Dark City, Silent God [2/2]
Title: Dark City, Silent God
Pairing: Baekhyun/Luhan, Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Rating: PG-13
Genre: RPG!AU, Post-apocalyptic!AU, Sci-fi, Dystopian (?), Tragedy (?)
Warnings: Hover
Length: ~6.6k (total ~15.2k)
Summary: The cost to start a revolution always runs a little high.
They find Minseok rummaging around inside the Underground, digging through stashes of broken equipment-according to Luhan, sorting restorable equipment from irreparable ones.
Locking eyes with Jongin, he whispers, “What do you think he’s doing that for?”
“What else would he be doing it for?” Jongin nearly laughs, whispering simply because Luhan is. “He’s obviously going to try and rebuild something.”
“Dude, he’s like, senile. Why the hell would he be up so early to spontaneously decide to rebuild something? And why in this room-he’s always the one telling us to be careful, shouldn’t he know that there still might be Zealots patrolling here? He didn’t even ask us if we wanted to help.”
“Stop acting so paranoid about everything.” Smacking Luhan playfully on the back, Jongin steps into the abandoned room.
“Wait,” Baekhyun murmurs, pulling Jongin’s hand back. “Luhan is at least right about the Zealots bit; I don’t suspect Minseok of anything but it’s a little stupid of him to come here alone-” He glances back at Minseok, gesturing as if to make his point, only to find Chanyeol walking into view with another pile that he adds to the one already being sorted through. “Chanyeol?”
Despite his efforts to remain reasonably quiet, the surprise in his voice amplifies it to an audible point and Chanyeol whips around, alarm flashing in his eyes for barely a moment before he grins and waves. “Hey, little buddy!”
“What the actual fuck,” Luhan mutters, blatantly annoyed. “Are you seriously joking.”
Even Jongin is puzzled at this point, but before any of them can say anything else, Zitao barrels forward, knocking them all into view as they stumble inside, and squeezes Minseok so hard that Chanyeol has to pry him away when he starts wheezing for help. “I thought you died!” he whines, “Minseok! I thought you died! Don’t go missing again, okay? You were missing!”
Soojung nearly growls at him. “Damn imbecile. Cretin. Zealot-brained piece of shit.”
Luhan hands Baekhyun his glasses, dusting them off as best he can with his equally dusty sleeve, eying both Minseok and Chanyeol rather warily for several seconds before looking back to Baekhyun. “I’m sorry for that last comment,” he mumbles, looking down at the ground once Baekhyun turns to make eye-contact with him. “I hope you know I didn’t mean it. The thing about us all using each other. I trust you, I really do, and I hope you know that, too. But I just… can’t trust him.”
Before Baekhyun can even offer a brief smile in response, Luhan gets up and walks toward Minseok, attempting to sound light-hearted when he speaks. “You know, I’m sort of offended that you didn’t ask Jongin or me for help. What is all this for, anyway?”
“Just trying to rebuild things, I guess. Not here, but at least do some inventory and figure out what we can get back.”
“... With him?”
Minseok shrugs. “Well, he was here, and he didn’t try to kill me when he found me. He also offered to carry everything here for me so I don’t have to break my back over it, so, you know, I guess I figured he was okay.”
“I think you’re crazy,” Jongin grumbles, eyeing Chanyeol cautiously. “I mean, I have no problem trusting him, but seriously? Coming here alone?”
“Well I suppose we’re all a little bit desperate,” he replies, glancing around at the others in the room, “We haven’t much to lose-”
“Except an entire city,” Luhan hisses under his breath.
“-but we’ve got a lot that we’re looking to gain. Desperate times-”
“Yeah, yeah.” Soojung cuts him off with a grudging wave of the hand. “Call for desperate measures. But they don’t really call for idiocy.”
“It’s all the same, really,” he laughs, picking up another piece of headgear and examining it before setting it carefully into line with a few others. “Anyway, Chanyeol says he found an abandoned bakery a few blocks down from the old library that got burnt down when this all started. It’s a bit far and probably hasn’t got much left that’s edible, but I think Soojung can go have a look. There’s probably water there, at least, and raw ingredients can always be cooked until they won’t give you a stomachache. Luhan, Jongin, you can stay here and help sort, if you like, and Baekhyun-”
“I have somewhere to go,” he blurts out, turning to Chanyeol. “I found something at the theater yesterday, it’s really cool, but I can’t really get to it. I’m not really sure what it is, or if it’ll really be all that significant but I honestly don’t think it’s something we should overlook.”
“I second that,” Luhan sighs, turning to head out the door. “I’ll go with them, since I was there when he found it. I can probably help some.”
Chanyeol whoops loudly and abruptly before sweeping Baekhyun off his feet and running out the door, nearly knocking Luhan over in the process. While Luhan flails to regain his balance, Baekhyun laughs and clings tightly to Chanyeol’s shirt, yelling at him to be careful and not to drop him, and Luhan can’t help but wonder when he stopped being able to laugh with Baekhyun that way, why Chanyeol thinks he can just waltz in and leave with everyone’s trust and with Baekhyun. When he finally catches up enough to be within hearing range, he finds himself desperate for something to say, something to push Chanyeol away and remind Baekhyun that it’s he who has really been there for him all this time.
Through the burning in his throat and the raspy breaths he can barely squeeze through his windpipe, he shoves his middle finger up at Chanyeol and shouts as loudly as he can, “JUST REMEMBER YOU STUPID CANNIBAL, I WAS HIS BEST FRIEND BEFORE YOU WERE!”
Right after, he trips, and Chanyeol goes barging right on ahead.
Luhan wonders when it got so hard to get back up.
“Where’d Luhan go?” Baekhyun asks as he climbs onto Chanyeol’s shoulders, laughing all the while. “I thought he said he was coming.”
“I’m sure he’s on his way. I’m apparently tall enough to eat people, so I suppose I should be faster than the average one.” The shriveling fruit laugh comes back again, and Baekhyun can’t manage to hold back his own amusement, laughing until he’s practically falling and Chanyeol has to sit down before he doubles over far enough to dump Baekhyun right from his shoulders.
While they’re laughing, Luhan stumbles around the corner, panting and wheezing as he keels over on the floor, coughing so hard that he can barely lift his head high enough to watch Baekhyun. Upon seeing him, Baekhyun swallows his laughter and knits his eyebrows together in concern, pulling himself away from Chanyeol and rushing to Luhan’s side.
After a full minute of choking and attempting to take deep breaths, Luhan rights himself and clears his throat several times. It’s fairly obvious to him that Luhan is still struggling to breathe regularly: every few breaths, he shudders, and every time he inhales it sounds as though the air is barely making it through. For a while, he looks slightly disoriented, and for the first time, he doesn’t answer when Baekhyun asks if he’s okay.
“I’m glad-” he rasps out, cut off by another fit of coughing before he can finish. Forcing a pained grimace onto his face, he chokes out something that’s supposed to resemble a chuckle and pats Baekhyun on the cheek. “I’m glad you had fun without me.”
Baekhyun blinks, taken aback, as sincere confusion settles into his features. Lips still curled in an awkward smile, Luhan waves away his concern and lets out another coarse laugh. “Go get it open. I’m fine. I’ll just wait here until it’s open, go play nice with the cannibal.”
Chanyeol rolls his eyes and kneels again, Baekhyun hoists himself up and the rest is fairly straightforward; once they’re up, it takes another brief round of Baekhyun’s shadow radar to find the lever again, and once they’ve found it, another few minutes pass before he can figure out which way the lever is even supposed to be pulled.
The lever jerks in its socket with a cacophony of metal screeching against metal and rust grinding against rust, a sound so obnoxious and painful it makes Chanyeol wince. He lets go of Baekhyun to cover his ears, who in turn nearly loses his balance and topples to the floor. Luhan lunges to catch and right him back up, glaring angrily at Chanyeol all the while.
There is a quiet but satisfying click when Baekhyun finally shoves the lever into place, but as Chanyeol takes his hands from his ears to clap, their celebration is interrupted by an even more obnoxious sound of grinding gears and an ensuing explosion of dust that sends Luhan scrambling for cover in the nearest alley, hacking and wheezing all the while. All of them cringe at the sound as the frame pulls itself apart, metal plates pushing away from the surface of the brick wall and expanding until the glass face of the poster becomes detached from the edges and falls off completely, shattering as it hits the ground. Chanyeol lets out a startled shout, but through the dust, Baekhyun can’t see what’s wrong. Someone-and Baekhyun can only hope it’s Luhan, judging from the fact that Chanyeol is on the opposite side of him-grabs his arm and drags him with them. The cloud of debris thins out as the person pulls him away, and suddenly he finds himself around the corner in an alley with Luhan. As soon as he deems the other safe, he lets go, stumbling forward and crashing to the ground, body overtaken by another round of violent coughs.
By the time all the dust settles, Baekhyun can already tell that the faint circular glow of the sun has moved quite a ways from where it had been at their arrival. While Luhan is breathing normally again, each inhale still makes a faint, irregular noise, and his eyes are watering. He’s about to ask, “Luhan, are you sure you’re okay?” when Luhan wipes his eyes and shoots him a threatening glare. Pursing his lips, Baekhyun stands up and rounds the corner to find Chanyeol examining a shallow but bloody cut on the side of his upper arm.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Chanyeol mumbles, still peering curiously at the beads of crimson pooling over the injury, now large enough to begin trickling down the side of his arm. “I’m fine, I think, it doesn’t hurt. It sort of tingles.”
Baekhyun blinks at him. “I think you’re not really okay then. I don’t think it’s supposed to tingle.”
“We’re all alright,” Luhan shrugs, leaning against the wall in an attempt to look relaxed despite the obvious exhaustion in his limbs. “Anyway, we came here to figure out this place, so I guess we should start, yeah?”
Chanyeol holds up a finger, signaling Luhan to wait for a moment as he rips a piece of his shirt off with his teeth and ties it around his arm, subsequently spending the next thirty seconds or so making spitting noises in an attempt to get the dirt from the fabric out of his mouth. Luhan finds himself snickering for a few seconds, amused by Chanyeol’s struggle to properly spit, while Baekhyun eagerly scrambles into the gaping hole in the wall.
For just a little while, Baekhyun feels a little disappointed. It’s nothing all that special, something that resembles the average bedroom, sort of like his except not as quaint and a little more cramped: there’s a twin-sized bed pressed up against one corner, a bookshelf pressed against the wall across from it, and there are spots where the wallpaper is peeling from the walls. And then Luhan lets out a foreign sounding mix between a shout and a squeal as he launches himself through the hole and rolls onto the carpet, pressing his nose against it and staring at it as if he’s on some extremely effective hallucinogen. “IS THIS A REAL LIFE FUCKING BEDROOM? IN REAL LIFE? WITH A REAL LIFE FUCKING CARPET-ARE YOU, SERIOUSLY, KIDDING ME?”
Chanyeol watches him, confused at the way Baekhyun’s eyes widen in realization when he bends down and pokes the carpet with a curious finger. “Are you sure we’re not in the game?” he asks, suddenly quiet, “Did we somehow get double layered into the game? Is this another glitch?”
“Man,” Luhan sighs happily, flopping onto his back with his arms and legs extended over the dusty wool. “Man, one glitch I’ll believe, but this is too good for even the game. And even if it were a glitch, I don’t think I’d care. This is so great. I think you can kill me here, thank you very much. The Lord hath given me salvation, praise Him and His father’s most holy dildo. A-fucking-men.” Turning his head, he cocks an eyebrow at Chanyeol. “Well? You gonna enjoy this with us or hover over there like a scared animal?”
Baekhyun furrows his eyebrows at the carpet when Chanyeol laughs, because it’s not the shriveling-fruit-face laugh; it’s constricted, louder than it usually is, and a lot more nervous-he’s obviously not a good actor, because Luhan hears it too, turning his head back to exchange looks with Baekhyun, as if it’s proof that he’s not exactly a trustworthy person. “I’ve, um,” he begins, still chuckling nervously, “Well, I’ve never really seen a bedroom.”
“Don’t Zealots have real life bedrooms and shit?” Luhan asks, although it’s more of a statement than a question. “I mean, assuming you’re an ex-Zealot.”
Chanyeol shrugs, stepping inside. “I’m not, really. Loner.”
“Those exist? Where’re your parents from, then? Are they still alive? How are you still alive?”
“Luhan, rude.”
“I’m the only one I know of, and Zealots are easy to steal from.” His answer is clipped, lips pursed in a straight line, and Luhan shoots Baekhyun another look before he stares back at the ceiling and closes his eyes, breathing in deep.
“Okay,” he exhales. “Sure. Cool. Man, I really could die like this. It’s sort of like the old city, right? People died in their sleep, in their bedrooms and stuff.”
Letting out another deep sigh, Luhan pulls himself into a sitting position and pats the carpet before standing up. “Sucks that we have work to do. Or maybe it doesn’t, because maybe after this we’ll all have a bedroom. Jesus Christ. That’s amazing.” He lifts a finger and carefully pokes at a section of peeling wallpaper; it crumbles at the slightest pressure, evoking a disappointed sigh. “Yeah, great. Work to do. This bedroom probably would have decomposed if we found it a day later. I hate my life.”
“Well,” Baekhyun adds, wiping a finger over the surface of the empty bookshelf and rubbing the dust off when he’s done, “I’m fairly sure we all know that whoever built this thing was a Seditionist, and they didn’t do it just to hide a rotting bedroom. We’re obviously looking for something-the note mentioned something about a gate, right? So maybe we’re looking for a key, or…”
As he turns away from the bookshelf, a set of nightstand drawers pressed up against the bed frame catches his eye. The top drawer is just barely pulled out-not even enough to catch any glimpse of the inside and, curiously enough, it’s the only thing that looks like it’s been touched by someone. He’s just about to open it when there’s a thud on the other side of the room, and when he turns around, Luhan’s curled up on the floor coughing, and then he’s not really breathing in anymore, just coughing out, out, out, and clutching at his throat as each attempt to inhale is cut off by another forceful bout of hacking. Without missing a beat, Baekhyun shouts at Chanyeol to carry him out of the room and get help, and Chanyeol does, though Baekhyun can’t help but notice it’s a little too hesitantly for his liking, and once he does he puts Luhan on the concrete in front of the wall and sprints away, saying that he’s going to go get an inhaler but he can’t bring Luhan with him. Baekhyun isn’t really sure what that is, but if it helps it helps, so he just sits there, useless as he ever is, hugging Luhan and telling him, uselessly, to breathe.
As soon as Chanyeol rounds the corner, Luhan does exactly that. He straightens up, hugs Baekhyun back and breathes in, chuckling slightly. “I’m okay,” he murmurs, sounding amused and vaguely bitter at the same time. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Baekhyun pulls away, too relieved to yell at him but too angry to do anything but blink and stare.
“Sorry,” he sighs, letting go of Baekhyun and reaching into his jacket pocket. “Don’t be mad, okay? I told you, I trust you. But I won’t trust him, and really, really, I’m telling you-you shouldn’t trust him either. Even if you want to make really obvious googly eyes at him all the time.”
While ruffling Baekhyun’s hair briefly with one hand, he unravels the note he’s just retrieved with the other. “I found this, tucked into one of the spots where the wallpaper was peeling off the wall. There’s not really anything on it, it’s just a sketch of the bookshelf with a circle and-”
Grudgingly, Baekhyun snatches the paper from Luhan and examines it before wordlessly shoving it back into Luhan’s palm and storming back to the bookshelf and knocking on an arbitrary area of the wood. As expected, it’s hollow. Peering more closely at the shelf, he can make out a vague outline of a square cut into the surface-but when he presses it, nothing happens.
“Of course,” he wonders aloud, laughing. “I can’t believe I even tried that.”
Luhan squints at him as though he’s spontaneously transformed into some long extinct animal, following his every movement as he reaches over to open the drawer and furrows his eyebrows before tentatively reaching in to pick up a picture frame.
Several minutes pass before Baekhyun can bring himself to speak-the picture depicts his grandparents’ wedding, something that took place long before this whole mess started, years and years before the city was burned down by spontaneous firebombs and smashed to pieces by panicking looters. His grandfather had shown him the picture twice before he left, though he refused to talk about his grandmother at all, claiming that focusing on the past for even half a second was dangerous when they were just barely surviving. Despite his silence over the woman in the picture and his relationship with her, Baekhyun could faintly remember how he used to take the picture out at night, when they weren’t in the game, and smile at it. Sometimes-especially before his moments of formidable genius-he would talk with her, and laugh with her, and when he’d built the game along with his friends he’d had it imported so he could put it on the windowsill of his virtual bedroom.
Seeing it used in this way seems absolutely baffling, yet somehow, it’s still incredibly like his grandfather to do something like this. Just to confirm, Baekhyun slips the picture out of the frame, ignoring the fact that Luhan’s squint seems to be growing more and more skeptical as it bores into his skull, and turns it over. Surely enough, there’s a note.
Sometimes, Baekhyunnie, we must destroy the things we love to bring back the things we hope for.
“Of course,” Baekhyun states again, almost giggling this time. “Of course.”
“So are you gonna like, tell me what’s going on here or…?”
“I’m going to destroy my grandparents’ most prized possession,” he shrugs, tone completely nonchalant.
Tossing the frame aside, he takes the picture between two of his fingers and slides it into the top edge of the square cut in the wood. It takes a few tries before the machinery behind the bookshelf whirs to life, but just when Baekhyun feels the slightest pang of regret and reaches forward to take the picture back, the photo paper is rolled straight through the backing. They stand in silence, Luhan throwing his arms up in some form of exasperation, while the mysterious device devours the photo with several subsequent clunking noises and something that sounds like an exploding chainsaw, followed by a brief silence before another rather ineloquent set of old gears begin to push the bookshelf open on a hinge. Debris rises in clouds from the carpet, sending Luhan scrambling to get out until it’s over while Baekhyun simply gawks with the fabric of his shirt tugged over his nose.
When the bookshelf finally swings completely open, Baekhyun nearly passes out. Right after the irritating buzz that follows, the jaundice of aged electric lighting flickers overhead, painting the walls with the color of rotting parchment paper-but it’s not even the lights that are the best part, there are shelves and shelves filled with dusty books and walls lined with paintings of every kind, and across the ceiling spans a photograph of an ocean sunset, greying dusk mixing into fiery fuchsia behind lavender clouds as the sun sinks behind the horizon. He’s frozen in place.
Maybe it’s just the brightness of the lights that burns his eyes, but the past is glaringly beautiful.
“Luhan,” he whispers, voice quivering as he raises it in volume. “Luhan.”
“I’m right behind you,” Luhan breathes. The ending of the last word catches in his throat, and he has to clear it several times before he can continue. “It’s okay to cry, I think, Byunbyun. I think I will, too.”
“This isn’t the game, is it? Are you really sure that it’s not the game?”
“Of course it’s not, you idiot,” Luhan replies, breathless and failing to sound as unimpressed as the words imply.
“This is what we’re fighting for.”
Neither Baekhyun nor Luhan dare to step inside for the several hours that they spend staring, Chanyeol and his quest for an inhaler all but forgotten as Luhan falls to pieces, sobbing and laughing with the occasional exclamation of, “it’s beautiful” before he starts cry-laughing again. Baekhyun can’t bring himself to cry-perhaps he will later, but this is something too sacred to be remembered as a blurry mess of tears. It’s strange, when he thinks about it, how much they’ve relied on a virtual world to bring the past back to them, because it’s not accurate in the least. A simulation, as perfect as it is, is only a simulation, and maybe he can see and feel and hear everything just the same, but suddenly there’s something so much more attainable about bringing the city back.
The world was not a projection of pixels and electric impulses to the brain in an attempt to mimic life before living crumbled to the ground in ashes and charred bricks-it wasn’t even close. The world was everything all at once in the span of forever, the whisper of clouds against the horizon and the warmth of sunlight on pale skin, cool breezes and the smell of old books, soft wool against bare feet and melodic chirping of nightingales on blue-skyed Sunday mornings; the world was bright headlights and screeching tires blurring together between glowing skyscrapers, twinkling stars against violet gradients, the aroma of frying fish cooked with scattered spices by the late-night street stands. The world was time, time to take it all in with every passing second without having to run away from invisible enemies, time to capture moments in glossy photos, time to sketch memories into scenery on canvases and easels, time to thread stories together with the glide of a pen over paper, time for plastic ink between the fingers giving way to hands intertwined with hands, time to laugh together and cry together and exchange love with lips against lips, time to combine all those things into an entity so tangible and lucid in their boundlessness.
And all of it-everything that was-sits in front of him, right now.
This isn’t the game.
This is the sedition that they’ve been searching for: the beginning to end what is, to go back to what was, and to make the past become what will always be.
“You know who probably wants to see this?” Luhan chokes out, sitting up and wiping forcefully at his eyes, looking the other way to hide his face. “Minseok probably wants to see this. Let’s bring Minseok here. Dammit, god dammit, you better not tell anyone I cried. I wasn’t crying, I hope you know that I wasn’t crying. I swear on The Holiest of Holy Dildos that I was not crying, okay?”
Baekhyun laughs. “I believe you. I’ll believe anything, now.”
They don’t run when they leave to find Minseok and the others-Luhan is too busy trying to clear his vision, asking every three minutes if he still looks like he’s been crying even though he most certainly hasn’t been, and Baekhyun doesn’t really know which way is which anymore. It’s disorienting to see the sunset one moment, then look the other way to see the horizon line obscured by charred smog and a broken piece of cityscape.
It’s still alive. The city is still alive and hiding, seeking shelter in its own ruins and resuscitating itself. Maybe they don’t have to bring the dead back to life. It’s just a matter of protecting it until it awakens once more.
“Minseok!” Luhan shouts, barreling straight through the door frame once the Underground comes into view. “Minseok! Books, Minseok! There’s books! So many of them, and Jongin, paintings, you wouldn’t believe how many paintings, in fact you can’t believe any of it, but Minseok, there’s books!”
There’s a loud clatter of plastic casings when Minseok drops everything he’s holding and spins around to meet Luhan’s eyes. “Books?” he nearly squeaks, “What books?”
Jongin blinks several times, baffled. “Wait, what?”
“The theater, it’s all in the theater, we need to bring everyone, you wouldn’t believe it, but it’s beautiful, the epitome of beautiful, more beautiful than the glorious moment when I first claimed that god’s old man had a dildo-”
“Let’s round up people,” Minseok declares, “Zitao, Soojung, whoever we can find scattered around the city. Or maybe not, because we all split up after to escape the break-in, it might take too long. Just get Zitao and Soojung, and I’ll catch up with you later.”
Before he’s even finished, Jongin has taken off through the door towards the theater, Luhan and Baekhyun following closely behind him. They pass Soojung walking back from the bakery lugging a giant bag that’s probably important, but without stopping, Jongin sweeps her off her feet and knocks it out of her hands, charging straight forward, screaming something incoherent about paintings over the plethora of curses that Soojung is shouting at him.
When they reach the hole in the wall where the bookshelf used to be, nothing new happens. Baekhyun thinks it will never get old, because his eyes are burning again; Jongin drops Soojung on the floor as he gapes at the grand arrangement of everything they’d thought destroyed, and Soojung doesn’t even bother complaining. Nobody notices when Minseok comes in several minutes later with Zitao and Chanyeol by his side, until Minseok takes a sharp inhale and pushes past them all to set foot on the carpet within.
Shortly after, they all follow suit with the exception of Zitao, who’s already crying too hard to stand up and walk inside. Minseok takes to flipping through everything from Dream of Nine Clouds to The Crucible while Soojung lies flat on her back, tears drifting down her cheeks as she stares silently at the sunset printed onto the ceiling. Jongin runs delicate fingers over every outline of The Great Wave of Kanagawa before curling up in a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth as violent sobs rack his body.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop crying,” Jongin chuckles, through his incessant weeping, falling over sideways and sniffling in between every other word. “I think I’ll drown the place. I feel like it’s breathing. This whole place is breathing.”
“I think we’re alive,” Soojung hums quietly, “I think we’ve all finally come alive.”
After hesitating a while, she turns her head to glance at Baekhyun. “Is this… you know, yours?”
“Yeah,” he replies, a smile pushing up at the corners of his lips. Pride bubbles up in his chest, warm and soothing; this is consolation for a lifetime of uselessness. “It’s the little eureka! you were all waiting for.”
Sighing heavily and shutting her eyes, Soojung nods.
“Thank you.”
“This isn’t right,” Chanyeol mumbles, still standing barely inside the entrance when Baekhyun is halfway through his third book. “This really isn’t right.”
Baekhyun blinks, taking his eyes off the page and peering up at him quizzically, only to find that he’s begun to pace back and forth before the entrance, or maybe has been for the past few hours given that he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything other than books since he stepped foot inside. “What do you mean it’s not right?”
Chanyeol swallows, chewing on his lip, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, making another few round trips of pacing before he responds. “I can’t… I can’t say, I think we have to go, um,” he rubs his palms together, biting on his lip harder as he wills himself to stop pacing, “maybe I’m allergic to something.”
As he speaks, his voice rises; Soojung doesn’t notice since she’s fallen asleep, and Jongin can’t hear him over his hysterical sobbing on the floor, but both Minseok and Luhan look up. Minseok’s face flickers with realization, and he slips the book back onto the shelf, almost painfully slowly, as if he doesn’t want to let go.
“Allergic to what?” Luhan scoffs, turning away from the photograph he’s been staring at. “Art? Electrical lighting? Being alive? And who the hell even let you in here?”
“I did,” Minseok shrugs, sighing as he heads toward the exit.
Luhan chokes on his words for a moment before responding. “Why would you do that? There are books in here, Minseok, don’t you think we should be a little more… careful about who we let in? This is probably the only gallery of anything we’ll ever find.”
“You shouldn’t have found it in the first place!” Chanyeol blurts out, almost shouting, startling Soojung from her sleep. She squints at him groggily, propping herself up on her elbows as he continues. “That’s what! This isn’t right, this is the past, and I just don’t understand why you lot are trying to bring it back, don’t you understand that it doesn’t make any sense? The past was destroyed for a reason! The bombings happened for a reason! People suffered back then, so the world was to be destroyed. It was the end of all ends, and this is just… so wrong, how you’re all trying to un-end it! It was supposed to be like this! God meant for it to-”
“Zealot!” Luhan spits, whipping his gun out of his back pocket and clicking it off safety as he points it at him. “I knew it, I fucking knew it.”
Before he can pull the trigger, Minseok grabs Baekhyun and shoves him roughly in front of Chanyeol; as he hands Chanyeol his gun, Luhan nearly drops his, and Baekhyun stands shocked in the middle, Minseok’s hands steady on his shoulders.
“What the fucking hell are you doing?” Luhan shouts, hands trembling around the gun. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Minseok simply smiles. “I’m too old for this,” he claims. The nonchalance in his voice induces a sickening build-up of bile in the back of Baekhyun’s throat. “I don’t wanna die, you know? It’s a pretty sweet deal I have, now. I change sides, I go to heaven, I live a nice life-afterlife. All I have to do is believe in their side of the story; honestly, it’s a really fantastic story. And no one has to work this hard.”
“That’s not how it works, Minseok. You know better than anyone that that isn’t at all how it works. You don’t know what happens after you die. No one knows. We can only control the present, isn’t that right? We can only fix this city, we can only make sure that we live well in this life, right? You’ve said this before yourself. Heaven might exist but we’re not sure, so it doesn’t matter-Minseok, this is what matters, this is what has mattered all our lives, this is what you’ve been fighting for all your life and you’re throwing it away because you don’t want to die?”
“Everyone likes believing what they want to hear, right? Yeah, maybe I’ve fought for this all my life, but what does it matter after I’m gone? The city goes to shreds-so what? Why do I care? I’m dead.” Minseok throws his arms up in the air, a short but natural burst of laughter throwing all of them off.
Luhan starts to say something, but Minseok silences him, shaking his head as though he’s amused by the looks on all of their faces, and continues. “It matters to all of you, maybe, because you’re all alive, but it won’t matter in the slightest to me. Look at me! I’m old! I’m going to die soon! I don’t care what happens to this place, but I want to believe that in the next life, if there even is one, that I’m going to paradise. Is that so bad? Is it so wrong of me to care about myself and what happens to me?”
“You’re abandoning us,” Baekhyun mumbles, “Isn’t that wrong, if only a little bit?”
“And whose side are you on? Were you part of this, too?” The gun in Luhan’s hand shakes violently, and there’s something off about where it’s pointed, but Baekhyun doesn’t have time to discern it.
Chanyeol’s lips curl into a menacing smirk. “Well, that’s up for him to decide isn’t it?”
“I-”
“Think about it, little buddy. Who’s really going to protect you? Where will you really feel useful?”
“Fuck ‘feeling’ useful, Byunbyun, where will you be useful?”
The thing is, Baekhyun tells himself as Chanyeol’s gun clicks off safety behind him as well, this argument doesn’t have an answer. If he joins the Zealots, leaves Luhan and Jongin-who’s finally noticed and is now standing behind Luhan-it doesn’t make him anymore useful. All that changes is that he doesn’t need to be. There’s too many people with the other faction for each and every one of them to need to be useful, and it won’t matter if he’s still stuck in this state of floundering around for his niché or not. They don’t need him. But neither do the Seditionists, because up until now, for all seventeen years of his life, he has done nothing except tag along with everyone else and hog Luhan as some sort of bodyguard. Who can say that he’ll be useful in the future when this discovery is his only achievement?
He thinks about Minseok, about how he’s lying to himself, and about the Zealots, about how they’re all lying to themselves, and about the Seditionists, who were lying to themselves until now. In order to answer Luhan’s question, he would have to join in on the lying, pretend that he really even has the ability to be useful once they pass this point. Everyone likes believing what they want to hear. Baekhyun wants to pretend that because of this, he’ll be able to do more. But that’s not the case. This is the singular eureka! that everyone wanted from him, the reason everyone was afraid to tell him he was useless that one night, but the future is the reason for the silence that followed.
And then he realizes what’s off about Luhan’s gun. It’s pointed at him, not Chanyeol. And if he turns around, he knows he’ll see the same thing on the other side.
The future is the reason for the silence that followed, and it all makes sense then, because his future is the silence that followed. No one can say anything to nothing. He isn’t supposed to have one. The most useful thing he can do right now is to stop trying, drop everything, and make sure that what he’s brought to light will never be left behind, that the new inspiration he’s just uncovered will never be put out.
The inevitable end he faces teeters on the edge of every breath. One of them will shoot him, and he must choose the one that makes his death mean something.
Swallowing down the bitter taste of sacrifice, he straightens his back, smiling, looks Luhan in the eye, and takes a step backwards, towards Chanyeol. And then another, and another, and Jongin’s lips move but he can’t hear what he’s saying over the silence Luhan is giving him, the slow-motion anger that creases between his eyebrows, the gradual steadiness that seeps into his hands, the glare of the barrel staring him in the chest, and then the silent whisper of the bang, a quivering mess of tears burrowing itself into his skin and past his ribs, just a little too deep.
The purpose doesn’t make it any less painful.
While everyone’s off-guard, Chanyeol goes down, too; the bang is louder this time, it sounds so definite, and then it goes after Minseok, and Luhan hasn’t said a word and Jongin is screaming “no!” but it’s not desperate, just regretful, just pitiful, just sorry, and Soojung watches Minseok fall in silence, and Zitao is still cowering outside the doorway, crying, with three dying bodies lying between himself and a bloodied paradise.
Baekhyun listens to the seconds passing between himself and Luhan, silence sweeping them all around and around in circles, remorse coating their skin and settling in their hair, bleeding out in faint crimson over the distant ache in his heart. Luhan breathes deeply, steadily, until Jongin whispers something like, “you shot Baekhyun, you just shot Baekhyun.” And then he lets it all out in a sigh, a shuddering, uneven mess of air from the lungs, stumbling over to Baekhyun and dropping to his knees.
“Promise me you won’t go back,” he whispers, shutting his eyes to the feel of Luhan’s hands cupping his own. “You killed me, okay? But you did it for a reason, and now you can’t go back. Promise me, you won’t go back.”
Jongin goes back to his painting of the wave, Soojung blinks up at the ceiling, Minseok reaches uselessly for Baekhyun’s book, dropped two feet away from him, and Luhan remembers that they’re fighting for something. He almost laughs then, tears pooling over his eyelids as he thinks about how Baekhyun is using his last moments to throw his own words back in his face, to remind him so permanently to think about what matters.
“Okay,” he murmurs, pressing a hand against Baekhyun’s forehead to brush his bangs out of his eyes. “I promise.”
He waits like that for a while, long after Baekhyun’s skin goes cold against the heat of his palm, long after Zitao’s cried himself to sleep. He stays until he can blink the tears back, until he stops hearing Baekhyun’s voice in his head asking him if he’s okay.
And then he stands, straightening up and breathing deep, testing the weight of a city on his shoulders.
Pairing: Baekhyun/Luhan, Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Rating: PG-13
Genre: RPG!AU, Post-apocalyptic!AU, Sci-fi, Dystopian (?), Tragedy (?)
Warnings: Hover
Length: ~6.6k (total ~15.2k)
Summary: The cost to start a revolution always runs a little high.
They find Minseok rummaging around inside the Underground, digging through stashes of broken equipment-according to Luhan, sorting restorable equipment from irreparable ones.
Locking eyes with Jongin, he whispers, “What do you think he’s doing that for?”
“What else would he be doing it for?” Jongin nearly laughs, whispering simply because Luhan is. “He’s obviously going to try and rebuild something.”
“Dude, he’s like, senile. Why the hell would he be up so early to spontaneously decide to rebuild something? And why in this room-he’s always the one telling us to be careful, shouldn’t he know that there still might be Zealots patrolling here? He didn’t even ask us if we wanted to help.”
“Stop acting so paranoid about everything.” Smacking Luhan playfully on the back, Jongin steps into the abandoned room.
“Wait,” Baekhyun murmurs, pulling Jongin’s hand back. “Luhan is at least right about the Zealots bit; I don’t suspect Minseok of anything but it’s a little stupid of him to come here alone-” He glances back at Minseok, gesturing as if to make his point, only to find Chanyeol walking into view with another pile that he adds to the one already being sorted through. “Chanyeol?”
Despite his efforts to remain reasonably quiet, the surprise in his voice amplifies it to an audible point and Chanyeol whips around, alarm flashing in his eyes for barely a moment before he grins and waves. “Hey, little buddy!”
“What the actual fuck,” Luhan mutters, blatantly annoyed. “Are you seriously joking.”
Even Jongin is puzzled at this point, but before any of them can say anything else, Zitao barrels forward, knocking them all into view as they stumble inside, and squeezes Minseok so hard that Chanyeol has to pry him away when he starts wheezing for help. “I thought you died!” he whines, “Minseok! I thought you died! Don’t go missing again, okay? You were missing!”
Soojung nearly growls at him. “Damn imbecile. Cretin. Zealot-brained piece of shit.”
Luhan hands Baekhyun his glasses, dusting them off as best he can with his equally dusty sleeve, eying both Minseok and Chanyeol rather warily for several seconds before looking back to Baekhyun. “I’m sorry for that last comment,” he mumbles, looking down at the ground once Baekhyun turns to make eye-contact with him. “I hope you know I didn’t mean it. The thing about us all using each other. I trust you, I really do, and I hope you know that, too. But I just… can’t trust him.”
Before Baekhyun can even offer a brief smile in response, Luhan gets up and walks toward Minseok, attempting to sound light-hearted when he speaks. “You know, I’m sort of offended that you didn’t ask Jongin or me for help. What is all this for, anyway?”
“Just trying to rebuild things, I guess. Not here, but at least do some inventory and figure out what we can get back.”
“... With him?”
Minseok shrugs. “Well, he was here, and he didn’t try to kill me when he found me. He also offered to carry everything here for me so I don’t have to break my back over it, so, you know, I guess I figured he was okay.”
“I think you’re crazy,” Jongin grumbles, eyeing Chanyeol cautiously. “I mean, I have no problem trusting him, but seriously? Coming here alone?”
“Well I suppose we’re all a little bit desperate,” he replies, glancing around at the others in the room, “We haven’t much to lose-”
“Except an entire city,” Luhan hisses under his breath.
“-but we’ve got a lot that we’re looking to gain. Desperate times-”
“Yeah, yeah.” Soojung cuts him off with a grudging wave of the hand. “Call for desperate measures. But they don’t really call for idiocy.”
“It’s all the same, really,” he laughs, picking up another piece of headgear and examining it before setting it carefully into line with a few others. “Anyway, Chanyeol says he found an abandoned bakery a few blocks down from the old library that got burnt down when this all started. It’s a bit far and probably hasn’t got much left that’s edible, but I think Soojung can go have a look. There’s probably water there, at least, and raw ingredients can always be cooked until they won’t give you a stomachache. Luhan, Jongin, you can stay here and help sort, if you like, and Baekhyun-”
“I have somewhere to go,” he blurts out, turning to Chanyeol. “I found something at the theater yesterday, it’s really cool, but I can’t really get to it. I’m not really sure what it is, or if it’ll really be all that significant but I honestly don’t think it’s something we should overlook.”
“I second that,” Luhan sighs, turning to head out the door. “I’ll go with them, since I was there when he found it. I can probably help some.”
Chanyeol whoops loudly and abruptly before sweeping Baekhyun off his feet and running out the door, nearly knocking Luhan over in the process. While Luhan flails to regain his balance, Baekhyun laughs and clings tightly to Chanyeol’s shirt, yelling at him to be careful and not to drop him, and Luhan can’t help but wonder when he stopped being able to laugh with Baekhyun that way, why Chanyeol thinks he can just waltz in and leave with everyone’s trust and with Baekhyun. When he finally catches up enough to be within hearing range, he finds himself desperate for something to say, something to push Chanyeol away and remind Baekhyun that it’s he who has really been there for him all this time.
Through the burning in his throat and the raspy breaths he can barely squeeze through his windpipe, he shoves his middle finger up at Chanyeol and shouts as loudly as he can, “JUST REMEMBER YOU STUPID CANNIBAL, I WAS HIS BEST FRIEND BEFORE YOU WERE!”
Right after, he trips, and Chanyeol goes barging right on ahead.
Luhan wonders when it got so hard to get back up.
“Where’d Luhan go?” Baekhyun asks as he climbs onto Chanyeol’s shoulders, laughing all the while. “I thought he said he was coming.”
“I’m sure he’s on his way. I’m apparently tall enough to eat people, so I suppose I should be faster than the average one.” The shriveling fruit laugh comes back again, and Baekhyun can’t manage to hold back his own amusement, laughing until he’s practically falling and Chanyeol has to sit down before he doubles over far enough to dump Baekhyun right from his shoulders.
While they’re laughing, Luhan stumbles around the corner, panting and wheezing as he keels over on the floor, coughing so hard that he can barely lift his head high enough to watch Baekhyun. Upon seeing him, Baekhyun swallows his laughter and knits his eyebrows together in concern, pulling himself away from Chanyeol and rushing to Luhan’s side.
After a full minute of choking and attempting to take deep breaths, Luhan rights himself and clears his throat several times. It’s fairly obvious to him that Luhan is still struggling to breathe regularly: every few breaths, he shudders, and every time he inhales it sounds as though the air is barely making it through. For a while, he looks slightly disoriented, and for the first time, he doesn’t answer when Baekhyun asks if he’s okay.
“I’m glad-” he rasps out, cut off by another fit of coughing before he can finish. Forcing a pained grimace onto his face, he chokes out something that’s supposed to resemble a chuckle and pats Baekhyun on the cheek. “I’m glad you had fun without me.”
Baekhyun blinks, taken aback, as sincere confusion settles into his features. Lips still curled in an awkward smile, Luhan waves away his concern and lets out another coarse laugh. “Go get it open. I’m fine. I’ll just wait here until it’s open, go play nice with the cannibal.”
Chanyeol rolls his eyes and kneels again, Baekhyun hoists himself up and the rest is fairly straightforward; once they’re up, it takes another brief round of Baekhyun’s shadow radar to find the lever again, and once they’ve found it, another few minutes pass before he can figure out which way the lever is even supposed to be pulled.
The lever jerks in its socket with a cacophony of metal screeching against metal and rust grinding against rust, a sound so obnoxious and painful it makes Chanyeol wince. He lets go of Baekhyun to cover his ears, who in turn nearly loses his balance and topples to the floor. Luhan lunges to catch and right him back up, glaring angrily at Chanyeol all the while.
There is a quiet but satisfying click when Baekhyun finally shoves the lever into place, but as Chanyeol takes his hands from his ears to clap, their celebration is interrupted by an even more obnoxious sound of grinding gears and an ensuing explosion of dust that sends Luhan scrambling for cover in the nearest alley, hacking and wheezing all the while. All of them cringe at the sound as the frame pulls itself apart, metal plates pushing away from the surface of the brick wall and expanding until the glass face of the poster becomes detached from the edges and falls off completely, shattering as it hits the ground. Chanyeol lets out a startled shout, but through the dust, Baekhyun can’t see what’s wrong. Someone-and Baekhyun can only hope it’s Luhan, judging from the fact that Chanyeol is on the opposite side of him-grabs his arm and drags him with them. The cloud of debris thins out as the person pulls him away, and suddenly he finds himself around the corner in an alley with Luhan. As soon as he deems the other safe, he lets go, stumbling forward and crashing to the ground, body overtaken by another round of violent coughs.
By the time all the dust settles, Baekhyun can already tell that the faint circular glow of the sun has moved quite a ways from where it had been at their arrival. While Luhan is breathing normally again, each inhale still makes a faint, irregular noise, and his eyes are watering. He’s about to ask, “Luhan, are you sure you’re okay?” when Luhan wipes his eyes and shoots him a threatening glare. Pursing his lips, Baekhyun stands up and rounds the corner to find Chanyeol examining a shallow but bloody cut on the side of his upper arm.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Chanyeol mumbles, still peering curiously at the beads of crimson pooling over the injury, now large enough to begin trickling down the side of his arm. “I’m fine, I think, it doesn’t hurt. It sort of tingles.”
Baekhyun blinks at him. “I think you’re not really okay then. I don’t think it’s supposed to tingle.”
“We’re all alright,” Luhan shrugs, leaning against the wall in an attempt to look relaxed despite the obvious exhaustion in his limbs. “Anyway, we came here to figure out this place, so I guess we should start, yeah?”
Chanyeol holds up a finger, signaling Luhan to wait for a moment as he rips a piece of his shirt off with his teeth and ties it around his arm, subsequently spending the next thirty seconds or so making spitting noises in an attempt to get the dirt from the fabric out of his mouth. Luhan finds himself snickering for a few seconds, amused by Chanyeol’s struggle to properly spit, while Baekhyun eagerly scrambles into the gaping hole in the wall.
For just a little while, Baekhyun feels a little disappointed. It’s nothing all that special, something that resembles the average bedroom, sort of like his except not as quaint and a little more cramped: there’s a twin-sized bed pressed up against one corner, a bookshelf pressed against the wall across from it, and there are spots where the wallpaper is peeling from the walls. And then Luhan lets out a foreign sounding mix between a shout and a squeal as he launches himself through the hole and rolls onto the carpet, pressing his nose against it and staring at it as if he’s on some extremely effective hallucinogen. “IS THIS A REAL LIFE FUCKING BEDROOM? IN REAL LIFE? WITH A REAL LIFE FUCKING CARPET-ARE YOU, SERIOUSLY, KIDDING ME?”
Chanyeol watches him, confused at the way Baekhyun’s eyes widen in realization when he bends down and pokes the carpet with a curious finger. “Are you sure we’re not in the game?” he asks, suddenly quiet, “Did we somehow get double layered into the game? Is this another glitch?”
“Man,” Luhan sighs happily, flopping onto his back with his arms and legs extended over the dusty wool. “Man, one glitch I’ll believe, but this is too good for even the game. And even if it were a glitch, I don’t think I’d care. This is so great. I think you can kill me here, thank you very much. The Lord hath given me salvation, praise Him and His father’s most holy dildo. A-fucking-men.” Turning his head, he cocks an eyebrow at Chanyeol. “Well? You gonna enjoy this with us or hover over there like a scared animal?”
Baekhyun furrows his eyebrows at the carpet when Chanyeol laughs, because it’s not the shriveling-fruit-face laugh; it’s constricted, louder than it usually is, and a lot more nervous-he’s obviously not a good actor, because Luhan hears it too, turning his head back to exchange looks with Baekhyun, as if it’s proof that he’s not exactly a trustworthy person. “I’ve, um,” he begins, still chuckling nervously, “Well, I’ve never really seen a bedroom.”
“Don’t Zealots have real life bedrooms and shit?” Luhan asks, although it’s more of a statement than a question. “I mean, assuming you’re an ex-Zealot.”
Chanyeol shrugs, stepping inside. “I’m not, really. Loner.”
“Those exist? Where’re your parents from, then? Are they still alive? How are you still alive?”
“Luhan, rude.”
“I’m the only one I know of, and Zealots are easy to steal from.” His answer is clipped, lips pursed in a straight line, and Luhan shoots Baekhyun another look before he stares back at the ceiling and closes his eyes, breathing in deep.
“Okay,” he exhales. “Sure. Cool. Man, I really could die like this. It’s sort of like the old city, right? People died in their sleep, in their bedrooms and stuff.”
Letting out another deep sigh, Luhan pulls himself into a sitting position and pats the carpet before standing up. “Sucks that we have work to do. Or maybe it doesn’t, because maybe after this we’ll all have a bedroom. Jesus Christ. That’s amazing.” He lifts a finger and carefully pokes at a section of peeling wallpaper; it crumbles at the slightest pressure, evoking a disappointed sigh. “Yeah, great. Work to do. This bedroom probably would have decomposed if we found it a day later. I hate my life.”
“Well,” Baekhyun adds, wiping a finger over the surface of the empty bookshelf and rubbing the dust off when he’s done, “I’m fairly sure we all know that whoever built this thing was a Seditionist, and they didn’t do it just to hide a rotting bedroom. We’re obviously looking for something-the note mentioned something about a gate, right? So maybe we’re looking for a key, or…”
As he turns away from the bookshelf, a set of nightstand drawers pressed up against the bed frame catches his eye. The top drawer is just barely pulled out-not even enough to catch any glimpse of the inside and, curiously enough, it’s the only thing that looks like it’s been touched by someone. He’s just about to open it when there’s a thud on the other side of the room, and when he turns around, Luhan’s curled up on the floor coughing, and then he’s not really breathing in anymore, just coughing out, out, out, and clutching at his throat as each attempt to inhale is cut off by another forceful bout of hacking. Without missing a beat, Baekhyun shouts at Chanyeol to carry him out of the room and get help, and Chanyeol does, though Baekhyun can’t help but notice it’s a little too hesitantly for his liking, and once he does he puts Luhan on the concrete in front of the wall and sprints away, saying that he’s going to go get an inhaler but he can’t bring Luhan with him. Baekhyun isn’t really sure what that is, but if it helps it helps, so he just sits there, useless as he ever is, hugging Luhan and telling him, uselessly, to breathe.
As soon as Chanyeol rounds the corner, Luhan does exactly that. He straightens up, hugs Baekhyun back and breathes in, chuckling slightly. “I’m okay,” he murmurs, sounding amused and vaguely bitter at the same time. “I’m perfectly fine.”
Baekhyun pulls away, too relieved to yell at him but too angry to do anything but blink and stare.
“Sorry,” he sighs, letting go of Baekhyun and reaching into his jacket pocket. “Don’t be mad, okay? I told you, I trust you. But I won’t trust him, and really, really, I’m telling you-you shouldn’t trust him either. Even if you want to make really obvious googly eyes at him all the time.”
While ruffling Baekhyun’s hair briefly with one hand, he unravels the note he’s just retrieved with the other. “I found this, tucked into one of the spots where the wallpaper was peeling off the wall. There’s not really anything on it, it’s just a sketch of the bookshelf with a circle and-”
Grudgingly, Baekhyun snatches the paper from Luhan and examines it before wordlessly shoving it back into Luhan’s palm and storming back to the bookshelf and knocking on an arbitrary area of the wood. As expected, it’s hollow. Peering more closely at the shelf, he can make out a vague outline of a square cut into the surface-but when he presses it, nothing happens.
“Of course,” he wonders aloud, laughing. “I can’t believe I even tried that.”
Luhan squints at him as though he’s spontaneously transformed into some long extinct animal, following his every movement as he reaches over to open the drawer and furrows his eyebrows before tentatively reaching in to pick up a picture frame.
Several minutes pass before Baekhyun can bring himself to speak-the picture depicts his grandparents’ wedding, something that took place long before this whole mess started, years and years before the city was burned down by spontaneous firebombs and smashed to pieces by panicking looters. His grandfather had shown him the picture twice before he left, though he refused to talk about his grandmother at all, claiming that focusing on the past for even half a second was dangerous when they were just barely surviving. Despite his silence over the woman in the picture and his relationship with her, Baekhyun could faintly remember how he used to take the picture out at night, when they weren’t in the game, and smile at it. Sometimes-especially before his moments of formidable genius-he would talk with her, and laugh with her, and when he’d built the game along with his friends he’d had it imported so he could put it on the windowsill of his virtual bedroom.
Seeing it used in this way seems absolutely baffling, yet somehow, it’s still incredibly like his grandfather to do something like this. Just to confirm, Baekhyun slips the picture out of the frame, ignoring the fact that Luhan’s squint seems to be growing more and more skeptical as it bores into his skull, and turns it over. Surely enough, there’s a note.
Sometimes, Baekhyunnie, we must destroy the things we love to bring back the things we hope for.
“Of course,” Baekhyun states again, almost giggling this time. “Of course.”
“So are you gonna like, tell me what’s going on here or…?”
“I’m going to destroy my grandparents’ most prized possession,” he shrugs, tone completely nonchalant.
Tossing the frame aside, he takes the picture between two of his fingers and slides it into the top edge of the square cut in the wood. It takes a few tries before the machinery behind the bookshelf whirs to life, but just when Baekhyun feels the slightest pang of regret and reaches forward to take the picture back, the photo paper is rolled straight through the backing. They stand in silence, Luhan throwing his arms up in some form of exasperation, while the mysterious device devours the photo with several subsequent clunking noises and something that sounds like an exploding chainsaw, followed by a brief silence before another rather ineloquent set of old gears begin to push the bookshelf open on a hinge. Debris rises in clouds from the carpet, sending Luhan scrambling to get out until it’s over while Baekhyun simply gawks with the fabric of his shirt tugged over his nose.
When the bookshelf finally swings completely open, Baekhyun nearly passes out. Right after the irritating buzz that follows, the jaundice of aged electric lighting flickers overhead, painting the walls with the color of rotting parchment paper-but it’s not even the lights that are the best part, there are shelves and shelves filled with dusty books and walls lined with paintings of every kind, and across the ceiling spans a photograph of an ocean sunset, greying dusk mixing into fiery fuchsia behind lavender clouds as the sun sinks behind the horizon. He’s frozen in place.
Maybe it’s just the brightness of the lights that burns his eyes, but the past is glaringly beautiful.
“Luhan,” he whispers, voice quivering as he raises it in volume. “Luhan.”
“I’m right behind you,” Luhan breathes. The ending of the last word catches in his throat, and he has to clear it several times before he can continue. “It’s okay to cry, I think, Byunbyun. I think I will, too.”
“This isn’t the game, is it? Are you really sure that it’s not the game?”
“Of course it’s not, you idiot,” Luhan replies, breathless and failing to sound as unimpressed as the words imply.
“This is what we’re fighting for.”
Neither Baekhyun nor Luhan dare to step inside for the several hours that they spend staring, Chanyeol and his quest for an inhaler all but forgotten as Luhan falls to pieces, sobbing and laughing with the occasional exclamation of, “it’s beautiful” before he starts cry-laughing again. Baekhyun can’t bring himself to cry-perhaps he will later, but this is something too sacred to be remembered as a blurry mess of tears. It’s strange, when he thinks about it, how much they’ve relied on a virtual world to bring the past back to them, because it’s not accurate in the least. A simulation, as perfect as it is, is only a simulation, and maybe he can see and feel and hear everything just the same, but suddenly there’s something so much more attainable about bringing the city back.
The world was not a projection of pixels and electric impulses to the brain in an attempt to mimic life before living crumbled to the ground in ashes and charred bricks-it wasn’t even close. The world was everything all at once in the span of forever, the whisper of clouds against the horizon and the warmth of sunlight on pale skin, cool breezes and the smell of old books, soft wool against bare feet and melodic chirping of nightingales on blue-skyed Sunday mornings; the world was bright headlights and screeching tires blurring together between glowing skyscrapers, twinkling stars against violet gradients, the aroma of frying fish cooked with scattered spices by the late-night street stands. The world was time, time to take it all in with every passing second without having to run away from invisible enemies, time to capture moments in glossy photos, time to sketch memories into scenery on canvases and easels, time to thread stories together with the glide of a pen over paper, time for plastic ink between the fingers giving way to hands intertwined with hands, time to laugh together and cry together and exchange love with lips against lips, time to combine all those things into an entity so tangible and lucid in their boundlessness.
And all of it-everything that was-sits in front of him, right now.
This isn’t the game.
This is the sedition that they’ve been searching for: the beginning to end what is, to go back to what was, and to make the past become what will always be.
“You know who probably wants to see this?” Luhan chokes out, sitting up and wiping forcefully at his eyes, looking the other way to hide his face. “Minseok probably wants to see this. Let’s bring Minseok here. Dammit, god dammit, you better not tell anyone I cried. I wasn’t crying, I hope you know that I wasn’t crying. I swear on The Holiest of Holy Dildos that I was not crying, okay?”
Baekhyun laughs. “I believe you. I’ll believe anything, now.”
They don’t run when they leave to find Minseok and the others-Luhan is too busy trying to clear his vision, asking every three minutes if he still looks like he’s been crying even though he most certainly hasn’t been, and Baekhyun doesn’t really know which way is which anymore. It’s disorienting to see the sunset one moment, then look the other way to see the horizon line obscured by charred smog and a broken piece of cityscape.
It’s still alive. The city is still alive and hiding, seeking shelter in its own ruins and resuscitating itself. Maybe they don’t have to bring the dead back to life. It’s just a matter of protecting it until it awakens once more.
“Minseok!” Luhan shouts, barreling straight through the door frame once the Underground comes into view. “Minseok! Books, Minseok! There’s books! So many of them, and Jongin, paintings, you wouldn’t believe how many paintings, in fact you can’t believe any of it, but Minseok, there’s books!”
There’s a loud clatter of plastic casings when Minseok drops everything he’s holding and spins around to meet Luhan’s eyes. “Books?” he nearly squeaks, “What books?”
Jongin blinks several times, baffled. “Wait, what?”
“The theater, it’s all in the theater, we need to bring everyone, you wouldn’t believe it, but it’s beautiful, the epitome of beautiful, more beautiful than the glorious moment when I first claimed that god’s old man had a dildo-”
“Let’s round up people,” Minseok declares, “Zitao, Soojung, whoever we can find scattered around the city. Or maybe not, because we all split up after to escape the break-in, it might take too long. Just get Zitao and Soojung, and I’ll catch up with you later.”
Before he’s even finished, Jongin has taken off through the door towards the theater, Luhan and Baekhyun following closely behind him. They pass Soojung walking back from the bakery lugging a giant bag that’s probably important, but without stopping, Jongin sweeps her off her feet and knocks it out of her hands, charging straight forward, screaming something incoherent about paintings over the plethora of curses that Soojung is shouting at him.
When they reach the hole in the wall where the bookshelf used to be, nothing new happens. Baekhyun thinks it will never get old, because his eyes are burning again; Jongin drops Soojung on the floor as he gapes at the grand arrangement of everything they’d thought destroyed, and Soojung doesn’t even bother complaining. Nobody notices when Minseok comes in several minutes later with Zitao and Chanyeol by his side, until Minseok takes a sharp inhale and pushes past them all to set foot on the carpet within.
Shortly after, they all follow suit with the exception of Zitao, who’s already crying too hard to stand up and walk inside. Minseok takes to flipping through everything from Dream of Nine Clouds to The Crucible while Soojung lies flat on her back, tears drifting down her cheeks as she stares silently at the sunset printed onto the ceiling. Jongin runs delicate fingers over every outline of The Great Wave of Kanagawa before curling up in a ball on the floor, rocking back and forth as violent sobs rack his body.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop crying,” Jongin chuckles, through his incessant weeping, falling over sideways and sniffling in between every other word. “I think I’ll drown the place. I feel like it’s breathing. This whole place is breathing.”
“I think we’re alive,” Soojung hums quietly, “I think we’ve all finally come alive.”
After hesitating a while, she turns her head to glance at Baekhyun. “Is this… you know, yours?”
“Yeah,” he replies, a smile pushing up at the corners of his lips. Pride bubbles up in his chest, warm and soothing; this is consolation for a lifetime of uselessness. “It’s the little eureka! you were all waiting for.”
Sighing heavily and shutting her eyes, Soojung nods.
“Thank you.”
“This isn’t right,” Chanyeol mumbles, still standing barely inside the entrance when Baekhyun is halfway through his third book. “This really isn’t right.”
Baekhyun blinks, taking his eyes off the page and peering up at him quizzically, only to find that he’s begun to pace back and forth before the entrance, or maybe has been for the past few hours given that he hasn’t really been paying attention to anything other than books since he stepped foot inside. “What do you mean it’s not right?”
Chanyeol swallows, chewing on his lip, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, making another few round trips of pacing before he responds. “I can’t… I can’t say, I think we have to go, um,” he rubs his palms together, biting on his lip harder as he wills himself to stop pacing, “maybe I’m allergic to something.”
As he speaks, his voice rises; Soojung doesn’t notice since she’s fallen asleep, and Jongin can’t hear him over his hysterical sobbing on the floor, but both Minseok and Luhan look up. Minseok’s face flickers with realization, and he slips the book back onto the shelf, almost painfully slowly, as if he doesn’t want to let go.
“Allergic to what?” Luhan scoffs, turning away from the photograph he’s been staring at. “Art? Electrical lighting? Being alive? And who the hell even let you in here?”
“I did,” Minseok shrugs, sighing as he heads toward the exit.
Luhan chokes on his words for a moment before responding. “Why would you do that? There are books in here, Minseok, don’t you think we should be a little more… careful about who we let in? This is probably the only gallery of anything we’ll ever find.”
“You shouldn’t have found it in the first place!” Chanyeol blurts out, almost shouting, startling Soojung from her sleep. She squints at him groggily, propping herself up on her elbows as he continues. “That’s what! This isn’t right, this is the past, and I just don’t understand why you lot are trying to bring it back, don’t you understand that it doesn’t make any sense? The past was destroyed for a reason! The bombings happened for a reason! People suffered back then, so the world was to be destroyed. It was the end of all ends, and this is just… so wrong, how you’re all trying to un-end it! It was supposed to be like this! God meant for it to-”
“Zealot!” Luhan spits, whipping his gun out of his back pocket and clicking it off safety as he points it at him. “I knew it, I fucking knew it.”
Before he can pull the trigger, Minseok grabs Baekhyun and shoves him roughly in front of Chanyeol; as he hands Chanyeol his gun, Luhan nearly drops his, and Baekhyun stands shocked in the middle, Minseok’s hands steady on his shoulders.
“What the fucking hell are you doing?” Luhan shouts, hands trembling around the gun. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Minseok simply smiles. “I’m too old for this,” he claims. The nonchalance in his voice induces a sickening build-up of bile in the back of Baekhyun’s throat. “I don’t wanna die, you know? It’s a pretty sweet deal I have, now. I change sides, I go to heaven, I live a nice life-afterlife. All I have to do is believe in their side of the story; honestly, it’s a really fantastic story. And no one has to work this hard.”
“That’s not how it works, Minseok. You know better than anyone that that isn’t at all how it works. You don’t know what happens after you die. No one knows. We can only control the present, isn’t that right? We can only fix this city, we can only make sure that we live well in this life, right? You’ve said this before yourself. Heaven might exist but we’re not sure, so it doesn’t matter-Minseok, this is what matters, this is what has mattered all our lives, this is what you’ve been fighting for all your life and you’re throwing it away because you don’t want to die?”
“Everyone likes believing what they want to hear, right? Yeah, maybe I’ve fought for this all my life, but what does it matter after I’m gone? The city goes to shreds-so what? Why do I care? I’m dead.” Minseok throws his arms up in the air, a short but natural burst of laughter throwing all of them off.
Luhan starts to say something, but Minseok silences him, shaking his head as though he’s amused by the looks on all of their faces, and continues. “It matters to all of you, maybe, because you’re all alive, but it won’t matter in the slightest to me. Look at me! I’m old! I’m going to die soon! I don’t care what happens to this place, but I want to believe that in the next life, if there even is one, that I’m going to paradise. Is that so bad? Is it so wrong of me to care about myself and what happens to me?”
“You’re abandoning us,” Baekhyun mumbles, “Isn’t that wrong, if only a little bit?”
“And whose side are you on? Were you part of this, too?” The gun in Luhan’s hand shakes violently, and there’s something off about where it’s pointed, but Baekhyun doesn’t have time to discern it.
Chanyeol’s lips curl into a menacing smirk. “Well, that’s up for him to decide isn’t it?”
“I-”
“Think about it, little buddy. Who’s really going to protect you? Where will you really feel useful?”
“Fuck ‘feeling’ useful, Byunbyun, where will you be useful?”
The thing is, Baekhyun tells himself as Chanyeol’s gun clicks off safety behind him as well, this argument doesn’t have an answer. If he joins the Zealots, leaves Luhan and Jongin-who’s finally noticed and is now standing behind Luhan-it doesn’t make him anymore useful. All that changes is that he doesn’t need to be. There’s too many people with the other faction for each and every one of them to need to be useful, and it won’t matter if he’s still stuck in this state of floundering around for his niché or not. They don’t need him. But neither do the Seditionists, because up until now, for all seventeen years of his life, he has done nothing except tag along with everyone else and hog Luhan as some sort of bodyguard. Who can say that he’ll be useful in the future when this discovery is his only achievement?
He thinks about Minseok, about how he’s lying to himself, and about the Zealots, about how they’re all lying to themselves, and about the Seditionists, who were lying to themselves until now. In order to answer Luhan’s question, he would have to join in on the lying, pretend that he really even has the ability to be useful once they pass this point. Everyone likes believing what they want to hear. Baekhyun wants to pretend that because of this, he’ll be able to do more. But that’s not the case. This is the singular eureka! that everyone wanted from him, the reason everyone was afraid to tell him he was useless that one night, but the future is the reason for the silence that followed.
And then he realizes what’s off about Luhan’s gun. It’s pointed at him, not Chanyeol. And if he turns around, he knows he’ll see the same thing on the other side.
The future is the reason for the silence that followed, and it all makes sense then, because his future is the silence that followed. No one can say anything to nothing. He isn’t supposed to have one. The most useful thing he can do right now is to stop trying, drop everything, and make sure that what he’s brought to light will never be left behind, that the new inspiration he’s just uncovered will never be put out.
The inevitable end he faces teeters on the edge of every breath. One of them will shoot him, and he must choose the one that makes his death mean something.
Swallowing down the bitter taste of sacrifice, he straightens his back, smiling, looks Luhan in the eye, and takes a step backwards, towards Chanyeol. And then another, and another, and Jongin’s lips move but he can’t hear what he’s saying over the silence Luhan is giving him, the slow-motion anger that creases between his eyebrows, the gradual steadiness that seeps into his hands, the glare of the barrel staring him in the chest, and then the silent whisper of the bang, a quivering mess of tears burrowing itself into his skin and past his ribs, just a little too deep.
The purpose doesn’t make it any less painful.
While everyone’s off-guard, Chanyeol goes down, too; the bang is louder this time, it sounds so definite, and then it goes after Minseok, and Luhan hasn’t said a word and Jongin is screaming “no!” but it’s not desperate, just regretful, just pitiful, just sorry, and Soojung watches Minseok fall in silence, and Zitao is still cowering outside the doorway, crying, with three dying bodies lying between himself and a bloodied paradise.
Baekhyun listens to the seconds passing between himself and Luhan, silence sweeping them all around and around in circles, remorse coating their skin and settling in their hair, bleeding out in faint crimson over the distant ache in his heart. Luhan breathes deeply, steadily, until Jongin whispers something like, “you shot Baekhyun, you just shot Baekhyun.” And then he lets it all out in a sigh, a shuddering, uneven mess of air from the lungs, stumbling over to Baekhyun and dropping to his knees.
“Promise me you won’t go back,” he whispers, shutting his eyes to the feel of Luhan’s hands cupping his own. “You killed me, okay? But you did it for a reason, and now you can’t go back. Promise me, you won’t go back.”
Jongin goes back to his painting of the wave, Soojung blinks up at the ceiling, Minseok reaches uselessly for Baekhyun’s book, dropped two feet away from him, and Luhan remembers that they’re fighting for something. He almost laughs then, tears pooling over his eyelids as he thinks about how Baekhyun is using his last moments to throw his own words back in his face, to remind him so permanently to think about what matters.
“Okay,” he murmurs, pressing a hand against Baekhyun’s forehead to brush his bangs out of his eyes. “I promise.”
He waits like that for a while, long after Baekhyun’s skin goes cold against the heat of his palm, long after Zitao’s cried himself to sleep. He stays until he can blink the tears back, until he stops hearing Baekhyun’s voice in his head asking him if he’s okay.
And then he stands, straightening up and breathing deep, testing the weight of a city on his shoulders.