Two
Four Shots
HIMCHAN POV
Yongguk says that we have to help this one, the one that collapsed in front of our cave, the one with the blood dripping from his leg and a symbol like ours imprinted on his palm, but I'm not so sure. Too many people have collapsed not far from here, in just hours, and all the rest have said to leave them, that they will die soon enough, that they will only burden us. What makes this one so special?
But I help Jongup carry him into our little place, and set him down, and watch as Jongup busies himself with our meager supplies.
This past day has taken its toll on me, however short it was, and I don't trust them, not Jongup, not Zelo, not anyone here. But I have to. I have to, if it means this war will end, and people will stop. Stop hurting, stop killing, stop dying.
My arms weighed down by wood, I shuffled past the door, entering into the shop. The air was crisp outside, the smell of winter wind hinting the beginning of the end, and the beginning of a beginning. Jongkook looks up as I kick the door closed behind me, breathing in the heavy scent of bread and a little maple. He grins, the soft light streaming in from the windows lighting up his eyes, and takes the wood from with whoosh of breath, surprised at the heaviness. I dust off my hands, picking off the parts of bark that were glued to my skin with sap, and grin as he shuffles awkwardly around the shop counter to the largest oven, dumping the wood in the holder next to it. The shop was quiet, the two of us a half hour from opening. I glance at the little ticking clock above one of the ovens, then back at Jongkook, and then at the clock again, letting my eyes widen and my mouth pout a bit. Jongkook caught quickly, as he always did, and sighed as he started rolling out a fresh piece of dough.
"Fine, go, just be back in 15 minutes, okay?" I smiled big, my heart feeling a bit lighter. With all the strange things happening right now, it would be good for me to see him now, even if it was just for a couple minutes.
"Yay! Thanks!" I squealed, and Jongkook just flapped his hand vaguely in my direction, focus directed on the flattening disk powdered with white in front of him. I swing out the door, my coat flapping as I dashed across the street, passing few people as I ran around the corner, across another street, and to the school.
He's waiting for me, his bag slung over his shoulder, his smile bright, and I can feel my heart getting lighter. I fight against the stream of high schoolers rushing out and in, but he comes up to me, pressing his face into the chain link fence.
"Hyung!" He says, and I smile, my heart thumping fast, like it always did when I saw him.
"T.K!" I yelled back, and even from this distance, I can see his face turn pink, and then red, and I grin.
That was when the bomb struck.
It started with a thud, the sound of metal cutting through the air, and a poof of dust, rising in a cloud. For a second, everything is still. And then the air is ripped apart, the ground is thrown to the sun, and I fall to the sky.
➻➻➻➻➻➻➻
When I wake, the sun is gone, and bombs are still flying. But I stumble to my feet, the thought of T.K rushing to my head, before I groan in pain and bend down, a bolt of pain burrowing into my skull. I open my mouth, the world exploding around me, and I scream a wordless scream of pain, which helps. It helps enough that I can stand, that I can move to where T.K was, just behind the fence. But the fence is riped, brutally, into shreds, high schoolers litter the ground around me, and I am the only one standing. Tears clot my eyes, dust clots my eyes, but when I look down, and scrub at my eyes, and blink it all away and try to look again, try to see T.K, he isn't here. He's gone.
So the only thing I can do is run. I can run, away from where I had last saw the boy, who was only 17, the boy that I thought I loved. I run, the fastest that I have ever ran in my life, just trying to get somewhere. Anywhere. But my sorrow is hindering me, because instead of running to the near edge of the city, where I think I will at least be safe, I have ran into the heart of Seoul, where bombs are wracking the earth. My feet pound on the pavement, in an unsteady beat, because things are falling from the sky, and keep me stumbling. I leap over a distorted telephone pole, the ground giving a great shudder just as my boots touch the cracked pavement, and I almost fall, but I somehow keep my balance, and so I keep running. My mind is whirling, my senses are going on overload, giving me things I didn't want. The terrible screams of people, all across Seoul. The salty tang of blood in the air. The fall wind that buffets into me as I run toward it, sending a chill through me and clumsily slapping on another layer of dirt on my jacket and the exposed skin on my face.
I feel like crying, but the wind dries my tears as soon as they fall. So I don't, and I run, and as I do, dodging overturned cars and things that I don't want to know what they were, dodging the bombs exploding on the ground, dodging the screaming, terrified people running against me, running behind me, running anywhere, just like me. Who will survive? If I do, what makes me better than all these people? What decides who lives, who dies? Who has that kind of power?
These people, in the machines that are dropping death onto us, I know. They have tremendous power over us, but really, anyone can have power over one another. They just need a gun in their hand, a heart enclosed in ice, and a mission, and one person can destroy the world.
I don't know how I got out alive. I just ran, I just survived, and I got lucky. The bombs stayed out of my way for the most part, and I found myself, two hours later, at the edge of the city, hidden from view. Gradually, the bombs began to disappear, the jets flew out of this stretch of sky above Seoul, and everything was deathly quiet. Too quiet, for this time of day. And then, a scream. Horrible, like it was ripped out of someone’s throat by a claw, too near.
I don’t know why, but I ran towards the sound, which had cut off as suddenly as it had appeared. The brush of the woods wasn’t thick, so I could see from a while off a kneeled figure in a patchy clearing of grass, another shape spread on the ground in front of it. My breath coming in gasps, my stained, dirty boots cracking in the too-dry brush, it was all too obvious that I was coming, and in this new world, someone coming is not something good. The figure, who I can now tell is a boy, about the same age as me, stands up, and in an impressively fast movement, reached behind him to pull out a gun, which he leveled at my head, his hands trembling but his jaw locked stubbornly.
I stop running abruptly, my feet just bridging into the clearing, wobbling a bit on my still unsteady feet, and lift my hands to the sky when I can see he’s not close to lowering the gun pointed at my face. I hadn't expected this kind of reaction, but how else would he react? Giving me a hug?
The guy with the gun made no move to speak, but he also didn't make a move to shoot me, which I appreciated.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, figuring that was a good start, but I don’t know what I want. Help? An alliance? My life?
“So what do you want to do, then?” The guy spoke wryly, exactly the wrong question.
“To… help you?” I wish it hadn't come out as more a question than a statement.
A sarcastic, self-pitying expression twisted the guy’s lips. “Can you bring back the dead?”
Well. I hadn't expected that, but one quick glance at the crumpled body of a woman, maybe in her late 50’s, solved that. He had lost her, most likely to the bombs. He had probably dragged her here, when she was barely alive, and when I had heard him scream, that must’ve been when she died.
I felt a crushing boulder weighing down on my heart, because this one, mourning a new death, was exactly like me. T.K was dead, but I hadn’t shed tears yet. I know it will hit me later, the fact that he is gone. I know it will hit me brutally all over, and I will be weak, so weak, until I can recover enough to think. I will be easy meat for the freaks that roam at night. I need an alley, I need someone to help me survive, and this guy seems like the best bet.
I my lips. “No.”
The guy gave a dry little laugh, his glittering eyes never leaving mine, his gun still not moved away from pointing at my skull. “Then get out,” he said, his voice suddenly as cold as ice and about as breakable as a block of diamond.
“But I can help you,” I protested, knowing it wasn’t smart to disobey a guy plagued with sadness with a gun. But I had to. If I leave now, I’m dead. Besides, a bullet to the brain would probably be less painful than being torn apart by Bears or Wolves.
The guy leaned back a bit, just a little, and a taunting smile appeared on his lips. “No, you can’t.”
I gave up that argument. “You can help me.”
Now he just looked scornful. “Why would I help you? I don't know you. You didn't help me.”
“I lost someone too, you know.” The softness of my own voice surprised me.
The guy looked back steadily, but I could see in the faint light the shine of salty tears gathering under his eyes. “There were maybe a hundred bombs, thrown at Seoul. The city is blown apart. You should've lost someone.”
I pressed on, determined. “I lost my boyfriend. A bomb, the first one, blew up in between us.”
Now his voice was a little softer, his gaze darting to the woman lying on the ground before fastening again on me. “She was my eomma," he said, and I felt a pang of empathy. I was quite sure my own eomma was dead, and it hadn't fully registered, but at least I hadn’t seen her die in front of me.
“I’m sorry," I said to him, and he lowered his gaze, and I think I saw the gun in his hands tremble, just a bit.
“Yeah, well, it happened,” his tone was back to business-like, and I felt he was trying to get us off the subject of his dead eomma, which I didn’t blame him for.
It was awkwardly quiet before he focused his brain and brought the topic back to me and the shooting of my head, which I wasn’t particularly thankful for.
“Just… just go,” he muttered, avoiding my eyes, but the gun was still there.
“Look. I want to get back at the people who did this, and I think so do you,” I reasoned.
He raised his eyes so his eyelids were slower than his sharp brown orbs as he gave me a bored look.
“Just ‘cause they killed a bunch of people, my family included, doesn’t mean I wanna kill them,” he retorted, his city accent suddenly showing through.
“But I think you do want to.”
HIs eyes drilled into mine. “ I don't like being told what I think,” he hissed, but his finger, the one wrapped around the gun's trigger, stayed still.
“But we can help each other. Please, just give it a chance. If we're a horrible team, I'll leave after a night. You can never see me again,” I said, my mind whirling. If he said yes, and it didn’t work out, at least I would get a night of protection. If it did, then it could work to my advantage. I had no idea what was going on outside of this chaos of the bombed, shelled city, and I needed to get out of here.
He let out a sigh, and I could see his mind working. He looked up at me, scanning me, and then back at his eomma. He looked at the position of the sun, at the smoking remains of Seoul, and finally spoke.
“Fine. One night. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, you're gone. Got it?” I nodded, suppressing my grin for the sake of the moment.
“What’s your name?” I asked, and when he gave me a dark look, “what, it’s not like you have to give me your last name or anything," I said irritably.
He lowered his eyebrows, but after a long pause, spoke. “Jongup.”
I smiled. Finally, we’re getting somewhere. “Himchan.”
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Double update! Yay! Well actually I had already typed up these two chapters before... But whatever! I still had to copy and paste and stuffs, so yeah.
And here is my bias, Himchan!!! Yay!!
XD
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