Chapter Text
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows.
- Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert
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Namjoon is aware first of the voices.
They’re low in volume, in the same room as him but still hushed. Do they fear they’ll wake him? It seems out of place considering the next thing he’s aware of is the bindings around his arms and legs. They feel like heavy chains, so whoever captured him must know that he’s strong enough to break rope. That also means that they know who he is. Namjoon comes this close to cursing out loud.
Well, there’s no point in pretending unconsciousness then. He opens his eyes slowly, carefully taking in his surroundings and taking stock of his body.
He’s not injured, which is— surprising, he thinks. He had automatically recharged in the time he’d been unconscious, so his head feels clearer than it has in weeks. It really shows how low his power cell had been, that someone had been able to move and bind him without him waking. However, other than the heavy metal chaining him to the chair that he’s slumped in, nothing about his current situation is any worse than the filthy dumpster that he had fallen into before losing consciousness in his desperate need to rest.
He wonders who found him; what their reaction had been to seeing the last completed RM — known unofficially and across all Capture For A Reward posts as Kim Namjoon — wasting away among the trash.
He finally turns his attention to the men in the room with him. There are two, both sitting on either side of the only door. They’ve stopped speaking to each other to watch him, their faces blank and stiff. Namjoon knows immediately that they are afraid.
It takes less than a minute before the taller of his two guards — because that’s what they are — speaks. “What is your name?” he asks.
They already know his name, but Namjoon figures they’re testing him to see what kinds of lies he’ll tell.
“Kim Namjoon.”
“What is your age?”
“Twenty-eight years old.”
“Your animated age.”
“Nearing three years.”
“Why are you in Seoul?”
“I’m here to find my assigned family.”
His guard tilts his head, a single eyebrow pulled low so his whole face takes on a bitter emotion that Namjoon doesn’t know the name of.
“You mean Kim Junki’s family,” the shorter guard spits.
Namjoon forces himself to take a second. Not to calm down per se, but to change his usual answer to that jab. He’s in a delicate enough situation for him to acknowledge that saying "No, MY family" like he usually would is ill advised. “Yes,” he says instead. “They were his, but he is dead, and so now they are mine.”
The tall one leans forward. “RM’s don’t have families,” he keeps eye contact with Namjoon, presenting everything he says as a challenge. “You’re nothing but an expensive pet, monster."
Namjoon doesn’t allow his facial expression to move beyond the way he blinks slowly at this man, taking mental pictures and running them against all the information he’d seen on the current insurrectionist groups in Seoul. When he comes up blank less than a second later he figures that they must not be too worried about him hurting anyone if they’ve sent someone so low in the ranks that not even Namjoon has seen their picture before to guard him.
He’s still thinking of how to respond when the door opens and another man walks in. In the brief time that Namjoon can see through the opening, he takes in what looks to be a wide hallway and at least another two men standing guard.
“RM,” the newcomer greets, all false cheer. His tone is polite, but the heavy chains that bind Namjoon as well as the way he refuses to call him by name betrays how he — how everyone — feels about him. Namjoon runs this man’s face against his memories just to see if this is a man to watch out for. It only takes half a second to find it. Maybe he had been wrong in assuming that these people don’t think of him as dangerous after all.
“Kim Seokjin,” he greets back, matching the Seoul crime (and suspected rebellion military) leader’s cheery tone. If Seokjin is surprised at being addressed by name he only shows it with a barely there eyebrow raise. The tall guard behind him, however, leaps up and shows enough offense for everyone in the room.
“Don’t speak to him so casually, monster ,” he spits, like talking to Namjoon truly makes him sick. “You are nothing here.”
“And yet you obviously fear me,” he coos condescendingly back. He doesn’t know how long he’s been ‘asleep’, but he’d like to continue on his journey as soon as possible. His family will only stay in their current safe house for so long before switching locations again and he’d like to find them before it happens and this man is making his apparent interrogation unnecessarily drawn out.
The guard’s face twists in rage. “You一”
“Heongmin,” Kim Seokjin cuts in, his face still carefully cheerful. “Go get yourself some food.”
“But一”
“Nothing will come from you insulting him,” Seokjin asserts. He sounds so genuine that Namjoon takes a brief moment to wonder if the man doesn’t consider that addressing him as RM is, in fact, insulting. He immediately comes to the conclusion that Seokjin is just trying to get rid of the hothead guards. “It’s time for the both of you to switch out anyway. Go eat and get some rest.”
With some grumbling the two take their leave and are replaced by two more, though these are no ordinary guards. They carry themselves with an almost overbearing air of authority and go to flank Seokjin instead of sitting at the chairs that the previous guards had been occupying. Namjoon recognizes them almost as soon as they walk in.
Min Yoongi and Jung Hoseok. They’ve been on his father's (Junki's father, he mentally corrects) watch list for almost as long as Kim Seokjin has, but just like their leader no one has been able to pin them down for any actual crimes. Namjoon supposes that this situation would be enough proof.
If only he wasn’t on the run from government 'droid Cleaners himself.
Before he can dwell on that depressing thought for too long, Seokjin claps once to gather attention. “Well! Since you know me I’m assuming you know Yoongi and Hoseok as well.” He pauses, probably to wait for a response, but Namjoon doesn't give him one. Seokjin doesn’t seem at all put off by the lack of a reply. “So, what brings you here, RM?”
“Kim Namjoon,” Namjoon objects, trying for diplomatic but falling more towards irritated. Seokjin knows his name, he has no doubt about it.
His objection and insistence of his name seems to be what finally gets Seokjin to drop the cheerful facade. His smile smooths into a straight line and his shoulders rise from their false relaxation of before. He looks more like the war general he’s suspected to be when he speaks next, his voice cold and threatening. “Although I don’t agree with how Heongmin said it, he was correct.” He steps forward to loom over Namjoon. “You don’t have a name here, Resurrection Monster. We know what you are.”
Namjoon’s lip curls, matching the way that Seokjin drops all his false cheer. “I have a name wherever I go, Kim Seokjin. You denying it doesn’t make my identity void.”
“The self-identity of a Resurrection Android is meaningless,” Min Yoongi says from next to Seokjin. He has sharp eyes that remind Namjoon of the operators at the decommission facility. The eyes of someone who would disconnect Namjoon’s arm from his shoulder without even thinking to disengage his pain receptors first. “You say your name is Namjoon, but we all know who you really are.”
“You know who I am meant to be,” Namjoon snaps. “That is different.”
“No,” Seokjin says, and the straight bloodless line of his lips evokes in Namjoon’s mind the dead androids’ heads that used to be carted out of the facility late at night. Next to him, Hoseok stands straight and proud, his gaze refusing to catch Namjoon’s, not in fear but in disrespect. “I don’t think it is.”
He takes a moment to let that sink into the thick air of the room. The corner of his lips pulls up in a smirk that Namjoon immediately hates more than the emotionless line they were a moment ago. "Here's what's going to happen. We have questions for you. If you answer all of them honestly and without a fuss, we don't turn you out to one of the Cleaners that are at this very moment sweeping the streets for you. Understood?"
"Why don't you save us all the trouble and just throw me back into the dumpster you found me in?" Namjoon asks.
Hoseok's the one that answers. "You're a Resurrection 'droid." He spits the title like it's a curse. "We know you hold valuable information inside you, especially since your animation chip is more recent than other Resurrection Models we've come across."
Namjoon blinks, stunned. "You've met other RMs?"
Seokjin raises an eyebrow at the sudden shown interest. "Not recently. Does that matter?"
Namjoon thinks of the facility he'd escaped and all the different Resurrection Androids he'd met there. They had all known why they were being recalled. There was never an effort to hide the truth from them as their perfect compliance was always expected, even in the face of their own decommissions. He wonders how many others ran as the facility burned to the ground with the same flames that were meant to torch its prisoners.
"No," he finally says. He thinks of what it means for an android to stand still even as fire hot enough to melt metal is shot at them, and something inside him aches. "It doesn't."
The three men watch him silently before Seokjin nods. "So. It's a deal then?" It's stated as a question but everyone who hears knows that there is only one answer.
Namjoon knows that there's only one way for this to go, but he still draws his shoulders back and keeps his voice steady to say, "I want to contact my — Junki's — family."
Seokjin and Hoseok bark out surprised laughs that twist their features cruelly. Yoongi scowls and asks, "Do you think we're idiots?"
"I need to speak to them," Namjoon insists. "They need to know I'm alive."
Seokjin pulls himself together, but his features don't lose their cruel set. He steps forward and yanks Namjoon's head back by his hair, the sharp pain making the android blink rapidly as he stares into the man's eyes. "I should throw you to the Cleaners for even asking," he hisses. "I'll say it one more time: you're going to answer any questions we have and in return we won't hand you to the Cleaners or torch you right here in this chair. Do you understand me?"
Namjoon holds his gaze for a few seconds more before allowing his eyes to shut and his body to go limp in the chains and Seokjin's grip. There's nothing he can do here, no pride to be won. It's amazing that he's not dead already.
"Yes," he says, and images of the androids at the decommission facility flash behind his eyelids, their heads held high and shoulders perfectly squared even moments before they were engulfed in flames. He doesn't think he's ever had it in him to hold eye contact with his executioner. He really isn't Junki after all. "I understand."
He doesn't open his eyes again, not even when Seokjin releases his hair to pat him mockingly on the cheek. Not even when he hears all three men leave the room and two guards take position by the door. He watches the images of androids marching to their deaths flicker across his eyelids and wonders if this is what dreaming is like. He wishes, not for the first time, for the ability to sleep.
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The first time Resurrection Model 4991.219 ever opens its eyes, it is to the bright sterile lights of an android construction lab. A man stands above it with a datapad and stylus. He does not greet the brand new droid the same way he would greet a human.
“Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
“Waking up.”
“Oh excuse me, I should’ve been more specific. What is the last memory on Kim Junki’s animation chip?” The man asking the questions is tall. He never introduced himself, but RM4991.219 already knows that his name is Kang Youngjin because he met often with Junki when this android body was still being designed.
“Kim Junki’s final memory is of kneeling in the center of a wide road.”
Kang Youngjin smiles and nods before tapping something into the screen he’s holding. “Do you know what you are?”
The android closes its eyes and tilts its head back because that’s what Kim Junki would do when trying to remember something specific.
“I am a Resurrection Android, known here as Resurrection Model 4991.219 or RM4991.219. I have been assigned the likeness and animation chip of the late Kim Junki, who was shot to death by insurrectionists. He was twenty-five years old.”
Kang Youngjin smiles and claps, even though he does not have to. RM4991.219 would not be offended. Smiling and being polite are human concerns and the android is definitely not human.
“Very good! It seems that there are no problems with your animation chip or memory wiring. Now let’s see if you’re sufficiently mobile!”
____________________
He doesn't open his eyes for another day, and even then only opens them because he is asked a question.
"Do you eat?"
Namjoon blinks at the man standing in front of him holding two apples. He's one of the two new guards on shift, but Namjoon is instantly on alert in a way that he wasn't for the last two. Because just like their leader and Min Yoongi and Jung Hoseok, he knows these men.
Kim Taehyung and Jeon Jungkook.
Both wanted for the murder of various government figures. Both assumed dead after the bombing of the home they were confirmed to be hiding in produced two badly charred and disfigured bodies.
Namjoon looks up at these two very alive, very not-charred faces and thinks he would like to have a chat with whoever performed that autopsy.
Kim Taehyung shakes the apple in front of Namjoon's face to keep his attention. "Hey! Do you eat?"
"Leave him alone, hyung." Jeon Jungkook says from where he's slouched in his chair by the door. "Droids don't eat."
Taehyung looks vaguely disappointed. "Jimin said that he might." He pouts. If Namjoon didn't know who exactly he was looking at he would've taken this man to be an absolute idiot.
"Yeah? Well he lied. Droids don't even have stomachs."
Taehyung hmphs and turns to sulk in his chair. "This one might. He's a Resurrection Android after all."
They both turn to Namjoon.
"It's true," he says once he realizes they're waiting for him to answer. "I don't have a stomach."
Taehyung (murderer, assumed dead Taehyung) groans while Jungkook (also a murderer, also assumed dead) laughs loudly and mockingly at his disappointment.
"That sucks," Taehyung says to Namjoon.
"I'm... sorry?"
"I know you're not," Taehyung says blithely. It sounds innocent enough, but Namjoon knows what it means.
I know you aren't capable of feeling sorry.
He closes his eyes again and hopes he won't have to open them for the rest of their shift.
His inner clock tells him it's been exactly two hours since Taehyung's and Jungkook's shift started when he feels them shift to stand at attention, the door they're guarding swinging open for two more people to enter the room. It's not time to switch guards yet, but he only has to listen to the footsteps to know that one of them is Kim Seokjin returned, possibly for the interrogation Namjoon has been waiting for. Taehyung and Jungkook don't leave.
"Good evening, RM." Seokjin sounds like he's hosting a casual tea and chat. Namjoon doesn't have to open his eyes to know the man has assumed the same posture he held when they first met — the relaxed shoulders and false cheer. "Aren't you going to say hello to an old friend? He's missed you."
Knowing that ignoring him is futile, Namjoon braces himself and blinks his eyes open to meet the hard gaze of the newcomer, then instantly feels as if an ocean has crashed in on him. His head feels like it weighs more than his entire body. His ears are ringing. Everything inside of him very suddenly feels as if it has simultaneously frozen and burst into flames.
Before him stands Park Jimin.
Before him stands Park Jimin.
The man that executed Namjoon's animator, Kim Junki, three years ago.
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