Honestly, there’s a lot more to this, but I just needed to get it out of my head so I could focus on work. Now that it’s written down, I can go back to being productive 🥹

I just think it would be so cute to have little Ivan following Till around the rebel base. Sneaking into Till’s room every night because of nightmares. Waiting by the base entrance whenever Till leaves for supplies, sitting there until Till comes back. 🥺

Ivan steals Till’s pencil and hides it. At first Till is annoyed because original Ivan used to do stuff like this to bother him, but when he asks little Ivan why he did it, Ivan says he was sad and upset that Till wasn’t paying attention to him. That’s when Till goes, “Oh, so that’s why he did it.”

Like when Ivan gets upset because Till spends all day painting a portrait of Hyunwoo for Hyun (she always talked about him, and Till wanted to gift her something as a thank you for saving them)

And Till begins to show Ivan the care he never had before (the same care Till sometimes remembers receiving in dreams).Till also starts to understand original Ivan through little Ivan’s actions.

At first, Till is reluctant. But he starts to notice Ivan is more honest about his emotions now. He cries when he’s tired, smiles when he’s happy, he’s starting to act like the child he never got to be.

But at the end of the day, even though it scares him a little, little Ivan feels safe with Till. The sadness and cold feelings are less scary when Till is around. Slowly, Ivan stops hiding and trying to escape and follows Till everywhere. Cause of that, Till is tasked with looking after him.

The original Ivan learned to hide his feelings behind a fake smile. He never talked about them, never cared to understand them, he just pushed them down. But little Ivan doesn’t have that filter. He has all of Ivan’s feelings, but with no context or coping mechanisms.

But when Ivan finally sees Till, Ivan breaks down in tears. He feels warm, then cold, then angry. He tries to kick Till, then hugs him, and even tries to bite him. It’s a mess of feelings little Ivan doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t know how to act on them.

Till is also feeling guilt from R6, he wishes he could ask Ivan why he sacrificed himself, but now he can’t. He feels like he would never have a chance of truly understand Ivan.

Ivan acts like he’s back in the slums: hiding, scavenging for food (even when he is given food), trying to escape the base. At the same time, Till avoids Ivan cause he’s convinced Ivan will reject him like he does with everyone else, and deep down, it would hurt Till.

He lets Mizi approach him ( cause he somehow feels she is safe and she’s the one bringing him food), but he’s still wary of her. He’s terrified of Sua and hides whenever he sees her, feeling like he did something wrong.

This affected Ivan’s memories. He’s scared and confused because he remembers living in the slums but also has fragments of memories from when he was older. He can’t understand the feelings inside him or where they’re coming from, so he completely shuts down.

The thing is Ivan wasn’t fully developed yet when the rebels retrieved their bodies. He’s now basically a child, around the same age he was when taken from the slums (5? 6? more?) Sua on the other hand had enough time to develop fully into the body she had before R1.

So, a few days or weeks (idk) after R7 (where Till somehow lived long enough to get help from Hyuna, Mizi, and the rebels) they broke in again. This time they managed to save other humans used in the experiments, including Sua and Ivan.

In this idea, the information Hyuna was trying to retrieve had something to do with this, she suspected there might be a way to bring Hyunwoo back.

So let's say there was a way to bring Sua and Ivan back. (Basically, the aliens kept some of their DNA and worked on developing new bodies with the exact same characteristics they had, I mean if they made Luka they sure can do this too) they also managed to restore their original consciousness.