When Sunggyu wakes up this time, he knows something’s not right. Clearly, something hadn’t been right when he woke up before, but the wrong something now is a different something. First of all, his body aches all over like hell. He thought he was hurting before, but now the pain is real, not just a ghost. He feels like someone packed him into a tiny box and left him there for hours. Second—he’s trying to breathe in and out—he is now myopic. He can count the strands on the fur pelt in front of his face as clear as crystal, but anything beyond it is blurry. Third, it’s as though someone the colour out of his vision. Someone did something to his eyes. Myopic and slightly colourblind. Don’t panic, he tells himself. Fourth, he suddenly realizes a whole new world of smells that nearly overwhelm him. The rotten, fetid odour of a dead animal’s fur. The reek of his clothing—he feels like a wine connoisseur, picking out all of the old hints of grease and crackers and canned fruit. And the smell of something distinctly human that is not him.

He tries to open and close his hand again. His fingers instead splay outwards, and he realizes with some degree of horror that he can feel things coming out of the tips of his fingers and sliding back in when he closes his hand. He turns his head to look at it, and he tries to remember to breathe again.

But a massive human hand closes around his paw and starts to massage his pads soothingly. Another hand falls on his head and rubs behind his ears, which have slid up the sides of his skull to the top. “We’re good now, aren’t we?” someone’s deep voice laughs above him.

Sunggyu tries to talk, but it comes out as a high-pitched mew of confusion. Dongwoo? The voice didn’t below to Dongwoo. Speaking of Dongwoo, what did he do to him after giving him the drug? Who is this person? A million thoughts race through his mind.

And Sunggyu’s turned into a cat. This thought alone is enough to overturn everything else.

“I know you’re scared, but I’m gonna help you, okay? Trust me here. I mean, you don’t have any other choice.” His voice booms in Sunggyu’s ears, and the human shifts away from him and drops his paw. “Think about being human again. Think about turning back into Sunggyu; think as hard as you can.”

He’s right that he doesn’t have any other choice. Sunggyu closes his eyes and thinks about how it feels for his five fingers to open and close and how it feels to walk and talk. He thinks about scrutinizing himself in the mirror of a deserted house weeks ago—his too-long hair, his shapeless torso, his legs covered in bug bite scars, his stomach puffing slightly over the waistband of his boxers. Pinching at the fat. “When you don’t eat enough, your body goes into starvation mode and stores all of the fat from everything you eat,” Myungsoo tells him. “Either way, I’m telling you, you look fine.”

At first, it starts off as a trickle, and then it grows until it’s a full-blown wave, rolling across his body. He can feel the cat fur falling away and the ears sliding down and reforming. He can feel his lips blooming and his entire face pulling backwards while his chest expands, his ribs pushing out. He can feel his legs straightening and lengthening, and he swears he can feel his muscles reknitting themselves all over again. His ankles crack into place and his feet extend from his heel, the claws retracting into flat, stubby nails.

“Holy ,” Sunggyu breathes.

“I reacted like that too my first time,” the stranger says, sounding amused. “You just lost all of your fur, so you should put on clothes before you freeze to death.”

He’s right. Sunggyu’s skin is already breaking out in goosebumps. He spots his clothes lying beside him in a heap, dusted with brown and white cat fur. Thankfully, the stranger has chosen to turn his back to him and instead look out across the city, but Sunggyu still feels very bare on top of the roof under the massive sky. He hurriedly pulls on his clothes, and while he’s shrugging on his jacket, he hears the jangle of Myungsoo’s keys in one of the pockets. Thank goodness. At least Dongwoo didn’t take that away from him.

“You done?” the stranger asks, unmoving.

“Yeah.” He loops the scarf around his cold hands and coughs. “Who…are you?”

“I’m Bang Yongguk. And you’re Kim Sunggyu. I saw your name written on your clothes’ tags, just so you don’t have a nervous breakdown,” Yongguk says. He reaches out one of his hands and pats the space beside him on the edge of the roof. “Care to take a seat with me?”

Sunggyu crouches down and nervously scoots forward beside him, keeping his distance out of caution.

“If you’re scared, don’t look down. It’s okay. You’ll get used to it.”

“You’re implying I’ll be sitting on the edge of a roof more than once?”

“Maybe you will,” Yongguk says. “Did you even think about how you even got here in the first place?”

“No,” Sunggyu admits. He looks back at the fur pelt lying on the ground. He can’t even begin to think how that ended up on top of a roof with him. “But the cat thing. How…”

“The media called our kind ‘Endlings’, you know.”

Sunggyu stares at his hands in shock. He’d been infected with the Endvirus somehow after the drug knocked him out, but he hadn’t died. Was it because he’d been passed out? No, that wasn’t possible; he’d seen reports on TV of people being infected in their sleep and waking up just in time to die. Was it something in the pill Dongwoo gave him? Or did Dongwoo give him something after he passed out?

“Our kind?” Sunggyu echoes. “What do you mean?”

“You turned into a Japanese bobtail cat, you know, the ones that have little stubs for tails. I can turn into a golden eagle. Like this,” and Yongguk shrugs off his jacket and holds out his bare forearm, which flares in a sudden outcrop of dark brown feathers. They melt away as soon as they come, leaving smooth skin in its wake. “The golden eagle was my first, like the Japanese bobtail cat’s your first. You’re a smart guy to get all the way to the city, aren’t you? I think you should be realizing by now.”

Sunggyu remains silent and fists his hands in his scarf. The bigger question is, why isn’t he dead? He knows with some certainty that Dongwoo must’ve done something that led him to become an Endling. Dongwoo must’ve infected him with the Endvirus with the purpose of killing him, but by some fluke of nature, his cells hadn’t spiraled out of control and stopped multiplying after he transformed completely. On top of that, he’s surprised that he even transformed properly. An image of Haneul flashes through his head. But then there’s Yongguk, who knew exactly how to get him back to normal and had controlled transformations, just like him. Could a fluke like that happen twice?

Yongguk’s hand pats his back comfortingly. “Hey,” he says, “don’t sweat it. It’s a shocking experience. My first time, I ended up not even transforming back fully. It was really bad.”

That’s not it, Sunggyu thinks. Then another thought hits him. How did Yongguk find him? Dongwoo must’ve put him on the roof so that no one could even attempt to rescue him. But Yongguk can transform into an eagle…

“I’m just really confused. About everything.” He groans and buries his face in his scarf, muffling another cough. “My brain isn’t built to think about complex mysteries like this.”

“S’okay. Take your time.”

“Stuff like who exactly are you. Why did I turn into a cat. Why there’s this fur pelt behind me. How you found me.”

“Well, I flew over and saw you, didn’t I? It’s hard to miss a big fur pelt on a rooftop, especially with my eyesight. You were infected with a cat strain of the Metavirus. And I’m just one of the survivors in the city.”

“There are more of you.”

“Yeah, all of the survivors congregate in the city. At one point, there were a lot of us, but they all spread out afterwards and left the city to keep moving.”

“Are they like us? Endlings?”

Yongguk shrugs in reponse to his question, his face blank. “We’re not Endlings; that’s just media crap to generate hype.”

“But this is the End of the world, isn’t it?” Sunggyu asks.

-

After Sunggyu has a coughing spell and is left wheezing, Yongguk kindly gives his cat form a terrifying ride to the pharmacy. He drops him off on the counter and leaves Sunggyu’s clothes in a messy pile near the register before giving him a nod and eyeing him as if to remind him of what they talked about earlier. By sundown, once he’s done with getting whatever he needed, he would come out and meet Yongguk, who would be waiting for him in a tree. Then Yongguk would show him a good place to sleep. “So you don’t die of the cold,” he had said. “That’d because I just met you, you know. It’s a little hard finding company around here.”

Sunggyu morphs and sits there on the counter for a few moments, marveling in the odd feeling of remaking his entire body. Then he feels the chill creeping in and changes into his clothes.

He wanders aimlessly around the shelves for a while, unable to recognize a majority of the drugs, but in the end, he does down a capful of cough syrup and takes a small bag of extra-strength honey-flavoured cough drops. He also has asthma, so he picks up something that looks relatively close to his old inhaler and takes in a puff before slipping it into his pocket. He feels much better already.

He leaves the pharmacy and walks to the small organic grocery store that Yongguk showed him. When he enters, the sliding doors have already been forced open for him. How nice. Unsurprisingly, most of the products are gone, but he does manage to pick up some elastic bandages hidden underneath a fallen shelf. On the spur of the moment, he takes a small sprig of plastic white flowers lying on the ground. He no longer has his backpack, so he can’t take too much. Besides, Yongguk seems to be in good health and pretty willing to help him out in case he’s lacking something. It feels good to be able to have someone lead him around instead for once.

Later on when Sunggyu meets up with him, Yongguk takes him to an apartment building not far away whose front doors have been knocked out. In the far corner of the lobby is a massive bird’s nest, big enough to fit a person. “This is where you sleep?” Sunggyu asks. “It’s cold here too. The doors are open.”

Yongguk smiles, and Sunggyu notices that his teeth are pointed. But Yongguk’s smile is confident and brash, and besides, Sunggyu is too tired—physically and mentally—to put his guard up or to improvise any makeshift weapons. “Wait until you get into the nest. I built it myself. Sticks, wire fencing, grass, furniture, you name it.” Yongguk laughs and steps onto a large tire sticking out of the side and climbs in. “Hey, come on in.” He extends a hand to Sunggyu.

Sunggyu takes his hand and hoists himself up over the side, tumbling into the warm center of down, blankets, towels, and clothing. He finds himself glued to Yongguk’s side and tries to move away, to no avail. “It’s a little too small for the both of us,” he mutters, a little embarrassed.

“Think about being a cat again. I’ll change too so we can both fit and still have plenty of room.”

Sunggyu closes his eyes and thinks about feeling warm, enveloped in a pelt of fur. He thinks about muted colours and different smells and claws extending out of his paws.  

He cracks open his eyes to a massive brown eagle tucking its head into its . Bang Yongguk has invited him into his nest and is sleeping first, Sunggyu realizes with some kind of awe. It’s like an epiphany, and it lulls him comfortably to sleep.

ok so....for a couple days, I was waiting on my friends for feedback, but alas, they've all decided to stop reading my stories anymore or something along those lines so I just took it upon myself to post the chapter after tweaking it as best as I could (my writing is getting progressively choppier?!). anyways, I'm regretting killing off all of the members except for Donggyu because I could've saved a minor character like Hoya to take Yongguk's position. but at the time, I didn't have the foresight to do that. it was supposed to be a small story! :'D 

I don't know much about Yongguk, so I'm just winging it here. but I guess all of the characters are sorta OOC so that's okay! and sorry for not revealing anything about Dongwoo. more suspense lol. but it should end in something good (I hope), so thanks to you all for being patient and reading on ;__; 

listening to music while writing, yay! Old Yellow Bricks by The Arctic Monkeys and 陌生城市的早晨 (The Morning of an Unfamiliar City) by 声音碎片 (Sound Fragment) = awesome songs. so. yup.

and of course, thank you again for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)