It is dawn when Krystal wakes up in the miniscule fort of branches, and she opens her eyes to find it much bigger. She climbs out onto the snow covered ground and turns around to look at the place she was just sleeping under. Unlike before she had gone to sleep, where they had only put up a few large branches to keep the snow from covering her, the fort was now covered in branches and dead leaves mixed with mud.

Krystal lets out a sigh and watches the puff of fog disappear in front of her. She wraps her arms around herself, rubbing her hands over her upper arms in hopes that the friction would warm her up just a bit at least. She turns around, suddenly remembering that Taeyeon wasn't in there with her. In front of her is a small fire, orange flame at the cold air, fighting to stay lit. She drops her hands closer to the fire to warm herself just a bit and looks around for Taeyeon.

She spots her sitting on a rock near the start of the tree line. She's working on something that Krystal can't see from her angle; swiping her arm back and forth, her body jerking from the hard movement. When Krystal gets closer she catches the sight of the long branch the girl had acquired the previous day in her hands now, the bark peeled entirely off of it, leaving it smooth. The middle of it is cut thinner for her hand to grip better, Krystal debunks. Beside her are four thin and neatly carved up sticks with sharp points on one side and three leaves tied to eat of them with some sort of string and Krystal finally understands what Taeyeon has been doing this whole time.

"You're making a bow." Krystal says, finally announcing her presence to the older girl. Taeyeon shows no sign of being startled and continues slicing bits of unwanted branch off.

"Yes." She says, leaving it at that. Krystal stands behind her, unsure what to do; to sit with her, to walk away, or to just wait for her to make the first move. When Taeyeon doesn't speak, however, Krystal decides to say something again.

"When did you wake up?"

There's a few beats of silence where Taeyeon continues slicing at her bow's frame before she answers. "I would have had to sleep to wake up."

Krystal gapes at her. "You didn't sleep at all? Taeyeon, that's not good, you need to sleep--"

"If I slept, you wouldn't have been warmer with the mud insulation. We wouldn't have that fire. I wouldn't be almost done with this so I can catch something and we can eat." Taeyeon has yet to look up at her, continuing her ministrations on the frame. "I can't sleep when there's so much to do to stay alive."

Krystal doesn't know what to say, so she just doesn't. Instead, she moves to sit beside the full Korean and takes one of the makeshift arrows in her hands, twirling it around to examine the work. The string used to attach the leaves is thin and dark, but wrapped around enough time to do the job it's needed to do.

"What did you use for this?"

Taeyeon doesn't look up to see what she's talking about. She brings her left arm up to view and Krystal notices the way the end of the jacket sleeve is shorter than before and frayed at the end. "It won't hold for too long, but it will suffice long enough to hopefully catch something so I can replace it with sinew. I'm hoping to catch a bird somehow so I can replace the leaves. These will definitely not last long, so that's my first task today."

"You really know what you're doing." Krystal said, starting to shiver in her spot.

"My dad knew what he was doing. I'm only doing what I watched him doing most of my life, I don't really know what I'm doing."

"Your dad did a lot of this stuff, didn't he? You've mentioned it before, that you learned all of this... survival stuff from him."

Taeyeon nods silently and Krystal doesn't want to push her, so she keeps quiet as well. When Taeyeon looks up for the first time today, Krystal holds back her gasp. The dark bags that were always under her eyes are even darker now. Her lips are dry and peeling and drained of color and wherever her skin wasn't a burning red shade, it was the palest of whites. Her dark brown eyes are empty of emotion and Krystal feels like she's looking at a stranger or something dead.

"My dad was in the military for most of his life." Taeyeon starts. "A lot of bad things happened to him while he was in and when he got out, he was a paranoid man; a bat- crazy old man is what everyone called him. We would spend days out in the woods and he would teach us ways to survive. He said we would need to know it some day. He taught me and my brother and sister this stuff because he thought we would need to go into hiding during some future war. Little did he know it would be a war of the living against the dead."

It's unexpected to Krystal that Taeyeon suddenly tells her about her father; she never got into detail about her past to anyone, yet here she was telling her now. As if she can read her mind, Taeyeon answers the question Krystal is mentally thinking.

"I'll be teaching you the things he taught me, Krystal. For when I'm gone and you're left on your own. I just want you to know where this all comes from."

Krystal wants to argue, tell the girl that she's not going to go anywhere, that they would survive together until the end, but she can't. She can't bring herself to make a promise she surely cannot keep. Instead, she nods and watches Taeyeon pull more fabric from her ripped jacket and wrap the pieces together until it's strong and thick enough to tie to the bow.

Half of the day later, Taeyeon has caught nothing and the freezing temperature and burning wind have pulled everything out of her. Krystal tells her to give up for the day so they can start looking for a town to hopefully find shelter in for the night.

This time they find one. It's a small town, meaning less Walkers, and Krystal leads a drained Taeyeon through it. She can see the determination and confidence inside of the girl crumpling into a pile of failure for not providing for the two of them. They pick a small house close to the end of the town and check for any Walkers before beginning their search for any sort of food.

"One bag of stale tortilla chips. That's all." Krystal sighs when they sit together on the couch in the living room.

"At least it's something." Taeyeon grumbles. She sets her findings on the coffee table with a loud clank. "Look what I found."

The bottle of wine sits over half full in front of them and Krystal actually lets out a chuckle. "That's probably a bad idea."

"You think?" Taeyeon asks sarcastically, taking the bottle back again and pulling the cork off. She wafts the smell of the alcohol toward herself and sighs before bringing the bottle to her lips and taking a swig.

"Taeyeon, we haven't eaten in two days. Drinking is seriously not something you should do..."

"It's something, isn't it?" Taeyeon says, taking another sip. "Besides, we have chips now. Open it up and let's get to eating."

Krystal doesn't argue about it anymore, and instead takes the bottle from Taeyeon and takes a sip of it herself before she pulls open the bag and dips her hand in it. "I hope you're a fun drunk."

She's not.

Soon after the drinking commences, Taeyeon is well enough intoxicated that she just sits on the couch looking blankly at the wall. Krystal, on the other hand, hasn't had much to drink in fear that something would happen while they're both drunk, but Taeyeon's drop in mood has Krystal deep in thought.

"She loved you, you know." Krystal says quietly, breaking the silence. "She didn't tell you, but she loved you."

Taeyeon's expression doesn't falter one bit nor does she say a single word, and Krystal isn't entirely sure she heard her.

"She told me when--"

"I don't care." Taeyeon says in monotone.

Krystal scrutinizes Taeyeon's blank expression. "Taeyeon, I'm telling you that Jessica loved you--"

"And I'm telling you I don't care."

"What is your problem?" Krystal asks, shifting in her spot on the couch to get a better look at the girl. "I know you care, you can't lie to me. I know you..."

"I. Do. Not. Care." Taeyeon spits. "I don't care about her. She didn't care about me enough to give us a chance, so why should I care about some --"

"Don't you dare call her a !" Krystal yells, standing up and clenching her fists. "What the is wrong with you, Taeyeon? I get that you're hurt and upset and sad, but that's no reason to say ed up like that."

"She was a ! Your sister was a , Krystal!" Taeyeon stands up and faces the redhead. "She spent all that time being a stone cold instead of actually caring enough to actually give us a chance! So no, I don't ing care if she told you she loved me because it doesn't ing count. It doesn't make her any less of a ing ."

Krystal had enough of it. Her anger engulfs her and she takes the extra step toward the older girl before slamming her knuckles into the side of Taeyeon’s face. The contact causes Taeyeon to stagger backward, almost losing her balance completely, but she manages to stand her ground. Krystal doesn't like it and throws another harder punch. Taeyeon drops to the floor this time and Krystal kneels down and pounds a fist to her face, once, twice, three times more.

When she stops, Taeyeon is sprawled out on the floor, her bottom lip busted open and bleeding and a few fist sized welts already starting to swell up. Tears are rolling down the sides of her face and into her hair and she's breathing heavily, but no sobs escape her. Krystal is panting as she stands up, towering over Taeyeon.

"If you ever talk about my sister like that again and I will kill you." Krystal threatens. She turns on her heels and storms out of the house, leaving Taeyeon drunkenly lying on the floor.

She spends the next couple of hours roaming the town and the abandoned houses, searching for anything they could possibly use while also blowing off steam. She finds a small first aid kit a few houses in, which she uses to clean her slightly bloody hand before wrapping what little gauze was in the box around it. She finds herself sitting on the porch of a house, staring down at a Walker she had just killed and lets herself crash. She crashes hard, sobs stifled by the sleeve of her jacket so as to not grab the attention of more Undead. Her heart shatters on that porch; it shatters for Jessica, the only family she had left who would have done anything in her ability to protect her; it shatters for Yuri, who she watched before her eyes disappear under a herd of Death; it shatters for Hyoyeon and Tiffany, who were just as much sisters to her as her actual sister; it shatters for Malibu and for Joel, who were the purest form of hope they all still had in that town. The hope that was squashed as quick as the snow under her every step.

Her heart shatters for Taeyeon, who has lost everyone just the same as she has. She had stayed awake all night gathering sticks and branches to stack onto the ones that were already over Krystal. She had dug her bare hands through the thick layer of snow on the ground to cover those branches with mud just to keep Krystal warm. She was taking care of Krystal just as much as she was taking care of herself. Taeyeon was just as broken as she was over the loses of the other night. Krystal knew she didn't mean what she said; she didn't really not care. She knew Taeyeon enough to know she cared so much it probably physically pained her.

And Krystal had caused her more pain. Krystal had punched her for her drunken way of coping. Repeatedly.

"God, I'm a piece of crap." Krystal says aloud, wiping her eyes and nose before getting up.

The sun is beginning to set when she reaches the house Taeyeon is in, but she stops when she sees that the door is wide open and there's a Walker stepping inside. Her chest clenches and her heart drops as she rushes toward it and sticks her hatchet into it's head before running inside.

"Taeyeon?" She calls out when she doesn't see her in the living room where she had left her.

She hears a muffled voice further into the house and stops in her tracks to listen.

"Do you think I'm okay?" She hears Taeyeon’s loud and slurred voice through the walls. "Do I really look okay? I. Am. Not. Okay. Look at me! I'm not okay! I feel like you right now: dead. I'm dead. I feel so ing dead inside, so how can I feel so much? Wait -- let me finish. I said wait!"

The sound of glass breaking makes Krystal push her feet forward, running to the room she thinks she hears the sudden struggle in. She finds Taeyeon on the floor beside the bed, the lamp having fallen off of the night stand and shattered a distance beside her and one of her arms stretched out to grab a shard of it that is just an inch too far as her other arm holds the Walker on top of her just out of biting distance.

"Taeyeon!" Krystal cries out, running toward them and swinging the hatchet down on the Walker. Blood from its head streams down onto Taeyeon's chest, before Krystal kicks it off of the older girl. Krystal drops to her knees, panting beside the heaving Taeyeon that is lying on her back, arm still stretching for the shard. They stay there fighting to catch their breath until they finally do.

"What the hell, Taeyeon?" Krystal yells. "What the hell were you doing?"

Taeyeon's face has swollen up a lot in a quite a few places; her left eye turned purple and dark red and her lip caked in dry blood. Her eyes are closed and when she starts to shake, Krystal starts to panic, thinking she's having some sort of seizure or something. She stops her movements toward the girl, however, when a broken sobs escape Taeyeon's lips and she catches the gleaming stream of tears spilling into her hairline from the light of the darkening sky.

"I'm sorry." Taeyeon cries. "I'm so sorry, Krystal. I do care. I do care..."

Krystal crawls the two feet to Taeyeon and pulls her into her arms and lets her fall apart as she continues to repeat 'I do care' to the both of them. Krystal feels the hot trail of tears roll down her own cheek as she runs her hands through Taeyeon's tangled hair and whispers reassuringly into her ear.

"I know."

"I know."

"It's okay, Taeyeon."

"It's okay."

.....​.....