Chapter Text
Khun stares at the page. The lighthouse cursor blinks back from the empty fields. The cold blues of screen-light and irises reflect into each other until Khun breaks the staring match with a sigh and rubs his eyelids. The pocket floating beyond the screen flashes 03:00. In four hours, the team is meeting for his final briefing – and he still doesn’t know what to tell them, dammit.
Between gathering counterintelligence on FUG, digging for intel on the secretive test two floors ahead, and revising training schedules to keep pace with each teammate’s rapid growth, researching the floor test awaiting them always slid off one day’s to-do list and onto the next. Except now, there are no days left to buffer Khun from confronting his failure to plan perfect contingencies for the 58th-floor bloodbath.
The thought of Bam’s forgiving eyes in the morning makes Khun cringe into himself, tucking his knees up to his chest, a huddle on a cubic perch. “It’s okay, Khun-ssi, you’ve done so much already to prepare us for the tests,” the brunette will say. “You always know just how to adapt plans to direct us in the moment," he’ll smile, projecting a heartfelt confidence in Khun that this moment – 3am on test day with a blank void in place of a strategy – has just betrayed.
You’re destined for great things!
You’ll surely go far once Headon picks you!
You are without a doubt in the top 1% of minds I’ve taught!
Congratulations, this is the first perfect score for this test!
I’ve never seen such exceptional strategy, but then again I expected nothing less from you!
All this sickening praise going back as early as Khun can remember, hoisting a blue boy up on a pedestal he never cared about. It’s windy and lonesome at the top, but there’s no way down and nowhere safe to rest, so all he can do is keep climbing. When the baseline expectation is to break every record, there’s no way to exceed expectations. Pulling off the impossible has become mundane, merely a prerequisite to survival until the next challenge. Anything less represents failure, and from this high up, failure comes with a long, long fall.
Is that how it felt for Bam to fall? No, don’t think about that, stay on topic.
In moments like these, Khun sometimes wishes he could break down. The physiological aspects of a panic attack admittedly sound unpleasant, but the loss of control appeals in a way – wouldn’t it be cathartic to lean in to this desperation entirely? Wouldn’t it be a relief to bear these fractures externally, visibly, so everyone would finally stop piling all their petty problems on their overburdened lightbearer? If Khun is going to fall, why not feel the breeze on the way down?
But Khun doesn’t break. Ever. He supposes he lacks the constitution for such melodrama. Khun doesn’t break, but right now he also can’t function, which leaves him between a blank screen and a floor test with the pocket illuminating 03:07. Goddamn. That’s seven minutes wasted of the 420 he had left.
What can he do in 413 minutes?
He doesn’t have enough information to assemble a strategy, or if he does, his purportedly genius brain can’t put the pieces together. It would take a solid half hour to post to the lightbearer chatrooms from his various alt accounts in a last-ditch effort to sleuth more information, and the probability of getting a useful reply in time is too low to justify that. Seems the best an underprepared lightbearer can do is work off the cuff, coining tactics on the fly mid test. In that case, these remaining 411 minutes are best used to coax his brain to the most acute state he can salvage. Three hours of rest should earn him two REM sleep cycles. Sparing 15 min to prepare for bed and turn his thoughts off, that leaves…wait. Four hours is 240 minutes, not 420. Fuck, he’s really in no condition to coordinate a team test. Alright, 229 minutes left: allocating 15 for wrapping up and 180 for sleep leaves 34 to pull himself together in the morning before facing the team. Workable. He’ll just use dry shampoo instead of showering, like he has the past…how many days?
Khun slips under the covers in six minutes. The softness chafes against his sore limbs, highlighting how much the adrenaline–fatigue cocktail has tensed every muscle. He’s relegated the pocket to invisible mode and doesn’t notice the time when he finally loses consciousness.