because for some reason, it didn’t hurt.

It didn’t hurt as time returned to its natural pace. As he went falling to the ground, the voices of those who had caused him to do so distant. Too distant for him to care much for it at all. Too tired to even attempt to look on at them further. Too empty for him to not regret at least one thing.

His palm was too empty for him to not at least regret the fact that he wouldn’t be able to leave her highness as herself. That he never got to say goodbye to her. That he never got to see that familiar smile and, surely, she wouldn’t be smiling when she heard about all of this. His lone regret was thus.

He had quite the fatalistic view about the future, his entire body numb as he heard the footsteps of his assailant’s retreat.

And, upon realizing this, upon the slight movement of his fingers on the cold ground, a single drop of water colliding onto his cheek like the tears he couldn’t shed, many more joining it as the sky wept for him, for every Exotian who met their end like this, he pushed it.

He pushed his proverbial wall. A wall that took the form of the cement which previously blocked his way. The one just within his sight as he tilted his head back, thick black bangs sticking to his dark eyelashes as he blinked slowly, pushing and pushing and pushing. Feeling it push back, his will reaching for beyond that which was natural. Reaching through the many cracks that had formed, forcing his way through.

His mentor said it couldn’t be done.

He should have been dead. He would have been dead. But, the clock clogged its own gears. He stopped it, the defeatist nature of his thoughts. The breaths his lungs longed to take. The faint beating of his heart. The fluttering of his eyes. And he waited.

And he didn’t have to wait for long.

“The Board cornered him in an alleyway before taking him out.”

He heard the wavering nature of that deep voice echo in his eardrums. The owner of which had a presence which set the room ablaze. Warming him to his core. Calming him within the refuge of its underlying tones and vibratos.

“Are we sure that’s what happened?” Another voice, as light as a feather, as endlessly rough as the sky’s early morning winds, argued, “Kai, didn’t you say that the Exotians in Sector E all had their windows boarded up with not a soul in sight when you arrived? Surely, they’d be dancing over his body if they were the ones who committed the act.”

The person in question spoke up, corroborating his statement with one of his own, “I almost thought he was dead by the looks of him.” He in a deep breathe, the playful tilt to Kai’s voice, that sarcasm that weaved its way through his words whether he really wanted it to or now, never more bolstering than it was now as he listened in, breathing steadily in the confines of where he found himself now: his bed. “The Exotians who watched me from their homes seemed frightened but they sure as hell didn’t seem guiltless.”

But, it was at the sound of the voice which spoke next, the familiar mixing with the unfamiliar, kindness mixing with stern reprimand, that penetrated him farther than any piece of carved metal, causing him to start from his bed in alarm, his empty palms searching the expanse of where they lay for her presence.

“Suho, Xiumin, Sehun, and Chen will discover the truth of the matter. Until tomorrow morning, Lay shall stay with him to ensure he recovers completely.”

To be sure, his yell of her real name caused everyone currently occupying the room to jump just as he had, expecting him to neither wake so quickly nor so abruptly. Nor so rudely, the jaws of Kris, Kai, Lay, D.O, Baekhyun, and Chanyeol – along with Luhan, whose broken concentration in that moment almost cost him one of his precious floating spheres, his focus returning just before it could shatter across the marble floor of his room – dropping in disbelief of the syllable he just uttered without a second thought with such urgency and longing any outside onlooker would believe it to be the one and only word he had ever learned.

He, Tao, unaware of his indiscretion, held his right hand out to her, his fingers reaching as far as they could as his body forced him with all its might to stay sitting up. He felt an immediate pain in his lower abdomen and his left shoulder, places where, while there were no marks or scars to indicate his injuries, two of the ten bullets that had lodged themselves into his body laid their deepest claim, shredding muscle and denting bone. All of which was forgotten, along with much more, at the sight of her there at the foot of his bed. All of which had been repaired by the Guardian who went to his side first; aiding him in sitting up by placing a steady hand on his back and stomach.

“You need to lay down, Tao.” Lay urged him, worry coating his voice, “You’re not ready for any quick movement just yet.”

He didn’t heed Lay’s warning, however, his eyes trained on her figure, his hand still reaching out for her own. She stared back at him, seemingly lost in the depth of his gaze, in the depth of his affection, in the depth of his palm as she took steps forward, grabbing onto his right hand with both of her own.

“Lay down, Tao. I’m here.” She smiled that familiar smile, in that familiar way that lulled his eyes to cease their strain to stay open. With that familiar voice, she repeated, “I’m here.”

But, before he did, before he let himself fall back into the folds of his bed, he had a misunderstanding to clear up, "This wasn't their fault. It wasn't." The looks of confusion he received caused him to say it again, to clarify it in terms they could understand, "I wasn't shot by the Exotians that chased me. Not by the Board.” He his dry lips, and with a gaze that met her own, he sighed and said, “The one's holding the guns were wearing black body armor, embezzled with silver markings."

And it didn’t take long for Luhan to announce exactly what this meant, “The Council’s forces.”

And it was then that the door to Tao’s room opened, revealing behind it the currently seething lightning Guardian, his expression anything but pleasant, “Unless you all found something out about the Board, then the whole of this night was for nothing. Suho, Sehun, and Xiumin are finishing up up there but, really, all we’ve ended up with is a bunch of loose ends that go nowhere.”

“The Board is the least of our problems.” Kris informed him, pulling him to the side to fill him in on the vital piece of information that Tao had just given them; Chen relaying to Tao his relief for his safety before Kris began to talk his ear off. It was while Kris did so that Tao fell asleep to the soothing words that flowed from between Cera’s lips, looking and sounding quite unlike herself, a fact that failed to go unnoticed by the wandering ears and passing glances of the Guardian who had last entered the room.

Thus issued a short period of solace as Tao’s breaths evened out, the tense air masked by fleeting peacefulness. It was a brief silence in which they watched her, her hands leaving Tao’s own, reaching up to brush his hair from his eyes, tracing down his cheek as a sigh escaped her. And she whispered something, two words they weren’t able to hear, that they weren’t able to dwell on in wonder of as she stood up right then and there, turning to face them.

"I shall set up a meeting so as to confront the Council about this transgression." Before anyone could say a single word, she elaborated her, no matter how sudden, well-thought out decision, "Kris, Baekhyun, Chanyeol, Kai, and Luhan will join me."

And the world seemed to freeze over in that instant.

The only problem, the single crack in the ice, regarding this newest request of hers was what it implicated. Kris, Baekhyun, Chanyeol, and Kai’s presence was easy to procure. However, the latter of whom she desired to accompany her spoke up in protest, “I mustn't—”

“You will come, Luhan.” She interrupted him, not wanting to hear another one of his excuses, “You will physically appear before both me and the Council. I am not going to argue with you over this.” And yet, no matter how sternly and unyielding she stared on into that lucent orb that shook precariously before her eyes, she faltered. She cringed, just slightly, at her own words, as though it pained her to even say them.

Luhan, panicking as he felt eleven years of rules and regulations and expectations come crashing down around him, stuttered out in assertion, opposing her once more, “I cannot—”

Yet, still, she would hear none of it.

She was finished, after all.

Since earlier this very night, she was finished.

She was finished being tolerant and observant of his hesitation. She would ask of him to do something he did not want to simply because she knew if she didn’t, he’d never do it himself. This ill virtue of impertinent impatience was one that could not be attributed to the woman whose body she ruled over as her own. However, without a doubt, at the very least, such an attitude always achieved what it set out to accomplish.

Always.

“It is not that you cannot. It is that you will not. A will that, regarding this decision, I will not have denying me.” She turned her gaze away from his means of communication, stating a reaffirmation of, “You will come, Luhan,” before settling her eyes on Tao once more. Her features clenched again, faltered again, before returning to their firm state once more, not a single crack to be found in her façade. Or, rather, her true face. The face she had been holding back. The face she saw no reason to hold back any longer. Without turning to face them, she put an end to the unsaid arguments and rebuttals against her, “I am going to bed now. There is no need to prepare dinner for me, D.O. Tend to Tao’s bedside along with Suho and Lay. Goodnight.”

And with a fleeting whisper of “Rest well, Tao,” her fingers gently sliding down the length of his own, she rounded his bed without looking back.

D.O bowed deeply as she took her leave, Chen following her with a purpose soon after, the air left stale in her wake.

It wouldn’t be long now.

That subconscious voice’s yell grew louder and louder with each passing second.

The frozen wasteland melted at the seams, stubborn tufts of green breaking through the surface.

Metaphorically, in keeping with the themes and imagery presented, the fifth gong had rung on her newly adopted, authoritarian reign. 

A/N: 

Seriously, each chapter I write I love Tao more and more in this story. Does anyone else feel the same way? So, I'm not sick anymore! Yay! I wrote this chapter faster than many others! Double Yay! I've been craving an apple for this entire weekend and I finally got to have one! Triple Yay for craving healthy food for once! The crisp skin. The juicy center. The sweet taste that slides down your throat and settles pleasantly at the bottom of your stomach. Foodgasm at its finest. Food Challenge of the Day: Eat an Apple, proceed to revel in its deliciousness.