A man sits, slouching really, against the wall of the prison cell. His only sense of the passage of time comes from a tiny, barred window from which he can see the orange glows of the setting sun.

He pulls out a long piece of granite, tapered at the top to the point that it could possibly be used as a knife. Contrary to violent expectations, he flips it in his hand and etches a long line into the wall. Muscles tense – the only sign that his time spent locked up has not degraded his strength. This is another mark for the number of days he has been locked up in this prison cell. He hasn’t totaled it up in a while, but it’s been a week or so since the three hundreth day has passed.

He's been in here for just shy of a year. 

The man sighs and pockets the stone again. It appears a careless action, for all it would require is one strip search and all his weapons would be laid bare. But this man knows the jailors would never both with such a thing. This stone is not a weapon, and he is not a dangerous man. He is here because the world needed justice and this was the form it came in.

Time slips by slowly in prison.

The jailors are sympathetic towards him. They know he means no harm. But at the same time they understand why he is locked away in here. In the beginning they used to bring him scraps of papers and half-used pencils. They tolerated his rough scribbles and late night mutterings as he poured out what was he composed in his brain into pen and paper. Equations, graphs, conjectures. All of it is stored in a small pouch one female jailor gave him for Christmas. Not that he actually realized Christmas had come and gone. But this jailor was young and compassionate and the bag had been a worn out leather-satchel thing, filled with scavenged pens and paper, and he had accepted it gratefully.

He had only ever seen that female jailor once more afterwards.

It hadn't been a pleasant exchange.

Why did you create them? she had cried, hands clasped around the bars of his cell. She shook them violently and they rattled like loose iron filings. He had bit his lip against the screech of the sound and stared at her red eyes, blotchy, and the tears that streaked her once apple-red cheeks. He had thought her beautiful, a rare gem unstained by the cruel world. He thought her untouched. 

Why create something that would destroy this world?! Did you hate humanity that much?

He had been wrong. 

Why?! Tell me why! She had slammed her fist against the iron bars, ignoring the grate of rust against her soft palms. He had flinched and stood up hurriedly, not wanting her to injure herself.

D-don’t do that- he had reached out to curl fingers around her thin wrists. Anything to reason with her. But instead her eyes had widened and disgust had radiated from the corners of her downturned lips outwards.

She was just the next in a very long line to be transformed. 

Don’t touch me!

He had staggered backwards, surprised and shocked in equal parts at her violent act. It had been her who had wished him a Merry Christmas and a goodnight and a good day on her daily rounds. It had been her who against all odds had approached him with a smile and fresh food in hand. It had been her-

But now this was her... 

How deceptive the world could be. 

He had stood back, staring at the reddening like on his wrist where she had raked her nails across. It didn't physically hurt; rather the implications cut a wound far deeper. 

Other jailors had quickly come, alerted by the noise and her sobbing. One glance and they understood. Two well-muscled men had restrained her, pushing her to her feet and another woman had rushed forwards, whispering calming words and wiping away the tears on her cheek. The female jailor had quickly given up struggling and resorted to quiet fitful sobs. The last image he had of her was her dark eyes burning through bangs, glaring right at him. Blaming him. 

It’s all your fault, was what they had said.

He never saw that female jailor again. He didn’t expect to.

Later another jailor, one more experienced and long unaffected by the matters of why his prisoner had been locked away in there had come to tell him that the female jailor had been quietly reassigned to another branch. Word was that the Busan safe camp had been overrun by the Infected. Her entire family had been in there. Rumors said there were no survivors.

Time continues to slip by slowly.

The prisoner does not make any more contact with any of the jailors, new or old, other than the one man who had come to tell him the news. That man had told him shortly after the incident that he had always been estranged from his family, and whether they were alive or not at this point no longer mattered. The prisoner had asked if that was true, that the jailor really did not care. The jailor took a while to reply, but eventually he said that in this sort of hopeless world, it would be better to not care. The prisoner had no answer for him and so the jailor slipped away. Their relationship remains as thus, a gentle tolerance and an understanding that in a world as cruel and as hopeless as this, it is pointless to blame it all on one man. 

And so time slips by. 

The prisoner closes his eyes and tries to fall asleep again, to erase the need for thinking and to slip into oblivion where the Infected don't exist and the world turns happily and women don't bang at his jail bars demanding why he brought such madness into this world. Sleep comes, but it doesn't bring oblivion. 

*

In his dreams the scene is always the same. A lengthy lab room, white and clean and minimalistic. The equipment is sparkling steel, the computers shiny and new. He feels years younger, a strange sensation when all of this had only taken place just over a year ago.

He is young. Twenty three.  There because he graduated with the highest grades anyone in the country had seen in years and because he had the brains and the guts to dare to dream.

They had invited him to shadow their work and he had accepted without second thought. TS corp, one of the rising stars of the scientific community. They hadn’t be much against the three giants of the conglomerate world, but TS had been building reputation slowly through sheer hard work and consistency. And now they had joined hands with the big three for their next big research: an investigation into human viral transmission.

He had stared like a child at the candy store, but instead of sugar pops and candy canes he had enraptured by the quality of the equipment, by the sheer amounts of funding that must have gone into building the lab. He had wanted to trail hands over the buttons and the gears, to plop himself down into a black backed chair and just lose himself in the reels of data and play with the simulations that blew up 3-D brilliantly colored images of viral vectors and methods of  invasion.

It had been a dream come true for the six months he had spent there. But then someone higher up had stepped in, someone not from TS, and he had ordered for a new type of genetic material to be manipulated and inserted. There had been doubts, but there had also been a fair share of unadulterated excitement. It was something new and there were always adults who didn’t care what lines they crossed – so long as it was all in the name of science.

He however had swallowed hard here, eyes furrowing at the laws they were breaking and the possible ethical issues being shattered. But the world was very different now, far more desperate than it had been when these laws had first been published. And he was just a rookie scientist. Even if he had the best grades in the country, that all paled against his lack of experience. So he had kept his mouth shut, and he had done his experiments as asked, and he had watched with growing fear as the experiment got out of hand and human test subjects were involved and-

-and he watched as it had all blown out of proportions. 

*

It was the feeling of a hand slipping over his mouth that awoke him.

His eyes flew wide open and one hand instinctively reached for his granite weapon. However, his awakener was faster. One hand wrapped around his wrist, pinning it to the thin cotton mattress below. The prisoner felt the weight of hips shift and thighs around his waist hold him still.

A man was straddling him. He was dressed in all black: a leather jacket with silver zips and tight pants that were currently spread on either side of him. Dark eyes peered at him from underneath a curtain of thick black curls. His assailant looked young, baby-faced and with full red lips. He looked too young to be in the business of killing people.

The prisoner struggled, baring his teeth and doing his best to yell against the leathered material that covered his mouth. But his assailant was strong. He simply tensed and pushed down, forcing the prisoner to choke.

“Stop this,” his assailant chided in a voice that sounded boyishly young as well.

He glared back.

“And don’t give me that look,” the man sighed, shaking his head once to shift his unruly bangs so that they fell to one side. “I’m not here to kill you.”

He raised an eyebrow to say, really?

“Really,” the man huffed. He looked chagrined. “If I was I’d have killed you in your sleep. Now I’m going to remove my hand. Please don’t yell. I know the jailors will be making their rounds in a quarter of an hour so I’ll be quick and explain why i'm here.”

He removed his hand tentatively, as if he expected his prisoner to retaliate immediately. He didn’t though and the assailant let out a sigh of relief.

“Thanks for trusting me,” he said, letting go of his other hand and raking them through his messy hair.

“You’re not out of the woods yet,” the man below him growled, his voice unexpectedly deep and raw.

The black-haired man let out a short, barking laugh. “I see,” was all he said. “Then I better explain myself.”

“Please do.”

“My name is Yoo Youngjae,” he said, leaning backwards and shifting his weight off the man below. As he did so, there was a rattling sound, a signal of more hidden weapons.

“Well Youngjae-ssi,” the prisoner pushed himself into a sitting position and tried to not sound disdainful. “What are you here for if you’re not going to kill me?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Youngjae quirked a smile. “You’re Bang Yongguk, and I’m here to collect you.”

*

Yongguk stared at his assailant as if he was crazy.

He probably was.

Maybe he should get about calling some jailors to come take this crazy dude away for testing or rehab because he most definitively was out of his mind.

“I’m not crazy,” Youngjae said flatly, reading Yongguk’s mind instantly.

“You look it,” Yongguk said with no sugarcoating whatsoever. “Who else would break into a jail to bust out a man the world doesn’t need.

“Maybe the world does need you,” Youngjae replied simply. “Maybe you’ve been locked up in here for too long to realize.”

Yongguk had no reply for that. The deep doubt he felt was conveyed well enough across his face.

“Why are you doing this then?” Yongguk ask, sliding his legs off the bed and placing them on the floor. Barefooted, chills ran up his legs immediately as they came into contact with the cold corrugated flooring.

Youngjae leaned back on his haunches, tracking Yongguk’s movements attentively. He watched Yongguk slide on canvas shoes and stretch. The room was cast in shadows, day had barely broken and the room was awash with a navy blue-blackness. It was a time in between night and day and Youngjae loved times like these.

“I was hired to,” he said.

That caught Yongguk’s attention. “Hired? By who?”

“By the resistance group. The Freedom Fighters. Have you not heard of them?”

“Can’t say I have,” Yongguk drawled and it was true. You didn’t get much news being locked up in a jail cell.

Youngjae shrugged and hopped off the bed. Hard boots hit the floor, but the sound it made would barely rival that of a pillow hitting the ground. This man was experienced. He knew how to move his body, how to coil his muscles tight and control how he landed. Maybe not so much of a baby as Yongguk had first judged. 

“What do they want me for?”

“Who knows,” Youngjae shrugged. “I’m just a mercenary. People hire me, tell me what to do, I do it, ask no questions, and I get paid.”

“How convenient,” Yongguk said dryly.

Youngjae shot him a look. “In a world like this, I’d say it’s a very convenient job. Lots of people want a lot of things to be done anonymously. Mercenaries make a killing. Good mercenaries make even more.”

“And I take it you’re the latter,” Yongguk raised an eyebrow.

“Of course I am,” Youngjae replied unashamedly. “Now have you got everything? We have three minutes to be out of here before the jailors make their round.”

“Get out of here?” Yongguk stared at him.

“Yeah? Don’t you want to?”

“Well…of course I do,” Yongguk said slowly. “But how?” Prisons weren’t exactly meant to be broken out of after all.

“Silly,” Youngjae scoffed. “How do you think I got in? I’m an expert, trust in me a little.”

“Forgive me if I doubt.”

Youngjae sighed. “O’ ye of little faith. Watch and learn.” He slid one hand into his pocket and drew out a slim compact white card. The master key. Or at least the key that all the jailors used.

“Where did you get that from?” Yongguk breathed because the sight of it was a certainty. It was solid proof that he could actually escape from this tiny four by four cell of broken dreams and locked away hopes.

“I have sources,” Youngjae grinned and flipped the card in one hand, catching it neatly in the other. “Now are you ready?”

Yongguk had to stop and force himself to think at that. Was he ready? Ready to leave this place. Sure it had been a place of imprisonment for the past ten months, but Yongguk wasn’t sure he was ready to face the outside world.

To see what damage he had wreaked upon the world.

Youngjae held out one hand. “Come,” he said softly yet imperiously and without realizing it, Yongguk’s hand rose and slid into the leathered palm. It was comforting. Warm. Real. Yongguk could feel the pulse over one thumb, through the layer of material and it stirred something in his soul.

“One second,” he said hurriedly, dropping Youngjae’s hand and turning around quickly so that his rescuer would not see the red flush of heat that spread across his cheek. What was he thinking? Blushing because this was the first real human contact he had had in over a year?! Yongguk shook his head and dropped to his knees, rifling under the bed for his worn-out satchel of ideas. He tugged it out, dusted it and slung it over one arm.

Youngjae watched him quietly. “Ready now?” he asked and held out his hand again.

Yongguk stared at that palm. It was like an open door and Yongguk was afraid to turn the knob.

“I promise I’ll protect you,” Youngjae said and Yongguk had no idea why, but he believed him. He grasped the hand and Youngjae pulled him in close and threw wide open the door.