☤

The eyes in the mirror are steely gray, flecks of white near the pupil and darker at the edges of the iris.

It takes Jongin exactly four and a half seconds to remember that those are his eyes now.

He freezes his face in the imitation of an expression of vague interest to hide the way he feels as if something’s getting torn apart a little bit more inside of him from his mother and personal Enhancer who’re both sitting in front of him, watching.

But this isn’t so bad, really. Changing the colour of one’s eyes only requisites a minor surgery consisting of two steps; the anesthetizing of the patient and the simple injection of the Nano-machines into the eyeballs since they’ll be finishing the job all on their own once inside the organ. An Enhancement such as this one only takes up to three hours (excluding the hour it takes for the patient to wake up), tops.

Jongin blinks slowly, watching his pupils dilate and contract in pools of silver as they repeatedly adjust to the white light of the sterile room.

It could’ve been worse. His parents could have decided to remodel his face and/or body entirely, no traces of his old features left, and then he’d have woken up after an Enhancement that would’ve taken more than eight hours trapped inside the body of a stranger.

That’s what Jongin tells himself when he looks up from the mirror and pastes a smile on his lips which he aims towards his mother. “I love them. Thank you, mother.”

She smiles back, her green eyes sparkling dully in approval. “You’re welcome.”

The strange thing is that even though Jongin doesn’t know what color her eyes were before, he’s 100% sure that her eyes weren’t green when they entered the Enhancing Facilities.

And he realizes that he no longer remembers what color his eyes were before his eyes had been changed into brown, green, purple, brown, silver, when he’d still been too young to be allowed legally to start Enhancing himself.

He looks at the face looking back in the mirror, stares into that person's eyes.

Silver.