Work Text:
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night, T.S. Eliot
🝔 현재 🝔
The world is beautiful in the softening light of the autumn evening sun, all tangled branches reaching for the pink and yellow clouds floating in fluffy bundles across the dimming blue sky. There is a blanket of orange and red flowing in rivers across the green grass. Every footstep crunches and crackles with the last words of the dying leaves, still trying to cling to summer’s warm breathing.
All around, the mountains draw spines in trembling lines across the horizon, hemming the world in until it seems there is nothing beyond the little dips and curves of the valleys that hide between rolling topography. Everything is huddled, nestled, spirited away amongst the greenery-woven fortress walls of the ranges that curl like warm arms holding back all threats.
It’s not really cold, not yet, not that proper chill that puffs out exhales in misty steam against ruby red lips. It’s not quite cold enough for poorly-knitted scarves to curl around exposed napes, nor for worn woollen gloves with holes in the lining to sink frigid fingertips into.
But there’s still that chill in the evening air, the whispered hint of what is soon to come. It’s enough that when the faint breeze teases past him, Jisung pulls his fraying jacket sleeves just a little further over his hands and scrunches the tip of his nose that is starting to feel more like a frosted mountain peak.
He’s sitting in the same place he has spent much of the last three months, the decrepit swing chair roped precariously between the boughs of two ageing but sturdy elms. Every time he gingerly lowers himself onto the weathered wood he thinks that maybe this time it will give way beneath him, but it doesn’t. It holds.
Three months in Sangju. It’s the longest Jisung’s ever been in one place since—since It happened. He’s used to continuously moving, constantly staying alert, feeling the tremble of uncertainty shimmering over his skin if he dares to stay anywhere longer than a week or two.
He’s used to keeping everything in his tattered backpack, all his clothing and blankets and everything he needs to survive, wound tight together and crammed into the limited space. Anything that does get pulled out is never moved far and always tucked away as soon as it’s no longer useful.
Three months in Sangju and now Jisung lets his muscles relax on a wooden swing seat that was no doubt strung up by someone long dead or— and he can’t even see his backpack from where he sits.
The small cottage— more shack than actual building— he has been staying in crouches at the bottom of the slight incline in front of him. It looks almost like a pimple on the surface of the world, red brick faded into pinks and purples, rubbed raw by wind and weather. It hunches, in stark contrast to the woven greens, and browns, and here and there the splash of colour from flowers and bushes that refuse to give in to autumn’s fashion trends.
Jisung had come across the stoic haven completely by accident. His map reading skills still hadn’t improved, not even when five years had passed since the final percentage of his phone’s battery leaked away. He had been trying to find the nearby town, hoping to scavenge a few supplies before any Corvids caught sight of him.
Instead Jisung had veered a few metres off course— okay, maybe five or thirteen kilometres off— and ended up in front of the ugly brick walls with the wooden door that leaned wearily against the outside wall, paint peeling in little curls from deep gouges scraped into its surface.
Exhaustion had been pulling at his bones, magnetising his feet to the ground, and, with the encroaching threat of night, it was an easy surrender. He had stumbled into the shelter, using the last of his energy to yank the door across the entrance as some sense of a barricade. Then, with shuttered eyes, he had curled up in a corner, blankets from the top of his backpack swallowing his small body, and succumbed to sleep.
He had woken the next morning to a solid stream of sunlight flooding through a gap in the rotting roof, and almost bit his tongue in half when he realised he had slept through the entire night. That didn’t happen, it just didn’t. Jisung never passed a night without something waking him—nightmares, noises, Corvids, or, more often than not, sudden bouts of panicked terror that forced him upright, fingers digging into his cheek as the palm of his hand held back the sounds of his gasping breaths.
Perhaps it was that moment when he decided to stay.
But he forced the shock away, the confusion and uncertainty at an entire night spent only in sleep. He focused on the small room he found himself in. The floors were almost entirely hidden by grit and dust, small piles gathered in the corners opposite the doorway. The walls were nothing more than exposed brick, crooks and crevasses between them where the mortar had been ground away.
There was barely anything in the room but a single chest, lid swung open against the wall, and a basic wooden chair, tipped on its side, left like a skeleton long since abandoned on the floor.
Pressed in the corner across from Jisung was a small nest of tattered blankets, thread-bare and littered with holes. It was clearly a bed a passing traveller before him had mustered in a desperate bid for somewhere to rest. Now the twisted mound lay empty, layers of dust the only sign of the infinite passage of time.
Jisung’s eyes flicked down and he felt the breath hitch in his throat, bile bubble in his oesophagus, all the measurements of his skin and muscle tense and scream. He saw it, looked through the smattered atoms of dust and dirt that tried to hide the floor below and saw— red, not a bright crimson, not fresh and luminescent, but a deep maroon, leached and leaked through the brown grain of the floor.
Blood, a pool of it, spread across the wood like a thick jam that had been left to ferment and rot. The very edges of the blankets closest were fringed with the liquid, not quite far enough pulled back to escape the rising tide.
And then it all pieced together in Jisung’s head. Through his mind the past replayed in an imagined memory of what could have happened.
The door ripped from its hinges, the chair tossed to the side, the chest with its lid thrown open. They had never made it. Whoever they were, that traveller that paved the path Jisung had stumbled along, they never quite made it.
So they had bled, dripped, pooled, their existence had liquified on the wooden floor and stained the world so that someone— so that Jisung— would know that they had once been there.
And he saw them, he saw them, in the dissolving floors of his memory corrupted by the cramped room he awoke in. He saw their struggle, he saw their desperation, he saw their fight, their burning desire to do nothing more than survive.
Jisung saw the body caught in an angle of the world and felt their existence drain away. He was stuck there for seconds, minutes, maybe hours, trapped and collapsed in the small corner of a smaller room, eyes fixed on the mesmerising stain of an ending.
Maybe they’re dead, another body rotting in a field, long forgotten. Maybe they’re another Corvid, unleashed destruction waiting to spring upon those it once knew as friends. Maybe they’re alive, somewhere, raised flesh of a carved scar the only reminder of what they left behind. Maybe… maybe—
Whatever they are, whoever they are, the human that once curled in the mesh of tangled blankets is gone. Jisung is alone in the little shack sequestered away among shimmering greenery and white-capped mountains and blood on the floor.
🝔 현재 🝔
Five months.
Jisung has spent five months in the few hundred metres squared of one shack and the garden it defends with grey stone walls. The sun has changed, the nights, the seasons, from warm days at the end of summer, to the hint of winter's chill on the back of autumn winds.
Time has blurred together until the only awareness he has of the world passing by is in the single line scratches that he carves into the brick beside his head when he wakes from another night filled with nothing but sleep. The curved knife in his hand returns him to the world he had briefly forgotten and the precision of another line in crumbling brick feels like the sediment sift of dreams leaving his mind.
He wakes, and his eyes always follow the same pattern. They trace along the lines of the material pile opposite him. Decay and dirt gather on every seam, flow into the leaking stain of what once was in a red pool reminder.
Jisung doesn’t look long, averts his eyes to that gaping error in the thatched roof above him. He should really fix that hole before the winter sleet rolls in. He should really sweep the floor so he can breathe without the sediment dust snaking into his lungs. He should really rid the floor of that septic stain of blood and being. He should really—
But he doesn’t. He never touches that slumped tangle of a past life, never even steps into the imagined square of space that surrounds the material tombstone. And now it’s not an imagined square. Now, with months of Jisung tracing a worn path through the little shack, the dust and dirt has been displaced until all that’s left is the consecrated ground around the remains of that which came before.
So Jisung pulls his eyes from the hole in the roof that he really should fix, and drags his body up from the bedroll and mass of blankets that have become a permanent fixture in his corner of the shack.
The room hasn’t changed much, even in the five months that Jisung has spent calling the space his house— not home, home is dangerous. The chair sits upright now, his backpack crumpled, almost empty, against the spindly legs. He’s strung a tattered rope from one roof beam to the other for hanging his freshly washed clothes when the rain won’t let his laundry air. A drying rack that he cobbled together in a series of broken branches and loud swearing rests over the small fireplace which is little more than a recessed alcove with a hole in the roof.
The chest still crouches directly opposite the door, the lid still propped open against the wall. It’s another thing Jisung can’t bring himself to touch yet. He had looked in one day, eyes catching on the glistening metal inside. A thick hunting knife with a leatherbound grip lay on the black-painted bottom, resting idly beside a small handgun, almost hidden in the shadows.
He had reached out instinctively, his hand borne by a desire that he couldn’t quite understand. His fingers curled around the gun’s grip, skin tingling where the cold metal met him. It was heavy in his hands, heavier than he expected, even though he had handled more firearms than he would have ever imagined in the last five-almost-six years of runningfightsurvive.
He pulled the gun from its wooden haven, his free hand coming up to reverently cup the barrel against his palm. The metal seemed to warm almost instantly against his blood-boiled skin, leaching his body’s heat until it seemed to melt into his grip. It was a feeling he knew, the moulding of a weapon into his body.
An extension of your arm, Chan had told him once, one hand straightening Jisung’s wrist, the other twisting his hips until they aligned. It’s not another enemy, it’s just a tool. He had smiled softly, chin jutting over Jisung’s shoulder, dimples turning into shadowed craters in the early morning sun. You control it.
There was no magazine in the grip, only an empty space waiting to be filled. It wasn’t surprising, ammunition was a precious commodity, as rare as the people who still knew how to make it.
He pulled back on the slide and let the single shining round drop into his palm. He drew his hand away from the barrel, cradling the solo bullet between the creases of his heartline and headline. It was dulled, more grey than silver now, no reflection mirrored on its surface, just the flicker of shadows cast by the fire burning softly to his side.
A single bullet, never fired, just trapped, forever waiting to burrow into flesh and make a new home. Blood pooled against the wood and the stain never left as silver faded to grey.
Hastily Jisung sunk the round back into the chamber, thumbing the slide release as soon as his fingertips were free. The satisfying clunk of ammunition returning to the barrel barely registered as he almost threw the gun back into the chest and backed away to the middle of the room.
His breathing slowed to intermittent gasps, vibrating in his chest as his lungs frantically crumpled and expanded within his ribcage. The door opened easily against his shaking fingers, hinges reconnected long ago with his eyebrows furrowed and knife digging into the crosshairs of the rusted nails.
The cool air of the night hit him like a cold hand connecting across his puffing cheeks. Outside the four walls he fell to his knees, feeling wayward stones dig into the bones of his knees. It felt like a return, a wake-up call, an alarm he had never set. Night closed in around him and he let blood pools and warm metal fill his mind until tears were running down his cheeks in salt sea lines.
Five years since he had last cried, five-almost-six years and he let the sobs shake his body like a rippling earthquake beneath his thin, fragile skin. Five years and his lips twisted back, screamed silently for a person he had never known, would never know, was too late to ever know. Blood pools became a somebody lost in time.
🜍 과거 🜍
The world had ended when Jisung was asleep, at least that’s what he liked to think. The reality was a little different, of course. It wasn’t really as simple as one singular moment. It had been all the moments creased together, all wooden blocks pulled from a Jenga tower that swayed and faltered.
It started with a new virus detected in China. They reported it in hesitant concern, late into 2019, when Jisung was caught in the excitement of Christmas approaching, an essential time for a boy at sixteen years old who was desperate to convince his parents he still believed in Santa Claus (even though they knew better).
There was murmuring at the seasonal parties he attended with his mother’s hand clasped tightly in his own, but it all faded into the background noise of over-played carols and seasonal hits. He saw the tight lines of the other parent’s lips and the uncertainty in their trembling hands, but it got lost in green pine trees and shiny gift wrap boxes.
The new year passed in late-night celebration and he almost made it to midnight before he fell asleep against his step-father’s shoulder. The first month of the new decade rolled before him in the ease of carefully scheduled life, and if his parent’s eyes met over the morning news in slightly furrowed brows and pursed lips, he didn’t notice.
But it spread, through towns, through cities, through provinces, through countries. Through the small talk exchanged between adults, and the gossip between busybodies with nothing better to do, until it bled into the clambering uncertainty of school-yard whispers.
“What’s happening with this Covid stuff?” Changbin had asked once, his widening arms suspending his body from the metal monkey-bars laddering between the platform he started on and the one where Jisung stood. They were too old for the playground but Changbin insisted that it was part of his ‘workout regime’. “My parents keep talking about it.”
Jisung didn’t have an answer, he had been asking the question himself between news bulletins and the excess tins of food that his mother insisted on buying after she picked him up from school. He just shrugged and slid down the tunnel slide, Changbin’s legs wrapping around his waist as they shrieked like children at the static burn on their exposed limbs. At the bottom, they crumpled into a pile of body parts and explosive laughter.
“I don’t know, hyung.” Jisung replied eventually when their chuckles had faded into the woodchip below their bodies. “Probably some when-you’re-older thing they will explain when we’re too ancient to walk.”
“You’re already too ancient to walk,” Changbin replied, shoving Jisung into the ground with lips quirked into a self-satisfied smirk.
“Yah!” Jisung clambered to his feet and charged after his friend, already pelting along the edge of the playground. “You’re older than me!”
“Am I?” Changbin taunted as Jisung corralled him against a climbing wall. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
He slipped between Jisung’s grasping fingers and leapt over the wooden lip of the playground, dashing across the grass field of the school grounds. It was a dull summer day, the clouds crowding over the sun with the threat of rain. Still they spent every moment they could out where the air was just that little bit easier to breathe than stuffy classrooms.
In the end Jisung caught up to him. He always did. Changbin was shorter, just, but never quite as fast. They tumbled to the ground, laughter falling easily from their lips as Jisung trapped his friend’s wrists against the hard ground.
“Are you sure?” Changbin asked once their breathing had evened from gasping chuckles and a frown had wrinkled his forehead again. “Appa has that weird look on his face when he talks about it, the same face as when he has some important deal to make.”
“I’m sure, hyung.” Jisung replied, smiling brightly down at his friend’s worry. “It will pass, these things always do.”
Jisung fist-bumped goodbye to Changbin as he set out along the worn path leading home. Changbin smiled back, hand raised in a two-fingered salute from the bench where he waited for the car to pick him up.
It was the last time that Jisung saw his friend.
Sometimes he still saw that moment, in a Technicolour dream of the past that crept across his eyelids in hopeful shadows. He squinted at the memory, pressing his eyes tighter and tighter, until red-black exploded in starburst blood-cells across his vision.
Still Changbin’s face remained, chin sharp, eyes dark, brows furrowed; and his words slunk through Jisung’s ears until he was nothing but a whirlwind of sound.
My parents keep talking about it.
It doesn’t feel like it.
Appa has that weird look on his face.
It was the last time that Jisung saw his friend.
🝔 현재 🝔
He’s walking among the woods surrounding his home when something snaps in the woods behind him. Jisung freezes instantly, caught in the fear of something he doesn’t know, can’t see. Idly his mind reminds him of horror movies he saw when he was too young to envision the blood-soaked villains of imaginary worlds.
Slowly he turns, every inch of his body tensed in uncertainty and the swathe of time that separates him from that single crack of nature breaking. He’s met with a collaboration of hesitation, green leaves and broken brown branches that fold in miasmic patterns. Patterns that don’t betray a hint of the world beyond veined skin and bark-clad limbs.
Another snap and this time a groan filters through to his perked ears, exhausted and pained, struggling in that way Jisung knows from the end of a life. He rises, just to a crouch, back hunched, thighs burning with the desire to run and run and keep running. But he restrains the flight of his muscles and shimmers forward, one cautious foot in front of another, until he is just slightly ahead of the lipping waterline.
And he tries to ignore the heartbeat that shudders in his chest, desperate for a flight or fight response. Instead he holds himself crouched down, keeps his centre of gravity close to the Earth he knows.
The world seems to part at his presence, his muscles relaxing into an upwards lean as leaves fold easily beneath his hand, retreating into the bulbs that once held their life-blood energy. Branches pull away from his slim shape, curling back to reach once more at the shining sun.
Bit-by-bit he pushes slowly between green leaves and spindled branches that reach out to clutch at his clothes, He inches forward, searching for that space where all those sounds had reverberated from, and every fibre is telling him to run but that speck of curiosity tells him to keep going.
Every now and then he picks up on the softest whimper to assure him he’s on the right path. And those whimpers, they choke out, almost instantly repressed by the body that utters them.
Then he breaks through the undergrowth, into the slightest semi-circle clearing that gathers around the tiny river like a fingerprint crease upon the world’s skin. The space before him is small, each leaf of the surrounding canopy grazing against him like a constant reminder that there is a world to fall back into when he feels there is too much to take.
And—
A body lies before him, crumpled against the lush green grass of the river bank. A thin, pale hand stretches into the cooling water that flows by. It’s a human, or he thinks it is in the wrinkled remains of fingertips that dip just slightly below the river’s edge. They’re human, mostly, and their skin meets the water in the slightest curl of a fist, the water flowing between their fingers and into the rippling current with the slightest hint of white-cap waves.
Jisung lets his breathing slip out between open teeth, bathed in the hint of apprehension and the tremor of fear. It’s a human, he thinks. The man is hunched over, knees curled up against his chest, even as his bare feet splay outward and sink into the soft mud. He’s turned towards the water’s edge, as if he has always been trying to reach the river, one arm searching forward as the other pushes his body forward.
And every inch of skin that Jisung can see below his neck, every pale expanse surrounded by frayed hems, is traced by dark lines. Black-wire sketches skitter across skin in solidified patterns that run so close together but never quite criss-cross. Half-drawn images of a predetermined art bound by certainty, or destiny, and the grasp of infection.
Feathers. But not quite. Feathers. Drawn against skin in self-serving liniation. Feathers, not raised and touchable, but wound into the flesh below as if waiting for the skin to break, for the will to break, waiting for something to break and set them free.
It’s a turning, Jisung knows that much, has seen enough people morph into creatures beyond humanity’s control, to understand what he sees. He's a human— for now— caught between the inception of a virus and the dissolution of everything he once was.
“Are you still there?” Jisung’s voice is raspy, uncertain, rubbed raw by the passage of time, trapped with nothing to talk to but his own conscience. So he tries again, folds out the other half of his question, as if the words will bring him peace if he steadies his voice. “Is there anything you want to tell them?”
And the ‘them’ is explained without spoken words, expressed without definite knowledge. It’s a language developed in the collapse of society, in the apocalypse that became reality. Is there anything you want to tell your loved ones? Is there anything they should know?
“No.” The stuttered response comes in trembled words spit forth with certainty and desperation, the voice of one soul melting into the welcoming river-bed mud below.
“There—” The body ripples with the effort of a single swallow. “There’s no one alive to know.”
There’s no one alive to know.
And Jisung’s heart rips apart. It clenches in on itself. It folds into a million origami paper pieces and sinks into the earth, bogged down by the seeping moisture, all that blood dripping from a body he has never seen, and all those bodies that he has seen.
There’s no one alive to care.
He thinks of Changbin with hard crystallised eyes and hands that pressed against his shoulder in that soft flesh rebelling against his own. He thinks of his mother, unbreakable gaze melting into gentle words as soon as her eyes meet his. He thinks of his father, harsh lines broken by the silhouette of streetlights that fizzled out one by one. Jisung’s father who pressed chapped lips to his forehead and told him to run.
Run as fast as you can, Jisung..
“Are you sure?”
The stranger nods their head slowly, pushing mud into ridged molehills with the effort, and it’s slow, incremental, as if the simple movement pains every muscle in his body.
“Yes, I’m sure.” He turns his head ever so slightly to the side and Jisung gets a glimpse of sculpted cheekbones, long eyelashes, defined brows, eyes pressed closed into the deepest hint of lids that crease together into crow-lines. “Go.”
“W-what.” His voice is thin, barely sounded out against the soft breeze.
“Go.” The stranger turns back to the river and there is the slightest trace of black feather outlines unfurling along the nape of his neck. “Run—.” His body shudders, vibrating against the densely packed earth. “Before I can’t control it.”
There’s a silence, caught between their suspended forms and the rushing river that fills the gap with the caustic run of riverbed streaks and atoms swept ever forward.
“I don’t want to kill you.”
And Jisung turns.
And Jisung runs.
He flees through unforgiving leaves and branches that whip against his grasping fingers, against his tear-lined face. He runs and his legs scramble beneath his body, feet beating against the dirt in an inconsistent rumble like novice drummers trying to time themself upon the song of his frenzied heart.
It’s not long before he finds himself facing the grey stone wall that defends the little shack. Jisung feels relief flood through his limbs, tingling in his fingertips. A single stuttered breath clouds between his lips and then he is clambering over, legs slipping all too easily across the fortress walls that have been protecting him from searching claws.
The grass beyond the garden is just as lively, just as responsive, springing back into the gaps that his footsteps leave. The space around him is silent, broken only by the slightest breeze muffling the leaves around him. All else is still, mute, waiting in space filled by Jisung’s gasping breath.
He sees the pink and purple dulled bricks layered into a wall in front of him. The thatched roof perched over the carefully oblong walls and another wave of relief hits him. Somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders how he has so quickly attached to brick and mortar.
He bursts through the door and dives into the careful madness of blankets and bedroll and skin. He curls around the coarse material that reeks of sweat and mud and him, nothing but Jisung. It curls into his soul until there is no place left, until there is no gap but the ones filled with his own sense of self.
It takes hours, hours that swarm into months, swim into years, but perhaps only minutes have passed. He lies, fern leaf curl, crimped against the blankets, staring at that single hole in the ceiling. All the world runs through his mind in soft gurgles and desperate water gasps that pattern against river-bed mud until the only thing left in his mind is the silt-borne water of flowing streams and chapped lips that tell him that there’s no one left to know.
There’s no one alive to know.
🜍 과거 🜍
Jisung was sixteen years old when he saw his first turning. Well not quite, not in international years. Really, if you want to boil it all down, if you want to reduce the hours with eyes open on Earth to zero and build up from there, he’s fifteen. Just a kid, a sweet child, his halmeoni said, looking up at his father with her next words. Don’t make him grow up too fast.
But he does.
All of it just happens so fast. He’s walking with his father, hands linked to connect them in the crowd as they press through the bodies surrounding the butcher’s stall. It’s the market, the one that once happened every twenty-four hours but has now been narrowed into a single day per week; it’s the only way to reduce the risk of a mass outbreak.
Jisung is distracted, caught in the compress of bodies against his skin that makes his heart race until every beat is pulsing in his ears like he can hear the blood that slithers through his veins. The blood that increases in volume until it’s a pulsating chant that echoes against every body that fails to give way when he tries to follow his father’s staunch shoulders.
The marketplace is crowded, dense, as it always has been, and yet there’s a distinct separation, a void that is never acknowledged between the tight coil of bodies and the ones who stand around the edges. It took Jisung too many weeks to adapt to the uniforms that the outer circle wore, and, when he did, he ground his fingertips upwards, over his father’s thumb, until he could feel the pulse-point in his wrist, fragile confirmation of life continuing.
Grey, broken only by multi-coloured strips across the shoulder that ended midway across the chest. Guardians of the government, symbols of peace, origami creations of compliance. He had seen them marching out across the country in the flickering images on the news, before the channels defaulted to static and then black screens. He had heard the whispers too, the fear in those voices that muttered ‘thinning’, ‘not enough’, ‘too many turning’. ’How long…’
The soldiers stood around the marketplace, shoulders squared and arms crossed, legs placed in carefully measured segregation. They were many steps apart and yet formed together into a single wall, waiting for one unauthorised body to attempt to slip through their hold.
Outraged voices broke through Jisung’s thoughts and he turned his attention to the bakery-stall owner, who rocked back and forth on her heels, a twisted curl sliding across her mouth in an uncomfortable smile as she argued with a customer. In her hand was an over-baked loaf, darkened brown to almost black. Once it would have been slid into a brown-paper bag but that was a luxury for the previous decade.
They were second in line, Jisung shuffling from one foot to the other as the body in front of them got increasingly obtuse in her gesticulation. She was asking for more, even with the one-item limit. She was asking for better, when even the worst was still more than anyone should expect. She was trapped in a time before the world ended and even Jisung wanted to laugh, despite the anxiety pricking at his skin.
It was all broken, shattered and splintered, by the screams and shouts that filled the air. It was turned, from disgruntled outrage to a fracturing precipice of fear, brought forth and made real by the chaotic twist of bodies that turned to the single deafening screech that sounded out over the crowd like a demon’s war scream.
They tumbled, domino pieces carrying the combined weight of those that fell before them, they tumbled, and multiplied in force until there was a crowd of bodies flopping to the dusty dirt floor with eyes blown wide and shouted words twisting their lips.
And that ripple effect jolted his insides, that ripple effect sent Jisung whirling, colliding into earth, his body limp and weak against the ground. He was bowled over by the scattered pins that came before him, all those writhing bodies that once stood in peg-leg compliance, collapsing around him.
His fingers tightened around the wrist warped in his fingers, wrenching his father forward. But his father was stoic, his father was strong, his father was carved in metal and wood and brick and a million more materials that always held against the rising tide.
His father was steadfast and firm, he was that unwavering stone wall holding steady against anything the world threw against him. His father was an unbroken rock and all the fortifications that resisted the turn of the tide. His father pulled against Jisung’s hand, hauled his body until gravity righted him in a standing position.
Firm fingers gripped his arm and confident lips rasped against his ear, told him the stay calm and hold his feet. His father’s words promised him a world beyond dust tornadoes and grey uniforms but none of it filtered into Jisung’s conscious mind.
Instead he saw a body, caught in the epicentre of the world, corralled by a hundred figurines of stumbling anatomy. It was a single body, a single human, a single man, writhing and wriggling in their self-proclaimed skin.
But it wasn’t a person, not really, not anymore. It wasn’t a human, just a mound of flesh that thrashed and hissed. It was a somebody that once existed, a single-serve person peeling apart before Jisung’s eyes.
And in that split-second of life that he saw between bowling pins, Jisung knew that body, he knew that person. It was the baker’s boy, those downcast eyes that had fixed upon the cracks in the pavement. He knew his name, Seungmin, soft brown eyes, brought forth in caster sugar mounds and blackened hair that fell over his eyebrows until even his sporadic blinks wouldn’t move the strands from his sight. They had been friends— maybe— acquaintances at least.
Seungmin had always nodded when they crossed paths and Jisung, perhaps enamoured by a single person remembering his long-forgotten face, had smiled back, wide and gum-lined. Every now and then they had exchanged words, constructed small-talk waylaid by mindless conversation and the weight of one son passing by another.
And every now and then, just occasionally when their timelines aligned, they would sit on the playground swings and swap stories of the past and the fear of a world way-laid by unknown infection. A friend— maybe, just maybe more than an acquaintance. A friend, maybe, borne in the nighttime whispers of all those things that no longer belonged in simple conversation.
A friend that disappeared in dust storms and words screamed against the hard-packed dirt of the marketplace floor.
Seungmin’s body thrashed wildly in the circle of scared populace. His teeth were bared, sharp and white, absent of those braces that Jisung knew he finally managed to remove eight days before—
“Appa found me an Orthodontist one town over,” Seungmin said and grinned widely at Jisung until, for just a second, all the world was falling into perfect, white tombstone lines.
And Seungmin was screaming, wild and unconstrained as his skin melted away in sloughing tatters that were whisked away into the air like flower petals on the slightest breeze that drifted by.
Seungmin, another brick wall that stood in front of Jisung in an emotionless void that correlated his existence. They had sat together in mid-day sun, still too weak to burn their skin but strong enough to roam beyond a single layer of clothing. They sat together, baker’s boy and farmer’s son, running from the city, and they swapped stories of a life beyond and a life that might come after.
And Seungmin became a ball of black feathers, dark like midnight skies, sleek with the glimmer of sunlight creasing through the marketplace in golden fingers. Then Seungmin was delicate wings, too weak to carry a human body, and sharp claws, strong enough to rip through every inch of flesh laid before him. Seungmin was blue pupils, coloured in that infinite expanse of the sky above, darting from one target to another in the overstimulation of a hundred roiling targets, all those bright red bullseyes waiting to be pierced and consumed. The blue eyes met Jisungs’, azure rings around pitch black, peeling apart the layers of his skin as if his claws were already sinking in.
He was trapped. His father’s finger wrenched upon his wrist but he felt nothing. Flesh squeezed upon his pores but he saw nothing but sky-blue irises that searched for his own. He saw nothing but two bodies staring up at the cloud-creped sky, tracing shapes in the clouds with their outstretched fingers.
When he returned to the world, it was in the crescendo of all that he left behind.
His father shouted against his ear, so close the words felt like thunder reverberating in his bones. A disembodied hand gripped his shoulder and shook, dragging, pulling his limp weight, but Jisung felt nothing.
Those eyes, piercing and infinite, juxtaposed by black feathers that weren’t really black but a miasma of reflective hues in the rays of sunlight until Jisung was staring at a rainbow puddle of oil left behind in a parking lot. The entire spectrum of existence laid out before him and he was lost in the luminescent play of colours that rippled before him like an infinite whirlpool of being.
But he was being ripped away, carried in the hardened muscles that wrapped around his middle and lifted his feet that had been planted upon the planet’s surface. His father’s breaths rasped in his ears to a definite rhythm and the world collapsed around him in blue-eyed wheezes and scared whimpers.
Seungmin was fading into a pinprick shadow of fluttering feathers but still Jisung could see the moment when his friend, once so amiable and quiet, leapt upon another body and sank his sharpened teeth deep into the yielding flesh below.
Jisung felt his own body recoil in the stranger's blood that streamed beneath his friend’s sharpened incisors. The image splattered across his mind in red-black gasps of multi-language expirations broken by the pressure on his wrist. And then he was whirled away, was collected into a single dark alley corner until all he could see was arching shadows and his father’s face. And it was all too much when he could hear the screams of crying bodies weaving through the silence.
A hand slid against his cheek, warm and steady as the cold concrete that held stern and silent against his back. It was certainty and consistency, calmed in the eye of a storm that he never saw coming. A thousand memories and emotions and trembling feelings played across his vision in white starbursts that threatened to darken him into the safety of unconsciousness.
“Jisung.”
And the hand gripped his soft flesh, patterned white nail crescents against his sun-tanned skin. The eyes that met his own were infinite safety and plush comfort, the deepest brown like the strips of bark he peeled off the trees scattered around their small apartment building.
“Focus.” His father said, as he held Jisung’s gaze. His father, who rested skin against skin. His father, who always protected him from every evil that walked through in his dreams and leaked into his reality when the hallway light wasn’t strong enough to protect him. “Focus on me, son.”
“Okay.” Jisung’s voice was harsh and ragged, ripped from his vocal chords like he should never have spoken. The world raged beyond them in screeching ends and death-choke cries. There were a hundred bodies dying and turning into— into something nightmares are made of, would be made of. But Jisung heard none of it, registered nothing about the world beyond his father’s words.
“I want you to run.” His father’s eyes were hard and certain, so different from the heartbeat anxiety that pulsed in Jisung’s ears. “Run and never look back, my son.”
Jisung’s gaze flicked between his father’s eyes, from one to the other, never stopping in the mountain space between. “What?”
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.” His father’s hands dropped to his shoulders and twisted him, pushed him forward, towards the opening of the alleyway. His voice was warm, panting upon Jisung’s neck in summer sun gasps. “Run when I say go.”
“What’s happening, appa?” Brown eyes met his, rimmed by crystal tears and Jisung had never seen his father cry. His plaster-wall father, stoic and silent, never broken by emotion. “What is it?”
“Go.” His father’s voice broke and chapped lips pressed against his temple in a gentle press that was so juxtaposed by all the world around them, a sweetness that lingered a second too long when time was all that mattered. Then hands were thrusting him forward into the bright golden light of the sun’s rays. And Jisung was so exposed, traced against the street’s grey concrete in shadows and white chalk.
“Go!”
His father shouted from the dimly lit alley and Jisung didn't think anymore.
He ran.
He ran, and the inconsistent beat of his footsteps against the pavement sounded like war drums beating a rhythm faulted by those who had yet to see the world.
For a millisecond in time he looked back. His mistake. A body was flung between him and the black tidal wave surging from the marketplace square. A body of concrete poured into all those cracks in his soul. A body of certainty and consistency, a wall that had always stood, unseen, between him and all the rest of the world.
Run His father’s words riddled his consciousness, bullets piercing ever deeper into the soft grey matter of his pulsing brain. And maybe they screamed through the air around him, or maybe they were just echoes in his ears. Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.
Shrieking cries filled his mind until all he could hear was the end of life and those words rushed out before talons and fangs ended the consciousness that called for him.
He ran, heartbeat pulsing in his throat until all he could think about was the throb of blood in his veins and—
Those words.
He ran to his father’s house, through the red-painted door that he had walked through in school-worn shoes and the excitement of joining his father in movie marathons and popcorn breath. Jisung burst through the door in a way he never had and stumbled into his bedroom that had never once been changed, even when he left for months on end.
Cream walls and that grey duvet cover he sometimes wondered if it had ever been washed. Jisung grabbed the camping backpack from the floor of his closet, the one that his father had thrust into his hands on some birthday and told him they would trek across the mountains of Korea until Jisung had seen every landscape. He shoved every inch of clothing, every centimetre of warm blanket, every tin can of food without a use-by date into the nylon bag. He filled it until there wasn’t space left to fill.
Then he left the house that had been his second home since he was ten-almost-eleven. He left the home where he saw his father cry for the first time, propped up on the kitchen table with tears running down his cheeks. He left the home where he had hid in his bed, twisted in fern-leaf curls whilst his parents’ screamed in the lounge. He left the home where Changbin had beaten him in Mario Kart over and over and over and—
He left his home, but all he thought was one thing. Run. His father’s voice filtered into his conscious, weak but still there in every trembling syllable, uncertain but infinitely present.
Run and never look back, my son.
So Jisung ran, to the south-east, away from Seoul, away from Icheon, away from all those abyss memories that gazed back at him. He ran and all his mind was filled with alley-way cries and black-feather typhoons that never once spared a second to glance back.
🝔 현재 🝔
The house is more than just a shack, he concludes one day as he swings upon the rotten wood chair that bears his body in dusk-born shimmering light. It’s more than just a shelter that creases over his head.
And maybe that’s something that he has known all along in the carved inscriptions of sun-rise days that he has never bothered to count in anything other a single-serve safety net. And how does he really know how much time has passed when he never cared to track it before? He glares at the carefully tallied total and decides he doesn’t need to know. He thinks it's been six months but maybe it’s been more.
Hell, maybe it’s been less. Maybe Jisung is younger than he thinks he is and that thought churns in his mind. Maybe he’s not twenty-two, maybe he’s younger. Maybe he isn’t even in his twenties and he’s cried, and laughed, and mourned, and killed more than any teenager ever should.
But maybe he’s older, maybe he’s almost thirty and he’s more scarred, more alone, more desperate, more broken, than he ever thought he could be. Maybe his time is running out faster than he thought. Maybe the world is just waiting for him to finally snap in two, in three. Snap into the past, into the present, into all that he could have been.
The thoughts curl into his everyday routine but the garden, the house— home, maybe— stays the same, careful collaboration of green and brown, and pastel flowers against pink and purple brick worn in the way his bones have been.
He spends as much time as he can in the garden, tending to wayward vines and roots. He spreads clear river water upon the hard-turned mulch so it melts into deep-brown soil, almost like sea-soft sand, ready to be melded into complex fortresses or solidly packed castles.
Jisung tends to the vegetable roots and fruit vines that were sown by whoever came before him. There’s a small storage room beside the entrance door of the shack and there he finds a rusted watering can, time-rusted garden clippers, and well-worn gloves with the slightest skin-cell trace of those who came before him.
He dons the gloves without hesitation, fills the watering can in the river that flows a little way past the wall surrounding the garden— his garden— bears the clippers in certain swathes that cut through the overgrowth. He shoulders his weapons and, in time, he tames the excess that has overwhelmed Eden.
This place, it was clearly sown by the ones who came before him, each plant allocated a carefully selected slot in the calculated jungle. Cultivated varieties of lettuce fade into purple and green cabbages that give way to broccoli and cauliflower, delineated by twisting leaves of buried carrots and parsnips. They are mirrored across grass pathways by underground potatoes and swedes, bordered on the edges by out-of-season strawberries, blueberries, and climbing limbs of grape vines curling around thin wooden poles.
It is a garden, a farm, a life; built to bloom and harvest, mapped out with every season in mind and the ever-tilted spin of the world patterned in the lines of the structured seeds sown into tilled soil.
Jisung walks through the slice of paradise that has been built to bloom season-wide, carefully laid out so he has an abundance of vegetables and herbs and fruit through every season broken by sunlight strength and pattering raindrops. He feels the cold trace along his jawline but the bulbs erupting under the packed dirt don’t yet know the chill in the air. He thanks the unknowable presence that came before him and created an infinite evolution of food that shirks seasonable death.
He turns the watering can on the green shoots of life prepared to survive in the encroaching cold, and the buried plants that thirst for more with their parched roots writhing through the clumped dirt. He hums gently as he passes through the garden in slow footsteps, feeling the evergrowth unfurling beside and below his feet.
Life flows between his fingers and blesses the earth around him and he loves it, even as he feels his own energy writhing within his body, desperate to run until there’s nothing left. He sees a world crumpling at his feet, twisting in the caustic visions of a past that no longer matters. He rains heaven’s teardrops upon a garden built for survival and, for just a second, he thinks that he can bring life into a vacuum that has been waiting for a single gasp of oxygen.
But it passes all too quickly, as everything does. He collapses as the row of vegetables and fruits end. He falls to the ground, to the soft green grass that folds so delicately under his weight, all the world that crumples as he sinks to his knees.
Among the green vines and splattering of multi-coloured flowers, topped off by the red-orange hue of a hundred shaking leaves that are waiting to fall, Jisung kneels. The ground meets his flesh in the solid presence of a revolving earth, an ongoing planet, an uncertain existence, holding up his bones and muscles.
For a second he thinks he’s sinking, kneecaps disappearing into a soft quicksand that has been waiting to eat him alive and pick his bones until they are bleached white in the sunlight, so far from shaking black feathers. For a second he thinks he’s dying in the infinite collapse of a million galaxies that pull his knees down into the dirt of another universe, another world, another reality.
Then he realises he’s so much less than that, and so much more. He’s an ant crawling across the surface of the Earth, meaningless and non-existent, not worth the glance of all that gravity sprawling above his shaking skin. And he’s more, not just another comma in a body count, not just a wayward soul forgotten on the Styx, not just another body shuddering and loathing in a corner.
Maybe he’s something else, maybe he’s always been something else. Jisung in his intricately woven destiny, filled with patterned dodging of that inevitable death yearning for his body. Perhaps he’s just a little more than an ant running from the shadow of a boot.
When he sits on his knees in the garden that feeds him, that keeps him alive, he sees all the past embroidered before him in silken threads and cotton lines that refuse to fray. A tapestry of have-beens and have-nots criss-crossing over his vision in dull needle and thin thread.
Among vibrant green newshoots waiting to exist, and browning leaves of everything that once was before, Jisung feels the analysis of his life shift, his knowledge of the world tilt, and suddenly he is left suspended in a certainty that he had never known.
Just maybe, in this fractured world so misunderstanding of the past, maybe he wants to live just a little bit longer.
The sun hovers above the horizon, dropping lower and lower like a climber clinging to a rope. Jisung rises to his feet, thighs screeching at the time he has spent kneeling, body crying at the unused muscles that so well-worn. He stands against the world and he’s a single soldier against a million enemies, but for once he isn’t afraid.
Jisung turns to the pink and purple tinted brickwork of his home and smiles, open and wild, effervescent in the bubbling existence that dominates his flimsy limbs and all the garden that crowds around him.
And he doesn’t care that a single emotion controls his sentience because it’s an emotion he understands. It’s an emotion that he has survived on, a thought that he has built his existence on.
Hope.
So silly and inconsequential. He brushes his fingertips against a pink lily that seems to tremble at his touch. It’s hope, overflowing and unbridled.
The green shoots and winter vegetables, preparing to blossom from below, they fall at the wayside as he steps forward. Jisung treads through his garden, and returns to the small, faded-brick circle of blood-stained floorboards and right-angle chairs.
He pushes the door open and listens to the creak of those that came before. He curls in his dirt-ridden blankets and just a tiny piece of his mind learns not to care about the past. And, for a single train of thought steaming along abandoned tracks, he’s so infinitely consumed by the future he never thought he could believe in.
🜍 과거 🜍
The world had ended when Jisung was asleep, at least that’s what he liked to think. He liked to think this was true because it made things easier when he lapsed into the uncertainty of a once-were life. It made it so much easier to think that he just fell asleep and the world morphed while he wasn’t looking. It made it easier when he could believe that the present he once knew faded into the past when he was unconscious of the changing landscape.
It’s just so different. A night passes and he saw the evening news filled with military-march feet and the tight edges of his mother’s lips— but it’s so different. And maybe it’s days or pressure against his insides, maybe it’s weeks, maybe it’s actually months— but it feels like a single night has passed when everything changes.
The raucous laughter of boys his age, grouped on the corner streets, dissolves into a cloying silence broken only by hesitant murmurs. The press of a hundred bodies, yearning to reach their destination on the grey-patterned concrete, declines into the occasional rush of single fleeing footsteps anxiously seeking the nearest shelter. The chatter of conversation that once flowed over his distracted mind, dissolves into black depths of uncertainty and a future that is so utterly consumed by—
What are you doing? Fucking run!
They’re coming.
Just die, you’ll slow them down
They’re coming.
Get the fuck out of of the way.
They’re coming.
They’re coming.
“Run.”
Sometimes, every now and then, in the depths of the night, when he hasn’t yet succumbed to the siren song of sleep, he thinks of his mother. He thinks of gentle lips pressing between his fluttering eyebrows that crease in embarrassment when she smiles back with infinitely soft lines into his humiliated frown. He thinks of her gentle hands that smooth silken skin against his cheeks and hum words that settle into his bone marrow.
My son, she sighs, seconds before the bill plunges into her curved neckline. My sweet boy.
And the black beak sinks through her skin, like a knife through warm butter, like a spade through sand, like a finger through water. And Jisung is swallowing his bubbled breaths in heaving distortions of exhalation and all that blood that pools on the kitchen floor. It’s all just corrosive oxygen filling his lungs with carbon dioxide atoms and everything that won’t fill the space between his bones.
Then Jisung is sitting upright in that little shack he calls his own and the world is folding in around him but all he can think of is the absence of oxygen in his lungs. He’s sitting upright, welcoming the world in the curvature of his neck and that consistent forward press of his broken body, but he feels the softest smile against his forehead, and it never changes. It never grimaces, never falters, even when the energy of life fades away.
He likes to think his mother died with a smile on her face.
His mind is still stuck in those dreams of things that once were, caught in the press of his easy grins and trapped in the shadow of his father. He’s irrevocably pinned by Changbin’s last words that whisper in his ears, inescapably drawn to the black feathers that morphed through Seungmin’s skin, infinitely captured by that single body, writhed in smeared mud, whispering heart-broken denials into the void that waits for a voice.
The world ended when Jisung was seventeen but it never stopped spinning. He is sucked into the dreams of a million different possibilities and the little voice that he once labelled ‘hope’ that he has long since emptied from his ‘reality’. He tilts his head until ear is crushed against his shoulder but the view before him never changes.
Even in the space of brick shacks he feels his mind shunted forward into a reality that belongs only to his imagination. He sits upright, staring at blood-sewn fabric, and sees another body crawling across the floor in single-second desperation. He studies the complex constellation of blankets that mould into one tangled creation, and imagines a world where he stumbled into a shack filled with life.
He breathes in and the world around him fades from caustic memories and unfulfilled possibilities into the tombstones of past endings. He breathes out and the world is settled brick whirled inwards by evergreen leaves and twisting brown branches.
Jisung breathes in and the world is a million spaces filled by characters and caricatures of all the people he has met and all those he would have met, a thousand untethered ends floating in a future that will never be. He breathes in and those brick walls breathe with him but they only expand. They never collapse inwards, never pull in too close into the invisible space that he has claimed as his. Those pink and purple, once-red shapes, they never press into the precious square that has been claimed as his.
🝔 현재 🝔
There’s a storm raging outside. It batters against every inch of the stone shack in driving raindrops and screeching rain. This is winter, black clouds and storm-wind breath screaming through the infinite cracks in the plastered walls.
He’s been prepared for this season, even before he had huddled in trembling blankets creased into the corner of the small shack made for one body. He’s ready in the blue frayed tarpaulin that he spread across the roof and multiple layers of bug-ridden cloth laid across his skin. He knew that winter was coming to batter his ransacked world.
The fireplace crackles with life, red, orange, yellow flames flickering against the brick walls around him. Little mantle-piece figurines that dance into the space he lies in, their bodies whirling in his brown irises and black pupils until all he sees is a light show of flickering shadows. They are broken only by the occasional pop of lucky rain drops, bent just right enough to slip down the sloped chimney and sizzle into steam on the burning embers.
He’s ready for winter’s sleet and still he huddles deeper into the decrepit warmth of those layered blankets that coat him in millimetre warmth.
The door opens.
The front door of his wanderlust shack, so far off the beaten track that it’s almost lost in the wilderness. So offset from latitude and longitude that Jisung had to be thirteen kilometres off-course to stubble through upon the dull pink and purple walls.
The door opens.
He hasn’t bothered to install a lock, hasn’t bothered to barricade it. He hasn’t needed to with only the slightest threat coming in a single black feather that he once caught fluttering between green leaves and the rush of river water echoing between his grasping fingertips.
Seven months, traced in orange-brick carvings, he has never felt the need to bar his home from any intruder.
So the door opens.
A body stumbles through, caught in black shadows that shimmer along the walls against the fire’s light. The person— maybe, maybe a person, maybe something else— they lurch forward, rain-drenched and dripping across the wooden floor.
Their head never turns towards Jisung’s trembling figure, bolt-upright, pressed into the corner of the room that he seems to claim his own. They see only one place, focus on only one corner of the world, that corner of the tiny world. The body surges forward and collapses against the blankets singed red at the edges.
The yellow-red flames lick across the exposed skin presented in jagged cloth and all the rips and tears of a body that forced itself through wild undergrowth. Muscle ripples, distorts and distends as the person— maybe a person, maybe something worse— lurches into the carcass of dried cloth that quickly soaks the rain dripping over across their skin.
And there are black feathers warped across his pale skin.
Jisung is frozen, trapped and melded into the wall that presses on his body, as if he had always been a simple air-bubble in the brick, part of the room around him, one with the foundation of the simple shack in the middle of nowhere. He barely breathes, even as every expiration comes in panicked gasps, willing his body to still as if that will make him invisible.
The body collapses, sprawls into the nest that has never moved before, that is covered by forgotten layers and the puff of dust particles that swallow their crumpling shape for just a second. There’s no hesitation in their movements, absolute certainty, as if they know exactly where they are going and exactly where they are meant to be.
As the clouded air settles, Jisung sees him, sees him, that him, and it feels as though he has sight for the first time in his life.
He sees sculpted cheekbones, long eyelashes, defined brows, eyes pressed closed into the deepest hint of eyelids that crease together into forgotten age-lines. He sees raven-black hair wound by rain into sharp claws scratching over his forehead. He sees pale skin, unblemished except for that one red line across his right eyebrow that leaks a single crimson teardrop.
He sees a boy, maybe a man, maybe his age, maybe just slightly older. A human, cast in that pink tinge to his shallow cheeks and thin lips that press tightly together until they are only a shade darker than the skin below.
He sees the shiver that ripples his body and the arms that clutch tight against the opposing shoulder and pull at the barely-there blankets, searching for any kind of warmth. He sees the curling of his middle, the hitch of his knees into his stomach, the cramped contortion of desperation muddled by rain-water rivets.
Jisung sees a human. A human with the flush of warm blood and undisturbed skin and rounded fingernails and—
And the human’s eyes open— but maybe they’re not human, not really, not quite. One iris is the deepest brown, so dark that it is almost black, almost blending into the night. But when Jisung sees it, built up in fire light leaps and whirls, he can catch the explosive colour of tree bark and muddied water, perfectly contrasted by the vantablack reaches of his infinite pupils.
The other eye is electric blue, sharp and startling, piercing and bold, shattering in that precision point of colour that belongs only to blown-out pupils and the ring of other-world colour.
Baby Corvid, freshly turned, just beginning its rampage upon the world. Junior, desperate, blood-thirsty. Bright blue irises piercing everything beyond in black beaks and marketplace dust tornadoes.
The eyes, one human, one so very other, open and instantly they meet his own.
Jisung freezes. He isn’t even sure if he was ever moving, but he freezes. He holds his breath in a tight pressure bubble within his chest that tenses further with every second that passes. The eyes stare into him, never wavering, never changing, never hesitating. Hours swarm into months, minutes swim into years, but perhaps only seconds have passed. Perhaps only mili-seconds, floating between one human locked into one what could just maybe still be human.
Then the eyes slip away, eyelids shuttering the brown and blue irises and breaking the chain that had briefly bound Jisung’s every atom. He tries not to gulp in air, tries to quieten his riling lungs, tries to focus on something other than the body filling their square of the shack—
Filling his square of the world.
The eyes close and the threat diminishes in a single, simple movement, an indisputable sign of submission, a releasing of all the significance of a body unpredictable into a conscious second of trust.
A sigh comes from the boy— maybe a man, maybe a human— and Jisung can see the release of muscle into the blankets that are just barely pulled over his shoulder, just barely clasped around his rounded chin. And he sees the thin fingers thread into the thin material until the white ends of his nails are visible against the grey marle.
Seconds pass into minutes, and minutes pass into a lifetime, one that all leads to a single point in time. And it all passes, until those tightly pressed lips of the intruder part into the slightest black oval of sleep.
And finally Jisung forces himself to focus. He forces his body to unclench, forces himself to return to reality in the only way he knows how.
His mother taught him once, taught her anxiety riddled son, caught in a whirlwind of wheezing inhalation as he crouched on their linoleum bathroom floor. Her fingertips pressed against his arms and her words whispered to him, louder than any scream he had ever heard.
What can you smell? Smoke curling from the fireplace. Damp cloth trying to dry. That certain smell of rain like cucumber grass sliced in lawnmower blades. Human sweat, musty, stuffy, but almost unrecognisable in its accepted presence of a world without electricity-driven water.
What can you hear? The gentle pop of flames bursting through wood. The unbroken pitter-patter of raindrops upon the thatched roof and the occasional drop against hollowed tarpaulin. Jisung’s own heartbeat, thudding music patterns in his chest. The soft inhale and exhale of another body, simply there, simply sharing his space.
What can you see? Fire patterns flickering in shadow and light across the walls. His skin, dulled and trembling as his fingers incrementally unclench from the blankets he has wrenched as close to his eyes as he can manage. A body, furled inwards, collapsed until knees meet chest and fingers press into the sallow plush of caving cheeks. A corner that is no longer empty.
What can you feel? Humming warmth, settling across his muscles in crackling waves. Rippling cotton, moulding against his skin until he is entirely swathed apart from his fire-warmed face to his cold-nipped toes. In infinite possibility, stretching before him until he can’t see his predetermined future that should be filled by only the thought of survival. Because there’s something else. Something new. Something—
What can you taste? Fear, acrid and caustic upon his tongue, soured carbon-dioxide breathes that he tries to hold back in order to muffle every sound. The savoury vegetables he consumed an hour ago, stew stirred in the black metal pot that he once discovered resting in the soft dirt of his garden, ever so lightly seasoned by his ever-decreasing supply of black peppercorn and paprika, bubbling in the back of his throat
And something else. Something more in the way his tongue relaxes, no longer presses against the hard edges of his teeth in the suppression of a secret.
Something else in the thick scent of riverbed mud and musty blanket. Something else in the playful laughter of water between fingertips and the creak of a door that opened without Jisung’s press. Something else in the stretch of long eyelashes against pale skin and the dim shadow stain on wood grain. Something else in the searing fold of a paper heart, poised as it prepares to collapse into a body that has found a home.
Jisung doesn’t know when he closes his eyes. He doesn’t remember tiredness leaking into his tight muscles. He doesn’t remember the build of exhaustion. He doesn’t remember the compression of sleep.
He doesn’t dream. He doesn’t wake, not even for a single strangled second between nightmares that never quite come.
When he finally rouses the sun is shining through the dirtied glass windows set in four squares against the paint-flecked frame. He is still pressed into his corner of the brick shack, upright, back against the wall, weary fabric pulled up to his chin.
Opposite him is a pile of blankets, abandoned, forgotten, blood tinging the edges like a border that can’t ever be crossed. The fringes of sunlight squares glance upon the cloth edges and whirlwind motes of dust linger upon the fabric.
No one fills the space. No body with no torn clothes and no mismatched eyes. There’s no one in the shack, no one but Jisung. Just a single body in a space meant for—
He breathes out and he can’t tell if it is relief or—
🜍 과거 🜍
The screams echoed across the empty street like the sound waves were knocking over every bowling pin for a strike. It felt like a celebration, a joyous, screeching wound scraping away at the harmony of peace that once shuddered across silent urban battlegrounds. Now it was suffocated, choked, by a black cloud of destruction that consumed everything that dared to step forward.
A body, nothing but pure flesh and scrambling limbs, smashed against door frames and scraped nails against concrete in bloodied lines. They panted in the space around them, patterning the world, gasping, so fast and frenzied, but the stale air that was trapped under the ventilation mask couldn’t hold back the sound of desperate cries.
Jisung’s hand snaked out, faster than even he could comprehend and in all those moments wondering upon the past, he could never explain that instinct, not even to himself. His fingertips met the skin of a wrist and tightened, instantly, instinctively. The boy before him didn’t slow and for a second he was wrenched out of his hiding place until the momentum between them circled on an axis and they stumbled to a halt, face-to-face.
The boy before him was soft, there was no other way to describe him. He had gentle eyes, tilted at the edges, even as they were framed in panic. His cheeks were shallow but Jisung could see the hint of dimples peeking out around the grey plastic mask. His nose was large, taking up most of the space with close set eyes and dark eyebrows that raised in shock. He was soft, so soft—
And so deeply interwoven with… terror, dread, horror, panic, desperation—
And fear. It crept out in crow-line creases around his brow, and the tightening of his lips. It meandered upon his face in the way that his eyes widened, his brow clenched, his muscles tightened as he prepared to fight. His nostrils flared, pressing the flesh of his cheeks to the side.
His pupils dilated. They became black slits strewn across his face. But those irises, they were still there, and they were the softest brown, like melted chocolate, like hard-packed mud, like those dress shoes that Jisung swore he would never wear when his mother brought them home with a soft smile upon her face and a polaroid camera around her neck to capture every moment.
So Jisung didn’t pause, didn’t hesitate, even though he was melded by uncertainty and that desire to live just a little bit longer. His fingers tightened and pulled. He dragged the boy forward, tugged him down the steps of the basement he had claimed as his shelter, and through the steel door that creaked ever so slightly behind their backs, into the place that he corralled himself in a meshed version of own being that no other would ever view. No one but —
The screaming horde passed by, shrieking voices carried by sound reflection around the empty alleys that they stalked. Their footsteps were made into thunder that rumbled around the small basement. The horde passed in jerking limbs that longed for another meal and snapped their heads back and forward, toothless beaks clacking endlessly, so desperate for flesh to sink into.
Leaning back, Jisung tugged his mask down to fall against his chest, his head resting upon the solid steel door. He listened to the horde pass until all he could hear was the absence of breath and the constant gulp of oxygen and carbon dioxide beside him.
He turned his gaze ever so slightly, tilted his head until he could see the boy beside him that still clung to his wrist as though he might escape. As though Jisung had somewhere to run. As though he thought he could get away with little more to offer than tangled blankets.
“Chan.” The man— Chan— gasped, pulling his own mask down with a trembling hand, and maybe he was older by three or four years but it had been so long since Jisung had seen someone his age, so long since he had seen anyone, that he couldn’t tell anymore. “I’m Chan.”
“I’m Jisung.” He said, and his voice was just a little stronger now, a little less consumed by terror.
He let his eyes linger on the body that still clung to the solid curves of muscle even as sources of food dwindled. He let his eyes graze across the full chest pressed against the grey wall and the arms that held at definite angles, one braced against concrete, the other stretched out, still holding Jisung’s wrist, thumb tightening against the heartbeat that thudded below his skin.
He inhaled and let his gaze fall from the boy to the corridor leading down to his small basement. Jisung pushed away from the wall, one trembling hand gestured out in front of him.
“Welcome to my crib.”
Chan snorted and finally drew his body away from the wall, spinning around so his back just barely brushed against the grey concrete. His hand finally pulled away from Jisung’s wrist, leaving a ring of skin tingling with warmth. Chan raised a single eyebrow and the corner of his mouth lifted into the slightest hint of a smirk.
“Nothing like a good MTV reference during the apocalypse.” Jisung laughed easily, the sound bubbling, warm in stomach, before it crept up his throat. Strange. And he hadn’t laughed in… too long.
He walked forward, leading the body behind him into the cramped space that he had, at least momentarily, made his own. It was small, barely even a room, maybe more a closet than anything else. There was a pile of blankets against the wall. An industrial sink in the corner, the rest of the room empty except for the occasional pile of Jisung’s clothing. He grimaced and tried to kick the piles together before Chan could see them.
When he looked up Chan’s eyes were inescapably focused on Jisung, not straying, even to the messy room surrounding him. His sturdy shoulders and thick arms seemed to fill the doorway boxed around him, fill every crevice until there was nothing left for Jisung to see in his fear-sharpened gaze but ChanChanChan.
“I-It’s not much,” Jisung managed to choke out, feeling pricks of sweat spreading across his palms at the suspended anticipation that had suddenly tensed the space between them. “But it works for now.”
Chan stepped forward, just one footstep in front of the door frame but it was enough to fill every inch of the cramped room with his humming presence and black-hole dimples. He smiled, supplicant and soft in the space that he effortlessly invaded, a perfect juxtaposition to the thrumming tension he had created. Jisung breathed in and he inhaled the man who he saved and had somehow allowed to fill every iota of the room that once seemed so empty.
Then there was a heartbeat silence of time, a pause, just a momentary hesitance, where the world seemed to take a breath. It was filled, stuffed to the brim, absolutely overflowing with fear and uncertainty and the throbbing pulse of morphine as fight or flight still raged through his veins.
Then the stillness broke and their bodies collided.
And Chan was so soft. He was yielding flesh and reserved moans. He was the reverberation of adrenaline that fingered across Jisung’s veins and never seemed to cease, even beyond the echoes of horde footsteps. He was the concave slump of two minds desperately trying to hold back the terror of reality.
Chan was gentle curves and hard movements as he swept against Jisung, their lips connecting in the desperation of lonely flesh seeking any home still standing. Any home. Just a place to belong.
It was sudden, abrupt, so deeply unexpected, and exactly what Jisung had been waiting for. It was instinct-riddled heartbeats thudding in the occasional space between corrupted lives. Their bodies met and Chan quickly glided his tongue across Jisung’s lips, lingering there until he welcomed the thick muscle into his mouth.
Their car-crash connection surged in from the doorway of the room until Jisung collapsed, back against the thin blankets that covered the broken-spring mattress he had dragged from a forgotten garbage pile to his temporary safehouse. Chan hovered over him, ever so human, so close that he could almost feel the vibrating warmth that he had been longing for in long nights filled with Corvid screams and black-shadow nightmares.
“Is this okay?” Chan’s voice was tight, compressed, caught in his throat as if each word was harder to spit out than the last. His body shuddered over Jisung’s, seemingly held aloft by a sky god that no longer looked down. A sky god, holding Heaven so far away from a ruined Earth. His mask hung loose around his neck, catching against Jisung’s own, rising and falling on his chest with his staggered breathing.
“Yes.” Jisung nodded and he didn’t quite know what he agreed to but when Chan’s weight dropped against his own, when that unknown body collapsed against his own, he knew that he had made the right choice.
Chan stayed with him for almost six weeks. It was the longest Jisung had ever stayed in one place, and every morning he wondered if he should move, continue his meandering journey with no destination. Then an arm curled around his waist and tightened incrementally, drawing him ever closer to the solid body beside his own, infinitely traced by muscle and pale skin, ridged with scar tissue like braille outlines.
The world paced past, so far beyond their lives stuck in the tight corners of concrete walls. Every few days one of them dared to wander beyond the steel door, refilling their cracking plastic water bottles and bringing back the basics of life in thin toilet paper and the burn of expired mint toothpaste against their tongues so their heated kisses became more than just stale breath.
It was the exhale of winter that broke everything, and when it came to an end the world was coloured in the bright flow of the sun that still bore warmth even as it faded beyond the horizon. There was a horde coming, funnelling in from the west where someone was stupid enough to try and start a half-rusted car. It was on the outskirts of the city, filling the air with hungry screams and broken-flesh feet against the concrete.
“We have to go.” Chan’s voice was firm and definite, his hand gripping tight on Jisung’s wrist, but he pulled in the wrong direction. “We have to go, now.”
Jisungs eye’s snapped up from their connected body to the eyes that bore into his own, mining deep into his body but never quite seeing the thoughts beyond his bone-marrow skull. And those eyes were the deepest brown, infinitely gentle, filled with the warm slick of melted confectionery.
“No,” he said, barely more than a whisper, and the chocolate eyes widened, shifting uncontrollably between their conjoined hands and the open end of the alley-way.
“What?” Chan’s voice was strained, layered by that ever-present doubt, familiar uncertainty, and something else that didn’t belong in a long devastated world. “Come with me.”
The hands moved, pressing across Jisung’s chest, all curled and desperate at the ends, scrabbling in the sentience of one trying to convince another, trying to belong to another. And part of Jisung wanted to take the easy road, wanted to agree with the apocalypse connection that had been built between them.
But it was too late.
He could see past his own heartbeat, he could see past the blood surging through his veins, he had been staring past it for too long. He could see the space between them, coloured in nothing more than adrenaline nerve-endings and the desperation to not be— to never again be— so undeniably, devastatingly, unavoidably alone.
It was all just two bodies that desperately yearned to belong again.
Agreeing would be so easy, following chocolate eyes so easy, but Jisung didn’t want to give in, not anymore, not now. He didn’t want to crumble against the pressure on his skin. He didn’t want Chan to settle, Chan with sweet words and soft skin. He didn’t want that supplicant mind to settle with him, to settle for second, third, maybe even fourth best. Not now, not ever, not even at the end of the world.
The sun was bright against the horizon and Jisung let his fingers tighten against the hand collapsed in his own. It was a fairy-tale life, red and orange glimmering across Chan’s features until a sunset was captured against his skin.
But Jisung saw the ending, the incompatible scream of voices, the darkness of an encroaching night.
He knew they’d been what the other needed, the scratch to loneliness’s itch, the gentle shadow in the dark when all other shadows were black beaks and knife-edge claws. They had each been a body to wake up to, a warmth to hold tight when the clammy hands of reality tried to tear away their skin.
But there was nothing else. There was nothing more. There was nothing real. Nothing more than apocalypse comfort.
And maybe Jisung was a romantic, maybe he was stupid, maybe he was letting the best thing that he would ever get slip by. Maybe there was nothing beyond Chan except empty rooms with crumbling brick-work and rotten wood. Maybe there is nothing for him that would ever be better than melting brown eyes in the morning. Maybe the apocalypse would never be better than Chan’s arm wrapped around his waist, holding him tight and close against a body that the nightmares feared.
But in that moment of two someones diverting against the cold black concrete of an abandoned alley, he knew. Even with death bearing down upon them, with an end tied together, he couldn’t let himself be swayed by maybes, wouldn’t let Chan— kind, caring, sacrificing Chan— settle for second-third-fourth-best.
Wouldn’t let himself, fighter, survivor, runner, aftermath; settle for first, second-third-fourth?-best.
Jisung wrenched away from the tight hold on his wrist, pulling his mask up to cover his mouth as if he could hide in the plastic armour. He turned his eyes away, focusing on the opposite end of the thin alleyway, but he had already seen the pain, the devastation, the anguished confusion. He had already seen that gentle face with clouded chocolate-brown eyes, framed by the slightest crow’s-feet, and so completely devoid of dimples.
“No.” His voice shuddered ever so slightly but still held firm. “I need to go North.”
“Jisung…” He turned further, picked up his already packed backpack and slung it over one shoulder.
“I—I’m sorry.” His voice faltered, just for a second, and he cursed himself for the momentary slip. Finally he let his gaze look for those eyes but this time they wouldn’t meet his own. For just a few words he allowed himself the truth. “I want to go with you, hyung, I really do—”
The world was cold against his sweat-tinged skin. “But I know we both deserve better.”
Those eyes, so deep and sugar-brown, coated in unshed tears until they looked like the black coffee he once ordered from the cafe around the corner from his house when Changbin dared him to try the ‘adult’ drink, they met his own.
His heart cramped, crushed, curled in on itself until he thought that there might be no more muscle left to pump blood through his body. But he turned. His feet spun his body, whirled around and walked down the alley way with walls that seemed to press in so tightly around him.
His shoulders squared and gaze locked forward at the opening to a world beyond. He never looked back, not even as his footsteps broke into an unforgiving sprint, slapping against the pale concrete. He didn’t look back and tears streamed down his face, rolling over the smooth plastic mask, falling against his tattered shirt. He ran and didn’t look back.
When he finally let his pace slow to a bristling walk outside the city limits, his shirt was a darkened patch of wet fabric clinging to his chest. And when he trembled against threadbare blankets and wished for another body pressed against his own, Jisung told himself he made the right choice.
🝔 현재 🝔
Jisung makes it eight months before his supply runs out. It should be so much less. It should be nothing more than days, maybe a week if he’s lucky, before he is run bare and staring at nothing more than his own withering flesh. His scraped together supplies never last this long but the ever-blooming garden has been filling in the cracks like mortar between bricks.
Finally he reaches into his backpack and there is only one cold metal tin to meet his fingers. His eyes squeeze shut for a moment, blooming red shadows bursting against the back of his eyelids. He knew it was coming, it always did, but the fear is just as strong as the first time.
The next morning he empties his backpack across his bed, leaves everything that he doesn’t need and puts back only the essentials. He slides his knife into the holster at his hip, sharp and well-honed from the anxiety-ridden hours he spent whetting it the night before.
The leather wraps settle easily around his limbs, covered over the top with the heavy body armour he had once found under the backseat of an abandoned police cruiser. He settles his ventilation mask around his neck, not needing the protection until the high walls of the city have made it necessary.
He stands, rolls his shoulders, settles his muscles into something that he hopes is confidence, and walks to the door. He hesitates, one hand resting on the tarnished door knob. His head turns, chin jutting against his shoulder, eyes flicking to that chest behind him with the lid propped open against the wall. Emotions and rational rage inside his chest, inside his mind, fill all the space inside his small body until everything is yes and no and all those things hovering in between.
When he leaves the little brick shack, cold metal is pressed against the small of his back, a gun barrel slid into the waistband of his cotton-thread grey jeans.
The city is two hours walk from the little shack. Jisung checks and rechecks his course every fifteen minutes, too anxious of once again missing his destination. He slices his knife blade against tree trunks and dilapidated wooden fences as frequently as he can risk dulling the edge. It’s a path he can follow, breadcrumb trails leading him back home.
Midday spring sunlight is bouncing off the metal and glass skyline when he finally looks up from his plodding feet to see his objective in sight. It’s a small city, really not much more than a town with few buildings reaching higher than five or six stories, all of them clustered in the centre like fingers plunging out of the earth. Around them ripple the shape of suburbs that Jisung has been weaving around for half an hour already. Everything is in varying levels of decay, the homes and gardens of once busy, frantic lives now consumed by shoulder-high grasses and pools of rain-riddled mud.
He has already passed a multitude of corner-stores and local grocers but never bothered more than a passing glance. Front doors hang from hinges or splay across the concrete, windows shattered and left to whistle in the wind. Those shops on the fringes have long since been ransacked, most likely before black feathers were painted across every tv screen with power.
Jisung forces his feet onwards, forces his gaze forwards, pulling the mask from around his neck and fitting the plastic over his mouth. The city centre, once blooming bright with neon-flame lights and filled with car-engine smog, it’s the only place he knows he will still find any supplies, overlooked by those too scared or not yet desperate enough to risk the major population areas.
The buildings morph around him, from spaced-out single-storey dwellings with the occasional smatter of traditional carvings, to square-blocked apartment complexes in moss-ridden off-white, to the higgledy-piggledy rise and fall of home then industrial then home, all pressed so close together that two walls become one unending line of life.
Even the ground below his feet changes from two metre swathes of mini-map lined cracked concrete to haphazard brick paving stones, each a different shade from the last.
The deeper he slinks into the city, the further Jisung presses his body against the walls that surround him. He dips into alleyways and side streets when he can, the shadows cast soothing the pounding heartbeat that soothes through his ears.
He hasn’t seen a moving Corvid yet, surprising even in the once loosely populated suburbs. There’s been nothing but the glimpse of black feathers carried across deserted roads in a strange corruption of tumbleweed tropes, and here and there a crumpled body, emancipated and decaying a pool of starvation.
Eventually Jisung’s gaze settles on a small food store, stoic and unyielding with unbroken glass windows and a door that is set only slightly ajar. It’s not yet completely stripped bare, he knows from the rows of coloured packaging that he can just glimpse from across the street.
He pushes the door out, gliding with the slightest hitch of metal against the concrete pavement. His footsteps are loud on the laminate floor as he steps in, and while there are yellowed-shelf gaps between the rainbow wrappers, it’s enough to know he can stack his supplies for months to come between the aisles.
Jisung moves fast, faster than he would prefer but his eyes are jumping from one bundle of sustenance to the next, hands reaching for crinkling plastic in fits and starts as he fills his backpack. It’s enough, more than enough, a veritable gold-mine hunched between an apartment complex and an electronics store that has long since passed value.
He fills the canvas bag in his hand with ambient goods and products that once were necessary but he now counts as luxuries. It’s a good haul, not his best, but better than he dared to hope for.
It’s not until the last aisle that he hears the breathing. It’s subtle, almost lost within his own thrumming heartbeat, but once he picks it out, there’s nothing else he can hear. Another body breathing, another being apart from his own. He freezes, a box of smoked paprika clutched in his hands.
There’s a convalescent cloud of black feathers crumpled in front of the counter at the head of the store. It moves in a smooth rhythm, a gentle rise and fall of sleep. The stark overhead lights have long since faded out but bands of golden sunlight shimmer against the curled body that curls against the dirtied linoleum.
And how the fuck did he miss it? How did his heightened awareness and searching eyes focus only on jam-packed shelves and not the threat sleeping so peacefully on the ground? Jisung curses himself end on end, hand indefinitely frozen between his bulging backpack and dust-coated shelves.
Slowly he lets himself move, incrementally, muscles tight and tensed like they haven’t flexed in a hundred lifetimes. The final package slots into place and he dares to pull the zipper closed in the jerky grind of metal teeth.
He shoulders his backpack, sliding the straps over both arms so his precious cargo is pressed tight between his shoulder blades, never once letting his eyes wander from the inhale-exhale of the form at the end of the aisle. The bundle of feathers never moves beyond sleep-slow breathing and for a second he feels a wave of relieved tears cloud his vision as he turns towards the exit, hunching over as though making himself smaller will make him quieter too.
It’s then he hears it. The collision of a body against a single plastic container, and the creak of toppling packaging that comes with it. For a moment he is frozen in confusion, every sense tracing the corners of his body to find the culprit limb until he realises he hadn’t yet moved.
In the aisle beside him, the empty aisle he had already walked down, a heavy thud reverberates against the floor, twisting, turning, then the thud rings again, echoed by skittered movement just a decibel quieter. The pile of feathers below the counter stills instantly.
For a single second the world is frozen still, held infinitely poised on the end of a thread trying so desperately to pass through the eye of a trembling needle. Time shimmers past as Jisung holds oxygen in his frozen lungs until he thinks his bronchiole will burst with the pressure.
Then the world around Jisung detonates. The flowing pile at the foot of the counter explodes into a whirlwind of black feathers. Animalistic screeches fill the air around him until no other sound registers. A body slams against the other side of the shelving he is crouched against.
Jisung throws himself backwards, away from the front of the store where the noise that shattered his peace had come. He doesn’t stop until the cool glass of the drinks fridge hits his shoulder. Then he’s darting to the side, eyes pinned on the windows that glimmer in daylit streets. His hand scrambles against his side and falls on the tight leather sheath a second before he pulls the knife into his grasp.
He lurches his body forward, feet squeaking against the floor. He dives down the aisle, shelving flying past him in a blur as he charges towards the glass exit. He curses himself in that split second rush for an imagined finish line.
Why didn’t he close the door behind him? Why didn’t he secure the store before looting? Why didn’t he pay more attention? Why didn’t he follow the protocol? Why didn’t he—
The body hits him out of nowhere, a torpedo slamming into him from somewhere in his peripheral vision. Jisung crumples to the floor, every breath of air punched out of him in an instant. His hands raise instinctively and he feels a hard bone beak clash against the thick leather gloves over his fingers.
Desperation sinks into his muscles and he scrambles to push the body atop him away. Flesh and feather twists against his hands, presses an insistent weight down upon him. Claws rip against his body, trying desperately to pierce his protective armour. Just barely, he can hear his own screams beyond the starving shrieks that fill the air around him.
Searing pain lurches through his nerves and he feels, rather than sees, the bones of his index and ring fingers crunch and snap under the beak clenched around his left hand. The grey bone halts centimetres before his forehead and Jisung goes cross-eyed as he tries to focus the blackhole nostrils hovering above his face.
He moves on instinct, the leather-bound hilt of his knife has fallen to the side but he slides a hand underneath the small of his back and feels the skin-warmed metal that meets his fingertips. He pulls the gun from beneath his body and thrusts it upwards, buries the barrel into the black feathers suspended above him, and pulls the trigger.
The gunshot rips through the air around him. An explosion, a bomb dropped upon the world, a single sound ripping through the insides of every sound that came before, leaving his eardrums ringing infinitely. The gun shudders in his hand, the recoil reverberating in winding pain along every inch of muscle in his body.
The writhing weight atop his body drops instantly and he pushes it to the side, ignoring the bile that crawls in his throat. He drags himself to his knees, left hand pressed tight to his sternum. He slides the gun back into his waistband, barely feeling the burning hot barrel searing the thin skin at the small of his back.
His free hand scrambles for his knife, knocked aside in the desperate fight. He clambers to his feet and slams the leather-wrapped hilt into the window before him. The glass shudders under his assault, cracks snaking across the surface.
He can hear the frantic steps thundering towards him, feel the Corvid body from the counter hurtling down the aisles. Jisung pulls his fist back and hurdles the blade forward again, throwing his body weight behind the swing.
A hundred shards of scattered mirror pieces flutter against the concrete ground. Jisung doesn’t hesitate, diving through the broken exit door and he feels the air ripple past him as the Corvid’s claws pierce through the air where he once was just standing.
For a moment he scrambles against the concrete, leather and armour scraping against the knife-blade edge glass particles strewn below his body. Then he is on his feet and running, sprinting, dashing along the streets that barely held his gaze.
His heart is pounding in his throat, deep and unavoidable, counted in the gasping breaths that he can only now hear rasping in his ears through the manufactured plastic moulded around his lips. Every muscle, every centimetre of his skin, is screaming for attention but he presses forward.
The buildings rush past in his narrowed vision but he barely sees them as he pushes one foot in front of another. The backpack pressing between his shoulders is a heavy but welcome weight, dragging ever down with the pressure of everything that he has just barely escaped with.
Jisung runs. And then he looks back.
Later, in the four walls of that brick shelter that he has come to call home, he will wonder what it was that made him throw that single glance over his shoulder. Jisung doesn’t look back. He has never looked back.
But now he does. Freedom pulses through his body in adrenaline veins and all the weight of the world flowing in an invisible tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and Jisung looks back.
There are six, maybe seven, Corvid bodies racing after him, more joining every second, a horde built from a single gunshot. They surge in numbers from the dark alleyways and side-streets where all those shadows he dismissed reveal themselves as the hidden threats. It doesn’t matter. They won’t catch up, they can’t catch up to someone with their life on the line.
And there’s the slightest gap, the tiny ebbing of the tide around a single rock that doesn’t budge. A single body holds still in the acidic flow around it. In that single glance over his shoulder, Jisung sees him.
Dual-wield eyes, one deep-river mud, the other electric-shock blue. Long eyelashes and thin brows. Cheekbones that run tempered lines across an angled face. Pink lips ever so slightly parted so that Jisung can see the slightest hint of teeth just slightly yellowed by the passage of time. A man that doesn’t yet belong among iridescent feathers and hungered glazes.
He stands, like a ship’s figurehead, waves of black flowing around a single body that is still so human in every sweat-soaked pore. River-mud scent and he’s still human. Water-bubble laugh and he’s still just a human with multi-coloured eyes.
Jisung rips his gaze from the man and runs.
The tidal wave of black-hole shrieks follows him. The city melts into the suburbs and he tears the mask from his face so his exhaled carbon-dioxide melts into the air around him.
Thirty minutes later, when the caws are nothing more than distant thunder, he slows to a jog, lungs burning as he gulps in air. Still he doesn’t dare slow to a walk, every hastened footstep echoed against the world around him.
The pain in his fingers is overwhelming. Jisung pauses just long enough to pull painkillers and a triangle bandage from his backpack before he resumes running. He wraps the bandage around his arm, pulling the material into a temporary sling to hold his hand trapped tight against his chest. He forces the pills down his throat, desperate for the pain relief.
He follows knife-edge slits seared into the bark of tree trunks and withering fences. His feet never slow until he can see pink and purple brick walls and the ever-encroaching pattern of moss that wreathes his home. And his pace never slows, the full backpack bouncing against the small of his back. He never slows until the multi-layered dust of the wooden floor welcomes the worn fabric of his trainers that are split against the edges of his worn soles.
He throws himself into his nest of blankets, trembling, gasping, and still he can’t see anything but multi-coloured eyes staring back.
🝔 현재 🝔
The wind howls angry and churning around the edges of the little shack. It’s always amusing to Jisung how the first storms of spring are often worse than those in the dead of winter. It’s like the world is caught in the reminder of steam clouded breath and goosebump chills.
Rain pounds against the glass windows, against the brick and mortar, against the wood planks and tarpaulin roof. It sounds like fingertips drumming on his forehead, like knocking at the door, like something is trying to get inside.
He curls into a tighter ball, pulls the blankets closer to his body and cradles his broken fingers in the crook below his chin. It’s been a week since he fled the city and the shattered bones ache everyday, especially in the chilled air. He tries to limit how many painkillers he takes, ever so conscious of their dwindling number in his haphazard first aid kit.
There’s a sloppy splint around them now, constructed from the ends of tree branches and the ripped fabric of his least favourite shirt. He knows little about setting bones, just hopes that his efforts will be enough to save the thin limbs.
A thunder clap shatters through the air and he can’t stop the way his body flinches and tremors at the sudden sound. It’s loud and unforgiving, pressing into all the spaces that should only belong to Jisung and rolling through his tensed muscles. It feels like an intruder, a presence invading his home.
The door opens.
He should have seen it coming. That’s the first thing he thinks as the worm-ridden wood swings open in front of him. He should have seen it coming, and perhaps he did, but he never tried to stop it.
A body stumbles into the shelter of the shack and Jisung doesn’t need to look up to know who it is but he does anyway.
Mismatched eyes hover below black hair pulled into knife-edge strands that drip with rain water. Water rolls off his pale skin and collects in puddles on the worn wood floor.
The body instantly moves to the corner where he belongs, the corner that has been waiting for him. The man collapses against the blankets worked into a pile, untouched from the last time he filled the room.
His skin is trembling, shivering intermittently as if even the touch of open air chills his flesh down to the bone. The body furls into a foetal position, arms curling tight around his legs, the black feathers traced upon his body like tattoo outlines waiting to be filled, stark against the pale skin of his exposed biceps.
Jisung pulls his mind from the intruder and tries to calm his breathing, only to find that every breath is already easier than the last. He focuses on his heartbeat and finds the organ pulsing gentle and steady in the cavern of his chest. He readies his mind, prepares to steady his physical reactions, and finds this body has already settled into the gentle rhythm of a resting body.
Wait. What?
When did an unknown presence ease the uncertainty that had wound every inch of his sinew and bone until he knew nothing but fear and panic? When did a stranger become nothing more than another flowering fruit in the graveyard of his apocalypse? When did he breathe easier when another body joined his own?
The body lying across the room sighs, deep and weary, the inches of his muscle loosening with each exhaled breath. He squirms his head, winding deeper into the blankets that fell around him and Jisung finds himself relaxing even further into his own cocoon of warmth.
They rest like that for a while, Jisung lying on his side, eyes never leaving the other body in the room, even as he feels himself fade further into the tides of sleep. And the stranger doesn’t move again beyond the shivers that wracked his limbs in the spring-time chill of storms and wind that won’t warm until summertime sun.
And against all odds, against the uncertainty that should be pumping through his veins, against the adrenaline that should be gripping his heart, against the choked breathing that should be catching in his throat. Against all that he knows, Jisung sees his eyelids close, feels his breath calm, hears his heartbeat slow.
See, hear, feel.
Then the body lurched upwards. Those eyes, dual coloured, each so different in their slickened dull brown and heighted vibrant blue, they finally settled on Jisung’s curled form.
And now he feels it, the catch of oxygen particles in his oesophagus, the tightening of his muscles, the frozen uncertainty exposed upon his face.
That body before him moves. It stands, drawing a cape of dust-born blankets tight around his shoulder and it seems like he fills the entire room but perhaps that was just his shadow cast from the burning fire. He walks forward, every step so slow and measured, as if he is approaching a frightened animal, prepared to flee.
As if Jisung is a frightened animal, just waiting to run.
The stranger stops, the tips of his toes just barely whispering against the blankets that make Jisung’s bed. He hovers above him, so tall in the height of one stood above another, yet so small in the continuing tremble of his skin and the chin that is pressed deep into his chest, the eyes that focus only on wood-grain patterns.
“I-I can’t infect you.” The words came in stuttering uncertainty but Jisung could hear the questions that lurked behind certain truths. “It’s been more than two weeks.”
He hesitates, eyes flicking to Jisung’s and then casting away to the knife-edge notches carved into the wall beside his bed. “It’s been so much longer.”
“Okay.” Jisung’s voice is nothing more than a whisper fed into the space between their two bodies. Thunder-clap rolls echo beyond the expanses of their small shack but he barely tenses.
He doesn’t know why he moves, doesn’t know how he manages to interpret the unspoken request that is asked of him. Or maybe it is obvious in the aversion of eyes and shivering skin.
Slowly he lifts the blankets that surround him until there’s a cavernous space beside his body, instantly filled with chilled air.
It’s unexplainable, incomprehensible, that tied rope that he feels connecting between his own body and the stranger hovering over him. Jisung sees the feather outlines, constantly fluttering just beyond the surface of the other’s skin, waiting for a momentary lapse in focus that will set them free. He sees the single blue eye, the cue of a juvenile Corvid waiting to burst free into the world.
He knows that the man before him is balanced on a precipice, a frozen body hovering just inches over a cliff-face, caught between oxygen infection and the solid consistency of a human body. But he’s been poised on the edge for weeks, he’s been fighting, struggling, screaming, for months, for as long as it takes for blood to seep into wood floors. Jisung doesn’t understand it, doesn’t even know if what he sees is possible. And maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe it’s all a lie.
Maybe the mud-eyes are pretending in quiet words and the fingers that clench against blanket fibres. Maybe he’s acting in the gaze that filters down towards his ragged shoes and puddled rain-water spreading across the floor. Maybe he’s a liar, caught up in the pressure of hunger and a grey-toned beak that he holds at bay until Jisung’s soft skin is exposed.
Or maybe he’s exactly what he shows. Maybe he’s arms clasped tight against his own middle, as though he can stem the tide of disease that corrupts his atoms. Maybe he’s brown irises that never give in to the surging force below. Maybe he’s stammered words and that ever so human desire for a body to warm his own.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s as real as Jisung feels. Maybe, just maybe, he’s found a way to be more than just diseased flesh.
The stranger hesitates for one second, a single second caught in tense muscles and automatic reactions. His fingers curl tighter until the sinews of his forearms are bulging against his skin. His eyes widen in surprise and uncertainty until his eyebrows are disappearing amongst rain-slick strands of hair.
He stills, for a moment in time, and then there is a body folding into the space offered, curling tight against Jisung’s side.
It’s cold and wet, that other someone still soaked in the rain-patter footsteps that now collide with the brick and wood construction holding the weather at bay. But he’s warm, chilled skin but warm flesh, huddled tight against Jisung’s body like those burning stars that settle in predetermined constellations across a night-black sky.
Jisung lets his arm drop, lets his wayward limbs circle around the tense waist of the stranger pressed against him. He lets the wet chill of rain-soaked fabric melt into his body warmth until all he can feel is the fire of one human being against another.
“Thank you.” The stranger’s words are soft, almost lost in the harsh bullet-storm of rain that lashes against the roof above them. “It’s so cold.”
Words, almost lost in the t-shirt that stretches across Jisung’s chest, but he hears them, and Jisung understands them. He feels the osmosis appreciation soaking into his bones with water-logged fabric against his skin.
“It’s okay.” He whispers and his words spread in carbon-dioxide breath upon the nape of the neck curled before him.
And it’s okay. It’s all okay. That body whose trembles fade against his own until they are nothing more than the inhale and exhale of human design.
It’s okay. When the tight breathing filling the space around him evens out into the deepest displacement of air, ever so steady in the rhythmic press of sleep.
It’s okay when Jisung feels his arm tighten incrementally around the body pressed into him and knows that when he wakes he will be consumed by the emptiness of one room made for two humans.
It’s okay, and he lets himself float into the sea-trench unconsciousness of sleep, the world where he is so very vulnerable and so very unprotected. A world where an alien presence lays across his limbs and any second he will die, but, in this twisted world of the end of days, he has never felt safer.
When he wakes the brick around him is bright and welcoming, pulsating in the light of a new day. The rain has cleared and sunlight beams through the windows, bright and overbearing.
He turns to the side, automatically seeks and raises the knife that has long warped from stiff leather into a mould of his grip. Then he pauses.
There’s a new notch on his wall, carefully carved in a single straight line standing beside those three most-recent crooked bars, scratched in the collapse of sleep. It’s inched into the brick below, sculpted in a structured score standing tall against the ones that came before, like a soldier sliding into a practised formation. It’s a single measure, another day, the image of time, etched indefinitely into the wall beside Jisung’s bed.
And he breathes in, drops the knife in his hand against the fatigued blankets below him. He breathes out and lets his fingertips roam across the indented line. He breathes in and feels another day fill his lungs. He breathes out and he can almost sense another body pressed alongside his own, even though that warmth has long since escaped through the wooden door and into the post-storm grey-scale morning.
🜍 과거 🜍
“Jisung-hyung?” The voice was high-pitched and wavering, barely more than a whimper, laced by the hint of panic. “Something’s wrong.”
“H-huh?” Jisung tried to rouse himself from the haze of sleep, tried to focus on his little brother’s words. “What-cha mean?”
“Mum’s not moving, hyung.” Jeongin’s voice was thin and stilted, achingly distant as if he was holding back the thunder rolls of emotions within. “And my Dad won’t say anything.”
My Dad. Jisung thinks that maybe those words should hurt more but it’s been three years since his parents divorced, two years since his mother found love in Jeongin’s father, one year and at least nine months since Jisung finally accepted his half-brother was too sweet, too gentle, to resent.
“I’m scared,” Jeongin whispered as he burrowed under the duvets warmed by Jisung’s body. “What’s happening, hyung?”
“I don’t know.” Jisung wrapped an arm around Jeongin’s frame and squeezed, pulling his gangly body tight against his own. He pressed a lazy kiss to his brother’s hairline, still too tired to care about the self-imposed boundaries of their relationship. “I’ll find out.”
Reluctantly he pulled himself out of the warmth of his bedsheets and away from the clasp of Jeongin’s limbs. His muscles creaked and sighed in protest as he pulled a shirt over his head, content with boxers to cover his lower extremities.
The apartment was quiet when he walked out of the room he shared with his younger brother. The cool blue shade of his computer’s monitor filled the space, Jeongin never remembered to turn it off when he used it. The silence of the room was comforting, soothing, natural. The early-morning city below them was too far for any sound to reach them, the gentle hum of the refrigerator being the only presence to fill the space.
It was all calm in Jisung’s mind until he saw the shadow sandwiched between the kitchen island and the counter that held their oven-top, toaster, and kettle. It was dark, almost blacked-out against the street light filtered in from the half closed curtain, but Jisung could recognise the outlines of his step-father, standing before the countertop.
My Dad. When his mother had sat him down upon their well-worn couch and explained how their lives were going to change, Jisung had hated him instantly. It was easy. Another body trying to slip into the space that still belonged to his own father, distant but still there.
He had hated his step-father, until he couldn’t. He had hated that replacement parent that moved in with another son in tow, for all of a week. His step-father was kind eyes that wrinkled with every easy smile. His step-father was a warm hand that shook his own and reassurances of ‘I never want to replace him’. His step-father never looked down on Jisung, didn’t ignore him, didn’t try to buy him, didn’t try to change him. He just accepted Jisung as he was and Jisung couldn’t stop himself from doing the same.
And maybe he had been laughed at in the classroom when the teacher turned their back. Maybe the school-yard bullies had told him his ‘real’ father didn’t want him anymore. Maybe he had heard the adults whispering about ‘what a shame’ and ‘broken home’.
But Jisung just couldn’t bring himself to care. Those coarse words and that poorly-hidden laughter were nothing new. The caustic jibes and the eyes that so quickly faded from pity to contempt were something he was used to as a slim frame with anxious ticks. He thought it would hurt more but he just couldn’t bring himself to care when reality was sweeter than he thought it could be.
In the end what mattered was his Mother’s easy smile, his step-father’s booming laughter. What mattered was the softening the air within his home and the beef jjigae his step-father perfected on red-hot rings of their oven-top. There was never a replacement, never trading one for another. There was just another person to stand at his side.
So he was frozen, trapped in the doorway of his room, eyes caught upon a shadow that was so very still, but he wasn’t scared. It was just his step-father, his second Dad because he was lucky enough to have two.
He ran his hand across the wall until his fingers hit the light-switch and clicked it on. Light bloomed across his vision and he squinted for a moment at the bright glare. When his eyes adjusted, he felt the world shatter around him.
His mother was laid upon the white linoleum floor of the kitchen, hair splayed around her face in a black halo. She could’ve been sleeping, that’s what he thought at first, her arms limp at her sides, legs bent just slightly. She could've been sleeping if not for the blood pooling below her body and the scream caught in his throat.
It was dark, maroon rather than the crimson in graphics from those video games he only played when no one was home to chastise him. It dripped from yawning gashes carved into the flesh of her torso. Each one spread out from her chest, fingers of violence pouring from her chest.
She could’ve been sleeping—
But a blackened beak protruded from her face. It was matte black, so dark it seemed like a blackhole streaked across the pale linoleum. So alien he thought he was seeing things until he blinked once, twice, and then again.
But the twisted scene never changed. There were no pink lips or white teeth curved into a sweet smile. There were no gentle words or careless laughter. It was all a twisted vision, a warped collision of human and animal trapped in his mother’s flesh.
Jisung gasped, sucked in oxygen, breathed in and out, curled his desperate inhale and exhale around the trembling space that had settled in the musculature of his lungs.
She could’ve been sleeping—
But his mother’s eyes were azure blue. They were so stark and multi-faceted in the glimmer of a single colour that could drown out all others. They were the hue of summer skies, the shade of glistening seas. There was no soft brown, no light hazel like wood grain. No slight glisten at the edges that Jisung had adored long before he was old enough to understand the love behind it.
And—
And his step-father stood over her still body, outlined by the streetlights glimmering beyond the enamel-glass window. A kitchen knife was clutched in his fingers and blood dripped from the razor-blade edge.
A sob ripped from Jisung’s throat. His step-father’s eyes snapped to his own as his gaze blurred. Tears caught against his swollen eyelids until his eyelashes were clumped into dull shadows at the edge of his vision.
“Appa?” And he had never called his step-father, that, never, not even when he wanted to. Jisung’s voice broke in the middle, uncertain and trembling with fear and hatred and something in between. Something that had splinted in his chest, something that snapped under the weight of his heart, so his abdomen was filled with knife-blades and jagged glass.
“I had to.” His step-father’s words shuddered, like his protests when Jisung had joined Jeongin on the living-room floor, tickling his step-father’s sides until delighted screams and laughter was flowing out the open windows and across summer streets. “I didn’t want to.”
And those tears welling in Jisung’s eyes, they streaked down his step-father’s cheeks like river water forced beyond tree-trunk dams.
“Run.” The words were tight and harsh, certain and unavoidable. Fists clenched at his step-father’s side and Jisung could see the pattern of black feathers that raised against the skin stretched before him. His step-father opened his mouth again, parted those lips that seemed to harden into grey bone. “Get your things. Put your mask on.”
And his father’s eyes met his own so afraid, so desperate, so scared, so— blue.
“Run.” His step-father curled in upon his own flesh, holding in the something that tried to rise upon his surface. “Get Jeongin and run.”
Two shadows, outlined by the harsh overhead light, silhouette by white linoleum and kitchen counters. One hunched over in the curl of regret and regeneration. The other spread out in violent ends and blue-eyed beginnings.
“Run.” His step-father said and the outline of black feathers pulsed out upon his skin.
Time skipped. Maybe there was a memory there, maybe something occurred in those minutes of desperate scrambling and uncertainty. Maybe it all faded away like an omniscience giant had scooped out of his soft brain matter. Perhaps Jisung moved, perhaps he teleported, or perhaps something passed that he just doesn’t have the memory space to recall.
Jeongin’s hand was clasped tight in his own and Jisung turned his brother’s head so he couldn’t see the death-scene painted red in their kitchen. And his step-father was black feathers and white knuckles that gripped the counter, holding himself back.
“Run and never look back.”
Run and never look back.
The words were broken and chattering. Barely a sound among guttural caws that bounced upon the cream-coloured walls that Jisung grew up within.
The world outside the apartment block was tumultuous and writhing. A mix of bodies and beaks and black feathers so dark that the moon could only shimmer across their surface. The silence was forgotten as screams and shrills shredded the night. They stepped out into a battlefield, a war, a roiling pavement of bodies colliding and collapsing, human and something else.
And Jeongin’s hand faded within his own. Jeongin’s skin, so warm against Jisung’s own. Jeongin with a metal-brace smile and eyes that crescent against the muscles of his own happiness. Jeongin with sweet words and a sweeter gaze.
Jeongin. It had been easy to roll his eyes when his mother showed him pictures of his new step-brother-to-be. He was long limbs, slim eyes and braced teeth in a smile too young to know the world.
Jisung, this is Jeongin. It had been easy to tilt his lips into a sneer, light enough that his mother wouldn’t notice but obvious enough to let his step-brother know he wasn’t welcome.
Jeongin, just the slightest bit taller than Jisung even though he was ‘still growing’. Jeongin with a sugar-dripped smile that softened his mother’s eyes. Jeongin who lingered on the living-room couch when Jisung was trying to get lost in video-game worlds. Jeongin, who knocked on his bedroom door with a stupid smile until Jisung’s sharp glares made him realise he was intruding.
Jeongin, who his step-father explained in carefully considered words when he pulled Jisung aside, two months into their newly built ‘home’.
Jeongin, he said after his eyes had fizzed around the room before meeting Jisung’s. He doesn’t have many friends. His step-father’s fingers dug into the plush pillows his mother had sewn on rainy weekends. He has trouble connecting with people.
Jeongin, his step-father said, as he sat on the coffee-table in front of the living-room couch where Jisung had been watching tv. He always wanted an older brother.
Jeongin, who played Mario Kart with Jisung after school, even though he never really liked video games. Jeongin, who always looked for Jisung when the bullies made him cry, even though Jisung just told him to stop being such a cry-baby. Jeongin, who snuck into his bed at night even though Jisung would kick him out if he wasn’t too tired.
The warmth in Jisung’s palm was wrenched away. There were bodies between them, screaming and shouting, eyes filled with unconstrained fear and borne by that instinct of a life on the line. The heat in his hand faded and Jisung thought he might be screaming.
“Jeongin!” The screech rose above all the writing bodies that had filled the street beyond his family’s apartment.
“Where are you?!” And the voice is the loudest Jisung has ever heard, so wild and unrestrained.
“Jeongin!” And Jisung knew it was his own voice, so desperate and screaming, louder than anything else under that night-black sky, even as the plastic mask suffocated his words. And his hand was so cold.
“Jisung!” He heard the response, his brother’s voice thin but oh so easy to pick out. He spun, trying to see through the strangers around him as though he had x-ray vision. “Help me, please!”
And his heart clenched with fear, his fragile heart held together by metal teeth braces and crescent eyes. Jisung’s fingers scrambled against stranger’s skin, digging in, white tips turning dark red. His legs tried to find footing on the grey concrete, tried to surge forward, but the crowd pushed him back.
“JEONGIN.” The scream tore through his vocal chords, ripping pain through his throat but he barely noticed it. His body, a ghost among clouds of fear, was carried away as his hands thrust over their shoulders. His hands, so cold, ice block popsicles like those Jeongin would whine for after school. And Jisung would roll his eyes, huff a sigh, and pull his wallet from his backpack
Jeongin. Step-brother. Jeongin. Somewhere along the way Jisung had forgotten the ‘step’. Jeongin. Brother.
The twisting mass of the riot among the streets threw Jisung into a cold-brick alleyway. In the darkness, unbroken by pale street-light, he dropped to the grey pavement, thighs pressed so tightly against his chest he could feel his panicked heartbeat trapped against his chest.
And he screamed, into his kneecaps, into his black canvas shoes, into the ground holding him up. He screamed as feet thundered past, as bodies knocked over his hunched form. He screamed as a foot connected with his temple and enveloped the streets of Seoul in black infinity.
He screamed for his brother. And he never again heard his brother scream back.
🝔 현재 🝔
Jisung is leaning back into the hard-wood caress of the swing chair the first time he sees him slip into the confines of his garden. It’s the first breathing creature he has seen trespass on his land apart from the occasional fluff of a hare’s tail and the fluttering brown wings of sparrows that send his heartbeat into fearful bursts of static.
It’s been five weeks since his supply run and the strength in his fingers is slowly starting to crawl back. Jisung knows, in the awkward angle and bulging joints, that they will never quite be the same without the knowledge of modern medicine, but he still quirks the edges of his lips every time he manages to grip the hilt of his knife or the handle of his spade slightly tighter.
The slow-paced healing is a small victory but he feels it nevertheless. It still feels like a win even if it’s just to grip the left side of his sheers and snip at the snaking arms of the berry bushes trying to reach out. Such a silly victory but Jisung knows he will take anything he can.
It seems he spends most of his days taking care of his garden, even more than he did before when he used to risk the clamber beyond grey-stone walls to the world beyond. Now he chooses to lurk in his garden. Now he cups green-stalk fruit and maturing seedlings between his calloused palms and speaks to them as if one day they will speak back.
Sometimes he thinks he spends too long in the garden, occasionally forgoing his wooden rope perch so he can sit cross-legged above the green grass, still well fed from winter rains. So everyone now and then he lets himself sit for minutes that blend into hours that meld into days and days and days and days, just watching his garden bloom.
“It’s like watching grass grow,” Changbin once said when they were in Maths class, both staring blankly at the equation that unravelled on the whiteboard before them in black ink just waiting to be erased. Afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the windows and Jisung felt it rising higher and higher on his face, not due to the passage of time, but rather because his chin dipped lower and lower in the cradle of his palm.
“What does that even mean?” He scoffed as Changbin’s heavily-lidded eyes turned to him. “Who the hell watches grass grow?”
“I have no idea,” Changbin whispered back, voice low enough to murmur low tones below their teacher’s. “Appa said it once when he was on a conference call and he was drawing things in his day-book like you are.”
Jisung looked down at his notebook and found every margin filled with random doodles and idle words, as if another consciousness had taken over when he so diligently ignored his teacher’s words in favour of the random scribbles against the curve of stapled edges.
There was no plot-line or pretence to the strange collection of blue-ink lines, no maybe or otherwise. There was just a collection of beings filling the borders of learning until there was no space left but the light-blue parallel stripes that waited for education to spill forth in short-hand notification. A blank page hemmed in by blue-ink margins.
“It’s like watching grass grow.”
A movement startles Jisung out of the memory-riddled daze that he had fallen into. The movement is slight and hesitant, progressing in careful steps as though they never wanted to be seen, never wanted to be noticed. It’s just a shadow that thought it was nothing more than peripheral vision ghosts.
But Jisung sees him. The black shadow flows over the turnstile like water flowing over a dam too short to stem the tide. He flits forward, hesitating behind the trunks of pre-bloom fruit trees as if the thin, white-stripped trunks will hide his gradual progress across the green grass.
Then he turns his head ever so slightly and eyes land upon Jisung’s little corner in the far edge of the hemmed haven. He’s still swinging back and forth, carried by the one foot he plants into the ground, muscles tensing and relaxing in the push and pull of the sewing seat. His other foot rests upon his thigh, rippling in height as he oscillates his body to a rhythm only Jisung can hear.
And the body freezes, multi-coloured eyes caught on the subconscious movement of another but never daring to rise further and meet Jisung’s gaze. He’s a silhouette caught between the adolescence of a towering banana tree that might live to adulthood, and the curling mesh of a blueberry bush.
The moment stills, wind whistling, sun warming their brown skin. Jisung allows his gaze to move, to settle on the man that has invaded the peace of his garden, the man that has long since trespassed in the corner of his shack— his home.
And the first thing he always sees is multi-coloured eyes, winding upwards to pierce into his own as if there was never any other place they could belong. The second thing he always sees is the black-feather outlines writhing in ever-changing patterns, like a living mandala injected below his skin.
The third thing he sees is everything. All of him, all the body compressed before him into the space of one human. Just a body, simple and aligned. One head, two arms, one torso, two legs. Everything exactly where it should be.
A body, layered by feathers and patterned by leaf shadows. Him. His feet are bare, toes digging into the soft earth and green grass. Him. A defined outline, swallowed by sunlight. Hime. And the magnetic pull of opposites draws Jisung’s eyes to the face before him.
It’s a face of tightened pink lips and pale cheeks; of raven hair that brushes against long eyelashes and the slightest flush of someone caught in a place they didn’t want to be seen.
Then the shadow relaxes their shoulders in a breath that exhales so many metres away but Jisung feels it against his cheek, as if butterfly wing caresses are born on hurricane winds. Then the stranger steps forward.
And he steps forward again.
And again. The grass gives way under his feet, then springs back when the weight of his body is carried forward again. His hand wreaths around the apple tree, then drops, only for the other to cup around an alder tree, as if the thin trunks can provide him with roots he cannot yet grow.
His steps grow closer until he is no more than five metres from Jisung, still swinging habitually on the rope seat that refuses to give way to fraying fabric. Then the stranger turns on a perfect right angle and sits.
Jisung stares at his side profile for a moment, silhouette perforated by compulsory snapshots of the background surrounding them, as if searching for an unseen danger and habitually drawing back although there is nowhere for him to go.
The stranger— is he still a stranger?— gazes straight ahead, lips drawn tight against each other, brows furrowed in concentration, staring resolutely at the garden edges before him, hands clenched tightly in his lap and shoulders held taught against his sides.
Jisung glances away in twitching patterns once, twice, twelve times, persuaded by that societal consideration that no longer exists but is still hammered into his automation, before he lets his gaze settle on the lines of the man before him.
Then multi-coloured eyes meet his own and the slightest twitch of a smile pulls the stranger’s lips up. Soft, subtle, just barely there. The smallest hint of something beyond all that jumbled uncertainty and fear and hesitance and secrecy and—
Jisung feels his own mouth wind into a mirrored smile before he skips his eyes away for the thirteenth time.
They sit there for hours, hours that Jisung doesn’t bother counting. They never speak, never even exchange the basic pleasantries that belonged to a world before. They just exist, in that five metre infinite space between two people in an ever-blooming garden, and wait for… nothing—
Maybe something.
When the sun has disappeared with the collection of night, and the shadows have lengthened into a grey-scale world, Jisung stands. He forgoes words for just a second and instead gestures to the shack before them. He isn’t sure what he suggests, what he means, with the small raise of his hand, but the stranger snaps to his feet and slowly, carefully, shakes his head.
“Good night,” Jisung offers, and silently congratulates himself when his unused voice doesn’t waver in the chilled air.
“Good night,” the stranger returns, and nods ever so slightly. Then he nods again, and once more, in staggered, smaller movements, as if he is convincing some omniscient deity of his resolve.
Then the stranger is walking away, slow and methodical, as if he has always belonged, as if he was never a creeping shadow sneaking across Jisung’s garden. He climbs smoothly over the turnstile and disappears into the undergrowth beyond, leaving shimmering leaves in his wake.
As if he was never there. As if he had never existed. As if he was something to be forgotten by those who were no longer alive.
Jisung trudges slowly to his home, running his fingers across the sandpaper texture of red brick worn pink and purple. He swings the paint-peeled door open, then pushes it closed behind himself, and he knows it would not open again until he wakes to greet the faint strands of morning.
The dam bursts open from that single day onwards. The invisible barrier that seemed to cling to Jisung’s garden is reshaped to allow a single specific body through. A single someone, granted entry with his multi-coloured eyes and high cheekbones.
The stranger— not a stranger anymore— fills Jisung’s days with a presence that lingers long after nightfall. He leans against tree trunks as Jisung tends to his plants. He sits on the green grass, respecting that careful five metres measured between their bodies. He runs his fingers in the water, just slightly downstream from where Jisung washes his earthy hands.
That strange person— strange but no longer a stranger— creeps on silent feet into Jisung’s every moment from late morning to darkest night. He crouches low and watches Jisung untangle captured prey from his multitude of traps. He cocks his head and listens with focused eyes as Jisung whispers pointless encouragements to his incrementally blooming garden. He slides his fingers over the developing bark of the fruit trees, as if reading braille, as if learning the thoughts and feelings of everything that Jisung can never understand.
He shakes his head every time Jisung raises a hand in the direction of his huddled home, once the stars had begun to sparkle just a little too bright in the black-bruised sky. He shakes his head and turns towards the grey-stone wall that rings the garden.
But Jisung is so sure that every night he lingers just a little longer, caught up in eyes fluttering between Jisung’s outstretched hand and the worn-brick shelter. Every night he hesitates just a little bit longer. Every night his gaze wanders just slightly further along the extended arm that Jisung reaches towards his home.
And every night Jisung finds himself lingering in the garden just a few minutes later. Every night Jisung waits just a little longer until the night has deepened and the universe is constellation-studded silk woven above their poised bodies. And every night he sits a little longer beneath those stars, staring into the collecting shadows. Jisung stands and stares just a little longer at the body disappearing over the turnstile as if he can see the stranger’s— not a stranger, was he ever a stranger?— life that existed beyond his own.
And every night Jisung finds himself wishing that his stranger had stayed… just a little bit longer.
🝔 현재 🝔
Late morning finds Jisung bathing his clothes in the shallow rush of the creek that traces an outline around his garden. Its soft, subtle just barely lingering around the contour of grey stone walls, nothing more than a gently bubbling creek but the strangely crystal clear waters always draw Jisung in until he has spent hours listening to bubbling water and gazing at the rippling pools of liquid that just barely break the surface of stillness .
A branch breaks, a twig caught in the force of weight that presses down upon it until something has to give way. There’s a heartbeat second of fearful uncertainty as Jisung flinches, almost lurching forward into the babbling brook as if the flowing water could somehow seclude his body.
Then another break fills the silence left by the one before. It’s another footstep, cast by someone uncaring of the sound made. Jisung spins, still hunkered down against the leaf-littered floor, his thighs screaming against the movement and his heels digging into rain-softened ground.
A body emerges from the tree-cover. He’s tall and certain, towering over Jisung’s earth-crouched form. He’s multi-coloured eyes, one blending into the river-bank mud, the other charged in the brightest blue as if azure electricity flows through his veins. He’s strong lines, imposing muscle that can be glimpsed in the tattered shreds of his blue-denim jeans and white shirt.
His stranger is standing at the edge of the trees and Jisung’s limbs relax with the instant elimination of any threat. He should have known really, but it’s still early in the day, earlier than Jisung has seen him before, and something feels strange, like there’s a tension in the air that wasn’t there before.
Slowly he stands and turns to properly face the other. His stranger takes another step forward, the weak rays of spring sun flooding across his skin, and then Jisung sees what he hadn’t noticed in the foliage shadows.
There’s always been the traced outlines of feathers on the stranger's skin, that warning of infection that matches his dual-coloured eyes. Every day the pattern changes, as if he sheds his skin during sleep to rebuild himself once more. As if being caught in dreams allows the disease in his veins to take hold for just a few sparse hours.
It’s different today. The outlines are darker, filled in with the slightest shading, like a half-finished sketch in grey charcoal. And they’re moving.
Jisung blinks, once, twice, a hundred times, and every blink he expects his vision to stabilise. It doesn’t. The feathers are shivering, shaking, fluttering, like the cool breeze floating past is blowing through bird-wing strands. Like if Jisung just reached out a hand, if he closed the distance between them, his fingers would brush over coarse plumage instead of smooth skin.
“Hello.”
Jisung’s eyes snap upwards as his stranger speaks, his voice trembling along the surface of the water as if every rippling whirl-pool was just waiting for his words.
“I’m Minho.”
“Hi.” The simple word escapes between Jisung’s lips in the gentle exhale of breath, so deeply juxtaposed by the fluttering footsteps of his heart that lies caged beneath his ribs. And he has a name now, a name to fit the person winding into his life. “I’m Jisung.”
“Jisung…” His stranger— Minho, Min-ho, MinhoMinhoMinho— takes another step forward and he’s at the edge of their five metre allocated space. His eyes are wide, eyebrows ever so slightly raised, lips parted as if the oxygen flowing through his nose won’t quite be enough. “Hello, Jisung.”
And his name sounds different now, sounds like rain pattering against the roof, sounds like a generator whirring to life, sounds like the crashing rumble of a waterfall colliding with a pooled lake below. His name sounds like syllables splayed across the sky in lightning strike fingers.
“Hello, Minho.”
Silence stretches between them for a long moment, filled with the world that continues around them. It’s nothing new, they have spent days with only single-word goodbyes to break the stillness. It’s different this time and Jisung thinks he is waiting for something although he doesn’t know what.
“I’m sorry.” The words are soft and delicate, almost unspoken, like autumn leaves falling upon a ground already filled by orange and yellow. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Why not?” It’s a question they already know the answer to but Jisung asks it anyway.
“I’m infected.” The stranger’s arms— Minho’s arms— wind around his taut body. His skin— Minho’s skin— tenses and relaxes and tenses again along his slim torso, muscle wriggling below the surface in skeletal patterns. The feathers— Minho’s feathers— tremble violently with the movement, shift and reshape, then continue to writhe, even when he stills. “I know I said it’s been months, and it has, it’s been years…”
He draws a breath and his shoulder’s rise and fall ever so slightly like the rippling breeze over a river’s surface. “But there’s still a chance I could turn you—” his lips press tightly together then part again “—if I lose control.”
“You won’t,” Jisung says and he doesn’t know where the certainty comes from but it feels like definite knowledge, a belief, faith. It feels like something that is too dangerous for apocalypse ruins.. “You won’t hurt me.”
“But I could.”
“So why are you here?” Jisung feels the words push against the fragile membrane that shimmers between his body and the one before him. He isn’t sure if he meant to ask that question, isn’t sure if he wants an answer.
“I don’t know.” The words tumble from the stranger’s mouth—Minho’s mouth— caught in the tanged certainty of sounds that have found a place to belong. “It just feels right.”
“It feels right.” Jisung echoes the words without realising until the sentence has fallen from his lips and settled like a bridge between two strangers, like a length of string binding them together. And he feels a craving sink into his bone marrow, a craving that has been crawling over his mind, over his cells, like centipede feet.
For a moment he thinks of Chan, Chan and his asymmetric dimples, one always always deeper, wider, than the other. Chan and his lips that were always softer than his sharp jawline, eyes so chocolate brown that all the world could tumble into those melting depths and never raise the shoreline beyond black pupils. Chan and the apocalypse connection that pulled them together in a scramble of fear and adrenaline and concrete ceilings.
Jisung breathes out and dimples fade from his vision. They give way to green trees and crystal water and rope chairs and a little brick home hunkered in the corner of a ruined Earth. A garden waiting to be tended and a shadow waiting to crawl over the creaking turnstile. A little slice of the universe that isn’t perfect, isn’t unblemished, but hasn’t yet cracked under the weight of indelible scar tissue.
“It feels right.” Minho’s words flit between their bodies, echoing back and forth in the vibration of sound waves hitting the hard surface of their skin. Minho is taller, by no more than a centimetre or two, but he towers over Jisung, like the twining metal and glass skyscrapers of those cities too infected for any human to pass between.
There’s a little space that shudders within Jisung’s sprawling skeleton, ice-cold, an empty freezer waiting to be filled. There’s a need that crawls into his flesh until all that muscle, sinew, fibre is caught in a longing that is something more than just survival. Jisung sees the outlines of black feathers on Minho’s skin and he knows the danger of falling from the precipice. He knows the uncertainty he is inviting into his home, into his life, into his heart.
But it doesn’t feel dangerous. Jisung isn’t afraid. There’s no adrenaline pumping through his veins. There’s no desperation, no uncertainty, no horde hunting him down.
There’s just Jisung, and Minho, and a bubbling creek.
“Yes,” Jisung whispers even though no question was asked. “It feels right.”
Then he’s reaching forward into empty space, extending a hand across the five metre wasteland. Then Minho is stepping forward, tattered shoes sinking ever so slightly into the ground. Then his hand is slipping into the offered one, his skin rougher than Jisung expected, cool in the spring air. A shiver ripples through his feather outlines, running up his arm and under the hem of his sleeve.
“Pretty,” Jisung mutters and it’s a stupid thing to say but it just feels—
He’s pulled forward and for a second he thinks he is falling, then lips meet his own. Lips that pressed against mud piles and told him to run. They are still against his open mouth, then they move, sliding against Jisung’s chapped skin, rough and dry. A hand is curling around his shoulder, a thumb slipping into the dip of his collarbone.
And Jisung has been kissed before. He’s known the collaboration of lips even before the collision of Chan’s body into his own. He’s felt another person pressed against him and known the intimacy of folded skin crumpling against his own. He experienced the collision of two bodies bound in the desperation of need.
He’s not a virgin caught in the de-evolution of the world. He’s not some hormone-driven teenager caught in the need for release nor is he a touch-starved office-worker tracing a well-worn path from home to workplace. He’s not an ignorant child, not anymore.
But in that moment he thinks he might be. In that moment when Minho kisses Jisung, he thinks he might have degenerated, he might have regressed. He might have folded back in time to when he smiled, wide and teasing, as Changbin told him about his first kiss with Chaeyeon, hidden in the shadows of the library walls. He might have unwound his body to a time when he was an uncertain child following in the footsteps of all those that came before him.
The wind whistles through the leaves above them. The river mumbles onwards in its path to the sea. The wet cotton of forgotten laundry bobs against the river-bank. The ease of spring-soothed air dances against their exposed skin and trembles the edges of the leaves against each other.
And all the world is filled with the soft sounds of their lips meeting and folding and shaping against one another. All else is filled with a fire so hot that Jisung thinks his insides might melt into a stew pot. All else is filled with the constellation of two bodies meeting and the infinite burn of one becoming two and then becoming one again.
Minho tastes… bitter… How strange.
Minho tastes like the Americano Jisung ordered when Changbin dared him to drink something other than hot cocoa, his favourite for when the outside world was bathed in story-board snow. It had taken at least five minutes of cajoling— okay, maybe two minutes of pointed teasing— before Jisung had given in to Changbin’s bright-eyed dare. He had stepped up to the counter and tried to ignore the surprise in their regular servers’ eyes when he placed his very irregular order.
Then Jisung was sitting in front of Changbin with a plastic cup wreathed in condensation, swirling with brown fluid that collected in cream-coloured froth around the rim. It could almost be cocoa, and for a second he was convinced the server had duped him, until the first sip flooded his mouth in an explosion of bitter liquid burning across tongue. He reeled backwards, lips wrenching downwards automatically, even though he tried to contain his grimace under Changbin’s inquisitive gaze.
His friend leaned over the tabletop, erupting with uncontained laughter. In his peripheral Jisung saw the couple at the table next to them turn towards with sound with unconcealed annoyance, and he might have felt the blush on his neck if he wasn’t so repelled by his own damn tastebuds.
“It’s that bad, huh?” Changbin had chortled as he settled back in his chair and it was barely a question but Jisung garbled a slight sound of confirmation as he choked back the bile in his throat. “Maybe it needs some sugar?”
Jisung barely held back the mocking sarcasm on his tongue as he reached for the brown paper tubes resting in the wooden holder on their table. Without hesitation he dumped one, two, three, packets of sugar into his— unfortunately already paid for— cup, and stirred it haphazardly with his teaspoon.
“I would rather die,” he had muttered, finally meeting Changbin’s ecstatic gaze across the laminated tabletop. “I would rather die than drink this.”
Changbin thrust his stomach out against the edge of the table and threw his head back into the space behind his chair, laughter pouring from his mouth. His guffaws only petered out when Jisung poked a finger between his ribs, but still a smile remained transfixed on his lips.
Finally he calmed, settling his hands around his own clear plastic cup of sweet-smelling tea. Still a smirk crept up his lips as he spoke.
“Who knows, Hannie,” he teased with feather-light words. “Maybe it’s just an acquired taste.”
Five years later— almost six— and Jisung thinks (for the first time) that maybe Changbin was right because Minho’s lips meet his own in a leaf-bound circle of stillness next to a bubbling creek, and it feels so goddamn right.
Minho tastes bitter. He isn’t sweet like the syrup in Seungmin’s hotteok. He isn’t sour like the crystallised candy Jeongin bought at the fair every year. He isn’t salty like the jajangmyeon his mother made with just a little too much soy sauce. Minho tastes like coffee shop dares and unbridled laughter and Jisung doesn’t love it, but god, he doesn’t hate it.
“Jisung.” Minho pulls back, just a few centimetres, just enough for words to escape between their hard-pressed bodies. “We shouldn’t.”
And the words expand between them, blow out like a balloon swollen by thdagainst rubber insides. It pushes them apart, in the way that Minho’s arms unwind from Jisung’s neck and Jisung’s hands gradually drop away from Minho’s waist.
“Why? Jisung’s voice comes out weaker than he ever wanted it to be, thin and wavering, cast into the river-bubble flow that rushes behind them and between them, until his words are almost faded and forgotten into the ever-expanding reach of the world. “Why shouldn’t we?”
“Because—” Minho turns away and the black-feather outline along his shoulders ripple as he moves. “I could kill you.”
“But you won’t.”
Jisung’s words hover in the air between them, thick and unsurpassable. Definite and deep, crawling out of his chest like his heart is spilled across the chilled air between them. Like the words are built into an insurmountable gate that will only open for one person, only for him.
“No,” Minho whispers. “I won’t. I’ll never hurt you.” He inhales, deep and desperate and the outlines against his are thicker, darker, more determined. They move without the breeze now, shuffle and shake on his skin as though there is something awakening below his pale surface. “But I could.”
Minho walks away. His tense shoulders are swallowed by the undergrowth. His rigid body disappears into the green leaves that fold under his pressure before they spring back into the place they once held. His head is bowed but every inch of his muscle fills out the space he holds until he is creating a broken shape among the leaves that part to grant him passage.
Jisung is frozen, his feet sinking into the soft mud that creeps up around the plastic soles and black fabric of his infinite-kilometre shoes. The gentle slap of wet fabric hitting upon the single rock he had found to beat the grime out of his dirtied clothes brings him back to the present, to the job he had been committed to before another body joined his own.
He turns. He drops to his knees in the river-edge mud. He looks to the edge of the water where it laps gently against the soft bank, against the sparse green strands of grass that haven’t yet drowned. His fingers crawl forward to the sodden fabric waiting for his return. Jisung returns to his task, to the reason he came out here, basic, simple, no thought needed.
He presses the splattered stains of dirt and filth out of the white cotton t-shirt and he feels his own sense of self wash away in the current of the river that surges ever further. He follows the white-water hiss and spit with tired eyes and wishes for his own body to be born upon the tides, to be carried into a world where he could be nothing but the soft insides of a jellyfish, borne upon the ebb and flow of the tide. Carefree, forgotten, whirled upon the will of the moon, caught in feeling absolutely nothing.
When Jisung returns to the brick walls of his home, he feels broken and snapped, fragile and fragmented, as if the edges of his soul are rubbed raw by fractured bones, sharp enough to break through the thin film of his skin. As if the world that he knows so well is pressing so tight upon his brittle being that any second he will cave in and crumble like three hundred Spartan soldiers folding beneath Persian tides.
He doesn’t. Instead he stokes the fire and lets his body sink into the blankets awaiting him. He lets the door close behind him. He lets the chill of the air fade away and he lets the warmth of the fire-place burn through his bones.
But, as hard as he tries, the lick of flames can’t contend with the overwhelming heat that came from the tongue that pressed between his lips.
🜍 과거 🜍
When the petrol station blurred into view among the shimmering mirages of summer heat, Jisung was somewhere between the middle of nowhere and absolutely, fucking nowhere. The tarmac below him was muddied black, that strange shade when the summer sun is hot enough to melt the crust of roads cut across the countryside. It felt ever so slightly sticky beneath his feet and he wanted to scoff. Turns out humans fucked up the Earth enough that even the apocalypse won’t stop global warming.
It’s the hottest summer he’s felt in what he was pretty sure was seventeen years of life— maybe it’s eighteen, time had become a little blurred since he stopped hiding in the cities where he could scratch days out on peeling paint walls. Sweat was dripping down his skin, soaking his clothes so the fabric clung tightly against his body and he felt slightly claustrophobic.
All around him were sprawling swathes of green fields, likely once farms, now reclaimed by nature. Every now and then, brick houses and wooden sheds broke the landscape but they were few and far between. Above it all the sun gleamed in the pure blue sky, not a single cloud to give him relief from the bright rays. Idly he wondered if he might be lucky enough to die of cancer instead of—
It’d been at least six months since he left the outskirts of Icheon. Seven months since he last saw another human being, at least since he saw one that wasn’t clad in black feathers. His backpack was light on his shoulders and he knew he only had a few days of supplies left. It was hard, travelling on half meals twice a day and blisters that bled into the holes of his last pair of socks. The hourglass he bore on his back was running out of sand.
He saw the sign at least forty minutes ago, a green hallucination— it was easier to think he imagined it, just in case— of dented steel painted with those characters that made hope flood through his chest and his feet move just that little bit faster. Rest stop- 5km.
It had been a few days since he stopped somewhere that wasn’t a patch of grass beneath the blinking stars. It was easier to follow the compass of the constellations and sunfall— even if he was still terrible at navigating. He had long learned that following the roads just led him on winding routes that were only swift by car, pockmarked by small towns that seemed to hold entire populations of starving Covids. He’d made that mistake enough times already and his body still throbbed with the memories.
He had almost given up hope on the sign, that he had surely imagined, when the petrol station solidified in his vision. Little oasis hidden somewhere in between Icheon and wherever Jisung might end up. It was simple, small, not really a rest stop— hell, it was barely even a building. It didn’t matter though. If there was one thing he knew, it was that the big city stores had long since been picked apart, but very few had survived long enough to reach those stoic buildings still standing in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere.
So he pushed his feet just that little bit faster. He raised one foot to press in front of the other, just that little bit faster. Slowly, in incremental steps he progressed, listening to his own gasped breaths, and the petrol station moved closer. And closer. The wear of the brick work, the grime coated upon the windows, the layers of grit upon the pump handles, they all creeped ever closer.
Then Jisung was stepping onto the forecourt. Shade caressed his body in a sudden chill and it almost felt like those rolling drops of sweat instantly froze upon his skin. The tarmac beneath his feet was a consistent shade of untampered grey-almost-black, protected from the sun by the roof that shielded the dust-coated pumps from the sun’s angry glare. Here was untouched, undisturbed, by human hands or the brightest glimmering star.
He let his eyes adjust for a second, still wanting to squint after hours in the glare of an ever-burning sun. When he did, everything was motionless, unbothered by wind or bodies. For a second he could imagine all around him was just a still-life painting, like those he saw when his school went on day-trips to the art museum. All those years ago, when he pretended to marvel at the canvas on the wall while Changbin muttered barely-whispered insults at their stone-faced teacher.
The petrol station was simple, a creaking canopy linked to two thin columns of engine-fueling pumps that haven’t been used in years. The roof bled into the building that stood in front of Jisung. It was so small, barely bigger than the barns he had passed as he plodded along the road that stretched into the horizon. It was so small that for a second hope faded in his chest and Jisung thought he should have kept walking.
Then he saw the shelves inside, barely visible through the collection of wind-blow dust and road-side grime that had melded into a thin film of filth that covered every inch of the rest stop’s windows.
And the shelves were crowded. They were teeming, blooming, overflowing with the stock that had been cramped into a single measurement of white-painted metal. It was a cornucopia, a smorgasbord. It was the bottom of a Christmas tree, spread wider than any roots ever would and overwhelmed with the abundance of presents.
Jisung’s breath hitched in his throat and the backpack hanging from his shoulder suddenly weighed infinitely more, as if it was already being filled.
He stepped forward, walked across the abandoned forecourt, and pushed open the unshattered door. A bell sounded above him and it was the old kind, the forgotten kind, jingling with the door-frame, not an electronic beep that had long since run out of power. The sound bounced off the walls inside the building and Jisung’s body froze, lowered, hunkered down to the floor. His eyes flitted around the cramped space, looking for an enemy.
A break in time passed with Jisung searching for a threat and the bell above him gradually swinging to a halt. Nothing moved. The rows of multi-coloured packets stayed frozen as they were and the sun threatened the windows just the same. Eventually the tension drained from his muscles until Jisung was just a strange pretzel pressed against the laminate floor.
Then he dared to stand and step forward. His feet were light upon the ground, so soft to his ears, so close and attuned, even he barely heard the sound made. He stepped forward and the world shifted in his vision, but nothing moved. He stepped forward, in the silence that had been carved by the bronze bell above the door.
The interior of the store was exactly how he imagined— cold, white, quilted in crinkled packaging of a thousand products Jisung knew and a spare hundred he had yet to try. It was exactly as a gas station in the middle of nowhere should be, racks bursting with un-purchased stock, filled to the brim by attendants who resorted to picking their fingers as they waited for once in a lifetime customers.
He didn’t hesitate any longer. Jisung slipped into the snack aisle, pulled the air-puffed plastic in towards his body and let it drop into the gaping chasm that his back-pack had become. The ‘best before’ date mattered little when his taste buds didn't care to differentiate between the crunchy chips he once knew and stale processed potato caking over his teeth. Anything was food these days and if it had MSG flavour, it was worth its weight in gold.
Hurriedly, Jisung flitted to the next aisle, slinking back and forth between tinned food that only expired a year ago, and the packaged noodles that hadn’t really gone off. Dried food only really lost taste with age. It was still sustenance to keep a body living. The instant ramyeon he pilfered from unadulterated stores might never taste the same as it did in his mother’s kitchen, but it was still safe enough to fill the hole in his yearning stomach.
A cold metal barrel pressed against the side of his neck in a hula-hoop pressed to his exposed skin.
The packet of ‘chicken’ flavoured noodles slipped from his sweaty palms and hit the floor in the crackle of disturbed plastic. The cool metal ring pressed deeper into his flesh, like it was searching for a home carved out in shattered eardrums and torn skin. He felt his heartbeat surge, thudding sharp against his delicate rib-cage.
“Stand up.” The voice that whispered past his ear was a void carried on exhaled wind. There was nothing in those words, not even desolate farmland. “Don’t make me ask again.”
And the body behind Jisung hadn’t asked but he felt himself rise up at the command, his thighs stretching out, his torso unravelling, until he was standing with his vision just slightly above the shelves, just slightly fixated on the door that he had entered through.
“Who are you?” The voice behind him spoke and Jisung’s eyes finally flicked to the side. Without his head daring to turn, there wasn’t much he could see. There was a fist, thin fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun— Jisung thought it might be a Glock but he barely knew a thing about firearms except what he had learned running his fingertips over metal engravings.
The body of the gun obscured most of the stranger. Jisung was left straining his eyes into a blackhole that pressed hard against his flesh until he almost thought he could feel the striations of the sanded barrel against his slackened skin. But there was something more, something beyond that black-hole space.
It started with a vermillion hue that shimmered in the very edges of his vision, like fresh blood spilling from new-corpse wounds. It was so bright, so effervescent, that for a second Jisung thought he was glimpsing the edges of the sun.
Then it faded, ever so slightly, and the edges of his vision were blurred with scarlet bursts and glinting rubies. After a split second, his vision focused ever further, lurched back into the high definition of reality sparked by corner-point stares, no longer dripped in the 4k-vision of imagination.
Strands of hair unfurled across his eyeline, carried by an unfelt breeze drifting from some tiny gap in the floor-to-ceiling door that Jisung had walked through, or perhaps carried from an exit that he forgot to account for. The hair was brightest red, lighter than spilled blood and more vibrant, more captivating, as if the owner had just stepped out of a bustling hair-salon and ended up in a dirty-pastel apocalypse.
“Stand up.” The red-haired stranger spoke and his words exploded upon Jisung’s neck in puffing clouds that crept across his skin like unwanted fingers. He was already standing but he collapsed the fearful hunch of his shoulders and drew his muscles up into his full height until he was standing taller than he thought he ever had.
The stranger’s elbow barely angled as the cold circle of metal remained pressed just below Jisung’s jawline.
“Walk,” he hissed and there was the slightest hint of pressure against Jisung’s neck, turning him to the side so he faced the back of the store. He didn’t hesitate, didn't pause, despite the cold metal sinking in his delicate skin. He walked to the end of the aisle and stepped slowly towards the far wall of the building, desperately trying to form any single plan that didn’t end with a bullet-hole through his flesh.
“Stop.” The calm command came and he halted a breath away from the back-door he hadn’t noticed until he was half a metre away. “Open it.”
He did as he was told and, when his hand raised, the gun dug deeper into the soft flesh between his jawbone. The door swung back to reveal a dark hallway, hunkered away from the light of the sun, painted in a grey so dark it almost looked like concrete. Jisung stepped forward and the barrel followed his movements.
The gun pressed to the side and Jisung followed the bend in the corridor, turning his head until his sight fell upon an exit door cut into the end of the hallway. When he reached it, Jisung let his hands rise and fall upon the cold metal bar fixed parallel to the ground. The metal below his fingers creaked loud and long before it gave way and dipped down.
Sunlight burst through every crack before it flooded the world as Jisung pushed the door open, his eyes on the green Exit sign and the running man imprinted beside it.
He stepped forward. All the world came back to him in the explosion of colour and sunlight and warm air caressing his skin. It was heat and light and the expanse of freedom, all anchored, all weighed down, by the cold metal that tipped his chin upwards. He closed his eyes against the sensory overload and maybe he might have prayed to gods he didn’t believe in.
“Kneel.” The word was spoken with infinite calm and that absolute assurance of someone who knew they were in command. It was sweet, almost gentle, a voice that wavered with the breeze. It was as though they weren’t certain with their words, but secured by that metal grip in their hand, their finger poised on that trigger, filled them with a confidence that was never theirs.
“Kneel,” he repeated and the gun barrel dug deeper but Jisung felt nothing except the warmth of sun on his skin and a steel-borne shiver that chilled his heart to stone.
“No.” His voice was raspy, catching in his throat, thumping his Adam’s-apple against the metal of the weapon waiting to take his life.
“Kneel.”
“No.”
The gun lurched deeper, into the flesh of his chin, and Jisung automatically tilted his head further backwards until the back-lit veins of his closed eyelids were painted in static clouds of red and white. Still, the trigger wasn’t pulled. And, still, his body was flooded by the sun’s warmth.
“I’m not going to kneel for you.” His words came out in hissed air between his clenched teeth and finally he opened his eyes to gaze up at the azure sky.
Idly he wondered if this was where he would die. That would be fine, if this was where his story ended— not great, dying was never great, but, in that moment, he realised he was content if he died at the hands of another human instead of having his throat ripped out by hungry beaks. This was better, he thought, this was something he couldn't run from and just hope to survive.
“I’m not going to make this easy for you,” he muttered, holding back the manic laugh bubbling in his throat. He wouldn’t kneel. In that moment of calm, Jisung refused to kneel— he believed in himself more than a curled body on the concrete— but he wasn’t sure where the words came from, the ones that spilled out of his mouth like tangled ramyeon. “I’ll die standing, and if you can’t stomach that, good for you.”
A hitched breath sounded behind him, so close he could almost feel it against the crown of his head, and the man behind him shifted his weight backwards, as if he was preparing to kick out Jisung’s legs and let him tumble to the ground in a pitiful pile of limbs.
“Okay,” the body behind him spoke and every trembling syllable relaxed his body as he felt the tension escape in the sun-soaked air around him. It was just the acceptance of a standing execution, but for a second Jisung let himself believe it could be more and gripped the escape rope tight in his blistered palms. “You can die standing.”
“I would rather not die at all.”
“That’s not your choice to make.”
“But it’s my request.” The hint of smirk curled Jisung’s lips, unbidden, unfounded. “Doesn’t the condemned get a final request?”
“You’re thinking of a last meal.”
“Okay.” Jisung let his weight shift again until his hip was just slightly cocked to the side, defiant, desperate. “Same thing.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works.” There was just the slightest hint of amusement in the stranger’s voice and Jisung thought that maybe he had won the first battle of a war settling under his skin. “Pretty sure it never worked that way.”
“Pretty sure nothing works that way anymore,” Jisung mocked ever so lightly. The gun barrel loosened against his skin until he could swallow down his nerves without the worry of retching his saliva back into his dry mouth. “It is the apocalypse after all.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well…” Courage churned in his veins with the relaxed pressure against his throat, and Jisung dared to tilt his head left and right, as though he was surveying the world around him. His eyes were still cross-eyed focused on the blue expanse above him. He pretended he couldn’t feel the barrel press harder against his chin before it relaxed again, and ignored the urge to swallow bile rising in his oesophagus. “Looks like the apocalypse to me.”
“Funny,” the voice replied, dry and unconcerned, but Jisung could feel the tremor of some sort of laughter shivering through the arm that was slowly lowering to rest on his shoulder. “You a comedian before—” Jisung could imagine an arm gesturing to the ruptured society around them— “All this or something?”
“Something.”
“Huh?”
“Something. Not a comedian but I think I was something before—” Jisung lets an arm dangerously wave before his torso in a gesture that encompasses all that world before him. “—before… all this.”
There was a sharp inhale and then silence. Just silence, creeping into the space between their bodies that was so small, even with a gun barrel against his throat, and a tired arm resting on his tensed shoulder. The sun beat down upon them and once again Jisung wondered if he would be lucky enough for his life to end with melanoma instead of a bullet in his brain… or a grey break tearing out his throat.
What a stupid thought. No one was lucky to be alive that long, not anymore.
“Okay.” The cold metal that had been warming against his skin dropped away and Jisung gulped automatically, relief flooding his veins. “Okay. Fuck this.”
The body poised at his back moved away, footsteps receding behind him. A door creaked open and then the silence filled the air again, dampened by acceptance, but overflowing with the thick ropes of tension that caught over those emotions still left unspoken.
Jisung turned around and there was a tall man standing next to an open door with a green sign above that was printed in simple black characters on white. Staff Only..
The man was slender, thin in the way that everyone was now. His face was a strange coalition of sharp angles and gentle curves, snub-nose and almond eyes. Long, bright red hair brushed over his collar and one hand was still on the doorknob. The other, looped around the gun’s grip, was propped on his jutted hip.
A strange snort of laughter bubbled in Jisung’s throat but he pushed it away. Idly he wondered how so many beautiful people survived the apocalypse. Or maybe it was the apocalypse that made them beautiful. Little glimmers of unmarked flesh and curled lips in a ruined world.
“Well?” The man fixed him with an expectant gaze, eyes sharp and slightly narrowed, chest barely moving with exhaled breath. “Are you coming?”
Jisung didn’t hesitate. He walked back into the petrol station and the man’s lips curved just slightly upwards. Beautiful people with scarred flesh, wandering around a broken world looking for something, anything, that wasn’t just survival.
They drank. It turned out the man— he said his name was Hyunjin— had been at the petrol station for three days, before that he had found a rare, unplundered liquor store full of glass bottles neatly lined upon wooden shelves. In the staff-room of the station he lined the cracked veneer of the table with bottles of various shapes and sizes, filled with liquid coloured clear, brown, blue, pink, even green.
The sun had just started to dip towards the horizon when Jisung snorted out a laugh and grabbed the bottle closest, Jack Daniels, and poured it into the plastic cup Hyunjin had set on his side of the table. The brown liquor sloshed against the sides and swirled within the yellowed plastic walls in the deepest gold. The bourbon dripped down his throat in a harsh burn and he couldn’t hold back a grimace at the first gulp. Hyunjin just laughed and poured his own drink.
For a long time, maybe hours, all they did was drink. They nursed each swallow and started at the white walls patterned with scuff marks and fly spots, the remnants of life that once was. Jisung traced shapes in the table-top dust and, with a puffed breath, sent the grey fluff accumulated on his finger floating to the equally dirty ground.
He watched Hyunjin ring his fingers around his plastic cup and finally Jisung let himself break the silence between them.
“How is your hair so red?” Hyunjin’s eyes flicked from his drink to Jisung’s gaze and a surprised chuckle burst from between his parted lips.
“That’s how you start a conversation?” He raised an eyebrow and Jisung shrugged his shoulders in reply.
“Why not? I was curious.”
“Fair enough.” Hyunjin glanced back down into his drink, swirled the contents slowly with one hand while the other propped on his elbow and he threaded his fingers through the oily strands at his left temple.
“The liquor store was next to a barber.” He shrugged lazily, not looking up from his cup. “My mother was a hairdresser so I knew what I was doing and I get so bored of being one colour.”
“You stand out.” Jisung thought of red hair flowing in the wind as Hyunjin ran with a black feather tidal wave chasing after him. “It’s a good look but you stand out.”
You don’t want to stand out in this world.
“I know.” Hyunjin glanced up and his eyes met Jisung’s in a dark stare. “I just don’t care anymore.”
“Fair enough,” Jisung echoed the words back and nodded, letting his lips curl into a crooked smile. “Maybe I should go green.” A startled laugh burst from Hyunjin’s throat.
“Yeah,” he nodded back. “Maybe you should. Maybe you could make it work.”
“Hey!” Jisung’s voice was filled with faux indignation, arms crossing over his chest. “It’s not a fashion choice! It’s camouflage.”
Hyunjin threw his head back and a hearty laugh spilled into the air around him. The sound flooded through Jisung’s body, riding on the warmth of whiskey flowing through his veins. Laughter, what a curious thing.
“Sure it is. You’d fit right in around here.”
Silence fell before them after the peals of Hyunjin’s laughter faded away. It wasn’t that awkward break in small talk Jisung had always felt at his mother’s dinner parties, not that crushing halt in conversation between those who stuffed their mouths as they tried to fumble out a new topic to revive discussion.
It was a strange companionship that basked in the space of a cramped staff-room, just two strangers letting time pass as they waited for the next curveball.
This time it was Hyunjin who spoke first.
“Where are you going?” Jisung glanced up, brows knitting as he tried to find an answer.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually. “There’s nowhere for me to go. I’m just walking.” Just walking, just searching, just hoping. He doesn’t know what he’s hoping for. “What about you? Where are you going?”
“I—” A sigh rippled through Hyunjin’s body, deep and weary, dropping his shoulders towards the tabletop and loosening his fingers around his cup until they sank to the base where the last few gulps of whiskey remained. “I’m looking for my friend.”
He glanced up for a moment, eyes filled with that dark cloud of uncertainty and sorrow that Jisung was becoming so very accustomed to. “We got separated back in Sangju but his grandparents have land somewhere in Changyeong.” Hyunjin’s gaze dropped back down to the cup in his hand. “He always said we would be safe there.”
Jisung nodded slowly, even though the other man wasn’t looking at him, even though he didn’t believe the sweet words.
Safe. What a childish idea. Safe. What a silly hope. Safe. Nothing was safe anymore. Nothing and nowhere and no one. Safety, hope, happiness, they were guns without safeties pressed flush against your temple, traps waiting to capture the last still left breathing.
“Where are we now?” He dared to ask, and, honestly, he had no idea where he was, not even a paper map to guide his movements.
“Uiseong.” It surprised Jisung for a moment, he didn’t realise he had wandered so far south. Automatically he glanced towards the sliver of the sky he could see through the small wide set high against the opposite wall. He could see the edges of the sun, falling below the dusty frame, and tried to calculate which direction he needed to walk to return to the north. The north, filled with memories and feathered bodies.
“He’s probably dead.” Hyunjin’s voice was emotionless, empty, desolate like playgrounds drenched in rain. “But I feel like I should go there anyway.” Just in case. Hope dripped from his words, strung tight like a noose around his slender neck.
“Yeah,” Jisung breathed out. “You should.”
This time Hyunjin nodded slowly, his head jerking up and down, whiskey rocking back and forth between his fingers. He raised the plastic rim to his mouth and swallowed the liquid in hungry gulps. Jisung watched his throat for a second, watched his Adam's apple bobbing like a fishing lure floating on ocean tides, then he too drained his cup. The amber liquor burned down into his soft flesh and roused a fire under his skin.
“You should,” Jisung repeated, and wished that he had a memory of a friend just waiting to be found. He wished he still had hope among collateral bodies.
When the morning sun woke Jisung with golden fingertips streaming through the tiny window, his head ached and his body felt weak. The remnants of alcohol churned in his stomach and made him wish for cold porcelain and winter winds.
His cheek was pressed against the staff-room table, and, when he sat up straight, his body creaked and cracked in disapproval. Hyunjin was still fast asleep, sitting across from him with his head tipped away, resting against the back of his chair. Choked snores wheezed from his throat and his hand was still loosely wrapped around his plastic cup.
For a few minutes Jisung just sat there, gathering his mind, gathering his body, gathering his strength, watching the vulnerable body in front of him. Hope.
Eventually he stood, ignoring the pulse of pain in his brain and the stiff muscles that screamed for the return of sleep. He padded out of the staffroom, slipping down the grey corridor and back into the main room of the petrol station. He slung his backpack against his chest and began to stuff it full.
In the Health and Beauty aisle, he paused. His hand hovered over the red and grey cardboard boxes and he thought of country roads and amber liquid. Finally he slipped three packets of painkillers into the side pocket of his bag, tearing a fourth apart and swallowing two pills dry, before he clutched the box in his hand. Then he continued along the aisles, taking everything he needed.
Once his backpack was full and heavy, hanging off his shoulders and threatening to buckle his knees, he returned to the staffroom.
Hyunjin’s head had tilted just slightly to the side so his snores were quieter, barely bouncing off the scuffed walls. Jisung carefully placed the opened box of painkillers on the table, a few inches from his guarded cup. He set a still-sealed bottle of water beside the ripped package.
Slowly he pulled a black permanent marker from his pocket, the blister pack tossed aside in a forgotten aisle of the store. He breathed in deeply and held the air in his lungs as he popped the cap of the pen and pressed it against the laminated wood of the worn table.
His handwriting was as messy as it had always been, and he remembered those confused glances from his classmates, those disgruntled glares from his impatient teachers, as they tried to decipher his whiteboard explanations. The marker tip squeaked against the smooth surface and Jisung risked a glance at Hyunjin’s face but the man never stirred, even when Jisung drew back and turned to the door.
Jisung closed the staff-room door behind him and walked down the grey hallway, this time without gun metal guiding his steps. His fingers raised and pressed down on the cool handlebar of the exit door. He didn’t look back.
Sunlight filled his vision, so blinding, and he felt his distant headache pulse in response. The world outside was empty. Overgrown stalks of grass swayed in the wind around the cracked concrete that was embedded by undisturbed sprouts of towering weeds. The road curled ever so slightly around the edge of the petrol station and into the green infinity beyond.
Jisung let his feet carry him to the black tarmac that had hardened once more under the forgiving moonlight. He let his eyes rise to the horizon, all rolling greens and blue skies, barely broken by tiny puffs of fluffed clouds. The road was steady below his feet.
North. The sun soaked into his skin. North. Travelling towards dead bodies. North. The rest stop faded behind him. North. Jisung walked and he never once looked back.
He left behind red hair and sharp wit and black pen scrawls.
Good luck. I hope you find him. J.
🝔 현재 🝔
Eventually the pills run out. It’s just another thing that Jisung knew was coming but didn’t want to linger on with the coalition of a perfect world in green gardens and a shadow by his side. He tried, in a desperate attempt to suspend disbelief, to manage intermittent days between the pills he swallowed, but the pain crept in every time, encouraged by the chilled air and the exertion of a garden that couldn’t fight back the weeds alone.
Every morning he was woken by the thickened fire of agony that hop-scotched along his divergent finger bones and sunk into the marrow below. Every morning he pulled his fingertips into his palm and felt the screaming resistance in those limbs that could still barely reach beyond right-angle bends.
So when he pops open the second-to-last blister pack and sucks the little circle of peace into his waiting lips, he knows he has to return to the city that had left him with mismatched bones.
The next morning he carefully follows his ritual. He empties his backpack across his bed, leaves everything that won’t help him in a neat pile on his blankets, and fills the bag with only what he needs.
The sharpened blade of his knife slides a little too easily into the holster that rests against his upper-thigh, just within his hand’s grasp. The leather and body armour settles easily over his limbs, their surface lined with scars of searching beaks and honed talons.
He stands, thick-soled boots firm against the planks of his home, shoulders rolling in an earthquake tremble of preparation. The weight of his ventilation mask is peculiar, uncertain, unnecessary when Jisung hadn’t let a foot fall past the stone wall of his home in months.
He glances over his shoulder in a sticky simulation of the supply run where he almost lost his fingers, and feels laughter bubble up in his throat as his gaze falls upon the open lid of the wooden chest. It would be so useless to bring the gun with him, even if the sharp-edged metal felt like safety at the small of his back. Bullets ran out long before food did.
Jisung presses his palm, already slick with nervous sweat, against the handle of his front door and forces his body forward. He turns to the road and for a moment wonders if he should leave a message for his second shadow.
He hasn’t seen Minho since he learned his name, since he felt hands around his wrist and felt his lips, so soft, so warm, so bitter, and—
Jisung hasn’t seen a silhouette at his side in four days now. There’s a five metre swathe dug around his body, like a moat around a castle, but there’s no water to fill it.
A little part of him hopes that Minho is still there, watching him, watching over him, from the shade of evergreen trees. A little part of him looks up and is so sure that he sees a shadow in the woods.
Jisung buries that little part of him deep within the ground, pats his spade over the fresh dirt, and scatters hand-picked geraniums over the mound like funeral petals. Then he turns towards the distant city and tries to forget.
He tries. Brown eye among green leaves, blue eye against pale skin.
In the end he leaves a single arrow, pointing in the direction he will take. Next to it is a short message, scraped into the dirt with the point of his knife. He hopes the slight breeze won’t blow dust over his words, then shrugs on his backpack and walks away.
City supply run. Wish me luck.
The city unfurls before him in grey-scale highlights that seem almost two-dimensional against the force of the spring-laid sun that floats behind them. It’s a paper-cut world that lingers before him, like a heat-wave mirage that he hopes is real. It’s half the distance that he has covered in two or three hours, but his body is regressing in the days spent swaying back and forth in lazy motions upon rope swing chairs, always accompanied by that single body that smiled back at him. So it’s noon by the time he reaches the city.
Jisung halts when he is just slightly encompassed by the weight of the suburbs that are defined in copy-and-paste houses once surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns, now hemmed in by towering grass and sprite-stemmed leaves that build against each other like evergreen Christmas trees.
He allows his heavy breaths to slow into restful inhales before he straps the ventilation mask across the lower half of his mouth. Then he delves ever so slightly deeper.
He knows that the pharmacies in the first suburbs will be picked dry but he hopes, in the sugar-scrapped knowledge of a nurse’s son, that the inner suburbs will be unadulterated enough for him to find the shelves at least half-full.
So he traipses through the outer-ring of the city, every step feeling like a trespass upon the lives that once were. He traces what he hopes is an inconsistent path, preferring all those darkened alley-ways to the wide berth of the motorways and main roads. He monitors his progress in the apartment-block shadows that gradually overtake the concrete as he passes into the city out-skirts.
Eventually his eyes fall upon a corner pharmacy, trapped in broken shard-windows and lined by desolate shelves. Despite how ransacked the aisles are, Jisung can see an overflow of stock in the back square of the shop that was once controlled by tired pharmacists.
He pushes open the door, listening to the grind of metal frame against the fragments of glass littered across the tiled floor. The interior of the store welcomes him in a strange silence, empty and forsaken, much like the rest of the world has come to be.
He carefully swings the door shut behind him, memorising the sound of disrupted glass shards and pulls the brass bell down into place from where it had been caught on its own wall hook, swung upwards by an aggression that Jisung doesn’t let his mind wander on.
Two alarms, set like animal traps to warn him of a threat that could otherwise sneak below the thin line of consciousness that lingers around his body. A chiming bell and the crunch of glass upon the floor.
With his defences in place, he moves further into the interior of the store, ignoring the half-empty shelves overseen by bright red plastic signs with white writing, reading things like ‘cold and flu’, ‘allergy’, and ‘general health’.
Sliding behind the counter, he rises the single step into the rectangular space of pill bottles and plain packaging, all allotted in white wooden alcove shelving. Each space has a little white sticker above it with the drug name, carefully organised in alphabetical order.
It wasn’t untouched, a select few shelves ransacked with names he knew. Glaring empty wells sat before him with titles like ‘oxycodone’ and ‘insulin’, completely empty. Jisung stops when his eyes fall upon a name he recognises. Tramadol. Pushed to the back of the shelf is a single white plastic bottle, knocked on its side, the capital letter name plunging at a right angles into the wooden shelf.
Instantly his hand shoots out and he wraps his fingers around the bottle, that little lifeline that fits easily in his palm. Jisung shrugs his backpack off one shoulder, swinging it to his front so he can push the bottle into one of the zipper pockets.
Without another glance at the shelves he rushes out from behind the prescription counter and heads for the exit. The tinkle of the bell bids him goodbye as he pulls the door open and slips out into the silent streets beyond.
A single scrap of paper whispers past his feet as he turns down the street and he feels every breath come more easily with each step he takes.
Quickly Jisung retraces his path as best he remembers, sticking resolutely to the overshadowed alleyways and trash-lined side-streets. Part of him thinks it’s too easy as the apartment blocks start to thin. Part of him thinks it was just easy enough, but he ignores that part because that part is what will get him killed.
He’s almost to the suburbs when he hears it. He’s paused, peeking around a building corner to scope out the next street. And he hears it.
The sound was hidden below the hurried disruption of his own body, but now he hears it, thrumming below the thud of his own heart. It’s another set of footsteps, echoing around the alleyway, each tread sharp and tactile against the grey concrete, rustling occasionally with the drift of garbage left like snow drifts.
Jisung spins, every muscle poised to break into a run even as his eyes dart around the small space he has passed by, searching for the source of the sound. The alleyway is empty, desolate, a single surgical mask flowing across the ground like the tumbleweed of a lost age.
Another step. A shadow rises against the far end of the wall Jisung is pressed against. It’s illuminated by lightrays cast from where the path bends on a ninety-degree corner to turn back towards the sun. It’s just the outline of a head at first, fuzzy at the edges around the brim of a wide set hat that sinks into the shape of angular cheeks and neck below.
Another step. There are shoulders now, broad and tilted just slightly down, ruffles around the edges that further blur the image. They aren’t hunched and shuffling, not lurching or shaking, not the stumble of something that isn’t quite there anymore.
Another step. The entirety of a torso glides across the wall. Arms hang easily at the sides, not rigid or twitching, but there’s a strange angle to the outline. Soft geometric shapes break away from just above the elbows of the body and Jisung would have thought them wings if not for the opacity of the corresponding shadows. It’s something transparent, maybe even completely see through, not quite restricting the light as the strands of feathers do, allowing the ghost of fabric to shimmer around the shadow on the wall.
Another step. He can see legs now. They are slim, clad in a tight material. Hands fall in easy lines, one slung into the top of a thigh, perhaps hooked into a pocket. The other is swinging gently, slender fingers ending in curved points and not the sharp talons that rip through Jisung’s nightmares.
Another step. A figure rounds the corner that Jisung has been fixated on and finally he sees the man that the shadow belongs to, the inches of his frame still illuminated by the sunlight that dances across his body.
The first thing Jisung realises is his height. He’s tall, not overly so, but tall enough compared to Jisung, and he already feels himself shrink further against the brick wall at his back. The man is slim, restrained waist and slender limbs, but not thin, not fading, not desperate like all those Jisung has met before. He’s not a body of bones and muscle, not yet a fingerprint of the apocalypse.
The second thing Jisung realises is that it wasn't a hat. That widened shadow rounding the man’s head wasn’t a brim. Light gleams across the crazed inky-black strands of his hair, shimmering as he slowly turns his head, reaching out like an inverted halo around his head.
It’s a frantic nest, the sweeping disfiguration of a vantablack mane jutting out from his forehead. Or perhaps it’s carefully styled waves, sculpted and cast in place, like a collapsing waterfall frozen by the breath of an ice giant. At the centre of the crafted folds is a fringe of slightly curled strands that lead down into—
The third thing Jisung realises, sees, computes, remembers, is his eyes.
They are barely more than two shadows trapped between dark eyebrows and the rounded plush of plunging cheekbones. But he sees the white sclera, the darkened— maybe even black— irises that seem to blend into the pupils within. They are broken by the ends of his fringe that are suspended, caught in long monolid eyelashes, curling up towards his forehead.
They’re just eyes, just black pupils, as tense and unyielding as all those that have lived beyond the end of the world. And yet they’re more, they’re just that little bit darker, just that little bit sharper, just that little bit more like a dagger that rends through Jisung’s delicate flesh and pins him in place, freezing every muscle in his body as if he had never wanted to move.
Maroon lips part in an angular face but Jisung can’t look away, can’t glance to the side to search for another threat, can’t even blink as he yearns for that split-second of calming darkness. Cheek globes rise as a smile— maybe a smile, maybe a smirk— splits the face swimming in his vision like twisted jungle vines across mountain sides.
And just for a second— a single second fixed against time-worn brick walls, ankle-deep in the swirling trash of another lifetime— Jisung thinks this man before him would have been gorgeous if all the world around him wasn’t desperate to get as far away as possible.
Another step.
“Well hello there, little one.”The maroon lips move and catch upon each other in the peel of supple skin and the touch of tactile skin coated with coloured matte. “What are you doing here?”
Another step.
The body grows closer, and every inch of Jisung skin screams to runrunfleerun, but he is frozen, pinned against the wall, insect in a glass jar, fox in a metal cage. His limbs twitch and shake, tremoring in unsettled nerve endings, even as his fingernails dig into the brick at his back.
And he can’t move. Not a single inch.
“What are you doing so far from home?”
The figure is steeped in shadows now, collapsing into the overhang of tiered apartment buildings, like he has always belonged to darkened alleyways, always belonged to those gaps left for everything that is dangerous and unknown. Blackhole eyes and a smile exploding across wasteland cheekbones like the deepest space voids.
He takes another step forward, drawing closer to Jisung’s crumbling figure, and another, boots clacking against the pavement, and another, shimmering across the pathway, and another, and another, until—
A body is standing in front of Jisung and he isn’t sure what happened to the distance between them but he feels the whimper that escapes his lips when a slender finger extends to caress his trembling chin.
“It’s dangerous here.” The wine-red lips part and writhe and press together again, so close to the bridge of his nose that he can feel the puffs of breath against his sweat-stained skin. “Didn’t your father teach you that?”
A memory blindsides his body at the words, a memory that floods through his body in the shuddering of flesh and the punched exhale of a visceral fist connecting with those precious organs his skeleton tries to hide.
“Focus.” And it’s his father, his father that held his gaze, his father that rested skin against skin. His father who always protected him from every evil that walked through in his dreams. “Focus on me, son.”
“It’s okay, little one.” Maroon lips hover in his vision but they are a distant, shimmering mirage, lost in the heat of a desert of golden sands and grey concrete. “Seonghwa-hyung will keep you safe.”
A finger traces his jaw line, slender, defined, blunt fingernails that gradually lengthen and extend into a pierce-point talon, and Jisung’s head tips back automatically, shying away from that lengthening dagger until the crown of his head is pressed against the wall at his back.
And it’s then, with his body frozen in fear, reacting only to the threat of pain, and gaze fixed on the danger, eyes rolled so low in their sockets that the flesh of his cheeks become half of his vision, that he finally sees it.
There is the slightest trace of black feather outlines unfurling along the nape of the stranger’s neck. It’s barely noticeable, crawling just slightly beyond the high collar of his denim jacket, worn at the edges. Just the slightest hint of a body clawing to stay alive and he’s seen it so many times in the river-mud skin of—
“What a shame you are.” The man hums introspectively and his breath puffs against the curve of Jisung’s cheeks. The exhaled clouds of air wisp and wind ever further, caressing and chilling the blood that pulses through the skin-thin cells of his capillaries. “Seonghwa-hyung was waiting for something better.”
Jisung’s eyes are cross-eyed for a second, trying to collate the staggered snapshots of the body before his own into one picture, into a present tense, trying to stop his gaze from being caught by that black tracing of a maybe not.
“Too broken to even run.” The words sink ever deeper, between strands of muscle and into the tissue of his organs. Jisung feels his body shudder before his mind can process the meaning that wreaths around him in highlight expiration and shuddering reality.
The pressure-point end of a single fingernail warps into an unfurled talon point pressed against the softsoft skin of his chin. It caresses the underside of his jaw in angry red lines, but he is too deep in the collapse of memories to feel the pin-prick point of blood that pearls against grey-scale talons that once were human.
“I want you to run.” His father’s eyes were hard and certain.
“In fact,” the voice of honey and salt continues, and Jisung can hear every treasure-pattern exhale that marks ‘X’s into his cheek. “I don’t even think you could run.”
Those eyes, fueled by the collapse of a burning sun, they flick down, searing around the plastic mask holding in Jisung’s hyperventilation gasps. They drop even further, to the backpack straps holding his future, to the worn-fabric shoes where his little toe presses against a hole too big to hide.
“You could never run from hyung.”
“Run when I say go.”
The world snaps in two.
Jisung’s body flings away from the grey-tinged wall and he doesn’t feel the scrape of skin against brick. He lurches for a second, borne towards the ground in the disagreement of his limbs that have long since surrendered to obedience.
And maybe it’s the chuckle from that body that pushes him onwards. Maybe it’s the memory of a time that once was. Maybe it’s desperation, tangible in the sweat-soaked exhalation of his mind that has long lost the regulation of two-times-a-day teeth brushing.
Maybe it’s self-preservation, that luminescent glow that transcends every other golden rule of the world that once moulded him. Maybe it’s that certainty to protect only himself and those scarce few he cares about, even when they are now all named in the dead and missing.
Maybe it’s just pride, plain and simple, that forgotten relic that once meant more to him than the burn of exhausted muscles or the firefly flush of embarrassment. Pride, the first sin, the eternal sufferance.
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
Maybe it’s all those things and everything in between.
Jisung fattens his right palm against the wall at his side and clenches the unrefined muscles that are twitching just inches beneath his skin. His body lurches forward and, just for a second, he thinks he might collapse upon the ground in a pile of uncoordinated limbs.
Then his right foot takes a single step forward and accepts the weight of the body he knows as his own. That single step, that tensing of flattened muscle against the grey-stained concrete. That shift of flesh that doesn’t end with a body sprawled against the concrete, it holds.
An acid-sharp rip of pain sears a line under his chin, across the supple v-line where his bone fades into the musculature of his roiling tongue. He knows that the talon that once rested in the apex of his jaw has shredded the skin, dermis, tissue, muscle—
Jisung’s feet warp beneath him in a stutter-step dance, the movement of a homecoming college-boy that never understood rhythm. His gaze has long since dripped down to trace the fractured concrete below his feet and now that’s all he sees.
Step on a crack, break your eomma’s back.
The landscape below his feet floods with sunlight as Jisung runs from the alleyway. The world around him explodes in colour, vibrating with a thousand reds and blues and yellows, all mixing to paint a scene before his eyes when he dares to raise his head.
Around him the street bursts forward in multi-coloured layers of laminated signs and plastic boards. The sun glints upon thin layers of transparent glass cast into jagged lines at open-mouth cavities. A winding river of dull tar snakes towards the horizon, broken by paled dashes of white lines.
A city, moulding into peaceful suburbs, rolls out before him like a red carpet welcoming Jisung into a golden-edge future.
“Don’t kill him.” The words are so quiet, even in the absolute silence of deserted streets. They are almost lost but the pure fear pulsing in Jisung’s brain spells every syllable out like he has never heard the words before. “Seonghwa-hyung wants him alive.”
A shadow moves in Jisung’s peripheral vision and it’s the inconsistent mound of paper notices with government warnings of an incoming disease, just a little worse than the common cold. Another moves and it’s the hunched pile of discarded fabrics that once were clothes, accumulating against the grey concrete of that one thrift store that all the university students named as their favourite boutique.
“Get him for me,” and Jisung knows he has run far enough, fast enough, that the words should have faded into a slight hitch in background noise, but the voice still sounds as though it is just a few metres behind him. “I want to play.”
Then something moves and it’s in Jisung’s path, filling his freedom with winding limbs reaching from overhang doorways. His feet stutter to a halt against the concrete as a writhing body slithers down the torn fabric awning to land before him. There’s a feathered mass against the concrete, close enough that their wing-tips whisper against the toes of Jisung’s shoes.
Eyes meet his, crouched down towards the concrete, blue orbs hovering above cracked black tar. A wheezing hiss fills his ears as the grey beak snaps at his knees. He’s dead. He knows it instantly in the frantic footsteps at his back and the writhing figures that gather beyond the one blocking his path.
How funny. He’s been running for five-almost-six— hell, maybe it’s actually seven— years but today he dies.
In a gasp of desperation he tries to flee, spinning his head on a 180-degree tilt that makes his neck scream in unused muscles. A black wall of featheredge fence-posts rises in his vision and blocks the path he has already run. A row of cobalt eyes pierce his flesh and there is nowhere left for him to go.
He whirls forward once more but the creature is closer now, slowly stalking Jisung like he is weakened prey left behind by the herd. The scream he has been trying to hold back dies in his throat is nothing more than exhaled air, and he’s never been so alone. In his mind the body count rises and he tallies himself in the collateral.
An explosion of midnight-black feathers detonates in the rim of his vision. A curling mass slams into that strange shape that launched before him. There’s an implosion of bodies twisting upon each other. There’s to being’s, set part, one and one.
They tumble into the empty street, red splattered against faded white road lines. Jisung is transfixed, body more frozen down to the muscles of his toes clenching in threadbare socks. He can’t look away from the battle that has erupted before him.
Talons slash through the air. Grey beaks slice through flesh and into empty space. Lone feathers float to the tarmac, ending in blood-drop pattern on the ground. And the shrieks, screams, hisses, layer over the desperate gasps panting from Jisung’s mouth, echoing in the empty space where he knows he should run.
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
And he knows it, feels it in the twitch of his fingertips and the itching energy that curls his toes against the unforgiving ground. He should be running.
The ball of feathers lurches to a halt, white-dash line of the road marking the split of two bodies into four, even as the sunlight blooms across their combined feathers as if there is no separation. From the turmoil of warring bodies, eyes glance upwards and meet Jisung’s.
The world falters.
He thinks that maybe the liquid in his cells has iced over with the single glance of those pin-hole eyes. He thinks that maybe time had stopped when the door to his home opened on that night with the gunfire rain. He thinks that maybe the end had come with his footsteps fleeing Chan’s warmth. Jisung thinks that his life had ceased so long ago with whirlwind feathers in the dusty marketplace.
But it never did.
Time passes in the flurry of limbs, every inch more disconnected than the last. But every millisecond never really slowed. Every atom never really disjointed from that ever-ticking clock. All the world continues to spin and Jisung thinks maybe he died so very long ago—
Until those eyes meet his own.
Mud-river brown.
Blue as the sky spread overhead.
Minho’s gaze meets his own for only a single second but that second is suspended in time like nothing else ever has been. A single second, millisecond, microsecond, picosecond, but in that picosend he sees the the chains that hang between their eyes, filter-coffee brown and hole-punched iris.
The chain binds them until Minho blinks and his focus switches to the enemy once more.
Then, for the first time since he remembered to inhale oxygen, the world passes by Jisung and leaves him in a vacuum of crumpling cells. It’s too much and too little and everything in between. It’s measured into a dying cell until there is just that microscond in time when Jisung realises there is a—
Living, breathing being that is choosing to fight for
him.
What him?
Run.
The words rebound in the echo cavern of his skull and Jisung doesn’t know if he has imagined them or if—
“Run, Jisung.” Minho’s voice is gasped in incremental inhales, so very desperate, patterned by the blows raining upon his thin body. And all his skin is black feathers .
There are no memories waiting to overwhelm his consciousness. There is no stutter-step path into moments that once existed. There is no recollection to overwhelm his senses.
Jisung stands on the pavement of an empty street. Well-worn brick walls stand beside him with green-grey mould clawing at the edges. Broken windows litter glass shards across the ground and reflect the sunlight in pale beams across multi-coloured garbage piles. The sky stretches above him in pale blue spurts softened by grey clouds born forward by the slightest breeze.
“Run.” Minho’s voice trembles through his existence like bubbling water-ripples waiting for white-capped waves. “Please, run.”
His footpath is illuminated by golden sun, patchwork patterned by the awnings of family-owned groceries that haven’t been visited in a decade. There are black tornados spinning ever closer but Jisung never sees them, even when his vision is bordered by feathers.
He just runs.
And it’s so different because he never stops running, not even when the suburbs of the city are a 20-minute memory. Not even when the clipped fence-posts have descended into rotten wood. Not even when weed-encrusted roads have dissolved into gravel footpaths. Not even when every inhale burns in his lungs and Jisung is sure that the sparkling stars bursting at the corners of his vision will overwhelm his consciousness.
He runs.
Not even when he sees warped-wood fence posts that he knows. Not even when his front door creaks under his thrusted palm. Not even when he tumbles into the mound of red-grey blankets that have moulded into his bed.
He runs and never looks back.
Not even then does he stop running. His feet still scrabble against the camp-bed mattress and his breath comes in desperate pants. His fingers scrunch the edges of air-cooled blankets between his fingers and when his feet finally lie dormant, still his fingers thread fabric between them.
With every gasped inhale pain blossoms across the belly of his chin and through his palms rubbed raw by brick tiles, but he thinks this is nothing. He thinks this is nothing compared to scraping talons and crunching beaks. He thinks this is nothing compared to a body flung into the path of another.
He thinks this is nothing compared to Minho’s screaming cells. He thinks this is nothing compared to the sacrifice of one body for another. He thinks his pain is nothing. He thinks it is nothing. It’s nothing. Cold fabric against the webs of his fingers. This is nothing.
And for the first time in nine months, Jisung can’t sleep.
🝔 현재 🝔
It’s been two weeks since he last saw Minho, since Minho fought, for Jisung, on city streets, screaming at him to run, and Jisung feels the constant absence in every breath of air that is slowly growing warmer with the incoming summer months. There’s a hole in his daily life, a gaping cavern, a wound that oozes with every second that it isn’t filled by that single presence.
How strange.
It’s so strange, to miss someone, to miss another body beside his own, even broken by metres of air between. He’s been alone for so long, for five years— no, it’s six years now— no one but himself to care for, to care about. No one but himself and the heartbeat in his chest, in his ears.
He walks through the garden cultivated by someone long dead, kept alive by the ever-changing weather and, Jisung likes to think, his gentle hands and soft whispers. There is no shadow to echo his footsteps, no figure poised on the sidelines, no gaze to meet only to glance away and fight down a smile. There’s no one here. He’s alone again.
When he walks down to the riverbank, Jisung’s not sure where he’s going. He’s not sure what his destination is. He sits upon the soft mud of the river bank and pulls his worn shoes off The Converse logo dulled almost as black as the fabric it’s upon, coated with the dirt and dust he has walked across.
He hisses quietly when the tips of his toes brush the chilled water’s edge. It’s cold, swollen by the runoff from the mountains that hunch around him. The chill of the past winter wreaths around his skin and he feels laughter bubble in his chest.
It’s funny how the world passes. It’s funny that the seasons blend together. It’s funny that everything continues as it once was. A before. A time that came to pass. All those cities, bustling and busy. A time that now passes in gurgle of running water. So slow, so languid, while white crests breaking over rocks just too tall to pass over.
How strange.
Jisung stands, when the sun is dipping towards the horizon. He wanders back between the trees, half following that path he has worn between his home and the riverbed; half following a map his mind has concocted from strange desires he doesn’t understand.
When he is no more than twenty minutes from home he hears the screams. They are instant, sharp and consistent, beat into a melody he could follow with a twisted song of desperation. They whisper through the air until Jisung is close enough and then they are knives cutting all that surrounds him.
It’s someone dying, that’s his first thought. It’s the end of life, the death throe cries of a beast ended by bullet or blade. It’s something, someone, bleeding out in the rotting leaf undergrowth. It’s the last cries of a being that wishes they were alive.
Then the branches before Jisung part and the slightest glimpse of the sun blinds his forest-adjusted eyes.
When it clears he sees all the world before him.
Minho is a crumpled pile of black feathers twisted upon the floor of the clearing.
What little Jisung can see of his skin is pale and broken by the infinite black lines that stretch across his skin. Feathers. Every inch. A body of feathers. A human patched by black tides until there is nothing left.
“No.” And Minho’s scream halted his footsteps. “Not me. Not him.”
A pool of black, sinking deep into the crisp grass, every feather trying to meld into the greenstrands around it. A blackhole in the middle of the woods, like Red Riding Hood wandering without a guide. A possibility, a probability, a potentially.
“You have to go.” Minho’s face is pressed to the ground, his forehead flat against the dew-riddled grass, until beads of liquid are spread across his pale skin. “Jisung, please go.”
His voice is thin, nothing more than exhaled air. Jisung can barely hear his words above the world around him; the whispering wind, the calling birds, the distant chuckle of that little stream that circles his pink-brick life. It’s all louder, so much louder, than those weak words that slither from Minho’s lips.
But Jisung hears every word.
“Run. Please. Run, Jisung.”
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
And Jisung wants to laugh. He can feel the sound bubbling in his chest, creeping up his throat like bile. He wants to laugh and it’s not just a chuckle, not just a snort. It’s full-blown laughter, shaking his weak vocal cords and thrumming unknown beats against his Adam’s apple.
“Just go. I don’t want you to see-” Minho’s throat bobs as he swallows. “I don’t want you to see me. Please, run.”
Run. How funny. Run. Such a simple word, basic. 달리다. Or maybe it’s complicated. So many syllables. So many complex sounds sliding so easily through Minho’s lips. 달리다. So many characters just for that movement of footsteps, just for those feet one step in front of the other. 달리다. 달리다. Run. Run.
“Please Jisung.”
Minho’s feathers shimmer in the patchy sunlight streaming through tree leaves. They’re not black, not entirely. They’re a glimmering mass of colours. They’re obsidian, and azure, and emerald, and lilac, and iridescent. Iridescent. They’re every colour of those rainbows that stretch across the world when a star’s rays cut through pattering raindrops. But more than anything, Jisung thinks, Minho’s feathers are beautiful.
“Jisung.”
So fucking beautiful.
How strange.
Jisung’s hands clench into fists at his side, tight enough for his nails to bite into the soft skin of his palms, but never break through into blood streams because he’s so very human and so vary cautious.
And he’s so incredibly beautiful, like watercolours splattered upon a white canvas that has just been waiting to be filled. Like a blank space in the world that has been wanting, yearning, to belong to something else, someone else. And now it does, with every colour of the rainbow Jisung once smiled at, once took pictures below.
“Run.” Minho’s head slowly turns to the side, his eyes still closed against jade-green strands of grass that run across his eyelashes like fingers on harp strings. A smear of brown dirt flows across his shallow cheekbones and swirls against the sharp edges of his nose.
“Jisung.” And his name sounds like thunder-clap rolls and sacred whispers.
How strange.
“Jisung.” Minho calls his name until it is just slightly louder than all that world around them.
“Jisung.” And he feels his nails dig tighter into his palms until he thinks that maybe now he can feel his skin slick with blood. But it doesn’t matter when Minho’s feathers are the deepest black, blue, green, purple, and everything but red. Everything but human insides.
“Run.”
How funny. 달리다. It comes again, from a mouth that is twisted against the ends of grass fingertips. And how funny. Run. Minho’s lips work so desperately against the ground and a single shining drop of dew sits heavy on his blunt chin.
It’s then, with not-just-black feathers and all those layered tiers of Jisung’s memory collapsing into a basement-bomb explosions. It’s then, with all those rivers of purposely misplaced recollections and all those intentionally forgotten minutes in time, that Jisung’s memories flood to the surface of his fragile consciousness. It’s then that he is nothing but flesh drowning in has-been lives.
“Run—.” His body shudders, vibrating against the densely packed earth. “Before I can’t control it.”
Tears streamed down his face, falling against his tattered shirt. He ran and didn’t look back.
“I want you to run.” His father’s eyes were hard and certain
His step-father curled in upon his own flesh. “Get Jeongin and run.”
His father’s eyes were hard and certain. “Run and never look back, my son.”
“Run, Jisung.” Minho’s voice is gasped in incremental inhales and so very desperate.
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
“Run.”
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
Something snaps.
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
Something breaks
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
“No.”
What a strange word.
“Run.”
“No.”
So strange. Jisung’s fingernails dig ever deeper into his palms and he knows that now they are drawing blood but he doesn't care.
“Please, Jisung. Run.”
Run.
It’s so simple, so basic, so deeply ingrained into his being that Jisung feels his muscles straining to do as they’re told, to do as they have done so many times before.
And Jisung hates it.
God, he hates it. He hates his body built to flee. He hates his mind ready to retreat. He hates his past built on footsteps pounded upon empty concrete and dirt ground. He hates his memories of empty spaces. He hates the loneliness that has dug so deep into his bones it feels like a whispered prayer kneeling at his beside.
He fucking hates it. So he says that single strange word again—
“No,” and his voice is so, so steady, as rivers of red run through the creases of his fingers and drip to the ground below.
Minho opens his eyes then. One so deeply brown that Jisung feels mud baths that soothe his broken and bruised skin. One so blue that the sky swallows Jisung and tosses his weak body into the universe beyond, into an infinity he never thought he would touch.
And still he speaks, every word trembling, his voice splitting in the uncertainty that threatens to overwhelm his mind and the assurance that he knows the man sprawled before him.
“I’m not going to run.”
“You need to go, Jisung,” Minho says and his lips are stricken by emerald-green grass stalks that seem to belong on his face. “You have to leave.” Leave me.
“No,” Jisung repeats and certainty swells in chest like an unpoppable balloon and he thinks that maybe with these helium insides he can fly. “I don’t need to do anything. I can do exactly what I fucking want.”
Minho turns his head again, presses his face into the dirt once more. And maybe Jisung thought that without those multi-coloured eyes fixed upon him he would feel free, less pinned down, less like an omniscient god was watching his every move. But he doesn’t.
Instead he just feels unknown, uncertain, blurred at the edges like the camera can’t quite focus on him. He feels lost, so very isolated in a world of loneliness. Those multi-coloured eyes turn away and for a second he feels like a ghost in the dreams he once had. For a second he is Theseus, forgotten in the twists of the labyrinth.
“I won’t run.” His voice sounds so weak, so frail, so consumed by all those emotions he’s been trying so desperately to hide “Everyone keeps telling me to run.” Jisung heaves in a breath and his chest expands and collapses like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.
“Everyone.” The sigh that ripples through his body drags his shoulders down until they feel too loose, too relaxed, too ready for everything that might come after.
“My father, my step-father,” Jisung pauses and his next breath trembles in his throat. “You. Even my own body. They all tell me to run.”
He steps forward, just one single step, and it feels like he’s fighting through molasses, thick, deep, dragging against his limbs until he thinks his skin will give way and peel off his bones. And yet, his veins vibrate with something so soft, pulsing through his body with something so very warm, and soothing, and all his muscles loosen in that single feeling.
Relief. It’s pure relief.
“Everyone has always told me to run.” He takes another step forward and the warmth thickens across his skin.
Once more Minho’s head turns to the side, and once more his eyes open. Coffee-cup brown. Summer-sky blue. Then his gaze drips down onto Jisung and his oh-so human face. His oh-so human fear. His oh-so human certainty.
“They screamed at me.” Jisung’s words are even softer now, just a murmur, just the slightest vibration of cells in the neutral air. “They begged me.”
He swallows and tries to even his voice. “They died for me.”
“And I did what they told me.” Perhaps his words are only heard by the air around him. Perhaps. Perhaps, they are whispers spoken into a wind that blows them into incomprehensible sibilance. “So I ran. I ran further than I ever ran.
“I ran, so far and so fast. But—”
Then Jisung’s body finds a strength he didn’t know he had. Something straightens his shoulders, something pushes his chest out, something arches his spine, just that little bit until he feels more important than he should be. Something raises his chin just that little bit higher, lengthens his neck just that little bit more. Something stiffens all of his edges until that weakness runs through his bones but doesn’t ever hinder his muscles.
“But— I don’t want to run anymore.” He falls to his knees, so easily, so effortlessly, as if this is where he has always belonged. His hands move automatically, raise upwards, until Jisung’s hand are cupping Minho’s cheeks. It’s so easy, all his body agreeing, all his mind content, everything that he is bowing before this body and it feels like the place we was meant to be.
Refusing to run. Refusing to leave. Right with him.
Him, with multi-coloured eyes. Him, with skin as pale as the corners of the sunset skies. Him with red lips, a perfect blend of roses and lilacs. Him, the shadow in Jisung’s garden. Him the someone that wished him good night. In shaky words and strong sentences.
+Him, that someone that was there when no one else was.
“Run, Jisung, run as fast as you can.”
Exhaustion, so deeply embedded in his bones that he thinks it might have made friends with the guilt woven into his cells. Because he’s here and they’re not. Because he ran and they fell. Because he breathes in that cold air tinged with green—
Tinged with life—
Tinged with everything they will never—
“Okay.” Minho’s voice is hoarse, worn raw so +his quiet commands that come out as rasped words. His eyes are fixed on Jisung’s, deep, knowing, peeling away the world until he can see everything underneath, everything that makes Jisung tick. “Okay.”
And everything happens so fast then, too fast.
Jisung is stumbling forward on scarred knees still expecting a fight. He’s crouched on blades of grass, still wet with morning dew. He’s winding an arm around Minho’s waist, the other threading through his hair, through his incandescent feathers humming in the sunlight.
And the dam breaks. Minho’s murmuring words so fast they sound like all those keyboard fingers in PC bangs he used to visit. Jisung’s saying a hundred things he won’t remember, a hundred words he won’t know, and a hundred nothings that he means enough to make them something whole.
“I’m here. I’m here now.” Jisung’s palm pressing into the dip between Minho’s shoulder blades and the feathers flutter against his skin like brittle whiskers. “You’re here.”
“Minho, just breathe. I’m not going anywhere.” The fingers of his other hand wind through those raven locks and scratch ever so slightly on the scalp underneath.
“I’m not leaving. I will never leave you.” His sight never leaves those eyes that gaze back into him, so sharp, as if they can see every lie he has even spoken. And they find nothing.
“Minho. Just breathe. You’re here, with me.” He feels it, when Minho believes him. He feels it in the body that liquifies beneath his hands, in the feathers that fade from between in his fingers, in the eyes that blur every so slightly at the edges.
“It’s going to be okay. I promise.” It all fades away, like ashes caught in the wind. Minho’s desperate gasps lull into measured breaths. The feathers mould into outlined tattoos. All those muscles beneath his fingers relax.
And then they’re just two bodies in the woods, dappled by sunlight and forgotten by the past. But Jisung doesn’t stop the words that spill from his mouth. Because he’s always been the one to talk, to fill the silence.
“It’s okay. You’re not going to hurt me. I trust you. You won’t hurt me. I’m not leaving. It’s okay. Just breathe. We’re okay. I’m not running. Not again.”
And those feathers, they fade away. That beak, it never hardens. That one eye, it returns to darkest brown. That voice, it’s silken soft and gentle in Jisung’s ears and he hears every word.
“Please don’t leave. Don’t let me go. Please. Please. I don’t want to be that. I won’t. Please. I won’t be that. Don’t let me. Don’t let me go. Don’t run.”
🝔 현재 🝔
Summer comes in fluffy white clouds shaded by the gentle grey of shadows that know when they aren’t welcome. The blue sky is cast over the world in an ever-reaching blanket of unbroken azure threads. The sun blazes down upon Jisung’s skin, turns his arms bronze with its rays and brings beads of sweat rolling down his forehead.
The garden thrives. Under the bright glow of photosynthesis and the murmuring trickle of cool river flow from the rusted watering-can Jisung found beside his hut-home, the garden thrives.
Wilted stems and browned leaves are pushed aside in favour of multi-coloured petals and bursts of colour soaking up the sun’s rays. A hundred faces turn towards the sky and every so often, in his daily routine, Jisung finds himself tilting his head skywards, eyelids pursed close in the blinding light.
He meanders slowly to the gurgling river. The world around him is filled with green skirts brushing against brown bark legs, and the voices of birds returning to nest in their summer homes. He listens to their songs, pauses in his steps to hear the tales of sunlit romance and the chaotic chirps of fledgling chicks falling from their nests. Falling to fly. Their shadows trace patterns across his eyelids in shaded black upon blooming red.
The bird's songs are louder when he breaches the tree line and steps upon the softened ground of the riverbank, not yet parched dry and hard by the sun’s rays. Those sweet trills are lifted, enveloped, by the gurgling chuckle of the laughing water tides flowing on to another land. Soft waves lap against his toes and he has long forgotten gaping canvas shoes in favour of feet hardened by pockmark blisters.
It’s still cold, the ever flowing river, as if its waters have been carried from spring and maybe even winter. The curling waves lip against his skin and even though he enjoys the chill to counter the sun’s harsh rays, he feels goosebumps raise over his shins.
His fingertips meet the river’s surface and although he knows the chill in his toes, he’s still surprised by the cold that snakes across his fingers. His lips part in a stuttered inhale and his hand automatically clenches into a fist even as he plunges his forearms into the chuckling water.
Soft smile and deep voice, eyes that screamed fearful and fingernails that dug crescents into his bared skin. He thinks of terror and a voices that stammered over bad news and worse news and everything in between. He thrusts his arm deeper into the consuming waters, until the short sleeves of his shirt are damped at the hem and stick to his biceps.
How strange.
When the sun is at its highest he pulls his arm back from the smooth riverbed rocks he had been running his fingertips against. The air feels somehow cooler against his drenched skin for a second until the afternoon rays heat his body once more. Jisung leans back, lets himself slump against the tree trunk behind him, lets his eyelids flutter closed.
He doesn’t sleep. Not because there is the chance of danger. Nothing feathered has dared to step forth in his woods since bundles of black and half-made promises.
No, it’s been quiet, so quiet, a life cradled in green-swathed valleys and the murmured oath of protection.
Jisung is safe.
So sleep evades him in that way it will when you’re waiting for something. It feels like those journeys, before everything, when he travelled between homes, between Seoul and Itewon, between mother and father, with only the clacking of train tracks and Jeongin’s sorrowful promises to keep him company.
It had been so quiet and yet so loud. When his inner whispers had been consumed by crescendoed background noise. But, even then, Jisung had never hated it. He had never hated the sound drop of white noise that filled his brain until every thought that was only ever half-imagined faded into black clouds. He had always appreciated that chaotic interruption.
And it came again. Birds chirped between branches in discordant harmony. The river laughed at unheard jokes. The breeze whistled through reed less trees. The sun shone in bright layers of yellow and orange and red. And, even with his eyes closed and mind blank, Jisung never slept.
In the end it was the teasing fingertips of the wind that moved him, the last glimpse of a snow-soaked winter that still clung to the simpering breeze in the drewdrop cover of morning. It ruffled strands of Jisung’s hair upon his forehead, traced goosebumps along his forearms, chewed upon his nose until a glowing red slope dominated the centre of his vision.
Seasons change like forgotten fashion, his mother had told him once, lips pulled into a wry smirk as she watched the first snowflakes of winter fall. What was prized one day is dismissed the next.
She had smiled down at Jisung, raised a hand to gently ruffle his hair. That’s just how life goes, she had murmured, a wry smile upon her lips and pain hiding her irises. That’s just how it goes. Everything old is eventually replaced by something new.
For a second her gaze had slipped beyond Jisung, into something he could never quite reach. For a second she was somewhere else, but then she returned, and this time the smile reached her eyes and clouded her pupils with something else, something like hope.
But it keeps going, she had said, and her hand threaded through Jisung’s cropped brown hair, fingers working against the natural folds until he felt woven and bared before her eyes. All that world keeps going, and sometimes what’s new is better.
She had left two days later, shoulders posed in straight lines, lips curled into a mask of certainty, brow furrowed in doubt, promises of weekends rolling of her tongue. She had left with Jeongin’s tiny hand clasped tightly in her own and Jisung’s father standing at the door without a single line creased into his face.
And Jisung never told her. He never got the chance. He never shared the wisdom of a seven-year-old without true understanding of the world.
The seasons change, summer becomes autumn, becomes winter, becomes spring, but it always becomes summer again.
When the last light of the sun is dipping below the rigid mountains and hills, Jisung stands and turns back towards his little brick home with the holes in the roof and days scraped into the walls.
He can’t see the little shack through the dense foliage but it’s as though he has x-ray vision, as though it’s a destination highlighted on his life’s minimap. He can imagine the pale orange outline blooming bright in his vision, a spotlight beckoning him home.
The birds are quieter now, the wind lulled to nothing more than a whisper, the world falling asleep around him. When he climbs over the turnstile, it seems his garden has been waiting for his return. All the flower-heads seem to turn towards him, patterning his eyes in their rainbow colours, dulled slightly in the evening light. The soft green leaves of the trees draw slow lines across his shoulders. Even the grass seems to welcome his footsteps.
He reaches the dirt path in front of his home and then he pauses, no more than four metres from the front door haphazardly refitted on rusting hinges. In the dust at his feet, a message has been carved by a stick carelessly tossed aside. It’s hurried, each character drawn by hands that just wanted to move, just wanted to leave, just wanted to run, just wanted to be anywhere else…
Only so they can return.
Supply run.
I’ll be back before sunset.
Take care.
M.
Jisung stands there, eyes fixed on the slightly curved right corners of the M, watching the sun’s last rays filter away from the dirt pressed to the edges of the letter’s indent. Eventually, at some point in his vigil, he sinks to the ground, pulls his knees tight to his chest, until he can feel his heartbeat against his tensed thighs.
And he waits. For the light to fade. For the day to die. For the season to change.
When the breeze is cool enough that he shivers in the moonlight casting too long shadows, he hears the distant thud of footsteps. They’re hurried, not enough to be sprinting, not enough to be worried, but hard enough, loud enough, strong enough, to be more than just walking.
Running.
Running.
1
Not from something.
Running.
To something.
He stands and flicks his gaze from the dirt-etched words to the winding path carried away from his home in golden sunset and outstretched shadow limbs. And he’s there, each step louder than the last, growing ever closer.
He focuses in Jisung’s vision, moulding from blurred outlines sketched in 420p to illustrated shapes cast in high definition. The footsteps slow as they reach the ramshackle hut called home and Jisung feels the smile stretch unwarranted across his face.
“Jagiya!” Minho halts in front of him, lips pursed but eyes shining bright in the dusk glow. “I’m home, aren’t you going to greet me?”
Jisung reaches out and his fingertips brush against sweat-drop skin as cold as winter rivers, and a body as warm as the summer-tinged earth. He’s not curled in on himself but he can still feel his heartbeat pulsing in his kneecaps, slow and steady, anchored deep so as not to be blown away.
He breathes in. “Was-”
His question is interrupted instantly, the same question he always asks when Minho makes a supply run.
“Nope,” the reply is carefree, light and easy, the same as always. “Seonghwa was nowhere to be seen.”
The same as always.
“Sungie,” Minho says, and his lips press against Jisung cheek for just a second in time before they’re pulling away into a one-sided smirk. “You’ll never guess what I found.”
Minho’s hand rises between their bodies and Jisung doesn’t know when they became close enough for Minho’s knuckles to press against his chest. There’s a tube clasped between his thin fingers, white plastic with a small red and blue label.
“Look, jagiya.” Minho’s eyes bore into his own, one blue, one brown, overflowing with smug pride. “Do you even know what this is?”
Jisung cocks an eyebrow, because of course he does. He’s not that old… not yet.
“Of course you don’t, you’ve never used it.” The smirk on Minho’s face widens. “Jisung-ssi, meet toothpaste.”
Jisung throws his head to the sky, blackened by night and dotted with sprinkled stars. He curves his back against the hand that presses in finger-print divots along his spine.
The small hut with bricks dulled to a pink and purple hue is in one corner of his vision. The sun dips below the horizon in the other. He lets his eyes flutter closed.
A solid body holds him close, wraps around him, fills the night with warmth. Lips press against the line of his jaw. And Jisung laughs.
He laughs.
🜞 미래 🜞
And maybe it changes, the strange symphony that Jisung has written in a tiny part of a world he will never see. Maybe it changes. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Jisung wakes. The sun wakes with him, the lines of the cracked window panes trace the walls. He lifts his hand from Minho’s chest and reaches for the knife beside his backpack pillow— Minho swears that on the next supply run he will find a proper pillow but he never does (Jisung doesn’t care, Minho’s body is where he rests his head after all).
Another line is etched beside the others. It’s a single measure, anoth
+er day, the passing of time. It’s another morning that he wakes and another day that passes by as easily as the last. It’s another night unbroken by nightmares and filled with warmth.
Minho mutters in his sleep at the movement, scrunches his nose, flutters his long eyelashes against his ever-so-carefully sculpted cheekbones. But he doesn’t move.
Jisung lets the knife fall back into its place, props his chin against Minho’s chest, and smiles. And it’s so simple, those minutes, even an hour, where he’s awake before Minho. Sometimes he wonders if maybe the other can’t fall sleep and that’s why he takes too long to wake, but he never asks.
He doesn’t ask because he can’t fix it. He just helps however he can.
So he lies there, the warmth of at least five blankets and one warm body against another, blowing away the tendril threads of spring’s last chill. He lies there and lets the world pass in the inhale-exhale of breath between Minho’s parted lips. He lies there and watches eyes tracing restlessly in dreams behind pale pink eyelids. He lies there, Minho’s arm still slung loosely around his waist, and waits for the world to resume.
Jisung watches and waits for those lips to press together, those eyes to open, that arm to tighten and those fingertips to crease his hips.
They never bother with breakfast. Jisung suggested it on their first morning, hiding his lack of an appetite with a small smile. Minho didn’t bother with the pleasantries and wrinkled his lips into a grimace and his eyebrows into a dark crease.
“If we must,” he groaned and Jisung couldn't help but laugh, loud in the morning’s stillness.
“No, we don’t need to do anything we don’t want to,” he grinned and shrugged easily. “I always hated breakfast.”
“Oh thank god,” Minho murmured, eyes raising to the roof that Jisung had finally fixed a week ago. “Breakfast always made me feel too heavy.”
“Would you look at that; just another thing we share.”
“Yeah, that and the apocalypse.” They laughed so easily and Jisung couldn't help but pull Minho just that little bit closer.
They always start in the garden. Perhaps it’s easiest to start there, the first step taken out of their front door, the first thing they see in the faint, still early, morning light. Perhaps it’s the most important, the food to fill their belly, the extension of their limited time. Or perhaps it’s just a collision of lines, a point in the horizon, a little epicentre of their very own earthquake.
Whatever it is, they always begin their mornings there. Jisung reaches out and twines his fingers with Minho’s, pulls his body close to his own, like a shadow that is not his own, a shadow that might fade away.
And he lets his hand cup green-stalk fruit and blooming seedlings between his calloused palms and speaks to them as their petals blossom and speak back. He runs his fingers over soft green leaves cut into a million curves and whispers to the trees.
The trees never reply but Minho always whispers back.
“I hope I made them happy,” he tells Minho one day, staring into the face of a calla lily until the white petals are a snow-storm against his pupils. “Whoever made this garden.”
“He is.” Minho’s reply is quick and easy, his fingers tightened around Jisung’s for just a heartbeat.
“How can you know?” Jisung turns to look at the man above him and the curved-stalked flowers follow his gaze in the after-image of white strokes around Minho’s hard-lined body.
“Because—” Minho’s voice was rough and pockmarked, his gaze fixed on a single tree set, not too fair from them, but Jisung knew he was seeing a million worlds past their current one. “I knew him.”
“You did?” The question came out a whisper, uncertain, hesitant of the ground it walked upon.
“Yeah.” Minho inhaled a deep gulp of air that bulged down his throat and puffed out his chest before settling into the stark lines of his body. “I did.”
“He was my friend.”
“You had friends?”
Minho lips twisted into a strange shape, somewhere caught between a smile and a grimace. His eyes, cornflower blue and hay-bale brown.
“Yeah, once upon a time. His name was Hyunjin.”
Jisung’s body freezes, his fingertips caught on the lily’s edges and his thighs cramping in his crouched position among his garden’s flowers.
“Was?”
“It’s his blood on the floor.”
That’s all the explanation needed. He knows everything.
And still Jisung’s voice is barely more than a soft-toy squeak in his chest.
“I thought it was yours.”
“No.” Minho’s lips twist then, emotion finally snaring across his face in the sinking crease of despair. “It’s all his.”
Particles of time dissolve as Jisung pulls his hand from the calla lily cupping the petals, hugging them close to his chest. His heart beats too fast and he thinks his body might explode from all the words in his chest but he spills them out anyway.
“Hyunjin?” He tries to level his voice but it still comes out a faint whisper.
“Yeah, Hyunjin.” Minho is too far away, so, so, far away. He’s gazing into the red-dawn hue of the horizon as if no one thing in the world can touch. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. “That’s him.”
How strange.
It was only… how long does it take for blood to dry?
Only… How far is Uiseong from Sangju?
Only…
“Hwang Hyunjin,” Minho says and all the world turns on its axis and the axis is a garden in the middle of nowhere.
“Hwang Hyunjin?” Somehow Jisung’s voice is clear and calm, as steady as lily leaves swaying in the breeze. Minho’s eyes snap up to meet his own but he doesn’t let it dissuade him from half-remembered dreams.
“He loves mint-chocolate chip and he’s—” Jisung stutters as he tries to remember the gas station and that wide grin within. “He’s looking for a friend.”
“A friend,” the echo falls instantly from Minho’s lips but those multi-coloured eyes never change, never turn away from the desperation that hangs on Jisung like his last words are being eked out between their bodies.
“Yes,” Jisung breathes. “He’s looking for his friend. His friend in Sangju.” Minho’s eyes blink slowly, once, twice, three times, just processing. “He said his friend’s Grandparents have land in Sangju.”
Minho’s lips part and Jisung feels the exhale that comes with the movement in every broken inch of his body. And there’s a smile, just the vaguest hint, that flickers at the edge of Minho’s lips. There’s water filling his eyes, blurring the irises until those dual colours are almost lost.
The words falter with his memory but they pick up again in the image of fingers curled around dirty plastic cups. A body slumped over a broken wooden table, left in the soft sunlight of morning as Jisung ran away.
As he always did.
Slowly he stands, the muscles of his thighs trembling at the moment and balls of his feet sighing as he redistributes his weight. Minho follows his movements, eyes tracing every inch of Jisung’s face as though he has bought a sacred gift, wrapped in only in his words.
“We drank whiskey at a gas station in Uiseong.” The stuttered sound that breaks from Minho’s lips is half gasp, half whimper. “His hair was red. I said I should dye my hair green.”
The silence at his words is the deepest cavern, rended into the Earth’s crust until Jisung thinks he could look down and see the night’s sky staring back. But he doesn’t. He fixes his eyes on those multi-coloured orbs that glisten before him in unshed tears.
“His hair was red,” Minho repeats and the words are so faint, so quiet against the garden’s slightest breeze. “Hyunjin’s hair was never red,”
“He said he wanted to go red but he didn’t. He didn’t until…” Minho’s eyes flood with a million seas and part of Jisung regrets speaking. ‘He didn’t until
Then Minho is collapsing forward. His arms are tight around Jisung’s waist. His breathing is short and tight in Jisung’s ear. His body is bound in tight lines against Jisung’s own, and absolutely everything that Jisung thought he once knew is filled with MinhoMinhoMinho.
“He always wanted to go red.” Minho’s lips brush against the skin of his collarbone in every word. “He always wanted it. But.
“Five years.
“Never red.”
They stand there, wrapped in each other, until the early morning sun has bloomed until the bright light of the middle of the day. It’s only when the sun is at its highest that Minho pulls away and Jisung can almost hear his joints creak as they move from their held position.
“Hyunjin was right.” Minho is smiling, so wide, so happy, easy and casual, even with crystal teardrops in his eyes waiting to fall, and Jisung is distantly aware that his shirt is still soaked through.
“What?” He croaks out, his voice hoarse with sobs, and he knows his face is criss-crossed with similar tears.
“You would look good with green hair.” Minho’s face is serious, honest, genuine, never changing, until the slightest hint of a smirk pulls at the corners of his lips.
Jisung throws his head back, rips his gaze away from the man still standing in the circle of his arms. He looks up at the baby blue sky carelessly patterned with fluffy white clouds, and the hint of a moon pushing its way into daytime.
And he laughs.
Three months later they travel to Changyeong. Hyunjin’s hair is fire-red under the afternoon sun. Minho rips his hand from Jisung’s and sprints across the bright green grass. Two bodies meet in the middle of the carefully cultivated field fallen into darkened weeds, and they instantly tumble against the ground.
Jisung walks over to the friends, smile so wide he thinks his cheeks will hurt soon. A hand sneaks out and grabs his wrist, gentle but oh so certain. Then he’s falling into the pile of bodies and Minho is kissing his jawline and Hyunjin is smiling above him.
“Thank you.” He doesn’t know who says the words. Maybe they are his own. “Thank you.”
Thank you
He’s buried beneath bodies and surrounded by warmth. Every breath comes easier than the last.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
Once their garden is tended to, soil darkened by water and each flower blessed with whispered words and delicate fingers, they climb over the turnstile and into the forest.
Each day is different among the trees. Sometimes they check their traps for prey, letting loose those still alive and thanking those who have given their lives. Sometimes they just walk, wander among the foliage, hands linked, watching the world around them. Sometimes they walk down to the river, dip their toes in the cool mud or wash their bodies and their dirtied clothes in the rushing current.
Sometimes they walk until they find a little clearing of fresh grass or meadow of flowers or field that once was tilled. There they sit or lie on the ground, bathe in the sunlight. Minho lies his head in Jisung’s lap, contended smirk pulling at his lips as Jisung hovers his hand over his eyes to block the streaming sunlight. Sometimes Jisung leans his body into Minho’s chest, an arm wrapped tight around his middle as Minho’s chin rests easily on his shoulder.
And they talk. They tell each other stories, of past times, of lives that came before the end of the world, of what they once were, of what they could be. They talk about the present, about the tasks for the next day, about inventory and what should be for dinner. Sometimes they talk about the future, of what could be, what they swear will be.
“We’ll never know what happens next,” Minho tells Jisung, eyes focused on a point far beyond the trees crowding their little patch of grass. “We didn’t see any of this coming.”
Jisung curls his knees tighter against Minho’s hips and presses his face just a little further into the hole in Minho’s loose white shirt, until the tip of his nose is ghosting against skin tattooed by black-feather outlines.
“I’m scared,” he confesses and his voice is the softest whisper among the raucous noon sound of a world returned to nature, but he knows Minho will hear him. “I don’t want to die.”
A hand soothes down his back, warm and steady, curls against his hip-bones, thumbs under his thin shirt. The skin against his nose leans back for a moment as lips are pressed into his hair for just a second longer than simple comfort.
“Don’t be. I’ll protect you.” The body beside him straightens once more, the hand falls away, but Minho doesn’t leave. “You don’t have to run anymore.”
“I won’t,” Jisung promises, nodding slowly, nose rubbing against the bare skin unfolded below him. He turns to the multi-coloured eyes and the soft smile curling below it. “And I’ll protect you too.”
Everyday ends the same. Even if one or the other has been away searching for just a little more. Even if Minho has been trapped in their little shack with black feathers sprouting on pale skin. Even if they’re both bone-tired with drooping eyes and minds set on sleep. Even when Minho grumbles and mutters under his breath as Jisung tugs at his hand or Jisung stumbles forward as Minho pushes against his shoulders.
Everyday ends on that little rope swing that somehow manages to hold their combined weight on frayed fragments of what was once stronger than their resolve. When the evening has folded in around their bodies and stars glint above them, they sit on that seat in their garden and exhale the exhaustion of the day.
And just sometimes, when the moon is bright enough; when the garden is packed with silver-lit infinite colours and hues that Jisung never thought he would see; when the wind picks up to carry words away, and the shadows are blurred suggestions of shade;
Sometimes Jisung sings.
It’s so silly, so strange. It’s a memory of one of those documentaries he watched on TV while his parents argued, so old and flickered with static in all those places he can’t quite recall.
It’s so silly because that documentary pulsed in flickering images and told Jisung that all that greenery never cared for music. They never cared for the vibrations of insect colonies and creepy crawly life. The never acknowledged the sound of a voice sinking beneath all the layers of life. The images never saw anything because they didn’t know death.
But Jisung knows. He sings to his garden and sometimes, just sometimes, he thinks his garden listens. He thinks that sometimes the petals uncurl at his voice. The trees reverberate with his vibrato. The roots sink ever deeper with his gentle words.
Most of the time the words are random syllables, picked from the air around him, woven into nonsensical sentences that flow from his lips. Most of the time it’s vague memories of those stories his mother read to him before he fell asleep, back when he was too young to believe in ‘bed-times’. Most of the time it’s just stutter-step thoughts that wind through his brain when he can’t quite find sleep.
But sometimes he lets his memories unwind, in rolling carpets of what-once-was. He sang those songs on the radio when his father drove him back to his mother. He sang those incessant pop tunes that played on repeat during his shifts at his first job when he was fourteen, maybe fifteen.
But sometimes he lets himself pick the words, lets his heart pluck thoughts from the ocean of his mind and throw them up like sea-spray into the air. The night’s fingers ripple across the garden and in the moon-meld of dusk, he lets himself create a song of crippling destruction and a small daisy of hope slinking through the cracks.
And sometimes—
When the night is drawing a cloak over their twined bodies, when the garden is overflowing with blooming life; when the wind has faded into nothing but the inhale and exhale of their breathing.
When Jisung sings of something more than daisy-chain hope and memories of a ‘better time’, a ‘previous time’, a ‘time that once was’; when he lets go of preludes and introductions and everything that came before.
When he sings of what is coming, what will be, what has yet to unfold. When he sings of a garden filled with breath and bodies joined by shadow. When he sings of maybes and must be. When he sings of a future, a mirae, a 미래, a certainty that steps upon his fleeing heels—
Sometimes Minho sings with him.