August 8th, 2017

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Nari hoists her bag to a more comfortable position, blinking back at Yoongi, whose words are brusque, but more curious than acerbic.

“Out?” She raises her eyebrows. She wasn’t aware that Yoongi cared enough to ask.

“Alone?” He frowns a little, shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts. It was swelteringly hot, and despite the cooling system and the ventilation, she needed some air, no matter how much the heat wave would affect her. “Weren’t you the one afraid to go out a few days ago?”

She shrugs. The pair that they had picked up wasn’t too much of a burden. They were all already eating less because of the limited supplies, even though they had enough to go around. The male, whose name is Kim Jongin, had picked up on that and ate even less than his share. And what Nari had thought was his daughter had actually been his niece.

His sister, his niece’s mother, had been missing for days. He said that her office was hit and reduced to a pile of rubble. The school had still been open when Jongin had limped there after getting his leg hurt, and he had picked up his niece, only to find that street he lived on had been attacked too, and that there were vandals everywhere.

Yoongi studies her face as her eyes flicker to Kim Jongin, who was curled up with his niece on a spare mattress. She could feel Yoongi’s eyes boring through her face as he finally speaks, “You’re going to try to find more survivors.”

Nari easily says the worst sentence that she could have, because she is a terrible liar and that fact is glaringly obvious, “You don’t know that.”

“We might not have enough room. We might not have enough supplies. And you want to bring more?” Yoongi huffs. “Just yesterday we went up to our old rooms and found that several apartments had been broken into! If it had been yours, what would we have done?”

“You think I don’t know that?” Nari’s voice is quiet, but Yoongi’s voice had carried to the point where everyone had tuned into the conversation.

Jimin’s nose wrinkled up at the thought, “We don’t have enough supplies to treat all of Seoul.”

“But we can keep some people alive,” Jin murmurs, folding his hands in his lap and looking up from his book.

“We don’t even know if we’ll live!” Jungkook snaps, and everyone else looks a little taken aback at the statement. It had all crossed their minds, and Nari knew it, but she had expected the youngest to have a little more hope. His yell makes Kim Jongin’s niece, Rahee, wake up from her nap and start crying out of fright.

Children always did have an odd sense of understanding, even for things that should be beyond their comprehension.

He quickly hushes her, rocking her back and forth until she’s lulled back to sleep. In the meanwhile, the rest of them dissolve into conversation, or rather, argument, about what to do. Namjoon, on the other hand, is quiet and pensive, as he blinks at Nari.

Eventually, the other males calm down, eyes flickering to Namjoon, who quietly says, “We need to get petroleum, don’t we?”

He brings up a fair point, and Jongin quietly cuts in, “If I may add, do you think we have a radio? Or some kind of form of communication? Internet is working for now, but signals have gotten shifty.”

Their eyes flicker to Nari, who had done a full inventory earlier. “I think we do, but I’ll have to do some digging to find it.”

“If we’re going out, some of us have to stay,” Taehyung says immediately. “The child can’t be left alone.”

“I’ll stay,” Jongin says immediately, and Jimin purses his lips.

“Look, we just met, but we don’t know if you’ll run off with some supplies.”

“His leg is healing, Jimin,” Nari cuts in. “It’s not like he can run off with much with a kid.”

If Jongin is offended, he doesn’t show it.

In the end, Nari, Namjoon, Jungkook, and Jimin are grouped together to go out. It was still early, but they had to hurry. They figured that there would be two hours before the music of bombs dropping would start playing again.
 

Namjoon feels somewhat disgruntled at the fact that they were all sharing two water bottles amongst themselves, and even more disgruntled to find gas prices three times the normal. They couldn’t afford that. So Jungkook comes up with the next best thing.

“What if we take petroleum from abandoned cars?”

“How do we know which ones are abandoned?” Namjoon frowns. “And how are we going to open up the tank if we can’t get into the car?”

“The abandoned streets and the ruined ones,” Jimin says, grim. “The office buildings bombed in the middle of the day. If the survivors didn’t leave already, they would have to be insane.”

The unspoken words are quite clear to Namjoon. They’d be stealing from dead people, but it’s not like they were any less condemned to h*ll at this point. They were living it.

“Do we break into people’s houses?” Nari murmurs, her feet jerking to a stop with a dazed expression coming over her face. And even though he disagreed with her on several accounts, she had a fair point. What if the people inside were dead?

After all, the looting and vandalism had already began. If they got to some of the supplies first, then they would be the winners. The question was, how could they tell a place that was quietly being lived in from a place that was abandoned?

“Keep up.” That's all Namjoon says to her, because he couldn’t really answer her question. They were getting quite close to Nari’s university, from what he remembered. The bus ride there from their apartments had been fairly short, after all. “Do we want to go to the university?”

“No,” Nari’s voice is grim. “Parts of the teaching hospital’s wings were bombed and abandoned. We won’t find many students after the campus shut down.”

Jungkook pipes up, “We won’t find students, but maybe we can find supplies.”

Namjoon ignores Nari’s reluctant face, increasing the pace. “We have to be back in an hour and fifteen minutes. Let’s see what we can salvage.”
 

Ruined shelves. Flickering lights. Na