The streets are bare. No one hardly walks in them anymore. They use alleys, sewage drains, underground passages or even rooftop lanes. No one wants to be out in the open anymore. Yixing checks the main clock in the parade square. It reads in bright green roman numbers: 11:10. There was still 50 minutes to go before the chimes call out people for the daily lunch. Yixing can't miss lunch, not again, he can't. 

Around the parade square there are 4 main buildling most important in the SM city. There's the white building, for nurses and doctors and peasants who are too ill to work. There's the blue glass buliding for Brother and His associates to take care of SM and its people, its comrades. There's the red building to give out rations to everyone residing in SM; rations for food, rations for play, rations for entertainment. But Yixing wasn't looking at these 3. He was looking at a single black building that had no windows and towered over the other 3 buildings and conveniently, the whole of SM. Brother calls it the Watch Tower - but to Yixing, it was nothing more than a black hole - everything that goes in, never comes out. 

The clock chimes 3 times and Yixing pats down his white overalls and adjusts his yellow wristband. He carefully closes the door behind him and waits for the little click that follows after. He needs to move slowly. Brother can't know he's locking his door.

It's mushroom soup and potatoes for lunch today. Could've been better - but could've been a lot worse. Yixing takes what he can get and pour a spoonful of mashed potatoes on his steel plate. He sat down at the white section of the canteen and searches his pocket for a plastic spoon - he doesn't have one. So he takes his coffee stirrer instead. Yeah, could've been a lot worse, he's seen comrades using twigs - not that he's allowed to look at other comrades. Yixing finishes his lunch quickly, swallowing as much as he can, forcing his body to whatever protein they could from potatoes. He refuses to stay monitored in the large room for more than necessary and makes his way to the White Building. 

"Where were you?" came the hushed voice from the cubicle next to him.

"Lunch." Yixing tries to limit the movement of his lips.

"You know we're given special food here, right?" the voice replies, a little louder this time.

Yixing surveys the entire floor, covered in white tiles, white walls, his white cubicles, the white suits of everyone working here, his whitely clothed comrades all focused with heads down in their own experiments.

He looks down at his own set of vaccines that needed to be tested and put on trial and he never knew white could be such a dirty colour.

"I just wanted food from the Big Hall." Yixing still kept his voice low and hands busy. 

"Who wants food from Big Hall?" the voice became more curious this time.

"Me." Yixing stood up and decided the trials could wait and another day because vaccines need to be chilled. 

He felt Suho watch him with his peripheral vision and he walked just a tiny bit faster to the chillers.

Yixing's room consisted of nothing but a bed made of simple wood, a bed with simple white sheets, a normal office desk to bring home his experiments, medical books on his tiny shelves ( 3 books to be exact, borrows were controlled strictly ), and a pen given by the Big Brother. Unbeknownst to any living human in SM, he had a small, thin book hidden between "Facts about Blood Cells" and "The Human Brain and its Wonders". He had a pen, his own pen, that he kept from before the Yellow Turn. Yixing had to be careful though, his pen was running out of ink.

He changed out of his white overalls into a simple white wifebeater and white slacks, and the mandatory half an hour nap at 5pm. He lazed around till 6pm, as he know all his comrades would, before taking out all 3 thick books onto his work table.

He arranged his own thin book behind the pages of his medical facts that he already had inside his brain and proceeded to write what Big Brother might think is his homework on Blood Cells, but actually about his observations of 01.01.2015.

Yixing is surprised he could still remember the date because no comrades knew that a new year had come and it was 8 years, 5 months and 3 days since the Yellow Turn. 

The world was a scary place when people only knew time and not the passing of it.

yes, no, maybe?
xoxo