A/N: These are the original (half-written) versions of the chapters 9 (Hopes and Wants) and 12 (The Liar's Tale) of my story CONTROL. I rewrote them both because they grew a little too messy and long for my liking.

There were more chapters like these I rewrote from scratch because I either didn't like the built-up or because they were silly (there was one about a sightseeing trip in Shanghai orz), but I completely deleted those. Chapter 9 was the first one I saved, because it helps to have an abandoned chapter as a guideline.

9.1

He didn't even notice the change at first. He thought it was just the 'alienation', the 'loneliness', something as simple as 'homesickness'. The world around him was different but he was still the same. He thought of himself as steady because he had always followed the same principles. But then, suddenly, it felt as if even he didn't even know himself any longer.

He couldn't even remember when or how it started, maybe because his ideas of 'love' and 'romance' were admittedly stupidly clichéd and probably unrealistic. His mother always told him how she met his father on the market. When the guy she had gone out with had started to molest her, Chanyeol's father had saved her. 'Love at first sight,' his mother always called it. 'Your father was like a knight in shining armor,' she explained and Chanyeol grew up thinking that he would eventually be just like him. He would meet a pretty girl and they would instantly knew that they were meant to be.

In District 3 life of course wasn't that easy. The only females he was close to were either related to him or elderly and the moment puberty hit him, he realized just how guarded any unmarried female between twelve and thirty really was.
He learned tricks and how to handle his powers in a useful way. Fire was perfect for people who wanted to look strong but due to his mother's constant destructiveness, he really just wanted to make the best of what he had. But that maybe ultimately was his biggest flaw. Average probably wasn't really what would impress a girl. Too late he noticed that there were barely any husbands like his father. The majority consisted of strong, hunky ones with showy powers who knew how to eliminate their opponents.
So no matter how many random females Chanyeol tried to chat up or to ask out, he usually failed. The only relationship he ever had lasted less than two weeks and ended with him getting his arm broken by a massive guy.

Of course he never gave up, not really, but often enough he just got sick of this constant game. He complained about girls a lot and sometimes completely stayed away from them to take a break. He would hang out with guy friends and have fun and ignore that he maybe wouldn't ever find a wife after all.
And then he realized that he was about to end up in a really awkward position. To imagine what would happen to him if he really never got married wasn't his thing. Like a gambler he was betting on one single horse, even when all the other guys like him just accepted that they had nothing to gain there.
The first time he actually noticed that a guy was openly hitting on him was when he was sixteen. It was a younger boy from his neighbourhood he got along with just fine  and who felt like a little brother. Chanyeol only had an older sister, so he frankly enjoyed to be bossy and they ended up spending a lot of their free time together. So much in fact that the boy probably misunderstood something.
It ruined everything, not just their friendship but also part of Chanyeol's illusion. It wasn't even that he was homophobic, he just didn't want to be one of those people who were not good enough to have their own families. He was strong enough, he looked all right and there were no illnesses in his family he knew of, so he liked to think that he was among those who would have deserved more. To him a relationship between guys wasn't all that odd but nothing he connected with 'love' or genuine feelings. It simply was a Plan B for those who were too weak.

Part of him maybe secretly wanted to leave when he found himself in his twenties and still alone. He loved District 3 and all his friends and family members. He didn't know better, so he didn't feel oppressed. What he saw on TV and what he heard on the market was not more than a fantasy world to him, something that had nothing to do with his reality. But he also knew that he couldn't continue his life the way he wanted to.
So when he suddenly was part of that world outside, he was lost at first. But then he realized that this maybe was the chance he had been waiting for. Half the world turned out to be female. There were dozens of nationalities and looks he could have chosen from. Nothing seemed impossible any longer, not even to marry a beautiful woman without powers who couldn't understand a word he was saying.

But rather than to jump at every opportunity, he felt wary. He was just confused, he told himself. He would get used to it and after a few years he could lead that life he always dreamed of. He just needed a little more time to acclimate.
That something really was off he probably should have noticed when his delusions failed to appear. Weeks passed and his future family seemed like his least worry. Maybe because his future suddenly didn't feel as clear anymore. Maybe because he didn't really have that much time to think anymore.
Maybe because something inside him changed with his surroundings. He spent all his life in District 3, so who knew whether he would ever be able to escape some of the basic principles he involuntarily learned there?

There were things about Xiumin he just somehow accepted as facts. Xiumin was prone to getting himself hurt for example. He was rather careless with his powers and usually only consciously used them in situations that were dangerous to begin with. Whether he just trused Lay's ability to heal any kind of wound or whether he really didn't care much about what would happen to him, Chanyeol didn't know.
Xiumin also sometimes was a very evasive and the only person he seemed to trust was Luhan. Chanyeol knew and didn't mind at first. Xiumin was older, more powerful and more knowledged, so to Chanyeol he was like a teacher who sacrificed his time for him. Xiumin also barey ever complained and was always patient, even after getting seriously hurt because of Chanyeol's careless mistake.
It was not more than that. Simple gratefulness.

But the more Chanyeol adapted, the more it confused him. He knew that the less Xiumin and Luhan pampered him, the earlier he would be able to live by himself, so he didn't mean to mind them leaving him behind every now and then, always just giving half-assed explanations.
He couldn't even explain the feeling he had when he mustered up the courage to ask them where they were going one day. Luhan told him that there was a friend who needed their help and Xiumin simply avoided his gaze, as if he didn't even realize that he was being spoken to. Because he reconsidered them to be friends, Chanyeol had meant to be persistent and to finally get a proper answer, when he suddenly wondered about his own motives. It wasn't about friendship at all because he didn't even care what Luhan was doing. He didn't feel rejected because of Luhan's words but because Xiumin shut him out.

He usually grouped up Xiumin and Luhan as 'his translators' and although he would have admitted that he preferred Xiumin, he always explained it with their background. They were from the same country and were both fluent. Luhan sometimes had trouble explaning some things and Xiumin's translations were usually simply more useful. It did make perfect sense but wasn't actually completely true.
Yes, they were from the same country. Yes, they spoke the same language. But that didn't mean that they actually had that much in common. There were words Xiumin didn't understand, things that Chanyeol found perfectly normal but that probably only existed in his district. Sometimes Xiumin mentioned products and how they reminded him of his childhood. Chanyeol usually only knew their names and what their commercials had looked like. Ultimately it was as if every tiny moment during which they mentioned random bits of their respective past only widened that invisible gap between them.
And still, Chanyeol always preferred Xiumin, even though he usually felt less tense around Luhan with his faithful translations and his easy-going nature. He thought it was normal at first but the more mines he stepped on because of issues Xiumin didn't want to talk about, the more he wondered just what it was. He wanted to have him around but he slowly ran out of explanations he would have believed himself. His moment of realization only came when it was already too late to change anything or to hold back.

Special District 54 in Sinuiju, north of Pyongyang in the northern half of Korea, close to the Chinese border, wasn't the kind of place any sane outsider would have wanted to go to. Chanyeol had never been particularly interested in history but he knew that the country used to be divided and only became one nation after the first Special Districts in South Korea had been built. On television they often showed documentaries about the current life of normal people in the north and how they were trying to adapt. Even the normal people lived in pretty bad conditions because it was obvious how much the south looked down on them and how poor they were. It wasn't hard to guess how much worse it must have been in the Special Districts.
There were of course enough slave ships landing there but mostly those who didn't mind selling many average slaves for cheap. The way Chanyeol understood it, Kris' idea was to sell healthy quality slaves, not desperate ones who had to be coddled up, so they had always just landed in the south.
The only reason why they went to District 54 anyway, was as stupid as it was potentially lucrative. If they managed to bring a few young, healthy and pretty slaves to a private buyer, they would earn more than they usually did but just why that price would have been justified, they realized earlier than expected.

Just how poor District 54 was became very apparent within the first moments they arrived. Even Kris who usually was quite oblivious about most things that didn't have to do with money, muttered something under his breath. That they could have found people who wanted to flee seemed out of question, the market was buzzing with people after all, but it was shocking how old and shabby everything looked. The Chinese merchants who arrived with them, too, didn't look very trustworthy and half the goods they offered looked as though they were stolen.
Chanyeol felt completely out of place. There was a reason why North Koreans were often dubbed on TV and Chanyeol had trouble communicating at all, although they all spoke Korean in a way. His height also felt like a disadvantage. No matter where he went, he usually was among the tallest, but here he felt like a giant in a miniature world. He walked around but didn't dare to talk to anyone because everyone just eyed him suspiciously. It was painfully obvious that he came from outside.

After a while he sensed something like a slight uneasiness. The people around him seemed nervous, some were hurrying into unknown directions and all sounds seemed damped. "They're coming," he thought he heard someone saying, so he walked back to the ship to see whether there were any news. He was almost there, when there was a tearing noise, as if the sky was being ripped in half. Everything immediately broke into a tumult. There was oddly no one screaming, they just ran away from the centre of the market. He heard explosions or gun shots and before he knew it, he just tried to get away from whatever was happening, blindly following the people around him.
He had no idea where he was going, when something caught his wrist, almost causing him to stumble. He shook he arm to get free and jerked around to realize that it was Xiumin.
"We need to hide," Xiumin said out of breath as he pulled him into an alley. "They're raiding the ships. We have to hide you until they're done."
It was that one big danger they always had to fear. If there was a raid and if the police was to inspect their IDs, to hide was the only option. Xiumin didn't have a valid ID either but he at least didn't have the bar code behind his ear. The main problem was Chanyeol as the Special Citizen who had been forced into exile.

Xiumin still firmly held his wrist as he dragged him through unfamiliar alleys and they didn't speak a word. The noises in the distance still kept on, so Chanyeol notice that something about Xiumin was odd and that the cold seeping through his sleeve was worse than usual. It was as if his mind was slowly thrown back into that night when his life got turned around. The noises, the smell, his hysterical mother, the shaking building, his sister getting shot. His sister bleeding on the floor, helpless, weak. And then, when they were already in a dark, smelly place behind waste containers, he saw it. The blood.
The dark fabric of Xiumin's shirt looked as if it had been teared apart around his side. Part of his skin showed through, dyed in slick, angry red.
"Oh, ," Chanyeol gasped and shortened the gap between them, just to feel useless because he didn't know what to do. "You're bleeding," he said and Xiumin frowned at him, as if he was dealing with a madman. It was probably the adrenaline. Chanyeol had heard of people who had knives stuck in their head and who only realized it when someone else pointed it out.
He tried to lift up the dozens of layers of fabric Xiumin was wearing, only to be pushed away. Xiumin gave the wound a short look before he turned away and kept walking even further into that dark jungle of alleys. "It's nothing," he muttered, probably mainly to reassure himself, as ice formed around his torso.

Xiumin was reckless and never bothered about his own wounds. The ones who took care of them were always Luhan or Lay, who would drag him away. It always worried Chanyeol but he wasn't allowed to care, as if Xiumin in pain was something hidden behind that border of secrets that divided them. Even when Xiumin got hurt because of him, he could never properly apologize because it was treated like something that had never really happened.
But this time was different. This time it was just them and it scared him. If he wanted to help, he had to break past the border.­­
"Don't be stupid! How is that nothing?" he asked and caught up to Xiumin to block his path. "I don't think we should walk any further. "

Xiumin furrowed his brows and seemed a little unstable now that he was forced to stop. "I won't get caught," he stated as if he didn't really see the need to discuss the issue.  If it was about anything else, Chanyeol would have listened to him of course, Xiumin usually did know better after all, but this was just mad.
"We should better hide," he suggested as he slowly took a step closer, as if he was approaching an animal. He tried not to be afraid but Xiumin sometimes accidentally lashed out at others and now that his eyes were widened and his face completely pale, he probably wasn't completely in control. They really needed to get him to Lay but if they just blindly turned back, they probably wouldn't have reached without running into a patrol. But if they kept walking, Xiumin would just lose more blood and if he did...
If he did...

12.1
"What the hell is wrong with you? How long did you plan to hide that?"
Kris had been incredibly calm. He had shown her papers as if it was no big deal, had paid the fine and made jokes about how he hoped that his two idiots hadn't caused any trouble. On their way back he had not said a single word, had cut off Chanyeol's agitated rants and had not complained when it was so hot that his sweat was running down his face like waterfalls.
But then they came back. Luhan wasn't there, Tao looked irritated when he realized that Chanyeol was slowly turning the room into a sauna and Kris snapped, first at her, then at Lay, the good soul they had dragged into the whole issue.
"And you, Lay, don't tell me you had no idea, not with all that patching up he... she needed. I mean, what, you didn't think it might have been important to mention that she's a girl? So you think it's okay for half the crew not to know? Do Tao and I look like rapists to you?"

"Wait, what are you even talking about? Who is a girl?" Tao interrupted before Lay had a chance to answer. "And what's Canlie trying to do here? It's summer, not winter in Mongolia."
Chanyeol looked hurt, felt hurt even, so much that even she could sense it like a dull pain. She always knew that there would eventually be an end to the whole game, so she had prepared herself. Her life had ended the moment she had found out what a monster she was, so it never really mattered much what would happen to her. Luhan being back in the midst of his family also was for the best. They were good people and even he knew that.
The only thing that really got to her was Chanyeol's reaction. He was her only genuine regret.

Whether she had a real name or not she didn't know, but she grew up as 'Ahn Sohee', the only daughter of Ahn Daegil, an average businessman, and Kang Minah, a beautician, in a rented mansion in downtown Seoul. She had always been a bit of a tomboy, so she had faint memories of wearing pants and of having short hair since young. That she and her parents maybe weren't directly related never even occurred to her as a possibility.
It was odd to think about her childhood in retrospect because it was so very different from her reality afterwards. She had wanted to become a dog trainer or a teacher then and her biggest fear was her mother forcing her to wear dresses. She did want to be as pretty as her, but also as funny and cool as her father.

What 'Special Citizens' really were, she never really understood as a child. She knew that they were bad, that they hated little girls like her and that they had to be kept in captivity because they had 'powers', whatever that meant. It was enough information for her because she didn't think that it had much to do with her.
But she was a cuckoo, doomed to eventually show her true self.
Later she learned that it was rather unlikely for girls to develop powers. Those who did were usually classified by men as either 'weak' or 'out of control', meaning that they were 'useless' and 'unwanted', even among other freaks. A girl with powers was like a miracle and a curse at the same time and in her case all her future prospects ended thanks to it.

It had happened a couple of times by then that her mother complained about it being too cold sometimes, but none of them suspected that it could have had anything to do with her, at least not until their little girl cried as she sat in front of her stiff, beloved cat Mimi. She got Mimi as a present on her fifth birthday. But Mimi had become a cold statue and when she tried to warm her up, her tail fell off.
There was something she had never seen before in her mother's eyes, something she learned to understand as terror. Mimi was burried and the issue was never mentioned again. But it already was too late. Cold rooms and cold food. Frozen over furniture, slippery floors, destroyed plants. There was nothing the girl left unscathed.

"She's still my daughter," she overheard her mother in a hushed onversation with her father. "You know what those Special Districts are like. It's no wonder her parents gave her away. Girls have no chance there."
"Well, we can't keep her here either. It's only a question of time before others realize that she's not normal. She's a danger to us all. Just look at her. She's ten but she already killed with her powers."

So they gave her away to people who would 'bring her to a place where people like her were safe'. That place was supposed to be the Outer Colonies. It was the same scam she would later use to earn money. There was no such thing as a place where she was normal and safe and she realized that when she found herself in a large room, stared at by people with lecherous eyes who spoke a language she had never heard before. When a man tried to touch her, his eyes got covered in ice. She had become a monstrosity.

Luck wanted it that her being a girl actually allowed her life to take a better turn than that of many of her male peers when she was bought by the Lu family. They were incredibly wealthy people in a pretty house with a nice garden. Luhan was their lone child and she became his playmate. They called her 'Xiumin' and made her wear all the clothes Luhan hadn't wanted any longer. She and him were the same age and almost always the same height, so soon she began to think of him as her brother, the only family she had left. He helped her learn Chinese, she secretly taught him Korean and they exchanged all their hopes and worries.

What they both didn't understand though, was the reason why she had been brought into the family to begin with. Outside they made her dress like a boy to give everyone else the impression that she was just an average slave boy. Inside they taught her how to stay composed and how to behave. She was to show no personality whatsoever, to make sure that her heritage had no influence on anyone around her. It had never been about her as a person, but about her body being that of a girl with raw and unrestrained powers.
"We want you to give birth to the next heir," she was told by Luhan's mother when she turned fifteen. Luhan was relatively weak, as most people within his family, so they wanted fresh and strong blood. Blood like hers.
It didn't matter to her. If being the borrowed womb was all she was good for, there was not much she could have done about it. She was alive and well and that way she could at least return some of Luhan's affection.

But once Luhan found out, he was furious. "That's just ridiculous. How are they expecting us to...? I mean, honestly, you're not just a thing they can use."
She shrugged because she knew that he only used her as an excuse. She believed him when he said that he cared about her, but she also realized that he simply didn't want the life his parents were trying to force on him. He wanted freedom, like the spoilt child he was, not aware how lucky he was to have parents who cared about him.

She didn't think he would ever run away for real and for the next couple of years he only quietly protested around her, no one else.
"I'm not going to marry some rich girl just because my parents want me to," he said but met her anyway.
"They want you to be the mother but not the wife. What a bunch of hypocrites," he muttered as he saw her in the dress she would wear during the wedding ceremony. Luhan was going to marry a lovely girl and she would stand by as the official concubine.
"Let's leave this place," he mumbled that night before the wedding and she didn't even really pay attention to his words. To her it was just another pipe dream.

She couldn't say no when Luhan left his family with just some money and the clothes he had on his body, because she believed that her duty was to make sure that he was well. If he wanted to try out what freedom felt like, fine, she would be there for him. It also somehow calmed her to think that as long as they were away, she wouldn't have to overstep that boundary that made her and Luhan siblings. Neither of them wanted each other's children, let alone a physical relationship like that.

They agreed that it probably was safer to keep up the facade of her being a guy, just to make sure that there wouldn't be any problems. No matter how strong she was, it was easier to be an unobtrusive, softish male, rather than an impressive, yet boyish female. She was tall enough to look like a short guy anyway and was neither busty, nor did she have a particularly shrill voice. It was almost too easy.
Luhan begged his old classmate to take them in and they just meant to stay temporarily. Once they were accustomed to living on their own, they would move on. Kris Wu probably couldn't really need use them anyway. She had trained to be a concubine, so she only knew how to suppress her power, not how to use it effectively. Luhan was smart and well-spoken but close to useless when it was about physical labour.

But Kris apparently was a lot more practical than he had sounded whenever Luhan mentioned his classmate whose family supposedly consisted of thugs. She probably underestimated the power of successful criminals, maybe because the ones who had sold her had neither looked smart nor cultivated. What Kris managed to do was to use every single resource he had, whether it was his own intelligence, Luhan's knowledge, his cousin's time control, his friend Lay's incredible healing powers or her accidental destructiveness. She couldn't freeze goods without damaging them, so Kris decided to smuggle something that could be preserved without ice: human beings.

Kris asked her whether she would mind selling Special Citizens and she didn't really understand the question at first, partly because she didn't know why he would ask a slave about their opinion, but also because Special Citizens weren't actually people in her eyes. She wasn't one of them because she had grown up in a normal family. Unlike them she knew morals. There obviously had to be a reason for the country to put them away.

She did sometimes wonder whether she didn't have double standards, but decided that it was easier to view Special Citizens as goods. In the end she had to function, not to think, and years went buy during which she got almost too used to this new role in life. Sometimes she even forgot that she wasn't really 'that aggressive guy', as Tao often called her. Luhan knew of course that she actually was female, as did Lay who couldn't not notice it, but it didn't really make a difference. She had no desires anyway, so in a way she was neither male nor female, but a neutral worker. And if she hadn't stopped in front of Chanyeol, she would have eventually fully ceased to be of any gender at all. Or so she sometimes thought when she felt angry and confused and helpless because overbearing emotions filled her chest.

The most obvious thing that had drawn her to Chanyeol was that he resembled her father a little. He was tall with a deep voice and a fluent way of talking. Without meaning to he made her laugh, and, something that really puzzled her because it didn't fit her idea of Special Citizens, he had caused havoc without hurting anyone to get revenge for his sister. It seemed odd to her that a guy would risk death for a female. She always had the impression that Special Citizens preferred males over females. Why else would they give away their daughters to normal people and turn the remaining women into birth machines? No matter which Special District they went to, at least half the females she met there appeared to be pregnant.
Chanyeol puzzled her but she thought that she would forget about the encounter and move on, as always, when Kris came up with that ridiculous idea to bring him aboard.

To get along with Chanyeol she had to ignore that he was a Special Citizen, so she blocked any conversation that lead to his past. She tried to think of him as an average fellow Korean who needed her help. That he used words she never heard before or didn't know many things she found normal, she decidedly called 'class differences'. They were both from Seoul but her old family most likely was wealthier than his.
She saw it as her duty to help him adapt and to make sure that there wouldn't be any arguments, so she explained everything to him she thought he couldn't know and shielded him from any criticism. Assimilation wasn't easy, she knew that by experience, so it was all she could to do speed it up.

She probably wasn't guarded enough because it had been ages since someone treated her the way Chanyeol did. Luhan was the one she was closest to but that feeling was different. Luhan was a fixed part in her life, Chanyeol she was excited to be around because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He made her laugh  and frown with stupid stories or stupid questions or stupid ideas. And she was amazed how easily he learned to adapt, as if it didn't actually matter where he was or what language the people around him spoke.

It was Tao of all people who made her realize that she had accidentally taken one step too far. "It's like you're getting colder every day," he angrily muttered and pulled up his shirt to cover half his face, as she happily entered the kitchen after teaching Chanyeol some basic phrases he could use on a Chinese market. Although he understood a lot by then, his pronunciation still was pretty bad because he seemed to remember words in the Korean alphabet. So when they had a mock conversation, she as the shopkeeper, he as the customer, and when he sounded like a stereotypical Korean tourist who thought that buying a phrasebook was preparation enough for any travel, they had to stop because it got out of hand. 'That's too expensive!' apparently was his favourite phrase and she started laughing whenever she tried to tell him that no, she wanted at least five kuai for her apple.
But Tao told her that she was cold, and she immediately knew what he meant. Luhan's mother had always warned her of her emotions because she would hurt the people around her when she felt too much. Her power was an anomaly because it forced her to suppress her wants.

"I think he's good for you," Luhan said out of the blue when they were out one day because he supposedly wanted to buy a new coat. Whenever there was anything any of them needed, they went together, mainly as a mean of distraction, so that the others wouldn't suspect anything. There were things she needed, things that helped her to hide, things she needed as a female. But those trips out of necessity had soon become excuses to stay away from the others. Luhan knew her too well. "If you ignore whatever it is you feel, you'll just make it worse. You're not a machine."
"I'm fine," she said and he sighed.

The more afraid she became of her powers around Chanyeol, the more obvious it seemed what he did to her. She wasn't so emotionally detached to not have an idea what 'attraction' felt like and once that word came to her mind, she couldn't stop the ideas coming with it. She had trouble sensing temperature differences but whenever she felt that warmth coming from him because he got a little too close, she became weak.
That her feelings weren't just 'one-sided' but most likely 'mutual' oddly pained her the most because it made her feel completely hopeless. She couldn't even dream of being honest.

Chanyeol's initial clinginess obviously came from the fact that he didn't have so many conversation partners to choose from. She was the only Korean and he admitted that he preferred her explanations over those of Luhan because Luhan tended to be 'too exact'.
But when he still always looked at her for help, even though he found ways to somehow communicate with everyone else, something about their relationship slowly changed.

"Are you crazy?" he yelled when she couldn't stand up because both her legs had been broken. "Are you trying to kill yourself?" That he had blood streaming down his face he didn't seem to notice and when Lay tried to help him first, he got angry.
When a bulky guy hit on her when they were scouting new slaves, Chanyeol scared him off by dropping obvious hints about how their ship didn't look very safe.
"Is he crazy?" Luhan asked in Chinese and shook his head. "Is he trying to ruin our business?"

And then Sinuiju and their victory celebration happened. She never meant to drink much because she knew that she couldn't handle her liquor well, but the success and Chanyeol next to her who kept pouring her drinks made her light-headed. It was as if the warmth grew stronger the more intoxicated she was, as if it was seeping through her bones the closer they were.What they talked about she couldn't fully recall but something about it must have made him sad. She tried to make it right again and he laughed at her. They were close, much too close and she was overwhelmed. He told her he could make her warm and she meant to say how much she wanted him to, when she realized her mistake.

It couldn't work.

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