Bird of Paradise • taekook

Eighteen

The Farm has always given Taehyung the cold shivers.

On the exterior, there's nothing heinous about it, if he's to be perfectly objective. Camp Peary is the official name of the facility, a vast 9000 acres of military reserve outside of Williamsburg, Virginia, mostly undeveloped and filled with rustling white oaks and sugar maples that turn crimson and gold in the fall.

Initially set up as a naval training base during WWII, various buildings now dot the facility, giving it almost a campus feel. It was only when Taehyung began covert ops training, that he realized what peculiar functions each unassuming building carried out. There was a brownstone set up to be a fake US embassy for surveillance training, a town square area where agents practiced making initial contact with target personnel, and a living quarter where their sleep could be interrupted at any hour to handle an "imminent threat". There was even a mock news channel resembling CNN, where snippets of info are broadcasted throughout the day, some of which are critical to them passing specific tests of the training.

Taehyung never bothered complaining about how useless it is to put a hacker through all the grueling training, never gave any of his handlers the satisfaction of watching him suffer. He knew, long before dozens of armored SWAT police stormed through the door of his parents' idyllic seaside abode, that this day would ultimately come. The price to pay for not only joining the world's most well known decentralized hacktivist collective, but also being the youngest organizer of LulzSec, the Anons group that took down various FBI and CIA sites and distributed emails and passwords of political figures through public domains. The irony is not lost on him, for the glory of spreading anti-surveillance and anti-censorship affinity throughout the world, for the ways they stood up against the tyranny of government control, his punishment is the stripping of almost all of his personal liberty, and to serve the very organizations he rallied against.

Training at the Farm span for many months, with various agents entering and exiting, each carrying a peculiar moniker to conceal their real world identity. When Taehyung was "promoted" to an unknown shortlist somewhere, Hoseok added a few personalized training courses that were much harder to swallow. There's an entire building near the old naval shipyard called the Row, where Taehyung had to go through mock interrogations, sometimes under the influence of debilitating chemical substances. He also had to watch endless footages of real interrogations, with every method labeled and explained. And execution recordings, for days and weeks, until the sounds and sights started to blend into his nightmares. That was the first time he finally snapped, charging into Hoseok's oversized office, demanding to know why these excruciating trainings were necessary.

Hoseok curled his lips in his signature cheerfully teasing way, "You tell me why. Give me the right answer and I'll graduate you out of the training right away."

Taehyung gritted his teeth and stood there, fuming and gasping for air, until the words could no longer be contained, "Because you want me to be desensitized to it all. I was wired for psychological testing every single minute of the way, you want to be sure I can make rational decisions no matter what I witness."

Hoseok's grin widened. But to Taehyung's reluctance, he also spotted something else in Hoseok's gaze, something stern and ernest, "And?"

Taehyung didn't want to say it, didn't want to give voice to the creeping realization on his mind, but he couldn't go back, not after weeks of forced sleep deprivation and phantom screams echoing on his mind, so he spat the words out with head lowered, "And you want me to observe the tells."

Taehyung had always been good at spotting the tells, those subconscious gestures each person makes that give away their thoughts. Growing up in a family that judged him for being so different provided plenty of practice. Getting into coding was probably his brain's way of staying away from it all, the millions of human cues that made him feel self conscious. That is, until he realized working with Anons required even more astute observation of subtle cues: the pauses in texts, how people's insecurity is manifested by the roundabout way they hide their code logic.

The tells. They become eerily apparent in the face of terror and pain: how some cling to loyalty and honor to the last trembling twitch, despite their downcast gaze for they cannot lie. Others snap in one critical moment and give into despair, their breaths turning shallow and inward, willingly dimming their own life force. Taehyung watched and understood it all, the language radiating from each person in the videos that was louder than the screams, for it came from a place far deeper.

Hoseok's gaze bore onto him at the response, as if he saw Taehyung for the first time. He hummed, softening his features into something fond, before replying with the same casualness as ordering a coffee, "The tells, yes. Never look away. And that concludes your training, V. Welcome to my team."

It was then, after training, that Taehyung realized the real missions were far more difficult. For it was no longer a phantom image being affected by his decisions, but people of flesh and blood, some he couldn't help but care for.