[A/N]: Visual depictions of cruelty and ual violence towards the end of the chapter

There are always more questions than there are answers. That’s what Sanghyuk realizes on the day of the trial, more shaken than he has ever been.

There are more questions they can ask him than he has answers for. There is more fear than he has bravery for. There is so many of them and only one of him. Minki tells him almost every time they meet that this war is stacked against them; the people they’re trying to charge don’t ever go to jail and Sanghyuk is prepared for that. It doesn’t make the war any less lonely.

Taekwoon helps him button up his formal shirt and guides him into a blazer when he’s so frozen in terror that he cannot move. The fluttering anxiety he can feel at the front of his forehead has been there for days. And in desperately trying to keep a lid on it, Sanghyuk has taped bandages on all his fingers to keep himself from scratching or peeling.

But it doesn’t help. Nothing helps.                                                                                            

As the morning draws on, Sanghyuk retreats further and further into himself. His mind, raking every old memory and every memorized statement so much, is incapable of actually forming or noticing anything new. His memory is shot to hell – He can’t remember what he ate for breakfast, he takes minutes to remember Taekwoon’s name. Hongbin presses the worry stone in his hand every few minutes but he very soon forgets it’s there and drops it.

It’s only right before the doors to the court opens that Sanghyuk gets present enough to lean on Hongbin’s shoulder, height difference a little awkward. His world softens a little at the edges, and the ringing in his ears fade out slightly.

“I’m freaking out.”                                                                                                                                                                          

Hongbin laughs a little. “You’re always freaking out.”                                  

“Hyung,” Sanghyuk shifts closer after a brief silence. “They’re really not going to believe anything I say, are they? Even if it’s true?”

“Maybe,” Hongbin reaches over to hold his hand. “And I’m sorry. But we’ll try our best.”

Sanghyuk doesn’t reply. He just stands there, shaking, until Hongbin brings him into a hug.

“You don’t want to be scared anymore.”                                                                                                                             

Sanghyuk closes his eyes and tries to breathe. “Yeah. Don’t wanna be scared anymore.”

***                                                                    

The courtroom smells like leather – the very smell at the top of Sanghyuk’s trigger list. But he can’t puke: he cannot puke. He just has to keep everything together for 10 minutes and then he gets a break. He just has to get through opening statements. If he breaks down later, it might be beneficial for their case. But not right now. Not right now. That’s what he tells himself as he clutches onto the statement draft in his hand.

Minki looks back at him and Jaehwan briefly before he starts speaking. Sanghyuk already knows all the words he’s about to say – they are iron marks burned into his frozen mind. No matter how he tries to drown them out, they still melt into his head.  

Words like sustained ual assault, words like willful deprivation of goods and services, words like inevitable punishment. He grips the hands of his chair so tight that his fingers go numb as he tries not to listen to battery, to forced ion, to ographic material. But they force their way in anyway: post-traumatic stress disorder, permanent disability, diminished mental faculty, destruction of self-worth.

He feels like an insect being dissected on the table, limbs spread out and probes pointing to where he’s irreparably broken.

Even when the statement moves to focus on Jaehwan, he feels such an intense connection to a fellow victim that he wants to cry. The tears almost do come when the other team of lawyers present their case. Minki had warned him about this – they’re going to be ruthless and they’re going to distort his entire life, no matter the fact that they’ve never come close to living it.  

And do they step up to the plate. They argue Jaehwan as a druggy who had willingly offered himself up for money and is now turning around to bite the hand that had fed him. They claim a lack of documentation and evidence for Sanghyuk’s case; they claim reasonable doubt; they claim Sanghyuk had lied about his age all those years: their clients would have never engaged in such heinous acts had they not been duped into it, so they call for sympathy, so they accuse Sanghyuk and Jaehwan for shamelessly bringing up such a case just for monetary compensation.

Jaehwan ducks out for a smoke the moment the doors open and Sanghyuk finds the nearest bin to puke in. The police personnel look at him with such sympathy that he buries his face further into the metal can, completely uncaring of the smell of bile and hollow stomach acid. They look like a train wreck right now – Minki holding on to Jaehwan’s wrist on the side of the court building, trying to talk him out of running away, and Hongbin rubbing Sanghyuk’s back as his vomiting de-escalates to sputtering.

The other team is in a different room. But if Sanghyuk lets his guard down for a second too long, he can see their blurry faces above him, smell the blood oozing from his body, feel the dark basement he was locked in for weeks at a time. He shudders hard and somehow finds something else from the depths of his stomach to puke up.

***

The Judge calls for court session breaks every 20 minutes (against protocol) because Sanghyuk does nothing but shatter. Jaehwan gets annoyed and grumbles, but he’s the one that finds Sanghyuk in the bathroom when the court is in full recess, penknife laying offhandedly on the sink as he stares at himself.

The dark circles around his eyes look like bruises… he doesn’t even look human anymore. He looks like someone in the process of dying, rotting. He thinks of the dark room, the way he screamed for days. The way he screamed himself hoarse. It feels the same way now but contained inside the confines of his flesh and bones.

Everything is happening within and it’s breaking him apart from the inside. His chest is the dark room and his soul is the prisoner.

“Oi!” Jaehwan rushes in and slides the penknife off the sink. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He makes a move to grab Sanghyuk’s arms – to see if any damage has been done, and does a full body glance.

“What were you thinking?” Jaehwan shouts. His voice echoes off the walls of the washroom and it sounds like an abattoir.

Sanghyuk just shakes his head and at this point he wants to cry but if he cries now, he’s not sure he’ll ever forgive himself. The truth is that he wasn't thinking at all. He just felt such an intense need to punish himself for all this mess that he stole whatever he could find from an empty frontdesk to get himself to be good. Sometimes - feeling pain - it's the only thing that works. 

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Sanghyuk says numbly. “I can’t move.”                                       

“What do you mean you can’t move?”                                                                                                        

“I,” Sanghyuk looks up but he can’t see anything. “I j – just can’t. Something is – Something’s wrong.”  

Jaehwan doesn’t understand at first, but then he sees the trembling of Sanghyuk’s limbs. He sees the panic in his eyes, and the stiffness in his legs. Sanghyuk is a soul lost at sea without an anchor – has been ever since he was born. He doesn’t know where to find land, but there’s a storm approaching. His brain skips frames like it’s a broken record and he feels as though if he moves in a wrong scene, he might get stuck there forever. The more his nightmares feel real, the more he feels un-real. He’s a man lost at sea – those people aren’t meant to thrive, they aren’t even meant to survive.

“You can move.” Jaehwan says. “You can. I promise. Just try. Please.”                          

Sanghyuk shakes his head and looks at himself in the mirror. He sees now that even though he really didn’t want to become a monster, him and Jaehwan… him and Jaehwan are products of monsters. Therefore that’s the only thing people like them can be. His head is hurting so bad and he wants to rub at it but he doesn’t want to get into trouble. He’s not sure who owns him, or which Sir he should listen to.

“Just move. Move.” Jaehwan is shouting now. “You can move. You’re fighting, you’re – we’re trying to win. Please. You gotta break out of this , man. If not you’ll lose yourself in your own head.”

The scene in his brain suddenly switches to a flash of him sitting in the field with Hongbin, Taekwoon, Hakyeon. He watches himself like a ghost: he watches the timid smiles on his face. He takes a deep breath and the ground beneath his feet materializes.

Sanghyuk stumbles backwards from the sink and Jaehwan just barely catches him.

“Come on,” Jaehwan puts him back on his two feet and lets go when Sanghyuk flinches. “You got five minutes to get it together. No more running away. I’m not ditching on you so don’t you dare bail on me. Got it?”   

He imagines, that in a parallel universe, a braver version of himself finds the energy to nod.

***

Inch by inch, the court crawls through its procedures. Sanghyuk and Jaehwan both pull through the Examination-In-Chief with the skin of their teeth. They answer Minki’s questions with composure, and try not to flinch too hard at the things said about them when the other side takes the stand.

They end the 5 hour court session with the presentation of evidence. Sanghyuk had been granted leave to be absent. He hasn’t seen any of these files, and he doesn’t plan to. Hongbin had requested to stay, but he’s really wishing he didn’t.

The projector comes to life as the lights in the courtroom dim.

They’re starting with Sanghyuk. Or, at least Sanghyuk 6 years back.

Hongbin already wants to puke. Sanghyuk’s face is all swollen like it’s makeup; bright purple and dark green painted across the side of his face. His lip is split, and despite the swelling, you can tell just how skinny and small Sanghyuk was at the time of the photo.

Minki proves the date and the location of the photo to the Judges, but Hongbin doesn’t hear any of it through the ringing of his ears. He’s so furious, and enraged, but he’s mostly sad. He’s grieving because very nightmare he has ever witnessed Sanghyuk going through is but a fraction of this. This… This is watching Sanghyuk’s night terrors come to life right before him – taking shape, forming a shadow, towering over him like a building he cannot possibly take apart with his bare hands.

There are hundreds of photos in chronological order. Minki skips most of them for convenience, but makes sure to display the ones whose locations and dates are impossible to dispute. Hongbin sees Sanghyuk grow up in front of his eyes, but not in the way he would have ever wanted to. The photo album of Sanghyuk’s life doesn’t contain a single smile.

But then they get to the videos.                                                                                       

Sanghyuk is being choked. He’s a thirteen year old and he’s hanging from a noose. Sanghyuk’s face goes purple but he doesn’t make a sound. In fact, he doesn’t make a sound from start to end, just tries to breathe as quietly as possible where anyone else would’ve shouted and begged.

Then a stone drops in Hongbin’s stomach as he realizes that Sanghyuk saw no point in begging. A pulley releases and the boy falls to the ground, starting to wheeze as his throat constricts.

In the next one, Sanghyuk is so skinny that the fist he’s being penetrated with can actually be seen through the skin of his stomach. The carvings on Sanghyuk’s body are fresh wounds.

Hongbin gags and runs out of the courtroom with a screeching drag of his chair. Moonhyuk, Soojin, Jooncheol, and all their friends smile under their breaths.