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The world has fallen into a ditch full of shit, and Juhoon knows exactly how it started.
Not the politics, or the conspiracies. He doesn’t know about any of that. He means the actual biological process of it. He was studying to be a doctor, after all.
The first sign can reveal itself under the inspection of a microscope. A pathogen breaches the bloodstream and travels quite efficiently, evading the immune defenses as it makes a home in the body. But the brain doesn't die, not really. It is simply rewired. The frontal lobe holding all judgment, empathy, restraint, love, shuts down in flickers. All electrical signals start to stutter as higher reasoning begins its slow rotting.
The brainstem persists in some way, stubborn in its primitivism, not unless you rip it out of the body too. That is why the ones who have become less than themselves continue to breathe. The lungs still pull air, and their heart forces blood through veins that no longer answer to a conscious will. There should be a fracture in the endocrine system, overriding pain receptors and pulling everything but the most basic impulses:
Hunger, movement, a certain reflex.
What comes out of it is, morally speaking, not a person.
But beyond that, Juhoon also remembers how the two of you had started out.
It’s a comforting thought as he walks into the room he had put you in.
You were both children back then, as unguarded and curious as any could be. His parents had brought him to the playground to make friends in the new neighborhood, while they mingled with the other attending adults in turn. He wandered just in front of a slide when you emerged out of it and came crashing into his little unassuming world.
It had grown infinitely bigger after that.
In the timeline that is now, though, he closes the door softly behind him and clicks the lock shut, taking one long look at you. Whatever ruin holds you now, you seem at once delicate and impossible to break. He thinks he could live, and better yet die, holding onto that contradiction.
Another memory resurfaces. High school, long ago. There's more than one. He’d walk you home after night class, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, sharing dreams far bigger than the borders of that small town.
“I’ll get out of this place soon. Watch me.” You had said back then, heart beating fast into a life beyond this. A life worth running toward.
Juhoon tilted his head, a crooked grin teasing his lips. “Already planning on leaving me here?”
“You’d want that won't you?”
“Never.”
He wonders if you had sensed it back then, that the world you liked daring so much would one day split itself open. He finds himself wondering again if, even knowing that, you would have still stretched onto your tiptoes to reach for even a fleeting inch of sky.
Where does it all go? The dreams, the love, the urge to wake up, because it existed once, and intangible things are untouchable, so can they ever truly be destroyed?
“Easy now.”
He holds the key that bears the ultimatum between you and him. One turn in the padlock and something may become of you both. The metals click softly, the fulcrum upon which your freedom, or something else, will hinge.
But that same damn key is the only thing keeping you from him.
As he comes closer, and your screams rise in pitch, he thinks of another memory.
He had been stretched out on your bed while you lay beside him, thumbs flying across your screen. He knew who you were texting, and he couldn’t care less about what you were talking about. At an age where wanting had grown almost indistinguishable from needing, there was only one thing he desired that night.
He slipped the phone from your fingers and sent it skidding across the bed. When you leaned after it, he nudged you back down.
“Ju, what–”
“Please don’t go out with him.” Smooth.
The words left him before he could swallow them back in the way he’s done a hundred times over. His nails dug into his palms like he needed the sting to keep going. He was so close back then. And he had never been this close, never felt this fearless, never pushed so far.
You asked, so quietly. “Why not?”
“Because he doesn’t deserve you.”
“You don’t know th–”
“And I don’t deserve you either Y/n.” His hand came up to slip through the strand of hair falling onto your face, smoothing it over to the side. He wanted you whole and unhidden before he could say anything else.
“I don’t. But I’m–I mean I can never feel anything else nowadays.”
You looked at him then with a bold glint in your eyes, and he felt it like a compass. You had always known where to point for honesty, and when you looked at him like that, the truth would claw itself out of his ribs even if it had to crawl.
You only have to whisper. “Feel what?”
“You know what.”
That night, your phone, and the person you had been texting, lay forgotten somewhere in the sheets, long abandoned. But there are things Juhoon knows he will never forget. The shape of your lips, the taste of your breaths, the warmth he holds close, and the wild pulse in his chest. He molds those truths into the skull that holds the brain, and they have followed him mercilessly until now.
So much of himself has been his to give, and he has been trying ever since.
There’s a sound in your throat that snaps him out of his reminiscing. It’s not a word, not anymore, but he pretends it is, straining to hear what you might want to say.
“It’s sunny. Don’t you like it when the sun’s out?”
He knows he must sound crazy talking like this. You answer only by lunging, sudden and frantic, your hands slipping through the bars to catch at his sleeve. Not tight enough to pull. Just desperate. Just very hungry, he assumes.
“What’s wrong?”
You tug again, teeth bared, not in a smile. In fact, it’s nothing close.
He already knows what's wrong. Still, it’s something.
He gets pulled into memory lane once more. This time, it’s colder than the rest.
Lunch was all you’d planned. The sun was out, air light, and the roast was still warm in your hands as you both stepped inside the threshold of your parents’ home.
But it was so oddly quiet.
The helper you had so desperately begged your parents to hire for themselves while you were away for college appeared at the end of the hall. Her expression was just so wrong, hollowed out, ravenous. She had lunged forward with an unthinking hunger.
Shapes lay on the floor behind her, two still silhouettes where there should have been none. There was no time to think, no time to make sense of the red staining the carpets. You both bolted, instinct and fear the only intuitions carrying you out and into the blinding afternoon.
He doesn’t want to remember how you were after that.
Life had quickly turned into a three step cycle: eat, sleep, run. You meet people, trust them, maybe share a laugh and a drink for a few days, and then they'd turn. Life (and hell) on earth had become a series of fleeting connections, and you only have your feet to keep you alive.
Juhoon reckons they’ve already run across the country by the time it happens.
Death shouldn’t feel routine. He isn’t even sure if this counts as death, not by any scientific measure. The heart still beats, the body still moves, but the soul has been leeched away. That much he knows, perhaps better than anyone.
But he sees death everywhere now. It grows even in the spines of those who live, in the vacant eyes that mirror the end. What does life amount to, after all, without purpose? And what worth can there be in a world devoted solely to survival?
He looks for answers in the paper he begins to unfold.
—----
Ju, my sweet Ju,
This world is so scary. It’s a god-awful place. I know I’ve only ever said it once. I want to be brave, or at least save a little face. But more than anything, I just want to shake you awake and tell you all this myself.
My memory's fading. I can barely hold on to anything except the last person who turned. Was it James? I’m not sure anymore. The image is burned in, but I’ll probably forget it soon. Give it a few hours.
Maybe you'll come up with a better way to explain all of this. It’s anatomical, isn’t it? You’ve always been good at that, what with you bandaging my knees every time I’d fall off the swings.
But I want to say it now while I still can. I’m so scared. I’m so scared Ju. You know I’ve never been a fast runner. I wish I knew that too.
More than that though, I need to tell you that I love you. It’s the only feeling that can override the fear I feel. That I love you. That there never was any other feeling I could reach for even in the rush of fleeing from the dead and the living alike. All I know is that I love you. And maybe it's because my brain is already starting to eat itself open, but that is the only clean thought I can give.
I feel like I’m slipping through my own skin. My hands don’t behave the way they used to, so I hope this is even a little readable. But even if I can’t really control anything else, I can still think of you.
Juhoon, Juhoon, Juhoon
Take a walk in your free time, yeah? Speak something into the wind or the sun. I will have fun gathering them all, as I always do.
—----
He crumples the paper and lets it fall to the floor, and its edges curl like the last remnants of a life that had been just a little out of reach. You stay in your corner, unnervingly still in a way you never truly were at grand. Juhoon wants to think that maybe you’ve learned patience in the aftermath that is this.
With a simple twist of a key, the lock clicks, and as he braces for nothing but a final act of love, the metal door creaks open.
Before anything else, he imagines warmth. What reaches for him is more than he ever dared to hope.
You had told him once that the love you feel had nowhere to go but outward. He believed it. You pressed it into the world, and more of it into him. That same night, he heard you praying something into the dark: God, I fear that love is violence.
But now, as he lies helpless on the worn cement, feeling a strange kind of freshness leaving him in small bites and quiet increments, the deep crimson you draw out of him pooling beneath his body, he wants to tell you that you’d been wrong all along.
Because when Juhoon looks for fear, he finds none. He’s convinced there is no violence in this, in wanting. To give and to take. Love, in all its forms, can never be brutal. He wants you to understand that now, as this room closes in on the shape of your hunger and the certainty of what you’ve always meant to him.
Can you feel me now? Do I taste just how you imagined?
Juhoon realizes that what they say is true. This feeling conquers any other. There is no ache in his muscles being cut open, and no preying fear in the heart that will soon be torn out of him. He can only look up at the thirst that takes you, and hope there is enough of him to nourish it.
And though he’s described this before as a monstrous disease, all Juhoon’s made of now is love. He brims with it and wants you to take your fill. This is the same girl he let himself feel too much about all those years ago. No matter how twisted your face contorts, or how hoarse your voice has become, you can only ever be the same to him.
It’s a sunny day outside, and sunlight spills through the window, casting sharp shadows across the room he remained so stubbornly alive in.
He looks at his hand still caught in your hair and feels a wave of dizziness sweep him, smudging the world soft. He coughs out red, bleeds it too, but still manages to speak.
“Slow down, yeah? I wanna look at you a little longer.”
Before he surrenders to the pull of unconsciousness, he thinks, perhaps for a moment, and maybe for all time after this, against the world being cracked open and the earth running dry, that there was never a better way to live.