Chapter Text
The end of the world happens so quickly that most of humanity is gone before anyone can actually make sense of the carnage.
Jackson is well aware that he’s one of the lucky few, even if every single waking moment is dogged by the unease over the nebulous fates of his family and friends. The campus’s international dorm is mostly standing, after all, and he has Mark and Bambam to keep him from crumbling under the anxiety that gnaws at his insides and from trying to dash all the way to Beijing even though he knows it’s impossible - the roads are either too crowded or too destroyed to navigate.
He can’t even make it to his boyfriend’s parents’ home. It eats at him like nothing else, knowing that Jinyoung is at least in the same country but not being able to go find him - or, for that matter, Jaebeom, Youngjae, or Yugyeom.
(Jackson refuses to entertain the thought that any of them are gone. Nothing can stop Lim Jaebeom’s dreams or dull Choi Youngjae’s light, and Kim Yugyeom is their maknae, which obviously means that he’s going to outlive them all.
And Jinyoung, well. Park Jinyoung is meant for the big screens, and Jackson will find him after the dust settles and tell him all about how he never doubted Jinyoung for a moment - just like how he has always known that Jinyoung was made to be adored.)
That said, he knows the practical move is to stay in the room he shares with the other two-thirds of ATK and two more friends. The university’s remaining students and staff, the ones who hadn’t gone home for that ill-fated 4-day weekend, had rallied in the weeks after the catastrophe. One of the first moves had been to convert the former singles and doubles into rooms capable of housing three to five people each.
Jackson has a “job” as well, though money isn’t exactly super valuable now. Instead, it just means that he focuses on reading through pages and pages of information to write notes for each of his three daily radio broadcasts, dedicating free time to helping Mark’s team look for isolated survivors, taking inventory of the supplies with Bambam’s team, or sweating his ass off doing manual labor for Namjoon’s newly planted farm (which used to be the school’s massive gardens, before it all).
People have been surprisingly cooperative. Perhaps it’s the lack of zombies like in all the movies, but he had thought that there would be more violence, more infighting. In this case, though, he’s happy to be wrong.
Jackson checks the clock on the wall, a cracked analog timepiece pilfered from an empty campus classroom early on. He can’t be sure that anyone off-campus actually listens to any of the 2-hour sessions, but so many university residents have come up to him and thanked him for them that all the work is worth it anyways.
This broadcast, the last of the night (or, technically, the first of the new day, given that it is now 12 AM), is always Jackson’s favorite.
“Hello, listeners, 大家好, I’m Jackson Wang from China, and this is the late night edition of ‘Story Time with Seun.’ As always, I am recording this at Seoul National U, please feel free to come stay with the rest of us if you aren’t already.”
All of his information - about the world, about life on campus, about the stories people give freely - come from his team, with the exception of his own tales. Jackson had, at some point, affectionately dubbed the members of the small group Team Wang, wholly underestimating how much they would enjoy having a name to call their own.
“From what we know, everyone’s still trying to fix all of the roads and get more energy sources up. Communications should be the next goal right after that, so if you’re like me, and you’re waiting to find out what’s going on with people in other countries or even in other cities, hang in there. It’s coming.”
They leave the in-depth news to the appropriate radio channels, but he always takes the time to summarize his team’s findings on the state of the world before moving onto any university-related matters. Here, Jackson repeats the most important information during each of his three broadcasts but tends to go into detail about different topics, providing a bit of variety for himself and listeners that might be tuning in more than once a day.
“So Namjoon-ah told me that our farms, oh my God, it’s still weird to think that we have farms on campus now, but they are doing pretty good - they, uh, the farm team wanted me to let you guys know that they could always use more help, so if you have time, please head over and they will tell you what they want you to do. Honestly, I already help out, and some of the more tiring stuff is like doing a workout, so if you do this, then no gym is okay even if you want to keep in shape.”
The segment that he likes most, however, is also the broadcast’s main draw. It’s a compilation of stories, some of which are his own - stories of the times before everything fell apart, but also stories of the triumphs of now - whether they are small victories in the slow march towards recovery or little things that spark laughter and joy despite the dreary grief that comes from surviving an apocalypse.
“Probably, right now, there aren’t any jewelry places open. But Sungho-hyung asked our sculpture professor, Professor Jung, if you didn’t know already, to make a pair of rings while he and some of his friends secretly did her chores in return, and I got to see them before he proposed and oh my God, listeners. The rings are beautiful . Super gorgeous white and blue marble, and Professor Jung even donated one of her own necklaces to add a little rose-gold. They were so surprised, especially Sungho-hyung’s girlfriend. A lot of us cried at the proposal. Happy tears, though, happy tears!”
It is an hour of comfort. It is an hour of hope. Jackson has talked freely about how much the broadcast helps him - at the beginning, it had felt like a thin and tiny gauze slapped haphazardly over a huge, jagged hurt, insultingly ineffective. Now, however, the stories have become a balm to his fears, settling his heart in a way that makes it easier to talk and laugh and connect with people again.
“Mark-hyung found his card deck yesterday. I don’t know how they got into his mattress, but I don’t think I want to know. Me and my friends, we get crazy when we’re playing games, right? So there’s this one time we all like, okay, we’re drunk, and we decide to play BS. If you’ve never played BS, here’s how to play - let me know if you try it out, it’s so fun but it’s also. It’s kind of like Uno or Monopoly, it’s really easy to end up getting in a fight.”
He grins. The memory is a good one, even if the constant ache revs up into something harsher at the thought of his closest friends.
(At the thought of Jinyoung.)
“Everyone gets the same number of cards and you want to get rid of your hand. You put cards face-down in a pile, ace to king, and you choose how many to put down. But you can lie, like, you can say ‘two 8’s’ and then put down a 7 and a 10, something like that. If someone calls BS, you have to take the pile. If they call BS but you’re not lying, then they take the pile.”
Jackson’s looking forward to reminiscing with Bambam and Mark later. Maybe they’ll even rope their roommates into a game.
“So we were drunk and we’re already wild sober, so everybody kept calling BS on like, every turn. Every turn. Yelling at each other, ‘ya, why don’t you trust me?’ or ‘how could you do this to your hyung?’ Nobody made any progress, and we, uh, we, started trying to make alliances and offer bribes. Yeah. For a game of BS. I think Bambam even promised to buy dog stuff for Coco if Youngjae would stop calling BS on him. I said, I told him, ‘Bam-ah, you can’t trust Youngjae in these games,’ because he is like a cute little demon otter when it comes to these things, but he didn’t listen to me.”
He pauses. “Also, I was right. Youngjae can smack me the next time we see each other, but I was right and I am going to remind Bambam tomorrow that he should’ve listened to me.
“Any time anybody got close to winning, the rest of us would suddenly unite against him Avengers-style and play rock-paper-scissors to choose someone to call BS so that the loser would get the pile if he were telling the truth. It slowed down the game even more, but if you’ve listened to this broadcast before, you know. We play rock-paper-scissors for everything. Everything.”
The game is getting more popular on campus, a trend that Jackson likes to attribute to his broadcast, even though it’s probably not the reason.
“Jinyoungie is super competitive, he will cheat if he can, so he tried to look at my cards. I like, I slapped my cards down on the ground and he got insulted by that. Or maybe he was pretending, but he was pouting so hard and, oh my God. Listeners, my boyfriend was so cute. Acting like he couldn’t believe that I didn’t trust him, but of course I knew. Of course I knew . He’s a fox when it comes to games. Mark-hyung too, don’t trust Mark-hyung if you play this kind of thing with him.”
Mark will smack him for this later. Jackson is kind of looking forward to it, if only for the fleeting sense of normalcy.
“I kissed him - Jinyoung, I mean, because. Mark-hyung is my bro, even if we kissed back when I was a freshman once or twice. Yeah, that was...Uh. Anyways. I kissed Jinyoung-ah because he looked so cute, but we ended up making out instead of playing the game, so we both lost.”
Not that Jackson had felt like a loser at all. Not when Jinyoung had dropped his cards to press Jackson down onto the carpet hungrily, insistently, big, lovely hands warm on his cheeks as Jinyoung followed him down, the two of them kissing until they had to stop for air and then diving back in, paying no mind to the other guys’ disgusted yells for mercy and complaints over how much harder it would be to play out the rest of the game.
“I can’t wait for...for the next time we get to play again. We’ll make the loser do aegyo. God, I hope it’s Jaebeom-hyung.”
The 12 AM broadcast is the least popular broadcast by far, just going by his university audience. It makes sense - most people are either asleep or falling asleep by this time, especially since it is now more crucial than ever to wake up early and make use of the sunlight.
What that means for Jackson is that this is the perfect time to talk about Jinyoung. In the beginning, it had felt off-putting to be so honest and vulnerable in a broadcast. But now, it doesn’t feel quite as strange - not when the very few listeners who do actually tune in let him know that his longing and his heartache speaks to them, speaks for them, his words like a warm side hug where you can tuck your face into someone’s neck and feel understood, just for a little while.
And there is something about speaking his memories and dreams on air that makes them more real , makes them feel a little less likely to slip through his fingers, makes the fear that perhaps they never happened in the first place quieten to a whisper instead of a cry.
(He desperately hopes that Jinyoung is listening. That Jinyoung, somewhere out there in the wreckage of their former lives, has managed to tune in to this channel and find him. That Jinyoung, against all odds, has managed to hear Jackson’s attempts to tell him how much he misses him and all his hopes for their future.
That Jinyoung has managed to catch a single “I love you.”)
“Listeners, if you’ve been here before, you know that I miss Jinyoung. So much. If you don’t want to hear how much, then turn off the broadcast. Go to bed, goodnight, please come back tomorrow.”
Jackson takes a deep breath. Even if it’s less weird now, he still has to prepare himself to be open about something he would usually keep private.
“I really miss knowing that I could just see him any time I wanted, as long as it wasn’t like. Too early in the morning. Or not without coffee and food - actually, Jinyoungie wakes up just fine, it’s really so Jaebeom-hyung doesn’t get mad at me.”
They had discussed the possibility of rooming together next year. Jackson desperately hopes that they’ll still have the chance to.
“Jinyoung’s going to be a famous actor in the future, so I used to help him practice his lines. Got him to laugh a lot when we did that, but he’s always like, he’s always trying to hide his laugh and I’m just, why? Why?! It’s so lovely, why hide it? But I really can’t wait to hear it again.”
He doesn’t say it, but he knows everyone can hear the unspoken “if” looming ominously and silently, a lingering chill down his spine.
(In fact, he can’t say it. Not here, not when this is, above all, about hope. About every precious reason to slog forwards as humanity shakily rebuilds its existence from the ruins of their planet.)
“I want to hear his voice. Even if he’s complaining about meat again or trying to make me do the laundry even though it’s his turn. Hey. If you’re listening, don’t roll your eyes, you know it was your turn. You. Know.”
Honestly, he misses everything about Jinyoung. Sometimes, when he cannot get himself to fall asleep, Jackson simply rests with his eyes closed, playing the voicemails from his boyfriend on repeat as he tries to conjure up the way Jinyoung’s lips move around his name, around each relentlessly fond “Seun-ah,” and valiantly ignoring the way his heart falls when the image never feels quite right.
“I miss going out. We’re college students, it’s not like we were always going out-out or doing fancy things, but I miss being with him. Miss being close enough to hug, to touch. ”
The reminder of their casual intimacy from less than three months ago (how is it possible that only ten weeks have passed since the end of the world?) is enough to bring the hint of tears to his eyes. Jackson bites the inside of his cheek until he can control himself.
He misses the way their hands tended to find each other. He misses the way he could sling an arm over Jinyoung’s shoulders to hug him closer, misses the way Jinyoung held him close with loving, gentle hands whenever Jackson curled himself against Jinyoung’s side.
(Some of his favorite dates had been simply watching a movie together, the two of them pressed so close to each other that it was like they were on an armchair and not a couch, snacks and drinks within grabbing distance as they joked about the dialogue or laughed at dumb shit.)
But it’s going to be okay. He’ll get this back when they make their way back to each other. It’s going to be okay. It’s something to look forward to.
“I took Jinyoung to a Chinese restaurant I like a lot - they make the best braised pork belly and congee in Seoul, it’s so good. Really. A little more expensive than this other place I took Bammie to, which is good because I would never have heard the end of it otherwise.”
Jackson sighs. “Kind of makes me wish I did take him to a cheaper place now though.”
He looks over at the picture of Jinyoung he managed to print off of his cellphone in an abandoned literature classroom, gently trailing a finger down the still image’s cheek. It sits in a slightly cracked frame he managed to salvage, right next to the pictures of his family - both the family by blood and the family he found in Korea.
“I hope that they open again after...after everything. I want to take you there again, Jinyoung-ah. We can go on a date just like that one, even the table we ate at, and you can rub it in my face if you remember something I don’t.
And then, after that, if I was wrong, we can do it all again so we’ll both be right in the future.”
1: 57 AM. Jackson should wrap up.
“Okay, everyone who is not my Jinyoung but still listened up to here. Cover your ears for 30 seconds please. Be nice!”
He waits approximately ten seconds before he lowers his voice.
“I love you, Jinyoung-ah. I know I don’t have to say it for you to know , but I want you to hear me say it anyways. If I’m lucky tonight, I’ll get to take you out on that date in a dream. Like a preview of the real thing, to tide me over until we make it a reality.”
He’s looking at the photo as he speaks, trying to picture the way Jinyoung goes soft and pleased whenever Jackson tells him that he loves him.
Jackson takes a deep breath and smiles. It’s important to end the broadcast with one.
“Listeners, I always say this at the end of this session, but if you’re with your family, your friends, your loved ones, please tell them in the morning that you love them. Please let them know. I’ll do the same.
This was ‘Story Time with Seun.’ Goodnight, everyone. Sweet dreams.”