The door eased open with a soft mechanical hiss, just the smooth return of protocol taking over. Footsteps followed: muffled boots pressing into padded flooring and behind them, the sound of portable med-stabilizers. The Axiom response team stepped in without a word. They moved with the precision of people used to high-risk entries, and also what followed them.
Yuwon was unconscious but still bound. Head slack. Breath heavy. His wrists, chafed raw where the restraints had held. A single twitch passed through him, then everything went still.
Saejin didn't move, couldn't, with how much blood he'd already lost. Slumped against the wall, he looked calm, like he'd chosen that exact spot. His shirt was dark, soaked through with crimson, and one side of his collar had torn clean through, teeth marks still visible. His head was angled down, chin almost resting on his chest. He looked asleep, but his pulse flickered faint on the scan.
"Saejin..."
Her voice came fast, too fast almost.
"Saejin... he's still... oh god, he's bleeding... someone... move..."
Hara.
She dropped to her knees beside him, hands already at his chest, searching for the wound beneath the fabric. Her touch was rough, panicked. One of the medics moved behind her, reaching for the stabilizer unit, but she pushed his arm aside.
"Not yet... wait... he hates that... he hates the cold ones... let me..."
Saejin heard none of this, not fully at least. He registered her voice like a frequency behind glass: warm and distorted, but also familiar.
Suddenly, it wasn't the room around him anymore. It was the bite of winter air, the creak of an old door that never closed right, gray walls dusted with time, and the dry scent of cold bread. Hara was there too, small, fierce, curled beneath the bed with her knees pulled tight to her chest and a slingshot clutched in one hand.
All of this would come next. He knew the memory was waiting, its shape was already forming in his mind, but her voice cut through first, pulling him upward. It was sharp, too loud for the quiet he'd been sinking into, and it reached him.
"Stay with me" she whispered.
And just before the dark took him, he thought: "Of course I will. You're the reason I learned how".
--------
The room had always been too big for its warmth. It wasn't large, exactly, just poorly shaped: walls too tall, corners that trapped cold air, floors that creaked no matter how careful you were. The orphanage was already halfway collapsed by the time they arrived.
Saejin didn't remember the names of the others who stayed there, only the sounds they made: the yelling, the coughing, the way the door latch clicked wrong at night. He also knew where the quiet spots were: the far corner beneath the broken shelf, the stairwell at 3 a.m, the windowsill that still let in a little light, even after someone had nailed cardboard across it.
But Hara never stayed in the quiet places, oh she liked the noise, the rebellion, the boyish grin she hadn't grown into yet. And the way her voice always rose at the end of sentences, like she was daring the world not to listen.
That night, she was hiding under the bed with a slingshot. She was planning.
"When they open the door" she whispered, "I'll shoot them in the shoe. That way they limp when they chase me."
Saejin sat in the corner, knees up, elbows resting on them. He was bleeding again in his left palm this time, but didn't say anything. He rarely did, back then.
Hara peeked out from beneath the bed frame, her chin resting on her arms.
"They said I talk too much" she muttered. "I think it's better than not saying anything."
He looked at her just for a second as she shrugged.
"I mean, you never talk. That's creepy, y'know."
He kept staring with a sort of childish innocent curiosity in his eyes.
"But cool creepy. Like the good kind. Like in books."
That made him blink funny. Hara grinned.
"I'm gonna be strong, I've decided. Like a soldier."
He didn't tell her she already was or that she didn't need to be. Instead he stood, walked to the window, and gently peeled back the cardboard edge. There was no moonlight out there, just frost on the outside glass and a flicker of distant light from somewhere in the city's half-dead power grid. He looked out, eyes tracing the faint movement of snow and for a moment, he allowed the smallest thought to surface: "If she's not scared, then maybe I don't have to be either."