[unfinished/abandoned]
welcome to the new age; jongtae; ~3100w
zombie apocalypse au
It happens on a Monday morning, which Taemin only knows because everything started on July third, a Monday, and that was exactly two weeks ago, according to the handwritten calendar he and Jinki are keeping. On that Monday, the world had gone to shit and the electricity had gone out, and after they'd positioned candles on various surfaces of their parents' apartment, Jinki had insisted that they keep track of the days.
"Why," Taemin had asked dully. "What's the point when we're just going to - "
"Because your birthday's coming up," Jinki had supplied. "The big two-oh! We wouldn't want to miss that, now would we."
But on Monday, July seventeenth, Jinki gets bit on a routine supply run, and Taemin could give a fuck about the date and day of the week because this is it, the end of the world. A trail of his brother's blood runs from where he stands, drooped over the kitchen sink, out the door and down the hall, to the stairs. It might as well be a neon sign lighting up their apartment with the ripe scent of human.
"How many?" Taemin says tersely, a rusty crowbar gripped tightly in his right hand. "And where?"
"It was just one," Jinki pants, wiping sweat from his pale face. "Mrs. Cho. I took care of it."
Mrs. Cho, their neighbor. Just yesterday Taemin had seen her alive and breathing, swaying sedately in her old rocking chair like nothing was wrong.
"What happened?" Taemin demands.
Jinki pauses, like he has a lot of answers but has to parse through the bad ones.
"She was sick," is what he finally says. Blood drips from his left forearm. Unspoken: Now I'm sick, too.
"But what happened," Taemin presses.
"She was lying funny on the stairs, facedown, kind of twisted," Jinki says, wrapping a towel carefully around the wound, masking the ugly scarlet crescents. "I went over, thought I could help her out." He tightens the towel. "I couldn't."
Sick. The government's euphemism, not theirs. Because "sick" implied curability, and any term with "dead" in it had the unpleasant ring of permanence. A crowded city seized with panic didn't need to hear that the dead were reanimating. Rather, it needed instructions, sent out on crackling radio waves, on how to calmly and safely avoid the "sick."
It's been two weeks since they've heard anything from the government, though, so Taemin chooses another expression.
"If Mrs. Cho was infected," he says to Jinki as they scrub out the blood on the floor, "there's another one in here somewhere."
"I didn't see one," Jinki says.
"It could be anywhere," Taemin says wearily. "I'll have to sweep the building."
"Okay," Jinki agrees. "I'll take the top floors, you - "
"I'm doing this," Taemin snaps. "You need to lie down for a while."
The truth is, neither of them know really what to do about infection. The news stations had stayed on air just long enough to broadcast the basics of how the virus worked. Once you were bitten, the first symptom was fever, which burned you up, flooded your brain, seized your heart. The second symptom was death.
The third, hunger.
They'd lost power before anyone figured out a hard and fast rule for how long the process took, or if it could be slowed or even halted. Even if there were a way, this is an abandoned apartment building, not a high-tech government facility. Taemin's guess, though, is that a little bed rest certainly couldn't hurt. What else can they do?
"Oh, Taemin," Jinki says softly, his eyes wet. "Let me help you while I still can."
"Just lie down, hyung!" Taemin all but snarls. Jinki begins crying in earnest, but complies.
The trail of blood leads, in a lurching, zigzagging kind of way, down the hall and through the door to the stairwell, down to the curve and landing where Mrs. Cho's body lies crumpled in an unrecognizable heap, brains bashed in courtesy of Jinki. The flies have already begun to gather around the carnage, and Taemin's stomach turns at the sight. He says a quick prayer before disposing of the body (ie, dragging it down to a second-story window and tossing it into the alleyway dumpster) and tries to put Mrs. Cho out of his mind. No point in dwelling on it when he's got an entire building to lock down.
But, as it turns out, the building is still secure. All the first floor fortifications are in place and undisturbed, and there are no traces of intruders on any of the other floors, either. Taemin returns to the apartment feeling worn down, frustrated. The sight of Jinki curled in a blind, restless fever doesn't help.
For the rest of the day, Jinki mostly just sleeps, and Taemin mostly just watches. It's not easy watching your last lifeline waste away, but the alternative is to let it happen while your back is turned. So Taemin sits silently by Jinki's bed, occasionally pressing a cool, damp cloth to his brother's forehead. As night begins to fall, he goes to retrieve candles from the kitchen, and when he returns, Jinki is lucid.
"You know you should kill me now," Jinki says, his voice unusually raspy.
Taemin knows.
"You're talking like a crazy person," he says briskly, setting the candles on the bedside table. "Want me to make you some soup? You haven't eaten all day."
"Nah, I'm not hungry," Jinki says. "But, well, actually. Go to the kitchen, get the container from the top shelf of the refrigerator."
"The refrigerator doesn't work."
"I know. Just do it."
Reluctantly, Taemin does as he's bid. Inside the dark refrigerator he finds a room-temperature tupperware, and inside that is a small, slightly misshapen cake, "Happy 20th Bday!" clumsily scrawled in pink frosting. Suddenly Taemin can't see for the tears that have clouded his eyes, can't swallow for the lump in his throat, can barely breathe for the raw emotion welling from his heart. He returns to Jinki's bedroom to find an expectant smile on his brother's face.
"Do you like it?" Jinki murmurs. "You wouldn't believe what I went through to make it."
Taemin sets the cake down carefully and then hugs his sweaty, fevered brother for all he's worth, memorizing the tickle of shaggy hair against his cheek and the reassuring pressure of Jinki's arms squeezing his midriff. From here on out, the only certainty is that Jinki's clock is ticking down. Taemin doesn't let go until Jinki says, muffled, "Hey, eat that damn cake before it gets stale."
The cake is dry, tasteless. The frosting is far too sweet. But Taemin forces himself to eat every bite, assuring Jinki that it's the most delicious thing he's ever had.
"I'm glad," Jinki says, closing his eyes and leaning back into his pillow. "Happy birthday, Taemin."
Morning comes and Jinki's eyes are closed, his fever gone, his chest still.
Taemin is a legal adult, and Jinki's heart has stopped beating.
There's little time to process this. The world is gray, and Taemin is numb. All he knows is that he is completely and utterly alone, and a wave of crushing hopelessness paralyzes him in place before Jinki's pale body. Seconds, maybe minutes, pass in a haze. Taemin can only stare unblinkingly at the serene shape of his brother's closed eyelids, as though with enough concentration he can force them to flutter open again.
But of course he can't, and as sunlight begins to warm the room, Taemin realizes that he must move eventually.
What a truly practical person would do, he thinks vaguely, is dispose of Jinki before he could reanimate and attack. But the idea of going at Jinki's brain with the crowbar and then tossing him into the alleyway dumpster makes him want to throw up, so Taemin nixes that immediately. Yet, he can't just do nothing, not unless he has a death wish.
In the end, he draws the sheet up over Jinki's cold, lifeless face and closes the bedroom door. Locks it. If he can't kill Jinki, containment is the next best thing.
And if there's going to be an undead, hungry Jinki dwelling in that locked bedroom, Taemin wants to be as far from it as humanly possible.
He has to get out of Seoul. He doesn't know where to go from there, but he'll figure it out on the way. As he goes around the apartment packing what he thinks he'll need, a new sense of purpose revitalizes his movements. Back before the media had gone down, there had been talk of a special research facility. A cure. If Taemin can just find it, bring it back here, he'll have his brother back. Jinki is damaged, but not beyond repair.
If for no other purpose than curing his brother, Taemin will survive.
The streets are eerily quiet, the shuffling bodies relatively calm, but Taemin remains on his guard. With his heavy black duffel over his left arm and a dusty, stained crowbar gripped in his right hand, he's not equipped to take more than one of those things at a time. As such, he's careful to make no noise as he treads, and to trace roundabout routes in order to avoid contact with any of them.
He's doing really well, too, until the roaring starts.
Two of the things, which had been slumped shapelessly like hoboes againts a rundown storefront, perk up at the sound. And then they catch sight of Taemin.
"Fuck," he mutters under his breath, turning to run back the way he'd come. But the roaring just gets louder, and from the corner of his eye he sees another one approaching in that careless, uneven gait.
And now the source of the roar rounds a corner two blocks ahead, skidding and squealing in a flash of gleaming, candy-red that is unquestionably out of place in the dull, unkempt maze of unlived-in Seoul: a luxury sports car, clearly new, and clearly breaking the speed limit. Not that Taemin gives a fuck about speed limits now (or ever, really), but a car that can put the speed limit to shame can easily outpace all manner of undead.
This car just might be his ticket out of the city.
So he does something that, in other circumstances, would be very unwise. He jumps in front of the car, waving his arms and yelling frantically.
"STOP!" he bellows. "HELP!"
The car does not slow.
Taemin winds up his right arm to heave the crowbar at the windshield (another thing he would never have considered in less dire times), and the car screeches to a halt just feet away. Taemin sprints to the passenger door, throws himself in, all the while looking over his shoulder at the things still following him in dogged pursuit. They're slow, but now there are even more of them. He would have been toast.
"You're welcome," prompts the driver gruffly as he revs the engine and they speed off.
"Oh, yeah." Taemin says, turning hastily. "Thanks."
The driver sighs. He's young, probably no older than Jinki, but more compact. Short and muscled, where Jinki had been covered in soft edges. A blue and white baseball cap is jammed over messy black hair, partially obscuring his eyes. His jaw is sharp, his lips round. And his skin is a weathered brown, his hands callused and steady as they caress the leather steering wheel.
"I shouldn't have picked you up," he mutters. "Damn it. Why were you even out there?"
"I just wanted to get out of the city," Taemin says, his voice small.
"What?" the man says, surprised. "You've been in here this whole time?"
"Yeah."
"I didn't think there was anyone left alive in Seoul." He sounds impressed. "What's your name?"
"Taemin."
"I'm Jonghyun."
Taemin says nothing. Somehow, the usual "nice to meet you" doesn't feel appropriate for this occasion.
"So where are you headed?" Jonghyun asks.
"Don't know yet," Taemin says shortly. He peeks at the gas meter, finds it to be nearly full. "Where are you going?"
"I've got a place," Jonghyun says, and Taemin can hear the sudden change in his tone, the way his voice has suddenly become closed off.
"Where?"
"A little ways off."
"Just you?"
"Yeah," Jonghyun says, and adds quickly "but don't start getting any ideas, kid."
"If I stayed with you - " Taemin starts hopefully.
"That's not happening," Jonghyun says, jaw tightening.
"I could be helpful," Taemin persists. "I'd earn my keep."
"I really doubt it," Jonghyun says.
They clear the city limits, and for a while Taemin is silenced by the sight of all the broken-down cars heaped like overturned Hot Wheels on the side of the highway, some empty, some with their occupants still trapped inside, scrabbling empty-eyed at dusty glass windows. He thinks back to the panic of the first few days, when people had stampeded out of the city in droves, caught up in a chaotic evacuation that had doomed more than it saved. Jinki had been right about staying behind - employing proper caution, they'd had the run of their apartment building, never worrying about food or being bitten.
Well. Until yesterday.
"Jonghyun," Taemin says quietly as the scenery out the window shifts to the greenery of farmland. "Take me with you."
"I told you - "
"I swear I'll pull my weight. I'll do whatever you ask," Taemin says determinedly. "I have nowhere to go. I don't know what to do."
"That," Jonghyun says heavily, "isn't exactly my problem."
"Okay, then let me off here."
They're in the middle of a deserted highway.
"Seriously?" Jonghyun says. He doesn't ease up on the gas.
"Yeah. And before you leave, put a bullet between my eyes."
"What?"
"If you don't take me in, that's as good as a death sentence." Taemin shrugs nonchalantly, even as his heart pounds desperately in his chest. "So, might as well just shoot me now. Same outcome."
Jonghyun chews his lip. He's wavering.
"Oh, jeez," he says finally, wilting in defeat. "You're lucky you're damn cute, kid. Yeah, alright. I'll take you in."
"Thank you so - !"
"But let me just say this," Jonghyun warns, cutting Taemin off. "You're cute and all, but I have no reason to trust you. You make one wrong move, and I will leave a bullet in your brain."
"Bullet. Brain." Taemin nods fervently. "Got it."
Jonghyun's place turns out to be a deserted farm, secluded, untouched, complete with four working wells and a sizeable vegetable garden. Jonghyun parks the red sports car next to a line of dusty pickups, a tan SUV, and a hulking RV.
"Nice fleet," Taemin remarks. "Why so many cars?"
"It wasn't always just me," Jonghyun says curtly.
They spend the rest of the afternoon on a tour of the premises, but now Taemin can't stop glancing around furtively for ghosts, and he doesn't miss the crude wooden crosses marking freshly turned soil beneath the old oak tree next to the barn. But Jonghyun doesn't elaborate on what happened to the rest of his party, and Taemin doesn't ask.
Dinner is cold spam, straight from the can. Taemin, used to eating semi-civilized meals with Jinki in the apartment building, spears a chunk on his chopsticks and waves it around uneasily until Jonghyun tells him to just eat it already, shit.
"I've never had spam before," Taemin says, after popping a piece in his mouth and chewing it with a pained look.
"There's a first time for everything," Jonghyun tells him, washing his down with a swig of water from a plastic cup. "When you're done, I'll show you where you'll sleep."
The bedroom is a decent size, but barely furnished. There's an ancient desk and bureau, a creaky midsize bed, flowery muslin curtains. The walls are a pale pink. Large off-color patches on the hardwood floor provide a blueprint of missing furniture. To Taemin, it feels lived-in but incomplete, as though the imprint of personality has been withdrawn, and the room is waiting patiently for its inhabitant to return.
"We think this was the daughter's room," Jonghyun says impassively. He pats the worn mattress. "And we checked; the bed's clean. No bugs."
"Who's we?" Taemin wants to know.
Jonghyun exhales heavily. "I don't want to have that conversation right now. Get a good night's sleep, tomorrow I'll show you how to work the traps."
Taemin's grateful for the bed, grateful to have his own space. But it doesn't hit him until he's lying alone in a stranger's bedroom how much has changed since yesterday. All day he's been active, moving, completely on edge, but now that he's settled and still, now that fatigue has stilled his limbs and left only his mind free to explore, now he remembers.
He's in some remote farmhouse miles and miles from Seoul, and Jinki is dead.
Jinki is dead.
It was inevitable from the moment of the bite, but it didn't have to be true until he started thinking it. Now he's started and he can't stop, because Jinki, his brother, the only one he had left as everyone in the city slowly disappeared, is now dead. Gone forever. He'd wasted their last hours together in stubborn silence, and now it's too late to say all of the things he should have, too late to make Jinki understand how much Taemin loved him and looked up to him and needed him not to be dead.
The comforter tucked under his chin smells soapy and girly. He buries his face in it, soaks it with his tears. When he feels hollow, cried-out, he stares across the dark room at the door. He'd shut it for privacy, since Jonghyun was sleeping in the bedroom directly across the hall.
Fuck privacy, he thinks, and gets out of bed. Tomorrow night he'll keep to his own space. But tonight, he just can't be by himself. Comforter and pillow gathered in his arms, he fumbles at Jonghyun's doorknob and nudges it open quietly.
a walking dead au that'll never get finished, posting it anyway, yolo
zombie apocalypse au
It happens on a Monday morning, which Taemin only knows because everything started on July third, a Monday, and that was exactly two weeks ago, according to the handwritten calendar he and Jinki are keeping. On that Monday, the world had gone to shit and the electricity had gone out, and after they'd positioned candles on various surfaces of their parents' apartment, Jinki had insisted that they keep track of the days.
"Why," Taemin had asked dully. "What's the point when we're just going to - "
"Because your birthday's coming up," Jinki had supplied. "The big two-oh! We wouldn't want to miss that, now would we."
But on Monday, July seventeenth, Jinki gets bit on a routine supply run, and Taemin could give a fuck about the date and day of the week because this is it, the end of the world. A trail of his brother's blood runs from where he stands, drooped over the kitchen sink, out the door and down the hall, to the stairs. It might as well be a neon sign lighting up their apartment with the ripe scent of human.
"How many?" Taemin says tersely, a rusty crowbar gripped tightly in his right hand. "And where?"
"It was just one," Jinki pants, wiping sweat from his pale face. "Mrs. Cho. I took care of it."
Mrs. Cho, their neighbor. Just yesterday Taemin had seen her alive and breathing, swaying sedately in her old rocking chair like nothing was wrong.
"What happened?" Taemin demands.
Jinki pauses, like he has a lot of answers but has to parse through the bad ones.
"She was sick," is what he finally says. Blood drips from his left forearm. Unspoken: Now I'm sick, too.
"But what happened," Taemin presses.
"She was lying funny on the stairs, facedown, kind of twisted," Jinki says, wrapping a towel carefully around the wound, masking the ugly scarlet crescents. "I went over, thought I could help her out." He tightens the towel. "I couldn't."
Sick. The government's euphemism, not theirs. Because "sick" implied curability, and any term with "dead" in it had the unpleasant ring of permanence. A crowded city seized with panic didn't need to hear that the dead were reanimating. Rather, it needed instructions, sent out on crackling radio waves, on how to calmly and safely avoid the "sick."
It's been two weeks since they've heard anything from the government, though, so Taemin chooses another expression.
"If Mrs. Cho was infected," he says to Jinki as they scrub out the blood on the floor, "there's another one in here somewhere."
"I didn't see one," Jinki says.
"It could be anywhere," Taemin says wearily. "I'll have to sweep the building."
"Okay," Jinki agrees. "I'll take the top floors, you - "
"I'm doing this," Taemin snaps. "You need to lie down for a while."
The truth is, neither of them know really what to do about infection. The news stations had stayed on air just long enough to broadcast the basics of how the virus worked. Once you were bitten, the first symptom was fever, which burned you up, flooded your brain, seized your heart. The second symptom was death.
The third, hunger.
They'd lost power before anyone figured out a hard and fast rule for how long the process took, or if it could be slowed or even halted. Even if there were a way, this is an abandoned apartment building, not a high-tech government facility. Taemin's guess, though, is that a little bed rest certainly couldn't hurt. What else can they do?
"Oh, Taemin," Jinki says softly, his eyes wet. "Let me help you while I still can."
"Just lie down, hyung!" Taemin all but snarls. Jinki begins crying in earnest, but complies.
The trail of blood leads, in a lurching, zigzagging kind of way, down the hall and through the door to the stairwell, down to the curve and landing where Mrs. Cho's body lies crumpled in an unrecognizable heap, brains bashed in courtesy of Jinki. The flies have already begun to gather around the carnage, and Taemin's stomach turns at the sight. He says a quick prayer before disposing of the body (ie, dragging it down to a second-story window and tossing it into the alleyway dumpster) and tries to put Mrs. Cho out of his mind. No point in dwelling on it when he's got an entire building to lock down.
But, as it turns out, the building is still secure. All the first floor fortifications are in place and undisturbed, and there are no traces of intruders on any of the other floors, either. Taemin returns to the apartment feeling worn down, frustrated. The sight of Jinki curled in a blind, restless fever doesn't help.
For the rest of the day, Jinki mostly just sleeps, and Taemin mostly just watches. It's not easy watching your last lifeline waste away, but the alternative is to let it happen while your back is turned. So Taemin sits silently by Jinki's bed, occasionally pressing a cool, damp cloth to his brother's forehead. As night begins to fall, he goes to retrieve candles from the kitchen, and when he returns, Jinki is lucid.
"You know you should kill me now," Jinki says, his voice unusually raspy.
Taemin knows.
"You're talking like a crazy person," he says briskly, setting the candles on the bedside table. "Want me to make you some soup? You haven't eaten all day."
"Nah, I'm not hungry," Jinki says. "But, well, actually. Go to the kitchen, get the container from the top shelf of the refrigerator."
"The refrigerator doesn't work."
"I know. Just do it."
Reluctantly, Taemin does as he's bid. Inside the dark refrigerator he finds a room-temperature tupperware, and inside that is a small, slightly misshapen cake, "Happy 20th Bday!" clumsily scrawled in pink frosting. Suddenly Taemin can't see for the tears that have clouded his eyes, can't swallow for the lump in his throat, can barely breathe for the raw emotion welling from his heart. He returns to Jinki's bedroom to find an expectant smile on his brother's face.
"Do you like it?" Jinki murmurs. "You wouldn't believe what I went through to make it."
Taemin sets the cake down carefully and then hugs his sweaty, fevered brother for all he's worth, memorizing the tickle of shaggy hair against his cheek and the reassuring pressure of Jinki's arms squeezing his midriff. From here on out, the only certainty is that Jinki's clock is ticking down. Taemin doesn't let go until Jinki says, muffled, "Hey, eat that damn cake before it gets stale."
The cake is dry, tasteless. The frosting is far too sweet. But Taemin forces himself to eat every bite, assuring Jinki that it's the most delicious thing he's ever had.
"I'm glad," Jinki says, closing his eyes and leaning back into his pillow. "Happy birthday, Taemin."
Morning comes and Jinki's eyes are closed, his fever gone, his chest still.
Taemin is a legal adult, and Jinki's heart has stopped beating.
There's little time to process this. The world is gray, and Taemin is numb. All he knows is that he is completely and utterly alone, and a wave of crushing hopelessness paralyzes him in place before Jinki's pale body. Seconds, maybe minutes, pass in a haze. Taemin can only stare unblinkingly at the serene shape of his brother's closed eyelids, as though with enough concentration he can force them to flutter open again.
But of course he can't, and as sunlight begins to warm the room, Taemin realizes that he must move eventually.
What a truly practical person would do, he thinks vaguely, is dispose of Jinki before he could reanimate and attack. But the idea of going at Jinki's brain with the crowbar and then tossing him into the alleyway dumpster makes him want to throw up, so Taemin nixes that immediately. Yet, he can't just do nothing, not unless he has a death wish.
In the end, he draws the sheet up over Jinki's cold, lifeless face and closes the bedroom door. Locks it. If he can't kill Jinki, containment is the next best thing.
And if there's going to be an undead, hungry Jinki dwelling in that locked bedroom, Taemin wants to be as far from it as humanly possible.
He has to get out of Seoul. He doesn't know where to go from there, but he'll figure it out on the way. As he goes around the apartment packing what he thinks he'll need, a new sense of purpose revitalizes his movements. Back before the media had gone down, there had been talk of a special research facility. A cure. If Taemin can just find it, bring it back here, he'll have his brother back. Jinki is damaged, but not beyond repair.
If for no other purpose than curing his brother, Taemin will survive.
The streets are eerily quiet, the shuffling bodies relatively calm, but Taemin remains on his guard. With his heavy black duffel over his left arm and a dusty, stained crowbar gripped in his right hand, he's not equipped to take more than one of those things at a time. As such, he's careful to make no noise as he treads, and to trace roundabout routes in order to avoid contact with any of them.
He's doing really well, too, until the roaring starts.
Two of the things, which had been slumped shapelessly like hoboes againts a rundown storefront, perk up at the sound. And then they catch sight of Taemin.
"Fuck," he mutters under his breath, turning to run back the way he'd come. But the roaring just gets louder, and from the corner of his eye he sees another one approaching in that careless, uneven gait.
And now the source of the roar rounds a corner two blocks ahead, skidding and squealing in a flash of gleaming, candy-red that is unquestionably out of place in the dull, unkempt maze of unlived-in Seoul: a luxury sports car, clearly new, and clearly breaking the speed limit. Not that Taemin gives a fuck about speed limits now (or ever, really), but a car that can put the speed limit to shame can easily outpace all manner of undead.
This car just might be his ticket out of the city.
So he does something that, in other circumstances, would be very unwise. He jumps in front of the car, waving his arms and yelling frantically.
"STOP!" he bellows. "HELP!"
The car does not slow.
Taemin winds up his right arm to heave the crowbar at the windshield (another thing he would never have considered in less dire times), and the car screeches to a halt just feet away. Taemin sprints to the passenger door, throws himself in, all the while looking over his shoulder at the things still following him in dogged pursuit. They're slow, but now there are even more of them. He would have been toast.
"You're welcome," prompts the driver gruffly as he revs the engine and they speed off.
"Oh, yeah." Taemin says, turning hastily. "Thanks."
The driver sighs. He's young, probably no older than Jinki, but more compact. Short and muscled, where Jinki had been covered in soft edges. A blue and white baseball cap is jammed over messy black hair, partially obscuring his eyes. His jaw is sharp, his lips round. And his skin is a weathered brown, his hands callused and steady as they caress the leather steering wheel.
"I shouldn't have picked you up," he mutters. "Damn it. Why were you even out there?"
"I just wanted to get out of the city," Taemin says, his voice small.
"What?" the man says, surprised. "You've been in here this whole time?"
"Yeah."
"I didn't think there was anyone left alive in Seoul." He sounds impressed. "What's your name?"
"Taemin."
"I'm Jonghyun."
Taemin says nothing. Somehow, the usual "nice to meet you" doesn't feel appropriate for this occasion.
"So where are you headed?" Jonghyun asks.
"Don't know yet," Taemin says shortly. He peeks at the gas meter, finds it to be nearly full. "Where are you going?"
"I've got a place," Jonghyun says, and Taemin can hear the sudden change in his tone, the way his voice has suddenly become closed off.
"Where?"
"A little ways off."
"Just you?"
"Yeah," Jonghyun says, and adds quickly "but don't start getting any ideas, kid."
"If I stayed with you - " Taemin starts hopefully.
"That's not happening," Jonghyun says, jaw tightening.
"I could be helpful," Taemin persists. "I'd earn my keep."
"I really doubt it," Jonghyun says.
They clear the city limits, and for a while Taemin is silenced by the sight of all the broken-down cars heaped like overturned Hot Wheels on the side of the highway, some empty, some with their occupants still trapped inside, scrabbling empty-eyed at dusty glass windows. He thinks back to the panic of the first few days, when people had stampeded out of the city in droves, caught up in a chaotic evacuation that had doomed more than it saved. Jinki had been right about staying behind - employing proper caution, they'd had the run of their apartment building, never worrying about food or being bitten.
Well. Until yesterday.
"Jonghyun," Taemin says quietly as the scenery out the window shifts to the greenery of farmland. "Take me with you."
"I told you - "
"I swear I'll pull my weight. I'll do whatever you ask," Taemin says determinedly. "I have nowhere to go. I don't know what to do."
"That," Jonghyun says heavily, "isn't exactly my problem."
"Okay, then let me off here."
They're in the middle of a deserted highway.
"Seriously?" Jonghyun says. He doesn't ease up on the gas.
"Yeah. And before you leave, put a bullet between my eyes."
"What?"
"If you don't take me in, that's as good as a death sentence." Taemin shrugs nonchalantly, even as his heart pounds desperately in his chest. "So, might as well just shoot me now. Same outcome."
Jonghyun chews his lip. He's wavering.
"Oh, jeez," he says finally, wilting in defeat. "You're lucky you're damn cute, kid. Yeah, alright. I'll take you in."
"Thank you so - !"
"But let me just say this," Jonghyun warns, cutting Taemin off. "You're cute and all, but I have no reason to trust you. You make one wrong move, and I will leave a bullet in your brain."
"Bullet. Brain." Taemin nods fervently. "Got it."
Jonghyun's place turns out to be a deserted farm, secluded, untouched, complete with four working wells and a sizeable vegetable garden. Jonghyun parks the red sports car next to a line of dusty pickups, a tan SUV, and a hulking RV.
"Nice fleet," Taemin remarks. "Why so many cars?"
"It wasn't always just me," Jonghyun says curtly.
They spend the rest of the afternoon on a tour of the premises, but now Taemin can't stop glancing around furtively for ghosts, and he doesn't miss the crude wooden crosses marking freshly turned soil beneath the old oak tree next to the barn. But Jonghyun doesn't elaborate on what happened to the rest of his party, and Taemin doesn't ask.
Dinner is cold spam, straight from the can. Taemin, used to eating semi-civilized meals with Jinki in the apartment building, spears a chunk on his chopsticks and waves it around uneasily until Jonghyun tells him to just eat it already, shit.
"I've never had spam before," Taemin says, after popping a piece in his mouth and chewing it with a pained look.
"There's a first time for everything," Jonghyun tells him, washing his down with a swig of water from a plastic cup. "When you're done, I'll show you where you'll sleep."
The bedroom is a decent size, but barely furnished. There's an ancient desk and bureau, a creaky midsize bed, flowery muslin curtains. The walls are a pale pink. Large off-color patches on the hardwood floor provide a blueprint of missing furniture. To Taemin, it feels lived-in but incomplete, as though the imprint of personality has been withdrawn, and the room is waiting patiently for its inhabitant to return.
"We think this was the daughter's room," Jonghyun says impassively. He pats the worn mattress. "And we checked; the bed's clean. No bugs."
"Who's we?" Taemin wants to know.
Jonghyun exhales heavily. "I don't want to have that conversation right now. Get a good night's sleep, tomorrow I'll show you how to work the traps."
Taemin's grateful for the bed, grateful to have his own space. But it doesn't hit him until he's lying alone in a stranger's bedroom how much has changed since yesterday. All day he's been active, moving, completely on edge, but now that he's settled and still, now that fatigue has stilled his limbs and left only his mind free to explore, now he remembers.
He's in some remote farmhouse miles and miles from Seoul, and Jinki is dead.
Jinki is dead.
It was inevitable from the moment of the bite, but it didn't have to be true until he started thinking it. Now he's started and he can't stop, because Jinki, his brother, the only one he had left as everyone in the city slowly disappeared, is now dead. Gone forever. He'd wasted their last hours together in stubborn silence, and now it's too late to say all of the things he should have, too late to make Jinki understand how much Taemin loved him and looked up to him and needed him not to be dead.
The comforter tucked under his chin smells soapy and girly. He buries his face in it, soaks it with his tears. When he feels hollow, cried-out, he stares across the dark room at the door. He'd shut it for privacy, since Jonghyun was sleeping in the bedroom directly across the hall.
Fuck privacy, he thinks, and gets out of bed. Tomorrow night he'll keep to his own space. But tonight, he just can't be by himself. Comforter and pillow gathered in his arms, he fumbles at Jonghyun's doorknob and nudges it open quietly.
a walking dead au that'll never get finished, posting it anyway, yolo