Title: The Innocence of Sleep (drabble)
Pairings: Hanchul
Genre: Apocalypse!AU/Friendship(?)
Rating: PG
Warnings: Death
Summary: Two boys stand alone as the last survivors of the apocalypse, and though there is no future for them they walk into the waste until their time is come, their hands clasped for eternity.

A hand reached into the rubble, a soft voice saying words he didn’t understand. His hand reached out weakly, grasping the smaller one. The boy stumbled from the rubble with eyes like a ghost, dark and haunted but the boy beside him smiled brightly and spoke again, a jumble of words he couldn’t interpret, but the sound of another person’s voice after all the time he’d spent alone in the darkness warmed his heart and he found himself smiling back faintly. The boy walked on ahead, his dark hair a tangled mess as it blew in the wind and his legs so thin he thought they’d snap at any moment, and he pulled him along by his skinny hands, a strength in them he couldn’t compete with. The crumbled concrete hurt his cold feet, but the warm hand entwined with his was enough to distract him from the pain of losing everything.

Rain scalded the cracked and broken concrete above them as they huddled beneath scavenged, tattered blankets. It dripped through the cracks and hit the ground around them, echoing on and on. They shivered against each other’s skinny bodies and the skinnier boy cried in his sleep, great body-racking sobs. He pulled his bony form closer and he wished he could cry too, but the tears wouldn’t come. He wondered if the boy was doing his share of crying, too.

Their skin was pale from the sunless sky, sore from the tainted rain. The skin on their feet was hard and sore and their ribs were visible enough to count. They walk through the ruined world as skeletons of a land long destroyed; they are truly alone but for each other and their labouring lungs are the only sound they can hear apart from the rain and the quiet beating of their hearts. No common language lies between them, they are nameless and wordless and devoid of innocence but there is light still in their rheumy, sunken eyes and tired smiles rest on their dry, water starved lips because though they can’t speak the same words, their eyes can say a thousand.

They stumble through a memory of a world that had long since crumbled away before they could even taste its beauty; yet neither boy feels loneliness, and the warmth of their hands and the steady beating of their hearts is enough to fuel their smiles and give them the energy to walk on further and further, step after step. They have no destination; they’ll walk to the end of the world if they have to. They have nowhere to go. They just had to keep walking.

They lie on the broken concrete of a collapsed, rain-beaten building and they laugh at nothing as the clouds roll apart and the sun warms their bones as if in farewell. Their laughter grows weaker til they are soundless, their starved stomachs cease to hunger and their sore feet never ache again. Gaunt and starved they lie as the last children of the earth, their fragile fingers entwined and their smiles unfading as the concrete apocalypse swallows them whole.