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It's been awhile since Jinsol bothered with keeping track. There really isn't much point anyway—she feels it. Feels the way the temperature subtly rises, how it situates itself onto the surface of her skin and fuses deeper into muscle. Nothing about it now makes her think twice.
Obviously, she knows why: it's the end of the world. To when The End is she isn't sure, but it's rapidly approaching.
Jinsol accepted defeat a while ago. Coming to terms with the fact your inevitable death will forcibly draw itself closer without a real date of when isn't easy, but she's managed to wager with it. It's why she's here right now, body half-slumped on an armchair, the rubble and ruins of whoever this house belonged to being her only source of company as the days tick by—
"Jinsol!"
Oh. There's also Kyujin, too.
Jinsol lazily looks at Kyujin. She's at the other side of the room, pacing back and forth through the rubble with some device in her hands. Jinsol has to squint to see her properly, their lack of light alongside the fact it was steadily approaching midnight making things harder than it needed to be. Kyujin continues. "I think the radio I found works."
If there's one thing that Jinsol finds fascinating about Kyujin is her approach to the current environment they're in. She's carefree, almost, too focused with what's in front of her to care about the surroundings. Kyujin doesn't concern herself with final prayers or attempts at receiving salvation or even wailing in grief. All Kyujin seems to care about is this flimsy radio.
(Prayers are, in Jinsol's grand opinion, fucking useless. They lead to no-where; seeing masses turn to clasping clammy hands together in the hopes to be met with eternal afterlife feels laughable. Hell would spare more pity than Heaven ever would in a situation like this.)
Jinsol doesn't bother to sit up. "You think?" she asks, wiping a bead of sweat off the back of her neck.
"It made a sound—a crackle! Someone else has got to be in range, right?"
Jinsol doesn't doubt her claim. They're still in the city—or, what remains of the city. A domino effect of panic lead to chaos, outbreaks of violence and destruction Jinsol can best compare to The Purge plagued most major cities around the world. Theirs was one of them. So maybe Kyujin's right: there likely is someone somewhere, but Jinsol isn't one to take chances. At least not anymore in the state they find themselves now.
"I suppose," Jinsol mumbles, already knowing where this conversation will lead to, "but they could be anywhere."
"Why don't we go find them?" Kyujin bounces back, stopping abruptly where she paces. Flecks of dirt and stone kick into the air as she does.
But time and time again they've had this chat, Jinsol knows, and her answer will always remain the same. "'You know we can't, Kyujin."
Jinsol thinks the frown that falls onto Kyujin's face might be enough to send the earth into eternal darkness. "You're so gloomy now, you know that right?" Kyujin groans, tossing the radio onto the floor. The clatter makes Jinsol flinch.
Jinsol is gloomy, but she can't help it. It's not like her to be like this, so overly pessimistic and thwarted. Yet it's the only feasible conclusion she's managed to come to. The more Jinsol panics the more she finds herself struggling to breath; she's learned as much, refusing to let fear mix back into the blood of her veins. She can't afford to be filled with fear right now. There are more important matters to be concerned over.
Such as telling Kyujin she's in-love with her.
There's a heaviness weighing into her limbs now and it's disgusting. Mindlessly, Jinsol gets up from her chair, walks towards the shattered window where the moon struggles to illuminate the earthly plain below.
Jinsol hates the moon. It's a rotten thing, she thinks, with the way it taunts its existence back at them. The moon isn't concerned with whether it will make it to the next day or not, or whether that feeling of being followed, of something looming just behind you, is real or a figment of imagination. The moon doesn't care; it'll survive all of this either way.
Jinsol thinks that's bullshit.
"Crescent moon," Kyujin tells her, walking up to Jinsol but leaving a comfortable space between them.
Jinsol turns to her, amused. "Since when did you care about moon types?"
Kyujin shrugs. "I don't. Just one of those things I know, I guess."
"Does it mean anything?" Jinsol doesn't know why she asks, but something about keeping in-conversation with Kyujin grounds her. Amidst the panic, the lives taken daily all around them, Kyujin manages to be the only thing she can solidly rely on.
"People say it relates to the cycle of life, or something."
Jinsol hums. It's little things like this why she likes Kyujin so much. She looks over; Kyujin's too busy staring out the window to notice her blazing glare. Everything is painfully unfair, she concludes, studying Kyujin's side-profile like she hasn't hundreds of times before. She can't lose this. Just—if she could have one moment, a singular proof of reciprocation, she'd gladly let herself permeate into nothing more than a death toll statistic.
"I'm in-love with you." Jinsol blurts, and her voice cracks.
It's blunt and nervy and comes out in all the wrong ways. Jinsol wants to rip her tongue out, scream into a void in the hopes that someone hears her failure and bestows a second chance upon her. To do things right; to go back in time and admit to Kyujin in a time where she knows death isn't perpetually swinging above their heads.
"Oh," Kyujin sounds out, turning face-to-face with Jinsol. She looks ready to say more, maybe even reciprocate back what Jinsol just told her, but she doesn't. Her line of sight trails somewhere behind them, face dropping in an instant. "Too late, Jinsol."
Jinsol is seething with sadness, but it doesn't last very long. Not when, without warning, the heat cranks up tenfold, and something dark whisks itself into the room. What feels like the dust Kyujin kicked off the floor earlier expands its way into her lungs. She's coughing, but it's useless with how she feels her airways restrict tighter.
She blinks, and everything goes dark.