Chapter Text
"What would you do if you knew this was the last night of the world?" Jeongin blurted as soon as the call connected.
Felix blinked at him through the screen.
“Sorry?” He said after a moment, and Jeongin swallowed, leg bouncing machine-gun fast beneath his desk.
“If the world was going to end tonight, what would you do today?” He said.
“What would I do; you mean, seriously?” Felix asked, but it was pointless to ask. Jeongin’s wide eyes and uncharacteristically pale skin said it all.
“Seriously,” he said. “What would you do?”
Felix stared back at him wordlessly. His gaze was slightly off-centre, looking at his screen rather than his camera. It was comforting and disconcerting at the same time.
“I—I don’t know,” Felix said softly after a long moment, nibbling the edge of his thumbnail. “I hadn’t thought.”
“You hadn’t thought,” Jeongin repeated, his voice brittle. “Did you not have the—”
“I did,” Felix interrupted, his tone final. “Everyone did, didn’t they?”
Jeongin watched himself nod on the little screen, delayed by just a moment.
“Have you spoken to the others?” Felix asked, and Jeongin saw himself shake his head. “Why not?” Felix asked, and the little digital Jeongin shrugged.
“Have you?” He fired back, and Felix shook his head; they lapsed into silence.
Changbin and Hyunjin were the next to join, two little figures in one box. Jeongin was instantly sickened with the sort of burning jealousy most people never get to feel.
“So,” Hyunjin said plainly, and Jeongin frowned.
“‘So,’ what?” He asked. Hyunjin rolled his eyes, and Jeongin almost cracked a smile at his unfaltering sass. Almost.
“The end of the world,” Hyunjin said, shrugging one shoulder. He and Changbin were sat on separate chairs, half a foot apart, not draped all over one another like usual. Jeongin didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. He wasn’t sure if such a concept existed anymore.
“I can’t believe you’re not crying,” he said, for lack of anything better to say.
“I don’t see why I should,” Hyunjin replied, and Jeongin nodded in silent understanding.
Half a minute ticked by in silence. For once in their lives, they had nothing to say to each other. Or maybe they had too much, but not enough time to say it.
“What are you guys up to?” Changbin asked, voice strained with the effort of making small talk. Nobody replied, and Changbin sighed. “What time is it there?” He asked. That was his real question all along, Jeongin suspected.
“Two in the afternoon,” Jeongin said quietly.
“You have time,” Changbin said—as if that made any difference.
“I don’t,” Felix said, huffing an empty laugh. “It’s ten p.m. here already. Me and Ch—” His voice cracked, and he swallowed thickly. “Me and Chan will be the first to go.”
“And I’ll be the last,” Jeongin said, only realising it then. They would tick out of existence, one by one, as the night went around the world. The others—Chan and Felix in Australia, then the others in Korea and Japan—would go first, and Jeongin would be left alone until it was his turn. The thought struck him with panic, his pulse thrumming in his neck, in the crooks of his elbows.
At that moment, Chan joined the call.
“Speak of the devil,” Hyunjin said, without a trace of his usual humour.
“Felix,” Chan said, as soon as his audio connected. His hair was a mess—even more than usual—and he had his coat on, car keys in hand. He was standing up in front of his desk chair, bent over awkwardly to fit into frame. “Didn’t you see my text? I can—I can come to you,” he said, frantic. “There’s still time.”
Felix swallowed again, silent for a long moment as Chan watched the screen expectantly. Felix’s face was blank, and the quiet was deafening.
“To do what?” Felix said eventually, so quiet the microphone almost didn’t pick it up.
“I—I don’t know,” Chan stammered, looking shocked, untethered. Felix said nothing, expression static and unchanging. “I don’t know,” Chan said again, his voice getting quieter with every word, “I guess I just wanted to be with you.”
Jeongin watched Felix’s heart break, his face crumpling.
“I—there’s no point,” he said, voice wavering. “The traffic is—you’ll never make it here before—” He scrubbed a hand over his face, visibly forcing his broken pieces back into place. “I’d rather you stay here. With everyone.”
Only then did Chan even seem to register the presence of the others, and it was like he snapped out of some sort of trance. He blinked, eyes skittering across his screen, then swore under his breath, keys clattering loudly to the desk as he fell back in his chair, burying his face in his hands.
Nobody said anything, just sat there, watching or carefully not watching. There was nothing to say that they didn’t all already know.
“I’m sorry,” Chan said in the end, his voice rough. “You’re right, I—I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It’s okay,” Changbin said, a little too understanding. Jeongin’s eyes flicked to Hyunjin, then back to Changbin. He decided not to think too hard about it. “Do you know if the others are coming?” Changbin asked, and Chan froze.
“Uh… I don’t know,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, eyes fixed somewhere away from his computer. Jeongin didn’t judge him for not reaching out to the rest of them—he’d be a hypocrite if he did.
They sat for a while longer, in a silence that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. It was the purest silence Jeongin had ever experienced; he thought it might have been peaceful under different circumstances.
Then, two new video feeds blinked into existence on their screens at the exact same moment. Minho and Jisung blurred into view, and Jeongin’s eyebrows shot up.
Minho was crying.
Jeongin was sure that he could count the number of times he’d seen Minho cry on one hand, so seeing him now, face swollen and eyes red-rimmed, was an unpleasant surprise. Jisung’s face went from blank to concerned in a flash.
“Hyung,” he said, eyes widening. “Are you okay?”
Minho sniffed.
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Hannie,” he said flatly, and Jisung visibly winced.
“Sorry,” he said, and left it at that.
“Are you still in…?” Chan asked, trailing off in question.
“Osaka,” Jisung said, his voice heavy. “I was meant to be going to Tokyo tomorrow.”
If Minho let out a little, broken sob, nobody mentioned it.
In the background of his video, outside the window, a giant red-and-white tower was lit up like a fairground ride. Jeongin looked over the top of his laptop screen and saw an almost-identical construction looming over the city—a day ago, it was a symbol of love and romance. Now, a bitter reminder of his isolation.
When the final empty grey rectangle appeared, with its little ‘Seungmin is connecting to audio…’ tag, every muscle in Jeongin’s body tensed. The tendons stood out of his neck, and his fingernails dug into his palms. He didn’t register the pain, nor did he register the pitying looks on everyone else’s faces.
When Seungmin appeared in the box, all that painful, straining tension loosened, at the same time as Jeongin’s heart dropped.
Seungmin was smiling.
Why was he smiling?
“How about that stupid conspiracy theory?” He said in lieu of a greeting, and the bottom fell out of Jeongin’s stomach.
“C-conspiracy theory?” Hyunjin breathed after a moment.
“It’s ridiculous,” Seungmin said, not missing a beat. “They lifted it all from a Ray Bradbury story from the fifties. The dream, the voice—everything.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t understand why so many people are believing it.”
There was a long pause as each of them took in the information. Chan’s face stayed carefully blank, while Minho’s head snapped up, an accusatory glare in his bloodshot eyes. Changbin’s eyebrows drew together in a frown, while Hyunjin’s mouth fell open in shock. Jisung’s eyes widened, while Felix just looked down at his lap and sighed.
For his part, Jeongin just stared. It might have been disbelief which had him blinking, eyes skating over Seungmin’s tiny, pixelated face; or, he might have been desperately trying to memorise the fold of his eyelids, the curve of his cheek, while he was still smiling. He pinned Seungmin’s video.
“Because they had the dream too,” Hyunjin said quietly, voice tinged with confusion—and rightfully so; Seungmin was the first person any of them had heard of who didn’t believe it. Now, he scoffed.
“They think they had the dream too,” he corrected, gesturing to his head, and Jeongin frowned. Seungmin's shirt cuff was undone. “It’s mass hysteria,” he said, shrugging.
Another long silence stretched out between them, Seungmin eerily nonchalant while the rest stared on in confusion, in disbelief, or in horror.
“I had the dream.” Changbin was the first of them to say it.
“Hyung,” Seungmin said, fondly exasperated. “You—”
“I did, too,” Hyunjin said, and Seungmin gave him this horrible, pitying look that made Jeongin’s stomach turn.
“With all due respect,” he said, “I can imagine Changbin telling you he—”
“We all had it,” Chan cut in, silencing Seungmin instantly. Chan quirked an eyebrow, unimpressed by Seungmin’s apparent smugness. “Didn’t you?”
“Me?” Seungmin laughed, shaking his head. “You think I’d fall for a ridiculous Internet hoax like—”
“Did you have the dream,” Chan asked flatly, “yes or no?”
“Did I have the dream,” Seungmin repeated, and Jeongin wondered if he was the only one who noticed that his conviction was waning. “The dream that everyone had,” Seungmin said theatrically, “where the spooky God-voice tells you that the world’s gonna end—”
“It’s a simple fucking question!” Felix blurted, blank expression finally cracking into a scowl. “Are you gonna answer it? Or are you just gonna sit here and—and mock everyone who did have the dream? Is that what you’re gonna do? Act like you’re above us?” He scoffed. “You’re gonna waste the last hours of your life alienating the people who love—”
“Of course I had the dream!” Seungmin yelled, and they all fell silent. “Everyone had the fucking dream! But it doesn’t—it can’t—I need—it—it doesn’t mean anything! Okay!?”
Jeongin blinked. Seungmin was shouting loud. Louder than Felix. Louder than Jeongin had heard him shout before. So loud that it came through the microphone all distorted and robotic. The strange, synthetic sound rang in Jeongin’s ears, filling their stunned silence with echoes of the outburst.
Jeongin didn’t know if it hurt more or less that they couldn't quite make eye contact through the screen.
“Seungmin,” Chan said eventually, his voice level. “How can it not mean anything?”
Seungmin blinked in disbelief.
“Have you all lost your minds?” He said, slow and quiet. “It’s a dream. Logically speaking, it has absolutely no bearing on anything that happens in real life. Do you not understand that?”
“Everyone had it,” Minho said, his voice wet and miserable. “The same dream. Everyone. That already defies logic.”
Seungmin seemed to notice, right then, that Minho had been crying. He faltered, just enough for Jeongin to notice, then gathered himself again.
“We don’t know everything there is to know about human psychology,” he said. “Chances are, there’s a perfectly scientific explanation for—”
“Seungmin, please,” Changbin said, looking pained. “It’s almost eleven in Sydney. We don’t want to spend our last hours together arguing, if—if it’s true. Please.”
Seungmin paused, staring at the screen blankly for a moment. Jeongin could see Minho’s slumped form reflected in the whites of his eyes.
“Yeah,” Seungmin said, suddenly looking exhausted. “Yeah, okay.”
The conversation moved onto lighter topics, then—what everyone had done today, where they’d been, who they’d seen. They talked about it all as if it wasn’t potentially the most significant day of their lives, and they ignored whenever Minho muted his microphone, turned off his camera, and came back minutes later, eyes freshly red and nose rubbed raw.
Somewhere around midnight, Chan yawned, and Felix cleared his throat, glancing off to one side.
“I… I think me and Chan should go to bed,” he said, and the rest of them froze.
“Bed?” Jisung said, eyes wide and panicked.
“Yeah,” Felix said, picking at his fingernails.
“Why?” Hyunjin asked. Felix bit his lip.
“I just…” He cleared his throat again, the sound thick. When he spoke again, his voice was small and frail. “I was thinking… I don’t think we want to be awake when…” He trailed off as realisation dawned on the others’ faces. “And I don’t think you guys—you know, I don’t think we should be… on camera…”
“Oh,” Jeongin whispered, horrified.
“Yeah,” Felix said. “So I’m gonna go.”
“Alright,” Changbin said, the word coming out forced.
“Bye,” Felix said. They repeated the farewell back to him, a chorus of hollow voices.
“I love you,” Chan said suddenly, but Felix was already gone. Chan sighed, the light all gone from his eyes, and left the call. Jeongin’s chest felt like a huge, gaping hole.
“Right,” Jisung whispered. His hands were shaking.
The conversation was threadbare after that, thin and stilted. Over the next hour, Jeongin watched as Minho’s tears dried, as Changbin’s jaw clenched, as Jisung went quiet, as Hyunjin’s eyes grew impossibly sad. All of them were in the same time zone, except for Jeongin.
“Are you gonna be okay, Innie?” Hyunjin whispered, when his own clock showed ten to midnight. Jeongin’s own was only just approaching five p.m., the sun shining red-orange through the narrow window of his hotel room.
“Yeah,” Jeongin said, shrugging a shoulder. It wasn’t a lie, as far as he was aware. He felt numb, strangely unaffected by it all.
“Okay,” Hyunjin said, and they left it at that.
They all logged off, one by one, with brief, throw-away goodbyes, just like Chan and Felix. Jeongin supposed he would’ve done the same; anything grander would hurt far too much.
Seungmin was the last to leave, only by a second.
“See you soon,” he said, smiling, and then he was gone.
Gone.
Jeongin was glad of it.
He was glad Seungmin didn’t see the way he folded in on himself, crumpling like he’d been hit in the stomach. He was glad Seungmin didn’t hear the first horrific, painful sob that tore its way out of his chest, echoing off the empty, white walls.
He was glad Seungmin didn’t see the way he slid down onto the floor, knees hitting the hardwood, body sagging over the seat of his chair, tears wetting the intricate brocade. He was glad Seungmin didn’t hear the way he screamed their names, one after the other, to the empty room.
He was glad Seungmin didn’t hear his own name, cried over and over until Jeongin’s voice ran out and he slumped to the floor.
Kim Seungmin. Seungmin-hyung. Seungmin. Seungmin, Seungmin, Seungmin.
Jeongin stayed there, cheek resting on the heavy damask rug, the leg of his chair digging into his back. His eyes roamed listlessly around the room, from the floor-length curtains to the out-of-use fireplace to the chandelier to the chaise longue.
He watched the sun slip lower and lower, grateful when it dipped below the windowsill and stopped burning his eyes. He watched the very top of the Eiffel tower light up, loath to stand up and see the rest. Why should he? Love was dead. Jeongin’s was, anyway.
As the moon rose over the city, dripping its mercury into the river and pressing silver leaf onto the rooftops, Jeongin fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.