August 17th, 2017

The days are spent with trying to come up with plans to manage supplies as their group slowly grows. When Nari isn’t out, combing through cars and bombed buildings, Chanyeol is training her in medical procedures to treat in the injured that were being brought in.

They kept voting on who to keep, and no one had the heart to throw people back out on the street. They all stayed. It had come close a few times, but no one could do it.

It’s on one of the lucky excursions—incidentally, Taehyung’s second since he had finally made full recovery—that they find out that water and food are being given out as station points. What wasn’t great was that their access to the station points gave them a limited time to forage for other supplies. The attacks hadn’t ceased, and the others had successfully gotten a way to get petroleum.

But when she had asked them to go to the mall and get thermal clothing for the winter, they all immediately looked at her as if she’s crazy.

“We have heating!” Jimin protested with a shudder.

“But for how long? If we have to rely on fire, which would require wood and a lot of risk since we’re indoors, how would we survive?” Nari’s questions are matter of fact, and that day they returned with lots of thermal clothing. She had no idea how they got it, because the mall had been shut down days ago, but if a door wasn’t open to the building, she wouldn’t be surprised.

After all, the male that they had picked up a few days earlier from the inside of a bombed building had somehow known how to pick locks. His name was Byun Baekhyun, and he was a very curious thing. He had hopped off the counter after Chanyeol and Nari had set his broken arm, and Chanyeol had added that he couldn’t and shouldn’t move it a lot. Baekhyun had retorted, “Who, me? Darn, I was going to enlist.”

Chanyeol had stared after him. “Either I found a new best friend or they picked up an idiot.”

Chanyeol, in a way, had become a constant for her. He taught her how to set, and wrap, and all the basics that she would have known if she had gone into medical school instead of dental school. Every night she was exhausted and collapsed on to the mattress, only to sleep until the next group of foragers went out, or the bombs and grenades started going off again.

They stopped asking her to go out, but she had to admit, she wanted to get some air.

So she wakes up early and announces that she’s going out, much to everyone’s horror.

“Nari, if we lose you, then we’re going to lose our access to treatment.” Namjoon’s voice is calm, but Nari could tell that even he was taken aback.

Jungkook, who had just started warming up to her, is hesitant, “You don’t know how to fight, and it’s getting uglier.”

“Then teach me,” Nari says simply, and that’s when Chanyeol interjects.

“Nari, baby—”

And she snaps.

“Excuse me? What did you call me?”

Silence falls over the group, and no one dares to answer. Even Chanyeol looks uneasy.

“We broke up almost a year ago, and that’s how it’s going to stay. Don’t try to ‘baby’ me into doing anything.” Nari hisses, and she can tell this is new knowledge to all of them. After all, Chanyeol and Nari hadn’t really talked about it, even between themselves. “I need to know how to do this stuff too.”

So, much to everyone’s chagrin, she puts a backpack on, and she heads out with Namjoon, Jimin, and Yoongi. The air is still laden with dust, and probably even more so, and they hide their faces behind masks, even in the sweltering heat. It was supposed to start cooling down soon, but at the rate of the explosions heating up the land, she somehow doubts that.

The goal for today? Soap and basic hygiene amenities. Even though they had some, it was going to start running low much sooner than later because of the growing amount of people being brought back to the shelter to be treated.

“Dead weight,” Yoongi mutters. “If they can’t be useful, they’re dead weight.”

“We need to give everyone jobs,” As much as Namjoon looks like he wanted to disagree with Yoongi, he didn’t. And Nari didn’t know if he could. There were a fair amount of young parents and their children, along with some older families. There were at least twenty people other than the group of the original eight, and that meant there were mouths to feed. Water wasn’t flowing out of taps most of the time. Electricity was running only a few hours a day.

They had given up trying to refuse people shelter. Some of them were badly hurt. One actually died as Chanyeol and Nari had tried to stop the internal bleeding. They failed.

Nari had been quiet for the next two days. If only they had been faster. If only they had been better. Both Nari and Chanyeol had quietly wrapped the body, and they took a shovel and buried it in the greenery across the street.

The others had asked if they wanted help. Nari had shaken her head. This felt like her fault. Chanyeol was more than trained in stopping internal bleeding after his rotations in the emergency and trauma wards at school. He had almost been done and ready to graduate.

On the other hand, she was just a dental student.

In those few days, something in her heart had hardened, and she wasn’t sure that it was going to soften again.
 

A few houses were ransacked and broke into, and were clearly not being lived in. All the food was taken, but they had been lucky enough to find hygienic supplies that had been left along in the bathroom. Jimin had stumbled into a kid’s room and grabbed the extra clothing from the closet. The closets hadn’t been fully searched through, and the coats were left. They picked up clothing in bags they had found in the kitchen.

Namjoon sighs a little. They had an hour to spare and they should head to the station points now if they were going to get through the lines of the scared civilians. The turn into an alleyway that was the quickest route to the station point.

“Hey, you guys are headed to the station points