Archive of Our Own

SPRING SUICIDE IN SOLITUDE!

It’s dark outside. Kai is counting his teeth again. 

Just to make sure he still has them all. The air is rotten, sicksweet. Like the smell of old roses carried on a spring breeze. Delayed. Who’s to say that the death in the air isn’t enough to seep past the worn enamel and into his nerves? Back into the roots that this life forsook. 

The flat cliff-edges of his top incisors. Four up, four down. The cuspids Beomgyu used to tease him for; down, boy. Beomgyu doesn’t do that anymore. He doesn’t do much of anything that isn’t sharpening his knife or mourning abandoned houses. Sometimes he smiles. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes, most times, he turns his face away from Kai. 

Perhaps Beomgyu believes his grief too, is contagious. Like this rot in the air.

The dips and knolls of his pre-molars. He stares at the dip of Beomgyu’s hips, turned away from him. Even in his sleep. His silence choking the elements with its vehemence. 

They will have to move tomorrow. The food supply they snagged from back in their hometown wasn’t much, and though it’s only been two weeks, it’s already running out. Two weeks of Beomgyu’s haunting. Two weeks of Kai trying to make him laugh. Two weeks since— 

Eight molars. Not yet twelve. Perhaps, maybe, not ever twelve. 

He won’t sleep. Beomgyu said to wake him up for his watch, but Kai won’t. Heavy is the head that bears the grief. He’ll let him sleep the night away. It’s the least he can do, if he can’t chase away the shadows by day. 

+

With the dawn, comes that fiery anger. So like the teardrop red sun in the sky. 

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” is the first thing Beomgyu says, after sitting up robotically. 

He wakes with the sun now, when just a few months ago Kai had to tug the sheets out from under him to even get him to stir. His voice has none of the fire it used to have, just a dull, steely ire. Kai doesn’t answer, simply folds up his blanket. 

(Kai doesn’t even think he misses it. There’s that empty hole in his chest.)

His silence makes Beomgyu angrier. How ironic. “Now, you’re sleep-deprived, I’m sluggish. How do you think we’re going to survive out in the goddamn wide-open nothing out there?” 

Kai forces a smile. As if he could ever be scared of the wide-open nothing when that itself has replaced his best friend, stolen away all his gentleness. “I just wanted you to get some rest.” 

Beomgyu’s face hardens. “You can’t— you can’t just do that. Don’t let your pity get in the way of your survival. Just. Just let it be fair, okay?”

“It’s not pity, hyung,” he replies. It’s not the point, but Kai needs him to know. “It’s not pity.” 

“Doesn’t matter.” The way his head turns away, again, in hiding, suggests he thinks otherwise. “Don’t do that from now on.” 

I’m sorry, Kai wants to say. “I just wanted you to sleep,” he repeats. Like a broken wind-up doll. 

“I know.” Beomgyu stands up, yanks on the creaky shutters until he’s silhouetted by the weak apocalyptic sun. He doesn’t turn to look at him. “It’s okay, Kai. I understand.” 

“Are you?” Kai blurts out before he can stop himself, rubbing at the half-moons under his eyes. Itchy. Springing with tears of sadness and of sleep. “Are you okay?” 

Beomgyu smiles slightly. It twists on his face like taffy. “Don’t ask useless questions, now.” 

Kai silently does the morning check. He doesn’t know whose house this used to be, but they fled some time ago. In a hurry, too, evidenced by the tea-stained mugs left in the granite sink, oil splatters dried up on the abandoned stove. They should’ve taken the stove, but perhaps they couldn’t. Perhaps whoever lived here got turned and simply walked out. The forced lock on the front door supports that, though Beomgyu tied a piece of rope to the door handle and looped it around the steel bars atop the windows last night so that it couldn’t be forced open again. 

The steel bars were meant for curtains. It must’ve been summer when the house was abandoned, because they’re bare. Flecked with paint stains and reeking of dereliction. 

“Someone must have been here before us, y’know,” he calls out to Beomgyu. “They washed the dishes but left them in the wrong place.” 

By the wrong place, he means arranged in a half-hearted checker all along the kitchen floor. Kai doesn’t quite have the heart to clean that up. It’s mundane, it’s so heart-breakingly mundane. He wonders what that person must’ve been thinking—to wash another person’s dishes in an active apocalypse. How lonely they must have been, to play hopscotch on the floor. Alone.

“Washed the dishes in an apocalypse.” Beomgyu appears in the doorway. “Maybe to make up for the fact that that bitch took all the food from here.”  

“Not the stove,” Kai comments. “Why?” 

“It’s two burners. You can’t lug that around with you if you’re going to move. Besides, it’s not electric. It’s useless without LPG and surely no one’s lugging around an entire gas cylinder.” 

Kai eyes the grease-stained bars of the windows. So many windows. This place must have been so bright, once. “Should we clean the plates up?” 

Beomgyu shrugs. “Do what you want to. I’m gonna search the bedrooms.”

He leaves without sound. Beomgyu, quiet. That should’ve been the first sign of the apocalypse, except it arrived after. Delayed like this year’s spring.

Abandoned houses have no eyes. Or hearts. Kai lets the plates be and sinks to his knees on the tiles, sitting in a would-be heartbreak of the greatest magnitude. 

+

Kai sees Beomgyu out the door. 

There are no morning birds to distract them from the suffocation anymore. Beomgyu squeezes Kai’s hand briefly, his knife in the other. It seems so little against the face of the whole sleeping world, now. Beomgyu seems so small, standing there. 

“You know what to do if I don’t return by nightfall.” 

Kai would rather not think about it. But he nods. “Yes. Be safe, hyung.”

He nearly says, Please come back. But he won’t. Begging never amounts to anything at all. It’s sometimes better, to let go impassively. To choose the coward’s way out, to shield the tissues of your heart. Against the breaking of the December ice. 

Beomgyu nods once. He turns around, and doesn’t look back once. 

Kai ties the knot of the rope-lock tighter and tighter behind him. In his head, he imagines it to be somebody’s neck. 

+

Yeonjun used to wake with the sun. 

Kai remembers how appalled Beomgyu always was when he checked his phone for messages and saw a good morning! timestamped before 6 AM. There was only one who’d ever even dare. Kai got them too, sometimes. 

It’s not even as if Yeonjun enjoyed it—waking up that early. He would constantly be yawning, nodding off in the cafeteria. Endless complaints about the woes of ‘working too hard’ into the small hours, which Kai interpreted to mean ‘crying over romcoms’. Barreling facefirst into the dawn. If the sun ever woke up, perhaps Yeonjun would be the one spared from the plastic heat. 

It’s nice to imagine a universe where he was. Never in this washed-up suburb they call a world, but somewhere. Somewhere nice and golden. 

Beomgyu said there was nothing of value in the bedroom. But lately value to him has been practicality. They’ve lost touch with each other, where the things that would interest Kai would bear mentioning. So he checks by himself. 

His heart hurts the second he opens the door. 

The place seems frozen in time. The sheets are still messy, there’s planetary rings made by coffee mugs on the cluttered desk. There are photos thumbtacked to a corkboard, a broken dreamcatcher hanging still and silent. Towels embroidered with traditional motifs he doesn’t recognise, strung up over the headboard. Perhaps they’d been left to dry there. The shutters are pulled shut, but the windows face east. 

Kai doesn’t look at the photos. Something in him still feels ashamed.

He approaches the desk with the caution of poking a sleeping bear. You never know what memories might jump up at you for the kill; be they your own, or borrowed. All of Kai’s memories feel borrowed, stolen. Everything golden, and not-his. 

They were never his, were they? They were always Beomgyu’s.

Yeonjun was always Beomgyu’s. And vice-versa. Try as he might, Kai will never patch the rips nor tape up the gash in their hearts. Who knows whether he can even stay. 

Loose sheets of paper are piled up on the desk haphazardly, filled from edge to edge with a child’s scribbles. A hat meticulously drawn in hard-pressed pencil, or maybe that’s a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. Kai reaches out to trace a hand over the curve of it, whatever it is. To check if it’s real. Strange, how this bedroom is definitely not that of a child’s, yet there are a child’s things dotted everywhere. A few red and blue building blocks under the bed. Those plastic rings you have to stack in decreasing order of size. Drawings, over and over. 

Kai turns to leave. He can’t stay here a second longer. 

+

Something cracks in the brambles. 

Kai’s breath catches in his throat. He whirls to the windows by the front door, crouching down far enough that he can’t be seen from outside. He tries to peek out at the overgrown garden out front by angling his head just enough. Nothing. Just the wide-open nothing and the glossy green leaves of whatever-the-hell that spindly tree is. Spring was unfair here, too. The weeds and some trees are thriving, while others are still left bare. Crouching in shame. 

The sound comes again. Sharper this time. From the opposite direction. 

Turn your head, Kai says sternly to himself. Turn your head and look at what could be there. You coward, just look.

He can’t. The panic in his heart crests over like seafoam, bubbling over the shores of his ribcage. Eight incisors. Four canines. Eight pre-molars. Eight molars. Eight, four, eight, eight— 

You can’t let Beomgyu come home to this. 

Kai snaps his neck around fast enough that he doesn’t have time to think it through. Wide-open nothing. Some weird flowering tree. Nothing in the branches. 

Now that he’s swallowed his brain and looked, he can’t look away. He scans the shadows of the branches and the leaves feverishly, robotically, for anything. Something to replace the yawning pit of terror with. To curb the realisation that he’s all alone. 

He is alone. He can’t even recognise Beomgyu anymore.

He swallows, stands back up. Just a squirrel, he tells himself. Or a bird. 

(Kai doesn’t remember the last time he saw a squirrel. Or heard birdsong.) 

He ties the rope-lock even tighter and picks up the plates from the kitchen floor. 

+

Some part of Kai wants Beomgyu to dance. 

He had loved to; back when there was still a Yeonjun to fall back upon and music to be heard and an audience to watch with their jaws hinged upon, eyes punched a cartoonish starry with awe. Beomgyu had many things to be proud of himself for, but it was dance he cherished the most. 

Beomgyu had told him once, about how he had helped Yeonjun and Soobin move all the furniture in their cramped apartment just to dance. How happy he’d looked as he recounted the tale. 

Kai hasn’t seen that smile for two weeks. It feels like two eternities. 

The naïve appendage stuck inside Kai’s ribcage believes that oh, if he just dances, it’ll all be all right. It’ll patch Beomgyu’s broken wings and they can go back to the way things were.

It’s wishful thinking, of course. Things can never go back to what they were, not with— 

Knock-knock. Knock. Knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock. 

Two, one, two, three. 

Kai rushes to the door. 

His heart stops screaming when he sees Beomgyu outside, face grim and tired, but by God, alive. Quiets down as it always does. Andante to andante, pulling Beomgyu inside, closer.

“Are you hurt?” 

“No.” Beomgyu shrugs off the backpack he stole off Soobin. Kai takes it without a word, watching as Beomgyu turns around and ties the rope as tight as his shaking hands allow. He clasps his hands together defensively when he feels Kai watch them quiver. “It’s fine. I’m just— frazzled.” 

They drag in the two chairs placed around the square table and push it up against the door for good measure. Kai doesn’t think it’ll help much against a stampede, but hey. Delusion is the mother of safety. He places the gaudy zebra-patterned bag down quietly. 

Beomgyu’s knees hit the floor with a sound like a gunshot. 

Kai lets him fall. Then he joins him.  

“It’s all right,” he whispers to the tip of Beomgyu’s cold nose, crowding himself as close as he can, because oh, oh, holding onto a sinking friend is like being Prometheus in those god-made shackles. “Hyung, Beomgyu-hyung. You’re so brave. You’re so stupendously, ridiculously brave. I love you.” 

Beomgyu’s eyes squeeze shut so tight they crease together like harmonium pleats. “Would you still, if I failed you?” 

“You won’t fail me.” It’s not what Beomgyu wants to hear, Kai knows. “You will never fail me.” 

Beomgyu turns away. Shimmies Kai’s hands off his shoulders with a wiggle that might’ve made both of them laugh, just a few weeks ago. But there are no laughs now. There is just a dried riverbed of hurt and a silence synonymous with carcinogenesis.

“This is a ghost town,” he tells him. “It feels like a movie set. There weren’t even groaning zombies walking around all demented. There was just— silence.” 

“Apocalyptic,” Kai summarises, feeling like they’re having two different conversations.

“Hmm. I found a grocery store.” Beomgyu looks up, straight into his eyes. “I got enough canned food to tide us over for a while. The only signs of life in this whole entire fucked place is the absence of food. Hah, life in absence. Oh, Kai, oh, I think I’m gonna be sick.” 

Kai pulls him into his arms. “Next time I’ll go.” 

Beomgyu can’t even argue. He just leans his head on Kai’s shoulder and closes his eyes.

“Tell me about your day,” he murmurs. He tucks his whole body up and away into Kai’s side, knees jutting into ribs, ankles crossed. Kai can’t remember the last time Beomgyu ever willingly made himself this small. 

“I snooped around in the bedroom, I cleaned up the plates in the kitchen, I catastrophised,” Kai rattles off. “I worried myself sick about you and played tic-tac-toe against myself.” 

“You failure,” Beomgyu teases. His voice is smiling where his lips can’t. 

“We’ll be all right, hyung,” Kai says, lies, promises, hopes. “We’ll see this through.”

“I wish spring would hurry up,” replies Beomgyu. He turns his head at an angle to stare at the front window. “Oh, fuck, pull down the shutters.” 

Kai knows it’s just a precaution. But he still wonders if Beomgyu is getting that feeling, too. Of being watched. 

+

The next morning takes the shape of Beomgyu’s half-shadowed silhouette leaning over him, shaking him awake. Kai blinks away the last dregs of that tea-dark dream. 

“Morning check,” is all he says, before disappearing off into the kitchen.

How do you ever trace a phantom’s shadow? Kai leaves him alone, perfunctorily tugging on the shutters to hear them creak with a sound like shattering wind. Tries the rope-lock over and over and over and fails every time.

When Kai turns back around, Beomgyu is sitting cross-legged on the floor, fighting with canned peaches. His eyes are sunken in. Not his. 

No, he corrects himself, his eyes are his own. You just don’t know him anymore. 

Kai touches Beomgyu’s knee with the blunt of two fingers when he sits down, just as a greeting, I’m here too. Beomgyu flinches back so violently peach-juice invisibly spills onto the red floor. Morbidly, Kai’s mind goes to fresh blood dripping over crusted. 

“I’m sorry,” he says uselessly, retreating. “Are you okay?” 

Beomgyu’s spine doesn’t stir. Not a breath shakes his chest. “I can still see him right there.” 

Kai goes still, too. What a strange, paralysing thing grief is. Jumping from person to person like an acrobat Medusa. “I see him too,” he confesses, uselessly again. “In my dreams.” 

“You don’t understand.” Beomgyu hands him a fork, extending the can towards him. “Even in waking. Everywhere I turn. He just won’t leave.” 

Kai spears a cut-up triangle of peach. It gives under the tines like a larynx. 

I’m real, he wants to say. I’m here, too. 

“Don’t you want to remember him?” he tries instead. 

Beomgyu eyes the spider on the ceiling fan. “Not like this. Never like this.” 

At least he’s talking. God, so Kai did miss his voice. High up in the nose, from the back of the throat. Makes sense, honestly. All their conversations used to give Kai the same sense of comfort a warm, tight backroom might. He’d do anything to himself to feel warmth again. To swim forward in backwards time, back into a womb. 

He tips his head back. Looks at the spider too. It’s the only life he’s seen apart from Beomgyu in weeks. “How would you like to remember him?” 

Beomgyu shrugs. He stabs at a slice repeatedly, forming polka dots. “How he was with me.”

Like pulling teeth, now, all this talking. All twenty-eight of them, because he might never have thirty-two. “And how was he with you?” 

Beomgyu falls silent. He pushes Kai’s half over listlessly, dragging the fork along the line of his leg, leaving indents like road markers. He never replies, so Kai doesn’t ask again. 

(So Kai thinks of what Yeonjun was like with him. Eyes bright with phospenes and grin dipped dopey into love, standing in the kitchen in Soobin’s ratty old graphic tee on a Sunday morning after game night and fighting with the coffee machine. Oh, you’re awake. Want some? … Well. I can’t figure out how this works, actually. Kai laughed and made three mugs. Yeonjun had grimaced at the taste of Soobin’s. 

How can anyone drink this? he had said, face aghast. Then he’d promptly drunk some more. 

When it’s made with love —Kai had replied, rummaging around for the cookies Yeonjun hides on the top shelf. He may have moved out, but all his paranoid, grandmotherly instincts were the same— anything tastes good.

Kai had still known them, back then. Kai had still known all his hiding spots. 

When it’s made by Yeonjun, Soobin corrected sleepily, dumping in more creamer, enough to make Kai’s molars twinge inside his jaw, anything tastes good.

Yeonjun smiled, a sweet thing. The sweetest. Simp. 

Kai turned away, smiling too. Clutching the packet of his favourite matcha cookies he’d found, even in Yeonjun’s new, barebones kitchen.) 

Kai doesn’t answer, though it sits in his throat like a living being. Soft and hurt and scared.

The Beomgyu that sits in front of him has shifted to staring at the floor. Connecting all the yellow and blue paint splatters with one shaky finger. “I don’t think anything will ever be okay again.” 

Kai’s heart squeezes like a peach with fingers sunken into its soft flesh. “It will,” he lies. “It will.”

+

Kai finds himself back in the bedroom, clutching in his hands a diary he found under the bed. It’s a gross invasion of privacy, he’s aware. But the world is ending. Whoever wrote this is long dead, or has long since left. The dust on the white windowsill tells him so. 

He opens to the first entry, dated approximately a year ago. 

That goshdarn Inhye forgot to do the paperwork again, and I had to fill in. How I hate this front, I’ve been run ragged. Mother would only say “I told you so”. God I hate how she’s always right, I’m gonna go over now and beg on my knees for hotpot. Oh fuck, I promised Seonju-ya we’d make tangerine jelly tomorrow. Shit shit shit shit!!! I forgot to get the tangerines!! 

Kai laughs despite himself, tracing a finger over the stiff coffee stain on the lined paper. The next lines are written in a different-coloured pen.

Diary, I’m back with a belly full of udon and a bag full of tangerines. I got the tangerines first, and then went to visit my mother. She did say “I told you so.” She boxed my ears and then told me I wasn’t eating enough. We talked well into the night. She hugged me in the doorway. It’s stupid, I know, but I nearly cried from the smell of her detergent alone. I’d missed her. More than I ever allowed myself to feel. 

You know, since I’ve already gone senile and sentimental, it won’t hurt to say this either. You’re the dead compressed innards of a tree. You can’t judge me. At the farmer’s market, I saw three old ladies, standing there and arguing over watermelons. One was saying it’s unnatural for them to be selling them so early, there must be all sorts of chemicals in them, and another was saying it didn’t matter, watermelons were fucking watermelons. That they didn’t have much time left to live anyway, so what did the “chemicals” even matter. The last of the trio was laughing at them. I looked away quickly enough. I wonder if they did buy the watermelons. 

I don’t know. Seemed like the three fates to me. Fate could be three grandmothers arguing over chemicals in watermelons. The food your mother cooked could be seasoned with it. It could be you, yourself. 

Kai doesn’t notice the tears until he finds he can’t read further, his vision too blurry. He snaps the diary shut hurriedly before the salt stains the pages. He doesn’t notice Beomgyu watching him quietly from the doorway either. 

+

“The water’s going to run out,” Beomgyu says grimly. “It’s a miracle there’s still any running.” 

Kai puts down a melamine plate made to look like kintsugi. He fingers the gold lines, wondering whether they were used daily or reserved for special occasions. “Okay. What do we do?”

“Every respectable house has carboys tucked away somewhere. I saw some out in the garden. We could, I dunno, collect water from all the other houses? And store it all here?” 

Kai levels him an unimpressed stare. “You mean steal.”

Beomgyu shrugs. “Is it stealing if there’s no one left? If you want to be a goodie-two-shoes during the end of the fucking world, be my guest. All right. We could always just collect rainwater, but that’s not gonna work for a few months.” 

Kai clicks his tongue, trying to dislodge a bit of peach-fibre from between his teeth. He wishes there were toothpicks in this house, if only just to stab into his own tongue. “What day do you think it is?

“A month, give or take a day.” Beomgyu traces the paint splatters on the floor again; voice hollow as a conch shell. “Since we ran. So it must be late May.” 

Kai looks out at the wine-coloured dawn. It’s happening more often than not nowadays—the both of them waking up in fits and starts like rusted machines, chased into waking by dreams. Most of the time, they just sit up in silence and wait for the light to reach its hands through the shutters. Neither of them talk. The security of this derelict place has rendered them mute, content to stew inside their boiling griefs. Beomgyu’s face, a gaunt wash in the dark. The silent sound of his breathing, an afterthought. Kai knows him through time alone. Everything else is rotten. Eaten. 

“No spring this year,” says Beomgyu. His hand creeps up like a knife to the back. His fingers slot into the spaces between Kai’s, scared and young. So young. “The mixing up of the seasons is always the first sign of the apocalypse.” 

“No it isn’t. The first sign of the apocalypse is a Choi Beomgyu who isn’t a clown.” 

Beomgyu’s wishbone fingers spasm inside the lines of Kai’s palm. “Well, I’m not. So it’ll come to pass regardless.” 

Kai has nothing to say to that. “I’m sure spring is just held up somewhere in those heavenly elevators. Or maybe Hades has finally snapped. Maybe Persephone isn’t going to come up this year.” 

It’s too dark to really see, but the shape of Beomgyu’s smile is unmistakable. It’s a tiny, mangled thing, but Kai knows what it is. “Hades wouldn’t do that.” 

“You’re correct. Maybe spring just grew tired of being used by all poets in all their love poetry and is showing them a year without her face. They’ll grow salty and stop.” 

“If I were in love,” Beomgyu starts, “this absence would only make spring more mystical.” 

If. Kai takes the words for what they are. A clear end to this conversation. 

“Fuck the water,” he says instead. “I want to look around this place. I haven’t seen the sun in weeks.” 

Beomgyu’s hand reaches forward, pushes down on the droopy skin under Kai’s eye with muffled affection. “This? This is the skin of a killer, Kai. You half-white vampire. Are you not ashamed?” 

“Let’s look around the place,” Kai insists. “Just the street, hyung.” 

“Supremely stupid idea. This is always how that circus of clowns in a horror movie goes to die.” 

“It’s a sunny day!” Kai jabs a finger at the shutters, the lines of pure white sunlight falling over the opposite wall like insects. “Any and all undead we’d see coming from a mile away!” 

“You’re going to get us killed.”

“Staying cooped up in here isn’t exactly living, is it?” Kai leans forward like a charmed snake, bending his spine to crook his face under Beomgyu’s. Forcing him to meet his eyes. “Life is the fucking art of dying anyway. Besides, we’d never know if a horde was coming if we didn’t go out.” 

Beomgyu worries his bottom lip between his teeth. The pale, chapped skin darkens with blood. “I still don’t like it. Loafing around without an objective.” 

“You want an objective?” Kai raises an eyebrow. He hesitates, then lays his head down Beomgyu’s lap. The muscles of his thigh tense up under his head, but he doesn’t push him away. He doesn’t stroke his hair like earlier either. “The water situation. A security check.” 

It’s underhanded, Kai knows. The guilt seeps into his heart the second Beomgyu stiffens. 

Silence. A bird twittering outside, its song sharp and biting. When was the last time he heard one sing? Is it a prophecy, an omen? 

“If we die,” says Beomgyu, a hand settling behind Kai’s ear like a butterfly, “I swear I’m gonna haunt you forever.” 

No, you wouldn’t, Kai doesn’t say. You’d forget me. 

+

In the end, it doesn’t take long for them to leave. Beomgyu gets his knife and hands Kai another one, hesitating for a moment before shrugging the zebra backpack over his shoulders too. 

“So,” begins Kai, “how’d you feel about chemicals in our fruits?” 

“The fuck,” Beomgyu replies, sticking to the middle of the road. His feverish eyes jump from fence to hedge growth to lime harling cautiously. 

Kai looks down. The road is solid grey brick, no grass growing yet to push between the seams. How minutely spring’s absence can be felt. “Just something I read about.”

“Read?” Beomgyu takes his hand suddenly, tugging him along firmly. “There are books in that place?” 

“I— no.” Kai swallows, embarrassed. “Whoever lived there before us left a diary.” 

Beomgyu is silent for a long moment. “Damn,” he says finally, “are we living in some poor grandmother’s house?” 

“No. It was someone quite young, actually. They worked a corporate job and hated it.” 

Beomgyu’s tendons shift under Kai’s lax grip. “Oh.” 

They turn the corner. In the convexity, sits a great Delonix regia, its bare branches extended to the sky. Kai can’t help but feel like the branches resemble begging arms reaching for God. Praying for beauty. Praying for spring. For laughter, again. 

Kai slows to a stop in front of it. Beomgyu sets his jaw, but says nothing and waits. 

“... I don’t know what these are called,” Kai says. “Not in Korean.” 

“Flame of the forest,” Beomgyu replies, shifting closer to Kai. The tension bleeds from his frame as he cranes his neck to look up at the spindly branches. “Bul—kkoch. Na—mu. They’re native to Madagascar, but… y’know. Colonisers.” 

Kai takes a breath. He reaches for Beomgyu’s hand again, feeling like a little child. “Have you ever seen one in bloom?” 

Maybe Kai’s gone mad, maybe Beomgyu’s voice softens. “Yes. They’re beautiful. The flowers fall with the slightest breeze and the entire street would get covered in them. If you stood under one and looked up, all you would see through the red was tiny blue patches of sky.” 

Kai tries to picture it. He fails. “I wish I could’ve seen them.”

“Good things come to those who wait,” Beomgyu says wryly, half-mocking. “Come on, Kai.”

Kai goes. Beomgyu doesn’t take his hand again, doesn’t look back. 

This network of the three or four streets that they’ve crossed stirs in Kai a deep sense of wrong. It’s too quiet. It’s way too empty. Even for some nightmare pulled straight from a sci-fi slasher meant just for money, devoid of soul down to a plastic core. The windows with their mosquito nettings pulled snug, the brass door-markers on some houses. The sorry states of the gardens. 

“How did you bear it?” Kai asks quietly. He feels like he has to whisper, lest he stir up some great evil left behind to rot. “Walking along these empty streets alone? My nerves are completely jammed. This isn’t—right.”

“Of course it isn’t right,” Beomgyu responds simply, stopping for him. He stalls for the second it takes for Kai’s footsteps to fall parallel to his own. “I don’t think we think the same way.” 

Kai huffs. “We used to, didn’t we?” 

Beomgyu turns to look at him, lips twisted into something not quite a smile. “And haven’t we both changed just a little?” 

“No. You changed. I just… stayed.” 

The silence grows cacophonous. Kai sometimes wishes he could snatch words out of the air and stuff them back down his throat. 

“Hyung, I—” 

Beomgyu’s hand clenches around the knife, his teeth audibly clicking as he sets his jaw. He inhales, shooting Kai a single incredulous glance, enough to have him shutting up. Beomgyu doesn’t reply, doesn’t change his pace. Walks as steadily as ever. 

“I’m sorry,” Kai says to Beomgyu’s back. “Hyung, I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t.” Beomgyu heads straight into the shadowed aisles of the convenience store. “I don’t— Forget it, Kai. I don’t want to fight.” 

Kai nods miserably. Something tells him, inexplicably, that they will come to regret this silence. 

“What the fuck?” Beomgyu’s confused voice cuts through the stagnancy. When Kai heads closer, he understands why. “It smells like something died in here.” 

Kai swallows, cold fingers clawing at his ribcage, crawling up his spine. “... Maybe something did.” 

Beomgyu turns towards him to tell him off, perhaps, but his words die the second he sees what Kai is looking at, so terrified, so transfixed. 

Bodies. Beautiful once, maybe, the way all things are. Propped up against the dairy refrigerator, blackened, rotten. Kai thinks they look strangely fluid, in movement—until he realised that’s just maggots. Dozens of them, pearly white, peeking out from behind cloth seams and liquefied flesh. 

Beomgyu’s breath seizes up, his hand clamping down on Kai’s arm, instinctively drawing closer. 

Kai claps a hand over his mouth, feeling his stomach churn. “Oh my God,” he chokes. “What the fuck. What the hell.” 

Beomgyu drags him away, anywhere, away from the stench, but they can’t escape it, it’s burrowed into their nostrils and shot straight to their brain fluids. 

“Those weren’t— They weren’t there when I was here last time. I’m gonna throw up, Kai, move.” 

Kai places his palm on Beomgyu’s mouth and presses down. “They must’ve died immediately after your visit. No way a body decays that quickly.” 

“Died?” Beomgyu hisses, wrenching Kai’s hand away. “They were killed. Did you not see the blood all around them?” 

No, Kai didn’t. He was staring at the worms.

So he goes back, holding his breath. There’s browned blood splattered intermittently around the bodies, enough to look like the fallout from gunshot wounds. 

“Two of them,” he says. “We never even realised.” 

Kai holds onto Beomgyu’s arm this time. He suspects he’s grounding them both. 

“Who… who could’ve done this? Kai, who would do this?” 

There’s no answer to that. Instead, Kai says, “Is there… Can you tell how they died? The—blood looks like something from a bullet wound, and there’s none on their clothes. As far as I can tell.” 

Beomgyu’s breathing has gone all wrong. Kai tries to soothe a hand down his spine, but he finds he’s trembling too hard to do so. He just places a hand between Beomgyu’s shoulder blades. 

“I can’t— They’ve. Been shot, I think. In the head. Look.” 

Kai just nods. He can’t—he can’t look. He won’t. 

“We should bury them.” Beomgyu clears his throat wetly. “Everyone deserves a resting place.” 

Kai sucks in a sharp breath, inching closer despite himself. “Should we burn them? Bury their ashes somewhere?” 

“Would that make you feel safer?” Beomgyu’s voice is odd. Like he’s clamping down on something with his teeth, unwilling to let it go. Sugar-stained like Johnny. “To know there’s not a single chance for them to haunt us?”

Kai blinks. His heart simmers down again. “What in the fuck are you talking about, hyung?”

Beomgyu breathes out shakily, his chest curling in on itself. He presses his face into his palms, trembling like a taut bowstring. Like bare branches in a springless sleet. “I’m sorry, I didn’t— I’m sorry.” 

Kai feels oh-so-disoriented. A few seconds, fifteen minutes, a lifetime ago, it was all the other way around. He doesn’t even know what Beomgyu’s apologising for. “It’s… all right? Forget this, too.” 

Beomgyu blinks rapidly. His voice is wretched, all wrong in pitch. “We can’t—we can’t move them. Can we? They’re— look at them.” 

“We can’t just leave them here either. You said so. It doesn’t feel right.”

Beomgyu’s breaths are all too shallow. His fingers cinch Kai’s sleeve tighter than a noose. 

“Breathe, hyung, breathe. You’re not alone.” 

Strangely, it seems to work. He swallows. “No, we’re not, are we?” 

In the end, they find some incongruously cheerful blue tarpaulins on the other side of the store. The sun must reach its zenith sometime into their morbid task, but all Kai feels is a cold sweat reaching into his spine through his back. An impossible heat. A biting cold. Beomgyu squeezes his eyes shut and Kai holds his own breath for him. They must roll the bodies up in the tarp, but Kai couldn’t tell you how. When he thinks about it, all he sees is that wriggling mass of nacre. Feasting. Writhing by their feet, falling out of creases like stolen stars. 

You could point a gun between Kai’s eyes and he still wouldn’t be able to tell you what they did, how long it took. It blurred away to nothingness in shades of grey. Spots of sunlight through the bright red flowers of the Delonix regia. Beomgyu’s clenched hands. The squelch of the bodies on dry grass where there should’ve been a thud. The smell of petrol forming flame. 

Beomgyu stands beside him. Quiet. 

They don’t touch. They don’t speak. 

Kai looks at his hands in the firelight. The shadows flicker like ghosts, making the light dance too.

“We’re not alone.” Beomgyu’s eyes are dark, hollow marbles. “There’s someone else here.” 

A killer, goes unsaid. 

+

I am a soul. I must be. 

There is another soul pressing close to mine, a wispy warm thing of wonder. Though I cannot feel anything anymore, there is a force that pulls me back. Back. Back into my burning body, back through time. I fight against it, I cannot bear it a second longer. How cruel this living has been. How unfair we have been to each other. What unlucky sacks of stars.

The other soul touches my definitions. A zing courses through whatever I am made of, a feeling both nauseating and exhilarating. The blinding relief of not being alone. I do not recognise the soul. I don’t even know which of the burning bodies is mine. But there is a lingering sense of belonging that I cannot feel anymore, not really. The utter miracle of companionship. 

Did that soul die with me, the other body? Did we love each other or did we meet just before we died? I try to picture it—a compendium of raw feeling. The terror of dying, surely. I feel as though we died quickly, without suffering. Caught unawares, perhaps. Then, the unfairness of it. The flashes of colour throughout, vividness and hatred and so bright and happiness and sadness and misery and light and heartache and grief and longing and love. 

I try to speak. There is a consciousness inside me. I am a soul, maker of all things, made of all things. I am not sure if I will be heard, but I say it anyway. 

Did you know me?

The other soul flutters. It feels like dragonfly wings against my cheek, though I do not have one anymore. I remember it, the feeling. I remember the little things, the mundane things. 

I cannot remember. Does it matter, though? I know you now. 

Someone scoops up my ashes with a gentleness I have never felt before. The ashes—I am buried beneath a night-jasmine tree, standing tall and fragrant. Even without spring. The ashes of my companion are close. If I had half the chance, I would have liked to linger. 

But I must leave. So I do. The other soul flies beside me, up, up, up. Back into the unknown. 

+

It’s a restless sort of feeling that takes a hold of Kai that night. It zings through his body like the current, grounding him in some twisted way. His extremities are all tiredly numb but there is a riot in his heart. Oh, so I can still feel. 

It affects Beomgyu differently. 

“Kai,” he hisses later, sitting on the living room floor looking so much older than he really is, “we can’t fucking stay here.” 

When Yeonjun and Soobin moved out, Beomgyu waited until their lease was up before vacating the place. He’d told Kai that leaving hurt like losing a limb, but staying could very well be worse. So he’d crashed in Kai’s shoebox for just a while, and a while turned into until the end. 

(I’d thought I could deal with it, Beomgyu had said, sitting on Kai’s couch in a position not unlike this. Their absence. The quiet. But I couldn’t.) 

“It’s dark out,” Kai says simply. He’s so tired. He doesn’t want to argue. “We can’t leave.” 

“God,” Beomgyu groans, pitching forward with his face in his hands. “The stench. It’s still there.” 

“I know, hyung.” 

“I can’t breathe, I can’t stay.” 

“Don’t go.” 

Don’t leave me. 

“Please, let’s leave in the morning. The second it gets light out.” 

Kai has never heard Beomgyu say please. Not quite like this. Not if it’s not pleading with Yeonjun to give him extra cookies or begging Soobin for mercy against his heavy-handed hits. 

Never once has he had to beg Kai for anything. 

“Slow down, hyung,” Kai tries to placate, tentatively placing his hands on his forearms. “Breathe. Breathe.” 

Beomgyu sucks in ragged, gasping breaths, vision haywiring all over the place. Looking for escapes. “I can’t. Kai, I can’t breathe.” 

“You are,” Kai says harshly, harsher than he’s ever wanted to be. He takes Beomgyu’s clenched fist and uncurls his fingers one by one, splaying his hand over his heart. Tick-tock. Kai’s heartbeat has gone sluggish with all the heavy love he carries around, unsure of where to put it down. “You are, and you will.” 

It might be seconds and it might be minutes and it might be hours. But it takes a while. 

Beomgyu stops shaking. Kai’s own shot-through nerves cease to ping-pong all over the place.

In the aftermath, there is stillness. “I’m sorry.” 

Kai closes his eyes, just for a few moments. “There’s nothing to be sorry for, hyung.” 

With his sight gone, all of Kai’s other senses go on overdrive. He can feel every minute shift of Beomgyu’s body, the way he adjusts his legs, the way he sinks further into himself. Can hear the soft squish of the trampled heart. Who knows whose it is. Can feel it when Beomgyu leans forward and tucks a few errant strands of hair behind Kai’s ear, the sound of his breath. 

“I did mean it, though. I don’t want to stay here.” 

Kai opens his eyes. Looking at Beomgyu aches. “We don’t know what’s out there.” 

“Exactly. We don’t know.” 

Kai curls his hand into a fist. He bleeds crescent moons into the skins of his palms. “Maybe not knowing is better, hyung.” 

Beomgyu’s face goes slack with shock. All the grief and rage falls away like a shredded paper crane, replaced with a look of open horror. “You’re content to just sit here and wait to die?” 

Yes. I’m content to sit here and wait for you until I die. I’m content to wait forever until this wasteful waiting dissolves into watching and that into wishing into grieving into liquid-smoke resignation. I’m content to watch you metamorphose. To put your hair up and spit out watermelon seeds. To watch how being human swallows you like the grapefruit you cut up into eighths swallows the salt you sprinkled in. To follow you through my mirrorhouse of grief even if I’ve lost you, even if you’re everywhere. 

The quieter whisper. At least we’d see him again.  

But how can Kai ever do that to Beomgyu? 

“We’re not prepared enough,” he settles on saying. It’s not a lie if he believes it, is it? “We’ve been fine all this time, haven’t we? Just a while longer.” 

Beomgyu’s voice goes dull. “Would you force me to leave alone?” 

“No I wouldn’t,” comes Kai’s reflexive answer. Then creeps in the doubt. “... Would you leave?” 

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Beomgyu replies, more exhalation than answer. As if it hurts to say. “The last thing I remember is wanting to warn my parents about the storm. You’re—all I have.” 

Kai wants to laugh. Or maybe cry. “We’re all we have, hyung. You have yourself, too.”

Beomgyu doesn’t answer. He raises his hand as if to touch Kai’s face, then seems to think better of it. His hand drops like a shot dove, like Kai’s heart. Like a body from a balcony. To the bottom of an endless lake. 

“We’ll—we’ll leave, okay? Not staying in one place seems like a very big brain thing to do. Just… calm down. We’ll be all right.” 

Beomgyu seems to know how helium-filled his words are, because he smiles. It’s not quite happy, more indulgent than anything. He’s looked at Kai that way for years and years. 

Kai laughs when he sees what Beomgyu has dug out for dinner. A pomegranate. 

Ah, lord, years and years and years of loving quiet and alone. Loving because he was quiet and alone. It’s hysterical. Complete and utter madness, tomfoolery. It makes him laugh helplessly, even in the wake of burnt bodies and the face of heartache. 

Beomgyu simply watches him. 

“I saw you in a dream.” Kai eats his own heart, bites into it like an apple. The only thing his nauseous body can stomach down. “You were laughing just like this.”  

Quiet and alone. 

+

Merely living hurts sometimes, the person-in-the-diary writes. Outlandish hurts. Like a pencil in your frontal lobe or a musket in your gullet. A metal beachball in your mouth. A maimed hand unable to write anymore. Rotten flowers over a grave. How did we let this happen to us, oh God it’s us isn’t it, it’s all our fault. 

The next entry, dated the next day, merely says: Seonju-yah couldn’t visit this week. It’s getting worse. She’s getting weaker. I wish I could just take her and run. 

Kai’s brows furrow as he reads on. 

They’ve given up all pretence. The names have been erased, they’re assigned numbers now. How did we let it get to this. How did I get here. How did we get here. How did we get here. 

Kai goes to turn the page, but then—

+ 

—from the living room, Beomgyu screams. 

Something inhuman and terrified, rocking around all the nooks and crannies and reflective showcases, bouncing back into their skulls like echoes. He’s never made a sound like this before, Kai is sure. 

Kai’s heart drops. He rushes in from the bedroom, woman-in-diary forgotten, wielding nothing but an X-acto knife snatched from the dresser, and sees why. His brain reels to a complete stop.

There’s a ghost sitting on the couch. 

Eight incisors, four canines, eight pre-molars, twelve molars, eight inci—

“Hi,” Yeonjun says. 

Since this is surely a dream, Kai, too, screams as loud as his voicebox allows. 

In the end, Yeonjun is still there.

“Are you done?” he asks, lips pursed. 

“Done?” Beomgyu says, eyes blown wide, stalking over with enough intent to have Yeonjun backing up a few centimetres. “Am I fucking done, he asks! No! No, I’m not done, I’m over this shit! I watched you die! Die! I left you there! You— I— what— How’d you get in? Who the fuck are you?” 

“It’s me, Gyu-yah,” Yeonjun says. He reaches over to take Beomgyu’s raised hand, gingerly holding it to his own palm. Guiding it towards his pulse. Whatever Beomgyu feels there, his ribcage tenses. “Just your YJ.” 

“No, you’re not.” Beomgyu sounds less certain now, his hand still clutched in Yeonjun’s. 

“I am,” Yeonjun insists. “I can prove it. July 10th. I won that game of Belgium.” 

Beomgyu’s fingers suddenly tighten around Yeonjun’s knuckles. The utter combustible joy in his voice is palpable. “No, you did not.” 

Kai feels bad for interrupting, he really does, but— “Yeonjun-hyung… how?” 

Yeonjun’s face turns grim. “I’ll explain later. Come here first.” 

Kai takes a step forward, then another, then another. The living room is tiny. He crosses the distance in those three steps of his and feels like he’s leapt across an ocean. The knife clatters to the floor when arms wrap around his middle bruisingly tight, holding him together. 

He soothes a hand down Yeonjun’s taut spine, half out his body. Surely he’s dreaming. He can feel Beomgyu’s eyes on them, thinking how even just a few months ago, he’d have thrown himself into their arms with little care. 

He leans down to whisper in Yeonjun’s ear. “Is it you, hyung? Is it really you?” 

“It’s me.” Yeonjun’s arms tighten. “I swear, it’s me.” 

Kai exhales shakily, stepping back from him. Yeonjun lets him go, too. 

A second of disbelieving silence. 

Then Beomgyu grabs Yeonjun by the shoulders and shakes him. “How are you alive? Where have you been? How’d you find us? And for the love of fuck, how’d you get in?” 

And where’s Soobin-hyung? Kai adds inwardly. 

Yeonjun squirms. Like a maggot, like those maggots— “Your piece of rope is very flimsy. The others, well… it’s a very long, ludicrous story.”

Beomgyu barks out a laugh, spreading his arms cheerfully, manic. “Oh, trust me. We have nothing but time.”

Yeonjun shakes his head, his overgrown hair flopping around. “We really fucking don’t. We need to leave tonight and I mean run for our lives kinda run. Like we’re running from the law.” 

“Now is not the fucking time to quote Taylor Swift,” snaps Beomgyu, crossing his arms. “Either you explain or” —he grabs Kai’s wrist— “we’re not going with you.” 

What a great liar, Kai thinks with no small amount of wry fondness. As if Beomgyu wouldn’t follow Yeonjun to the ends of the earth without question, without compromise. Without ever looking back. The hand around his wrist feels like a well-loved shackle. 

Yeonjun sighs, sinking his teeth into his bottom lip. He looks up at them with those watercolour eyes of his and opens his mouth. “It’s because of you, Beomgyu, that I even survived. When… when I got bit, you didn’t kill me. If you had, well.” 

Beomgyu stiffens in surprise. He drops Kai’s hand and Kai mourns the loss like the loss of his own soul. “What do you mean?” 

“Uh. I’m kind of—immune? Against the zombies?” Yeonjun scratches the nape of his neck, his mouth twisting into a boxy shape. “My blood is, I mean.” 

“What,” Beomgyu says flatly. 

“Yeah. So. You didn’t kill me and I woke up in the dead of night with a great big inflamed wound in a ghost city. I blew up a car; irrelevant, I just thought I’d tell you. And then I met this dude named Taehyun,” Yeonjun laughs. The sound sits upon Kai’s skin like light itself. “He led me here, betrayed me to this illegal organisation which was really sad because I liked him, but then he visited me later promising me he’d get me out. Pinky swear. And he did! Except he can only hide my absence for so long; the doctors are supposed to visit me at midnight and we need to break him and Soobin out—oh, yeah, he’s there too—and fucking abscond.” 

Midnight. A glance at the clock tells Kai it’s currently 7 PM. 

His brain melts a little. “What,” he echoes dumbly. “What do you mean ‘doctors’?” 

“Uh. Because a fucking zombie apocalypse wasn’t typical enough, there’s also a mad scientist organistion that experiments on humans? ‘For the greater good’?” 

Beomgyu looks vaguely embarrassed about the cliché state of affairs, though his face is twisted mostly in horror. “You were experimented on?” 

“Oh no, not yet,” Yeonjun replies, joyless. “Taehyun said that whatever makes me immune would be found in two seconds flat. He’s been trying to delay my examination for as long as possible.” 

“You trust him?” Beomgyu asks sceptically. “You said he’d betrayed you.” 

Yeonjun waves his hand impatiently. “I trust him, yes, that’s all resolved between us.” 

“And Soobin-hyung?” Kai butts in. He feels like a stranger to both of them, watching the fallout of years of history he’ll never know. 

“We— weren’t together when it hit back home. I didn’t know what happened to him and I didn’t stick around to find out. But funny how fate works. I found him again anyway.” 

“Yes, yes, we know you’re gay,” Beomgyu says. “But is he okay?” 

Yeonjun purses his lips. “He’ll be all right. Only if you fuckers get a move on already.”

+

They get a move on. Or they don’t, really, there’s nothing that warrants getting a move on. Kai simply gets the diary from the bedroom floor, dusting it off. He helps Beomgyu stuff all their canned food into Soobin’s zebra-patterned bag, along with the two bottles of water they’d boiled in the early morning in a fit of paranoia. He does it all in silence, his hands working without seeing. 

How quickly a life changes. How easy it is to get washed away by the foaming crest and forget there were ever roots and grains of sand and silt beneath your feet at all, growing used to the muscle-tearing pressure and lying suspended in the storm like a jellyfish. Happy as a clam before it gets caught up in a crab’s pincers. And how utterly cold the crags are. 

Beomgyu stops him in the threshold of the bedroom with a hand on his arm. “Is hyung actually there?” he whispers. “Like, really truly?” 

Kai takes a peek around the corner. Yes, he’s still there, looking at the knick-knacks inside the metal showcase with interest. “Yes. He is.” 

Beomgyu crumples against the wall. “Fuck,” he laughs. “Fuck. What kind of shitty two-bit thriller are we the stars of? Human experimentation? Really?” 

Kai leans just that scant bit closer. “We’re not the stars. Yeonjun-hyung is.” 

Beomgyu opens his mouth to protest, but closes it quickly enough. “Shit, you’re right. We’re the fabulous supporting cast that everyone likes more than the MC.”

“I’m not sure we’re more likeable than hyung, really.” 

Beomgyu shakes his head. “No, no, I certainly like you more than him.” 

The sudden movement makes Kai realise just how long Beomgyu’s hair has gotten. The ends of the longest strands brush his nape like ghostly kisses, his bangs framing his face. Kai brushes some off his forehead before he thinks better of it.

“Your hair is getting so long,” he says. “I like it. It suits you.” 

Beomgyu’s face flickers with a joy so supernovan it aches to see. What hurts worse is the way it collapses, the way he turns his face away. “Don’t. Don’t do that.” 

And normally Kai wouldn’t push. He’d just back away and they’d never speak of it again. But everything is upside-down today—dead men walking and who knows what else. 

What comes out of his mouth instead of silence is, “Why?” 

Beomgyu squeezes his eyes shut, pushing off the wall. “It isn’t your chance just because that happened to me. It isn’t.”

Kai’s karst heart is quiet and alone. Lonely he came into this world and lonely he will leave.

“It isn’t yours either,” he replies. Beomgyu’s face suggests he hadn’t expected that answer. There’s nothing left in Kai to even pick a fight or laugh it off. He is simply a machine made for the sole purpose of missing. “What, did you forget I loved him too?”

Missing the smiles when they’re half-heartedly hidden. Missing all these people he’d built a home with, watched it burn down with, watched as something dislodged and was never quite back in its rightful place. And God, missing himself. 

Kai takes a step away from Beomgyu, then another. Beomgyu doesn’t even follow, just lets him walk away. 

From the living room, Yeonjun laughs at something. Pealing and bright.

+

“Funny how we all ended up in one place anyway,” Yeonjun comments again as they trudge their way through the neighbourhood. 

“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Beomgyu replies drily. “I’m following you to certain death here, hyung, have some decorum.” 

Kai frowns at the same time Yeonjun does, but Yeonjun is quicker. “We’re not going to die.”

“Sure,” Beomgyu hums. His eyes are fever bright, even in the darkness. “Why exactly are we out here, then? In the wide-open nothing.” 

Yeonjun swallows. Kai watches his Adam’s apple bob like Eve watching the rain. “Haven’t you wondered why there aren’t any zombies out and about? This whole town is a front. It’s fortified against anything that so much as moves. Ironically, you’re the safest you could ever be inside the perimeter.” 

Kai raises his eyes to the heavens. “This plot would surely only get two-point-zero-three stars.” 

“Be serious,” Beomgyu chides. “No one would even pick it up.” 

“You’re lucky, you know,” Yeonjun says suddenly. “Not a single madman in there knows you two are even here. I’ve never been more thankful for your evil craftiness.” 

“That’s definitely not a word.” Beomgyu pauses. “Then how did you find us?” 

“Taehyun. Said he saw you two while patrolling, hauling out bodies from the supermarket. He thought your faces matched what I’d told him while travelling with him.” 

“So he wasn’t sure,” Kai says. “You bet all this on the miniscule chance that it was actually us.” 

“You don’t get it, Kai,” Yeonjun whispers, all of a sudden, like it’s something so very precious he can’t risk it breaking. “Whatever the chances were, I’d have made this choice every time.” 

Kai’s heart feels fit to burst. He reaches for Yeonjun’s hand and meets Beomgyu’s in the middle, already holding onto his fingers like a child. It sends a stab of pain through Kai’s spine, but he ignores it in favour of taking Yeonjun’s wrist in his hand, squeezing once, twice. Thrice. 

“We’re following you to certain death here, hyung,” Beomgyu says steadily. “Don’t spout shitty one-liners. You’re much too cool for that.” 

Yeonjun cracks a smile. The edges of it are recognisable even in the dark. “So you admit I’m cool, huh?” 

“The coolest,” Kai pipes in. “He thinks you’re the coolest, hyung.” 

Yeonjun laughs, hushed-up under his breath. Beomgyu’s firm kick to the shins is worth it. 

“You know what’s really funny,” Beomgyu begins, letting go of Yeonjun and stalking ahead despite having no clue where they’re going, “is how we followed you like little ducklings without question. Where the fuck are we. Where are we going. Hyung.”

Yeonjun scrubs a hand down his face, laughing again. A bit helplessly. He pushes his palm up to touch Kai’s fingers, still lingering on his wrist. Kai takes it as a sign to let go, marvelling at how he even thought to comfort him there. 

“Fuck, I’m a terrible protagonist. I didn’t even tell my musclemen where we’re going.” 

“‘Musclemen’, he says.” Beomgyu snorts derisively. “Keep talking like that, it’s going to keep me from exploding out of animal terror.” 

Yeonjun’s eye twitches. “Get up losers, we’re going shopping. For. Heads. For Taehyun and Soobin’s heads. But attached to their bodies. … Fuck.” 

“Were you written by Ehren Krugger?” Kai asks. “Where are we going, hyung?” 

“Past the poinciana. Their evil lair is just a normal residence, believe it or not. Number 822.” 

“Do you even have a plan?” Beomgyu butts in. “Fuck, we are following you to our demises.” 

Yeonjun ignores him with practised ease. “The security cams out back are smashed in. We enter through there, and meet up with Taehyun. Split up into halves. Two of us find Soobin, and the other two clear the escape route. Please, please, please deck a doctor in the face for me.”

Kai frowns. “How do we get out of this town? Won’t the perimeter be guarded?” 

Yeonjun might be smiling, but it’s hard to tell. “Hubris makes you careless. How’d you think you even managed to get inside? They’re so fucking overconfident. The rot in their brains has grown so deep they see no value in anything other than binaries. They think they’re so secure, oh-so-high and mighty.” 

Beomgyu’s eyebrows rise. “Sounds like you’ve held that one in for a while.” 

Yeonjun sighs. “I really have.” 

“It’s so… simple.” Kai frowns. “Weirdly convenient, don’t you think?”

Yeonjun swallows. “... I know. I thought that too, at first. But I’ve seen these people, Kai. I know.” 

“How will we get out of the building?” Beomgyu asks. “We should keep the bag there. Grab it on the way out and then run.” 

Yeonjun’s eyes startle when they see what he’s talking about. “That’s Soobin’s, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah.”

“Holy fuck.” His voice wavers. “It’s uglier than I remember. Why did I miss it?” 

“You always miss the tiniest things,” Kai replies absent-mindedly, his eyes on the tree growing larger in front of them. One step, two steps. Forward. “Not their smile, but the way their eyes would crease. The burnt toast. Or something.” 

“Or something,” Yeonjun mutters incredulously. “We’re leaving out a door that leads nowhere. You’ve seen how these houses are all fenced into their plots of land? If we can scale one and get to the other side, we’re good. If all things go according to plan, they won’t even realise they’ve been broken into.” 

They reach the tree. They stop and look up at it for a second, the gaps in the foliage littered with stars. There is no light pollution in an apocalypse. The stars are always watching. 

“It didn’t flower,” Kai observes.  

Beomgyu’s voice is quiet. “No, it didn’t, did it.”

“We skipped spring this year,” Yeonjun says, touching the trunk lightly. “We’ll see other poincianas if we get out of here. Let’s go.” 

They go. 

+

822 is the largest house on the street. Kai feels an extreme sense of unease while hopping over the bamboo fence out into the frontyard, feeling too brazen. Even in the dark and hidden by the dense hedgegrowth, this feels too… open. 

Inexplicably, Beomgyu’s hands find him in the dark. In a moment of stasis. 

Kai wishes he could hold him back. Kai wishes he could catch him when he falls, and have someone to fall back into in trying times. Kai wishes the silence would be warm instead of biting. 

“Go, go, go,” Yeonjun whispers, jabbing his fingers into the small of Kai’s back, eyes on the still and silent house. There’s the slightest hint of fear in his eyes too, Kai sees. “There’s an orange door, there beside the tube-well. Knock three times. Long-short-long.”  

They trudge around to the back of the house. While the fences out front were flimsy bamboo, the thing boxing them in is solid cement, no footholds or handholds. Taller than the tallest of them. Kai’s skin crawls at the silence. He clenches his hand and unclenches it again, watching Beomgyu hide Soobin’s obnoxious backpack inside a bush. 

Yeonjun takes a deep breath. He knocks thrice. 

The door swings open immediately. Standing in the threshold is a man who doesn’t look much older than Kai, if not younger. He’s wearing glasses and is sporting the queasiest expression Kai has ever seen on a person.

“Holy fuck, hyung, I thought you bailed,” he hisses, ushering them inside quickly.

They’re in a dim corridor, lit only by the moonlight from where the door’s not fully closed. Beomgyu closes it and they’re in complete darkness. Kai feels around with his hands and finds it’s just wide enough to fit a person comfortably, let alone four. He feels more than sees Taehyun’s eyes sweep over each of them in turn. 

“I’m Taehyun,” he says rather unnecessarily. “Either we die tonight or we be free.”

Beomgyu snorts. It puffs out against the nape of Kai’s neck like a caress. “That’s the same thing, my good sir. I’m Beomgyu.” 

Taehyun makes a sound that could be a laugh. “I assume Yeonjun-hyung already told you what the plan is? Kai, you’re with me. We get to knock people out; high five. Yeonjun-hyung and Beomgyu, you’re getting Soobin-hyung. Hyung will tell you more on the way.” 

Beomgyu is shivering. Kai can feel it against his own bones. “Anything we should know beforehand?” 

“We cannot save everyone,” he replies severely. The look on his face suggests he doesn’t quite agree with himself. “Don’t even attempt it. Get in, get Soobin, get out. There will be patrols inside the building, but Kai and I will clear the way for you. Hyung knows the way.” 

“Um,” Kai starts, “how exactly are we ‘clearing the way’?” 

It’s pitch-black, but the grin in Taehyun’s voice is unmistakable. “Ever smashed people over the head with hammers? Because you’re about to.” 

“What the fuck,” Beomgyu complains. “This keeps getting more and more outlandish.” 

“You try formulating a prison break inside a fucking hematologist’s wet dream where every variable you have to account for could either be smarter or dumber than you think,” Taehyun huffs. 

“Boys,” Yeonjun says tersely. “Midnight. Remember.”

Beomgyu rolls his eyes. “Okay, Cinderella. Keep your glass shoes on.” 

Kai takes a deep breath. “This is completely harebrained and I’m glad we agree. We’re going to make it out tonight, you hear me? We’re not dying in a place like this. We’re just not.” 

“No goodbyes,” Yeonjun says. Kai can’t see his eyes but he feels the warmth of them either way. “Just good luck, okay?” 

“Yeah. Just good luck.” Taehyun seems to be searching for something. Kai can hear him clattering around the small space, which he now suspects is actually a tiny room they turned into a supply closet. “Hyung, count to seventy-five, then follow, all right?” 

Taehyun hands Kai what feels to be a claw hammer. Kai wills his hands not to shake.

“Bonk anyone you see over the head. If you don’t one-hit them, well. Keep hitting. That’s your job, okay? I’ll tie them up.” 

“What if I kill someone?” Kai asks, feeling the weight of the hammer. 

Taehyun contemplates. “If you don’t want to use the hammer, land a solid uppercut to the chin or temples. Don’t pull your punches or hesitate. If anyone swings for you first, I’ll be there.” 

“Is that—really safe?” Beomgyu asks. “I dunno. Just walking out there seems… idiotic.” 

Taehyun shrugs. “No guards have firearms. They’re not even guards, just at the bottom of the mad scientist hierarchy. Worshipping a god of the sun while he burns them benevolently.” 

They’re already here, four grown men in a closet planning the escape of the decade, probably. Not that anyone would write it down in a record somewhere, not that any journalist would ever again pick up a pen. Not that anyone would ever remember them.

There’s a strange sense of peace in that. 

“Okay,” Kai exhales. “All right. All right.” 

Yeonjun hugs him again, his elbows on his shoulders and his hair brushing the soft spots above Kai’s ears. He doesn’t say anything, letting go just as quickly. 

But Kai turns to Beomgyu.

“I’m not all you have anymore,” Kai tells him. “Congrats.”

Taehyun eases the doors open. A sliver of light tiptoes into the place. 

Kai doesn’t linger long enough to let Beomgyu see what it took for him to say those words. 

+

The place feels like a maze. 

It’s bigger than it looks like from the outside, windows painted pitch-black and covered with curtains to not let the light seep through. Kai sticks close to Taehyun, clutching the hammer in his left hand. The sound of their footfalls feels unbearably loud in the stillness. 

“There’s one,” Taehyun whispers, inclining his head to the left, round the corner. Kai feels his brain go blank for a terrifying second, before Taehyun’s harsh whisper of now! tugs him sharply down to reality.

His knuckles sting when he pulls back. He stares down at the unconscious man, unprepared for how soft his temples would actually feel, the prickle of buzzed hair. 

Taehyun crouches down and binds his limbs together. He clicks his tongue as he stands back up, propping the man against the wall. “I really don’t like just leaving them here like this.” 

“Are there no cameras?” Kai asks as they make their way through the winding corridors. If he strains his ears, he thinks he can hear the sound of Yeonjun and Beomgyu following. 

“I bugged them. … Fuck, Kai, there’s three. What are they doing together?”

Kai grimaces. “I hammer one, you punch one, I punch the other. Teamwork.” 

Taehyun’s nose scrunches up. “They’ll scream. We’ll have to time it perfectly.”

“Then we time it perfectly.” 

Big words. Kai thinks the one he punches bites her tongue on accident, and Taehyun is just ruthless. But after everything, his left hand—hesitates. There’s enough force behind it, he knows. Force enough for what, exactly, makes him waver. 

It’s enough. The third one gets over his surprise and swings blindly. 

Kai hears Taehyun swear above his head as he ducks from the fist. He doesn’t stop to think before smashing the hammer into the back of the guard’s knee, sending him sprawling. 

It’s quiet after that.

There’s a ringing in his ears as he watches Taehyun gag the man for good measure, tying him securely to his companions. 

“This is where things could go wrong,” he says, standing back up. He doesn’t look completely unaffected; an odd tinge to his face. Kai realises that he must know some of these people. Must have shared lunches or laughs with them, must have known their names. He inclines his head to a plain door to their right. “Soobin-hyung is behind that door.”  

“The first guards must have woken up by now,” Kai can’t help but say. There’s a cold sweat building at the back of his head. 

Taehyun nods. “Let’s hurry. We just have to do the same thing. Follow me.” 

A part of Kai wants to go and snatch Soobin up himself. He stems it down and goes after Taehyun, their footsteps gradually growing silent against the floor. His ears have acclimatised to the unnatural quiet already. 

“How did you even find yourself here?” Kai asks at the end of a long corridor. 

“I was born here,” Taehyun replies, swearing when his knife slips and stabs into his thumb. “So many of us thought this was just a normal laboratory. We came to work here in hopes of finding something new. Tch. Fools.” 

“What happened to them? The ones who joined with you?”

Taehyun keeps his eyes closed just a second too long. “After the outbreak, we started to realise what this was. The braver ones protested and got killed. We learnt to keep quiet after that.” 

Kai stays silent, mulling it over. “What do they actually do? Hyung wouldn’t say.” 

“They wanted to create a ‘new age of humans’. A better body, one completely immune to disease and affliction. Utter bullshit, but the madness got to them. They started with the children, masquerading as a free science class for the neighbourhood kids. They’d poke and prod, believing if they could just alter the youth, they’d succeed.” 

Seonju-yah couldn’t visit this week. It’s getting worse. She’s getting weaker.

“They thought they’d done it, that they’d created the one true vaccine.” Taehyun’s face darkens. “I was there the day it happened. It was a virus they’d so lovingly birthed. They couldn’t contain it. Their own creation ate them.” 

Kai pauses despite himself. “The outbreak… started here?” 

“Yes,” Taehyun whispers, looking down at the rope burns on his hands from tightening knots as far as they’d go. “... I’ll understand if you don’t want me with you. After you get out.” 

“No,” Kai says immediately, surprising himself. “You couldn’t possibly have known what this was. You’re not at fault. Besides, you’ve helped us this far, haven’t you?” 

Taehyun purses his lips, but doesn’t argue. They continue their morbid task in silence. 

+

They reach the end eventually. Kai half-suspects someone to pop out of the shadows with a cocked gun, Haha, you’ve been got! but… nothing. Nothing at all. 

“This is it,” Taehyun says, his eyes so tired. He nods to the wooden door in front of them, its bolt rusted over. “God, I hope they’re okay.” 

Kai’s knuckles are bloody. As bruised as his heart. The throbbing pain distracts him from the creeping panic that something has gone terribly wrong. 

“What would happen if they got a hold of Yeonjun-hyung?” he asks. 

“They’d bleed him dry,” Taehyun answers, face ashen. “I did some blood tests on him myself, just a few samples should be enough to find the anomaly and duplicate it. But they wouldn’t understand that. They just wouldn’t.” 

“I’m glad you found him,” Kai says, and finds he means it. 

Taehyun scoffs, rubbing at his fingers. “I was sent to scout out any survivors of the first wave. I found him and bandaged up that wound on his neck and then I led him here. He trusted me and I… I just…” 

Kai presses their shoulders together. “And now you’re getting him out. You were just trying to survive, Taehyun. Hyung has already forgiven you.”

Taehyun opens his mouth to reply, then promptly closes it. His eyes widen, his hand shooting out to grab Kai’s wrist on pure instinct. 

Kai feels the heat before he hears the screams. 

Yeonjun and Beomgyu come barrelling around the corner, half-dragging Soobin between them. Behind them follows the unmistakable stench of burning plastic. 

“The building’s on fire!” Beomgyu yells. “Run, you idiots, run!” 

Kai doesn’t have to be told twice. He wrenches open the door and pushes Taehyun outside, ignoring his yelp of surprise. He gets Yeonjun’s shoulder to the chest for his efforts, then Beomgyu’s hand fisting his shirt and tugging him outside. 

Taehyun throws himself against the door, locking it from the outside. 

They find each other’s shaking hands, nerves wounded and eyes wide. Kai’s breathing has gone all wonky and he’s not sure it’s ever going to go back to normal. It’s no use running now. No survivors. Kai doesn’t think his legs would even support him if he took another step.

“Oh my God,” Taehyun chokes out. In the firelight, his eyes are glistening with unshed tears. “How did that happen?”

“We ran into a doctor. We tried to stop him, Taehyun-ah,” Yeonjun says unsteadily, “we really did. He said he’d rather burn the whole place down than be… be heartbroken like this. He’d already struck the match. We could only run.” 

Taehyun’s shoulders shake. Kai puts a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugs it off. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Just—give me a second. Please.” 

People he knows, Kai thinks again. Knew. People he must have grown up with. It’s one thing to leave someone behind and another to know they’ve left you. 

There’s nothing he can do. So he turns to Soobin, leaning against Yeonjun.

“Soobin-hyung,” he greets. Somewhere inside him, he swears he’s overjoyed to see him. Doing pirouettes on water and backflipping into the sun. “Are you okay?” 

Soobin smiles slightly. His eyes are sunken in and his collarbones stark, but he looks relatively unharmed. “I’m fine. Just weak. I was held there longer.” 

Yeonjun swallows. He leans his head on Soobin’s shoulder, and Kai takes that as his sign to look away from them too. What must it feel like, to love so deeply? 

He has nowhere to look but Beomgyu. He turns to find him already looking. 

Beomgyu approaches him first. “Your hands,” he says, and nothing else. 

Kai takes a good look at his face first before answering. There are dried tear-tracks on his face and soot on his cheek. The fire casts all sorts of colours and shadows on his face.

He’s the most beautiful thing Kai has ever seen. 

“They’ll be fine,” he says, a beat too late. 

“Yeonjun-hyung said he’d packed medical supplies. Want me to get them?” 

“Later.” 

Beomgyu nods. He’s more subdued than Kai has ever seen him, and he can’t stand it. There’s no anger left inside him anymore, no desire to hurt. He just wants them all to rest for awhile. To sit in the cradle of someone’s arms and weep. 

Kai reaches up before he can stop himself, brushing away the ash from Beomgyu’s cheek with the back of his hand. 

Beomgyu catches his hand, his eyes wild. “Why are you doing that?” 

“I love you,” Kai replies. “Do with that what you will.” 

Beomgyu doesn’t reply. He simply stares at the fire. 

Day breaks bleak and tepid over their heads by the time the embers finally lay to rest. And still they stand there, quiet and alone. 

+

And so they walk. 

They get out of the town. They travel north, where Taehyun had heard rumours of a safe camp. It sinks in that they’re holding a potential cure right in their hands, and they all unanimously sleep with Yeonjun at the centre. They travel by day, stopping in abandoned houses and barnyards and restaurants by night. Kai lets the falling Delonix regia leaves settle in his hair. Beomgyu cries at night when he can’t sleep, wordlessly asking Kai to hold him through the tremors. Taehyun worms his way into their circle like he was always there. They meet other people, bound for the same destination. Soobin gets better, gets his snark back. He makes shadow-puppets with his hands on nights they build a fire, spinning tales of bunnies and foxies in love, of mango deities and the Milky Way spilling into the earth like a spilt bowl of soup. 

And so they stay. 

One night, they find a house with a courtyard. Taehyun and Kai lock all the doors and windows while Yeonjun and Beomgyu build a fire in the middle. Soobin gets out their well-loved deck of cards and asks them what they’d like to play. 

They force different people every night to sing. Taehyun, to Kai’s delight, has the voice of a lark. 

“Get up,” Beomgyu says after a while. “We’re gonna dance.” 

It’s the first time he’s personally sought out Kai in a while. Since Kai’s confession however many days ago, they’ve kept an unspoken distance. I’m not saying no, Beomgyu’s eyes and the lines of his body at night seem to say. This is not a no. 

“All right,” Kai replies, bemused. He stands up, places his right hand in Beomgyu’s and his left on his shoulder. “There’s no music though.” 

Beomgyu’s hand settles gingerly on his waist, just below his ribs. “Make it up in your head.” 

“Hyung, I can’t slow dance,” Kai laughs. “Neither can you.” 

Beomgyu rolls his eyes, but Kai would recognise that smile blind. “Just sway, then.” 

And so they sway. Yeonjun and Soobin are engaged in a heated game of suit-matching by the fire, while Taehyun keeps score. The soft drag of their muted conversation fills Kai with a sense of peace. Oh, I can still feel. 

Oh, you’re still here with me. 

“How are you then this fine evening, hyung?” Kai asks, just to fill the silence.

Beomgyu smiles. “I’ve come to a revelation, my dear Kai.” 

Kai feels his face heat up. He prays it doesn’t show up. “Have you now?” 

“Yes.” Beomgyu’s soft face settles into a glare. “That this whole time, you thought I was in love with Yeonjun-hyung.” 

Kai trips over Beomgyu’s feet. Beomgyu whacks him firmly in the sternum with a fist. 

“What the fuck, Kai,” he continues. “Are you dumb? Him, really? Choi fucking Yeonjun? Now, I’d still have respected you if you thought it was, say, Soobin-hyung or something. But Yeonjun-hyung? What is wrong with you?” 

“Oh,” Kai says. 

“‘Oh,’ he says,” Beomgyu mocks. “I can’t believe you. You’re such an idiot.” 

He still hasn’t looked away. Slowly, terribly slowly, Beomgyu brings their joined hands to his lips, pressing his lips to Kai’s aching knuckles. Kai’s breath hitches. The world narrows down to just Beomgyu’s face and his eyes and his lips and his hands. 

“There,” he murmurs. His eyes crinkle. “I kissed it better.” 

“... You like me even though I’m an idiot, right?” Kai asks, surely smiling like one. 

“You could be that fraud Wizard of Oz and I’d still be attached to you,” Beomgyu says. The brightness hasn’t quite returned to his face, but he’s smiling. That’s all Kai wants. 

“You could be the Wicked Witch of the West and I’d kiss the wart on your nose,” Kai replies in earnest. 

Beomgyu’s grip on his hand tightens. He forces his lips into a thin, stern line, but they still twitch with mirth. “That’s not as romantic as you think it is, Kai-yah.” 

Kai presses a long, lingering kiss to his temple. “It was never supposed to be.” 

At some point, their hands fall. Beomgyu quietly winds both his arms around Kai’s neck and presses his face into his shoulder. Kai’s arms wind around his back, falling into place at the dip of his waist. 

“You don’t have to hold me like I’m water,” Beomgyu whispers, all soft edges and starry seams. Everything Kai has ever wanted. 

“You’re one of the few precious things left,” he says in lieu of an answer. 

And when Beomgyu leans in and kisses him, it feels like the first warm kiss of spring against Kai’s cheek.