She brushes her palm across his cheek, the band around her finger is a painful glide along his skin, still a vibrant angry red. “You’re going to be okay,” her voice is soft and sure but when Jongsuk looks up he doesn’t see her eyes, just the faint glow of a cracked blue eating his vision. When he thinks of his mother, he remembers snarling black devouring her pallid face. She doesn’t smile.

When Lee Jongsuk thinks about his childhood, he remembers the broken pieces, and what’s made of destruction is what is left. There are only a few happy moments— blurs of time beneath his eyelids or streaked down his cheeks when he chews the ash of a cigarette because he’s a pussy. He is told he has to become nothing—feel what nothing feels like in order to be something.

His father — is all flaring temper, meticulous planning and slightly dim in the head when it comes to drowning, not in alcohol (  If they could afford it, it was there but never in front of his boys since real men don’t drown their crying in alcohol, they drown it with hate and war, ) just the misfortune that makes up his long miserable shit-stained life. ( and those are his words, his drawn out soliloquies. don’t be a shit stain, don’t be a bitch.) A war mongrel, post traumatic stress disorder sewn into his brain but it’s the loneliness, the contempt that melts his rational thought processes and forces military ideals down his son’s throats.

Jongsuk is dedicated to his brother.

Minki is the mirror image of their father, if anything an acid spitting fire compared. Minki is dedicated to the rebellion and Jongsuk becomes the outlash; the inner turmoil, the wreckage that Minki treads upon. For Jongsuk his brother is the rebellion, he’s much more than Jongsuk believes he deserves. When Minki touches his bruises or his broken body with a tenderness only meant for him, Jongsuk is shipwrecked, choking on salt water and hurt.

It’s not the war the fuels Jongsuk or even the flimsy monarch the rebels build their justice on. He doesn’t give two shits about equality, or acceptance. He is Zero for his brother alone. Zero is a force, a massacre, everything and nothing at the same time. Zero consumes everything in its path.