Tao's POV

I worked damn hard for this. Every minute of every day should not be wasted. There were textbooks to read, documentaries to watch, notes to be taken, hypotheses to test, experiments to maintain. I wasn't alone and with the three other humans, worked late nights at the lab we built in Suho's old mansion.

We learned a lot from the pod and with some of what we learned, made incredible advances in human technology. We were especially proud of the changes we helped make in the medical field. There was a lot of money earned in this that helped fund a number of charities and more of our studies, experiments, and even creations. I felt like we were making a difference in the world.

One day we went looking for a test subject to help us learn more about the process the aliens went through to become like liquid gold and back again. Interestingly enough, it wasn't just something the aliens could do. It was a complicated process that involved a lot of calculations and test rats to get right. Our first human subject was a young, eager male with a passion for all things strange stemming from his days as a youth. He was very interested in our work and was more than happy to be subjected to the process of becoming golden goo.

When the experiment was successful, and the man turned back to normal (albeit with a slight tendency to glow at the ends of his hair), we all took the weekend off to recharge and be back with a fresh mind.

This mini-vacation didn't work for me. I spent that weekend at the beach, reminiscing about the day I asked Kai to be my boyfriend and watching the memories of him smiling at the little creatures he found unfold. It was a beautiful and relaxing thing to lay in the sand and remember his little quirks, but as the day wore on, I felt myself missing him more and longing to have him within my reach to the point where I questioned the use of all our work and seriously considered my old thoughts of calling it quits on this empty life.

That night was very rough, tossing and turning in the horribly quiet bedroom. The wound of his departure felt ripped open, fresh like my very first night without him, and like that first night, I found myself outside Luhan's door again.

He wasn't even surprised when he saw me there, dripping wet from the rain. The man simply pulled me inside and shot a tired joke about getting a towel for me and a towel for my panda friend. It was strange; I didn't even remember grabbing the plushie before I left, but here it was, dangling from it's arm in my fist.

As Luhan stood on his toes to lay the towel on my head, I realized how haggard and spent he looked. I couldn't look away from his eyes, that mirrored the pain of my own in every way. I was too late to notice that his hands stayed at the towel too long and he was getting much too close. In a moment of weakness, grief, whatever I could call it to justify this betrayal, I let the kiss with Luhan happen.

I was desperate for warmth, desperate for light. I wanted to feel loved again so badly and these lips and this warm breath made me forget for just that moment that my alien was light-years away.

The feeling was brief. A memory of Kai, beautiful and crying on my bed the night before he left, filled my mind as Luhan pressed closer and lifted the hem of my shirt, shocking me back to my senses. I untangled the man's hands and held them away from me.

“I'm sorry-” he choked, shaking his head as tears started to fall. “I'm... so sorry.”

Luhan apologized again and again to me, to Minnie, to himself. I didn't deserve half of the guilt he had for me; I let it happen after all.

I sent my own apologies to Kai that night, whispering them to the plushie as if it would relay these messages to him for me. I was sorry for betraying him, sorry for wanting to end the pain myself when he could be flying to Earth this instant or be just days away from discovering what was needed to come back. Every day of life on this planet was cold and dark without him, but I knew Kai wouldn't want me throw my life away when he was working just as hard as we were to make contact again.

That weekend, I vowed to keep on going even if I turned wrinkly and grey. I shouldn't end my life early out of frustration. I'll just endure everything and wait patiently. I owed him that and so much more.

Me and Luhan never spoke of that night again and rarely met up alone in case we lost sight of what was most important to us. With the other humans, we acted just as friendly as ever, because Luhan wasn't just my neighbor; he was my best friend and strongest support ever since the departure. Selfish as it was, I wouldn't lose the connection we shared for anything. I needed him, just not as a substitute for Kai.

***

Our discovery on the golden form of life had been a couple years ago and we were running out of things we could do with the cube. We tried our best to recreate the pod with several different models made to run on alternative fuels. Nothing we tried was working, and the wispy strand of the extinct plant-animal was as mysterious as ever. Do you know just how many letters of code there are in a single strand of human DNA? 3.1 billion and it took the human race thirteen years to map it all out. We estimated there to be about as many letters in the DNA of this small piece of alien species.

The human race was just beginning to understand all the purposes of the combinations of the amino acids in DNA - and who knew how far the aliens were in their work. This task we made for ourselves was sounding more and more like something that would only be complete when we were dead and gone, if not completely impossible. Hope was dwindling, but instead of slowing down, I worked myself harder. I searched frantically across the world's information stores for something, anything that could help us.

It was all I focused on and I admit, I bumped into the test subject (who had become our assistant) more than once after trying to read and walk in the lab.

“Taemin, I'm sorry.” I apologized after knocking him to the ground again. We were alone in the lab, working late in the night with the green swatch of alien species, which had been cut down considerably since the day it was left to me. What was left was about the length of my pinky now.

“If you don't want me here, you could just say so.” he responded, dusting himself off as he stood. It was a little unnerving to watch his hair flash angrily. We still didn't know how to fix that.

“It has nothing to do with that-”

“Then you do want me gone.”

“What?” I didn't say that at all! Where had he gotten that idea? “No. You're part of the team. You are a very good at what you do and we need your brain.”

Taemin let out a groan. “You say that, but we've done nothing but make green sludge for months. What even is that thing that we're trying to recreate? Where did you get it? No one's given me a straight answer since I got here.”

We... hadn't, had we? Taemin had proven himself to be very useful after he practically begged to be let on as an intern years ago. When he emerged from the golden form we put him in, we'd all been shocked at the side-effect it left and Lay was so certain that the youth would leave and probably sue the very second he saw it that he even made bets with Luhan on how much it would cost us. We never thought he'd be okay with it, much less delighted to be marked in such a way for science. He showed so much enthusiasm for our work that we decided to let him stay and work with us, though we never agreed on just how much we could trust him. I guess that indecision led to years of silence.

“Look, this stuff is obviously alien, which is cool and everything,” he continued. “But how did you come across it? Why is that such a big secret? You... you aren't, I mean, are you-”

“I'm from Earth, if that's what you're asking.” I finished for him, pulling off my latex gloves and disposing them before running my hands through my hair, forgetting the gloves had been powdered inside. Was it time to tell him everything? Would he even believe it? Somehow he had taken all this “alien stuff” pretty well. Maybe telling him could even be helpful to our cause. Who knew what kind of information could help us achieve our goal? He might come up with something we had never seen or thought to look for.

“Tao?” he called curiously when I didn't say anything. “I'm already under a contract for all your guys' lab secrets. I wouldn't tell a soul, I promise!”

I let out a deep breath. “Let me make a call first.”

***

Kris, as awkward as he was, made the perfect leader. He always kept us on track and on schedule, pulling strings and getting things done without anyone asking him to. It was him I called, to ask if telling Taemin our story would be wise. To my surprise, Lay answered instead.

“Yeah, Kris ish a little drunk.” came his voice, slurring his words.

I was so done with their drinking away their pain. The nights they go out drinking, they don't bother to come in to work for days on end. It's been getting worse and worse the past couple months, ever since our progress had slowed, and no matter how much I told them that slacking only slows down our progress more, they never listened. “You guys need to get your together, seriously. You want to die of alcohol poisoning?” I asked, harsh on purpose. “What about Sehun? What do you want me to tell him when he gets here? I'm sorry, Sehunnie, but your boyfriend is on the mantel. Isn't his urn pretty?”

“Stop. Stop it, Tao!” the voice cut off and I heard rustling of the phone being passed.

“What do you think you're doing?” said Kris' angry voice before the phone was moved again.

“You keep going on about when they get here, Tao, but they'll never come back! They probably consider themselves lucky to be rid of us! They probably couldn't wait to get away from us stupid humans! They probably-”

“Tao, why did you call?” interrupted Kris, back in control of his phone.

“Never mind- I'm still angry at you two!” I shouted. My hand on the mansion's landline phone was shaking and I gripped it with the other to steady it. “How could you just give up like this? You've spent years loving Suho-”

“It's because we've spent years together that we know how to forgive and forget the bad things from the past and just move on. Just because you and Kai had a short Romeo and Juliet romance, doesn't mean you can push your stubborn- ways on us-”

I hung up. I didn't want to hear it anymore.

And I never got to ask whether they'd approve of telling our assistant the truth or not, but I stopped caring. Back in the lab, I grabbed Kai's pod and stuck it in my pocket, telling Taemin to grab his jacket and meet me outside. I had a story to tell.

***

At my home, the house I've stayed in all my life (I just couldn't leave the memories behind), there was a box in my closet of all the things that reminded me of Kai. I took this out and wiped the cardboard lid clean of dust, Taemin seated on my bed patiently. This box had broken and repaired my heart dozens of times over the years.

Opening this box was stripping my heart for all to see and I hesitated with my fingers at the edge of the lid. Looking up at Taemin, I saw a familiar curiosity that sparked me into yanking the lid off all at once.

Inside was a book, a sketchpad, a USB hard drive, and the panda plushie that I had finally gotten myself to sleep without.

“That's it?” asked Taemin sceptically. “That looks like a bunch of old kid stuff. I was expecting something weirder, more alien.”

I smiled and took out the book, running a finger down the spine fondly and cracking it open. “This was given to me by an alien.”

“What, the book?”

“No, this,” Peeling the faded pink-brown flower off the page gently, I held it out for him to see.

“So, this alien-”

“He was my boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend. Boyfriend?” He looked disgusted and I waited for him to walk out the door and say I was crazy or lying to mess with him, but instead he straightened up and leaned forward to hear more. “That's gross! What did it look like? Did it have any tentacles or extra limbs or anything?”

Not only is he believing me, but he thinks I could have been romantically involved with something that had tentacles?

“Ew! No. Ugh,” I put away the flower and set down the book, bringing out the sketchpad. “This is what he looked like.” I said, opening to the first page and handing it back. “My camera was broken back then and I guess I didn't think to get a new one before time ran out.”

Taemin nodded and took a look. “Oh! This is really good,”

“I was so afraid that I'd forget what he looked like, so I took art classes and sketched out the memories.” The drawings did very little to capture him. I thought I'd lose the memory of his face, but it still stuck out vivid in my head, exactly like a star. The drawings could never even compare to the real thing.

“I think I've seen this face before...” he continued, squinting at the paper.

“I highly doubt that.”

He shrugged and flipped through the pages.

“Wait, there's some stuff in there you shouldn't see!” I shouted.

“What did you draw him or something?” The young man laughed and stood up when I tried grab it out of his hands. “Holy-” he exclaimed, pausing on a specific piece.

Ahh, he found it... This was a bad idea.

“Damn, he's hot,” Taemin turned it around to confirm my fear. He found the drawings I made of the day I found Kai dripping wet from the hose. Why did I even draw that? I should've known it'd come back to haunt me.

“His name is Kai- just turn the page. Please!” I told him, hoping the heat in my cheeks would clear up soon. I was too old for this kind of thing. It had been twelve years since Kai left. I was thirty now. Thirty-year-old men shouldn't blush for anything.

He did as told and his mouth fell open at the sight of the next page. It was Kai's smiling face, the light he made drawn in with colored pencil. “This... The glowing; it's the same. He glowed too?” Taemin's hands went up to his hair, the ends lighting up.

“His eyes glowed, his hair glowed, but only when he felt something strongly or when he wanted them to. Kai could even make other things glow. If you check the next one-” I hadn't finished talking and he already flipped the page eagerly.

This one was of Kai's hands, cupping the pink flower, light shot straight through the veins. I redrew this so many times before I felt satisfied enough with the result to move on.

“It's like a fairy tale...” mused Taemin, casually thumbing through my most cherished memories.

“But fairy tales have happy endings, which brings me to this here,” I picked up the USB drive. “This is something I wrote in high school. It explains everything and the ending is a complete lie, but it's a good lie. You might like it.” I gave it to him to take home and read when he got the chance. I still had a copy on my laptop and one saved in my email anyways. This was something that I was never going to let myself lose, ever.

“What's the real ending like then?”

“That's a much bigger file, in fact a whole diary. I don't know if you really want to read that, it's kind of mushy...” Just like Suho had asked, I never stopped writing. I wrote out what I did every day and every once in a while when I felt lonely, I wrote the same day in a second diary, one that starred a different world with Kai and the others in it. It was pathetic, but it the only way for us to grow old together with our experiments not working fast enough. “I can send you a summary over the weekend if you want.” I offered.

The assistant nodded. “And the stuffed panda? What's that have to do with this?” he asked, pocketing the little stick.

“That's just a toy.” I smiled at the ratty thing, with loose stitches and matted fur, a feeling of warmth returning in my gut.

No, hold on a minute. That warmth wasn't coming from me.

In my pocket, Kai's old pod was heating up, a slight buzz emanating from inside. I pulled it out and stared, not understanding, as I felt it swell and vibrate.

Why was it like this? I hadn't done anything to it; I was only planning on using it to explain.

Was it opening on it's own?