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“What will we do when the world finally ends?” Yoongi asks.
His hands are almost submerged in the small bucket. The faucet trickles continuously—little drops of water that falls with every heartbeat. The noise it makes is infinitely louder now; inside the small kitchen with its nearly boarded-up windows and the white noise of the cicadas outside.
Namjoon tweaks the radio until three pulses of static comes on. They talk of solar flares. It’s all everything they have talked about for the past few weeks. Namjoon still religiously listens, even when he knows it’s futile.
The station is now ingesting tidbits of prayers from every language. Between pauses of talks of solar flares are maxims of hope and repentance. Namjoon glosses over the last few syllables of Korean, but fixates on the new statement.
With every little pebble, I embrace the earth.
It has always been that way. Namjoon has embraced the earth for as far as he can remember. He walks its soil with reverence. He plants its seeds with faith.
The earth has failed Namjoon. It has weakened in his lifetime, and like all dust from the universe it will return to dust again. Namjoon and Yoongi will merely be an atom in its swirling mass of debris.
It is too late to get into details. It happened the way Namjoon knew it would. The sun will swallow the earth and in turn will be swallowed by the great unknown, until everything that everyone knows will be the same.
“What do you want to do?” Namjoon asks. He has left his place beside the radio to stand behind Yoongi and prop his chin over his husband’s bony shoulder.
For a moment, neither speak. It’s comical how they’re stood in front of a window where you can see nothing. Namjoon remembers the patch of shade and Yoongi’s cilantro garden. He knows outside is different now.
“I’ll put on my wedding suit.” Yoongi whispers. Namjoon chuckles before planting a hopeful kiss on his husband’s neck. “Cook a meal for two. Weave the plastic flowers around my hair.”
Namjoon hums. “Will we do a candlelit dinner?”
Yoongi laughs. A full-on belly laugh. “Don’t you think we have enough of flames?”
The radio sputters. It puts a brief spell from Namjoon nosing down Yoongi’s neck, talking about campfires and the great Olympic torch. Yoongi says he’s banning every little bit of fire talk—from puns to trivia. Never metaphors. Namjoon talks in metaphors, and Yoongi will not take that away from him.
“The world ends in an hour,” the radio speaks between intermittent beeping. “Signing off: the final transmission. Good night.”
They expected radio silence. Expected the mourning to sit tight below the gut, to wretch through the intestines until their insides swirl.
The next thing that comes, however, is a toothpaste jingle.
The toothpaste jingle becomes the voices of the three kids advertising sausage. Namjoon can vaguely remember the script, travels to the back of his mind to realize that the conversation took place sometime 2003. When he was merely a kid, still living in a capable world.
Namjoon holds Yoongi tight as all imaginable adverts and commercials from the past fifty years pour from the tiny sputtering speaker of the radio. They do not talk about it. Sometimes, Namjoon can hear Yoongi hum. At one point, he feels a tear drop to his finger.
He holds Yoongi tight until the commercials evolve to techno beats, to fully-realized English statements. Modern spins for the advertising. They recognize the chicken narration from a famous actor, and a drama-inspired spiel about a brand of soy sauce.
He closes his eyes to think of the world a week before. It was neither beautiful nor destroyed. It was there. It was the world Namjoon walked on, complete with Yoongi’s hands on his as they walk down the streets to their places of employment. It was its same parks and its same sidewalks, it was that little ttteokbboki stand they frequent before riding the subway home.
It was Namjoon’s world as he knows it—with Yoongi, until it isn’t.
But Yoongi is a constant. Namjoon has lost the flowers and the clouds and the small phonecalls from his mom. But Yoongi is here. Yoongi is stood in front of boarded up windows, weeping while the earth exhausts its last breath.
Yoongi holds him still.
The radio turns to a different tune.
Namjoon thinks back to the end of the world. Maybe it brings sickness. Maybe it brings delusion.
Because amidst the sweltering heat of the outside, he hears their song.
“Yoongi,” he whispers to his ear. “Do you hear that?”
Yoongi turns around, hands never leaving its grasp on Namjoon’s palms. He’s wearing a simple white tee, big enough to cover the hem of his worn shorts. It’s far from the wedding suit where Yoongi has special embroidered flowers by the holes of the buttons, but Namjoon still thinks he’s as beautiful.
“Dance with me?” Yoongi’s eyes shyly flutters, looking up at him.
Namjoon feels the first brand of tears sear white-hot tracks down his cheek. He nods with a watery smile. He’s sure his lips are trembling as Yoongi wraps his own arms around Namjoon’s neck, and Namjoon rests both his palms on his fragile waist.
They did a little sway. Namjoon is so sure some of his hair are sticking up. He cannot remember when was the last time he actually took a full shower. But Yoongi, shy little Yoongi, continues to look up. Traces every bone of his body with his lingering stare, whispering words of gratitude when he tips over to plant a kiss on Namjoon’s chest.
The song swells, and Namjoon feels its rhythm course through the space where his beloved’s lips whisper his final vow.
Stand beside it,the song croons, while Namjoon lifts up a hand to weave through Yoongi’s hair. We can’t hide the way it makes us glow.
The radio’s static increases a fraction before reverting to a crystal quality, much like before when the world is still in order.
And suddenly the kitchen is not surrounded by dying vegetation. Suddenly, the world feels anew as Namjoon takes Yoongi by the hand and spin him around while the latter’s little feet draw circles across the wooden parquet.
It’s no good unless it grows
Feel this burning, love of mine
Yoongi laughs as Namjoon gets carried away, stubbing a little part of his toe on the counter. They reconvene again the middle, under the hanged pans they received as a wedding gift from Yoongi’s cousin.
Deep inside the ever-spinning, tell me does it feel?
It’s no good unless it’s real
The instrumentation turns to a song in itself right around the time Namjoon pushes his body to slot his legs between Yoongi’s open thighs, catch the smaller’s back with an arm around his hips. He dips Yoongi to the floor and spins him once more, the latter’s giggling erupting all around the dusty kitchen as the song progresses.
Hillsides burning
Wide-eye turning
Till we’re running from it
They feel a little rumble erupt from the earth. It magnifies until the vibrations are enough to shake the shirts from their shoulders. All the materials they have amassed from living quietly in their little house dances as the foundation itself starts to uproot its hug on the recesses of the earth.
I’d take care of you
If you’d ask me to
In a year or two, oh
The world gives a great heave, as if palpitations have run its course, wracking little tremors on its lungs. Namjoon almost loses his balance as he pulls Yoongi up to a kiss, their hair tangling on each other. It tastes like the sweet cherries on Yoongi’s milkshake on their first date. It tastes like salt and brine like the summer sea they dipped their toes in last vacation.
It tastes like Yoongi, and the world falls quiet as the temperatures start to rise to astronomical impossibilities. Namjoon holds Yoongi close amidst the bone-chilling heat, putting out every word of every love song written as tiny little kisses on the seams of their lips.
“Yoongi,” Namjoon whispers, although it’s hard to be heard over the din of the world erupting to flames. Their lungs are coated with the smell of sulfur, and every syllable feels like a death sentence. “To here.”
Yoongi closes his eyes, and in something short of miracle, a final tear comes falling before evaporating in the earth. But not without coating his cheeks with a wonderful sheen, the last diamond on earth Namjoon will see before they disappear. “To after.”
I’ll take care of you
Take care of you
That’s true
The radio loses its volume as the heat melts its coppers. Above the lovers, with their clothes singed and bodies molded in an embrace, the kitchen rafters where they used to hang a mistletoe past December gives a great movement, until it falls down. Bodies swallowed by debris that quickly caught on fire, melting to the earth as smoke rises up to kiss the sky, where Namjoon and Yoongi and the world meets again, dancing their favorite song.