(no subject)
dead on arrival
g-dragon/top, pg-13, 2100ⓦ
Note: Set in an AU where there is no Big Bang, only GD&TOP and zombies.
“Shit,” Jiyong says, ducking as the soldier snarls and lurches toward him. He gets him with a bullet under the chin. His head explodes, bits of bone fragment and brain matter flying, and the body falls at his feet with the wet, sepulchral sound of grey flesh. “Breakfast,” he calls.
“Don't be disgusting,” Seunghyun calls back, but he laughs. He nudges a body aside with a boot and grimaces a little when the toe comes away dirtied. Underfoot, the shattered glass crunches. He ducks warily into the gas station’s tiny convenience store, but it’s quiet, the hollowed-out silence of a bomb shelter. The cabinet behind the counter is open, door wrenched half out of its hinges: the alcohol’s predictably all gone, but there’s a decent array of cigarettes, and Seunghyun considers for a moment before he thinks, might as well, and grabs a pack of Lucky Sevens, Marlboros for Jiyong, jams them both in his pocket and gets to work.
Jiyong appears in the doorway a while later, scrubbing a hand through his hair. He smells like adrenaline and motor oil. “Half a tank in the Mazda, and Sgt. Hungry had some ammo and a grenade. Not bad.” Seunghyun looks up and grins: paydirt. Jiyong hums as he walks up and down the aisles, surveying the meagre offerings. He grabs a pack of gum, unwraps one and folds it into his mouth. He’d stopped feeling bad about this part a long time ago. He moves onto the next aisle, looks into Seunghyun’s bag. “That’s not food,” he says.
Seunghyun, testing the water taps, mumbles something like semantics. A couple raids and people stopped being nice, stopped leaving money on the counter, stopped working under the assumption that anyone else was alive to leave supplies for. The first aid section is gone. Seunghyun had scrounged up a crushed cup of Jagabee, a dusty bottle of unsweetened black tea, and a three-pack of laver seaweed. Fresh was out, preservatives were in.
The sun is full and high by the time they’re done. His stomach is empty. There’s a body laid out beside the Mazda, face blank but for an echo of thirst. The flies, buzzing for a taste, have descended. “Hey,” Seunghyun says, and tosses him the Marlboros. The pads of Jiyong’s fingers are dirty, blackened. He holds the cigarette between a forefinger and a thumb, close to the filter, and nurses the flame from the lit end of Seunghyun’s cigarette.
Five months ago, a scientist working on recombinant DNA for animal viruses had gone home with a violent fever, numbness in his extremities. He’d returned to work the next day, died during the lunch hour and clocked back in along with everyone else.
The government’s response had been predictably military, with the result that most of what they called the first wave were soldiers. It’s a good thing, Seunghyun had grunted, heel crunching through nose bone, they don’t retain any of their tactical training. Instead, they were slow, vicious but uncoordinated, scenting out the weakest targets. Maybe I just taste better, Jiyong said, a little bit affronted. Don’t be jealous.
You probably taste like squirrel, Seunghyun got out, before he had to clamp his mouth shut to avoid a spray of blood.
These days, more of them were civilians. Ammo was getting scarce. The president of South Korea had gone into hiding. The virus had gone global. GD&TOP had been in the middle of a tour after their third album. For weeks, they’d travelled around in their tour bus. For the second concert in Seoul, their biggest fansites had held a support project, with the result that their mini-fridge was crammed with little fruit parfaits and water bottles with custom labels, chocolate croissants and madeleines, a three-tier cake with their fondant likenesses. One side of the bus was crammed with clothes racks, boxes of accessories and a tumult of shoes. “I feel a little bad,” Seunghyun had said, tearing open a bag of gummy bears. The black and gold sticker flashed as Jiyong made a haphazard turn. “For never holding that concert.”
The venue had been sold out, but the curtains never rose. Backstage, a girl had burst through security, looked up at Seunghyun, and said, “Oppa.” When her jaws widened like a hinge, Chaerin had grabbed a shoehorn, swung hard at her head, and said, “The concert’s off.”
It would be the third time they’d tried to run from a schedule and the first time they succeeded. Jiyong, going over last-minute logistics with a pyrotechnics specialist across the room, hadn’t seen it happen, but it was hard to miss the crack of metal against bone. When he got to Seunghyun afterward, Seunghyun was still staring at the body, the unnaturally bent arm and crushed skull, eyes still human enough to express something more tender than hunger.
The show had been sold out for weeks, fans streaming into the venue even as they’d ducked out the back door, but Jiyong knew it wasn’t them Seunghyun was really sorry to. When he looked over, gave Seunghyun a careful once-over, he was spearing the gummy bears with a fork, eating them tine by tine. It felt oddly cannibalistic to watch, even stranger to feel reassured by it. “Give me a white one,” he said, at last.
Once most of the food was gone, they’d gone for his Audi, parked in his parents’ villa. Seunghyun had argued the admittedly-significant benefit of having what amounted to a moving house, but shrugged and deferred without hearing out Jiyong’s reasoning. The tour bus ate up gas faster than they could get it; when they reached Pucheon, he pulled into park and watched the fuel indicator swing down past the E and die. After that, he started tapping unleaded, any grade, from every car they could get to, draining every gas station pump that still had something left to give.
He hasn’t showered in an age. He keeps his face and his hands clean when he can, but everything else mostly stays in a permanent state of grime and sweat so thick he could feel it on him like a second skin. He avoids mirrors. At any given time, Jiyong is a pretty good approximation of what he must look like: the dirty fingernails, the matted hair, the same haunted look Jiyong gets when he’s startled awake - which is pretty easy, these days, shying away from noise and movement, one hand tight on his crowbar, the other reaching out for Seunghyun before he’s cracked open an eye.
Jiyong’s best with a knife, going from nought to sixty, opening up a sickle curve on a throat, angled so that the blood sprays away from him. The carotid artery spills fast, like something wild, trapped under all those layers of skin. Seunghyun’s still holding onto the baseball bat he’d picked off some dead kid in Suwon. Between the two of them, they have a semi-automatic each and a pistol neither of them use. He’s the better shot of the two, but Jiyong had shrugged, said, better save the ammo. For emergencies was the implication: Jiyong, after all, always adjusted faster. It was Seunghyun who kept forgetting, had to keep waking up and remembering, we’re not in goddamned Kansas anymore. Holding onto an antiquated idea of normalcy like a grudge.
Things go to shit around Cheongju. It’s impossible to get into the city, cars backed up like a fleet, everyone trying to get a flight out. The exit ramp is a mass grave: bodies fighting to get in, bodies fighting to get out. There are walkers all over the place, swelling out past the barricade of cars. Jiyong makes a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulls off at a rest stop.
Seunghyun watches him walk out, shaking out the stiffness of the drive, then tries to get some shut-eye. He’s still in the car when he hears Jiyong shout, eyes snapping open as a body slams against the passenger window, snarling. “Jesus,” he curses, his elbow slamming into the door hard as he shoves it open, knocking the body off, and drives his machete into it. There are four of them, starting to swarm around Jiyong, who drives his knife into an eye socket, jerking away when a hand clamps down on his arm. “Ji.”
He drops another one, machete snug in its skull, in time to see Jiyong stab one in the throat and go down under another, its head ducking to clamp down on his neck. It takes two steps to reach him, yank the body away from him and pull out his semi-automatic. It tumbles down next to Jiyong, and Seunghyun pins it down with a foot across its protruding collarbones, leaning over it so that the shot meets its face point-blank.
For a moment he feels as wild as anything else out there, narrowed down to one purpose, breath heaving, seeking out flesh and bone: Jiyong’s palm warm and clammy against his, his pulse jumping frantically under his grip. Like he could smell the fear, the adrenaline, how alive Jiyong is. He pulls Jiyong to his feet.
They had one rule: stay fucking alive. “Sorry,” Jiyong says, quietly. He’s shaking. Seunghyun’s thumb brushes over the inside of Jiyong’s wrist again, unconsciously. His heart is still hammering in his chest, so loud he can’t hear properly; he feels like he’s been cut open, laid out and raw. Then Jiyong shakes free, crouching back down to retrieve his knife, fingers slippery with thick, viscous blood, and the moment passes.
They meet some kid gunning it alone in Daejeon, brass and mouthy, rifle slung over his shoulder. They cut a path through city central, dealing with strays. They’re halfway through when he appears on the other end of the street, swinging a hatchet casually as he calls out, “Everyone all right? Anyone need a mercy killing?”
“Bite me,” Jiyong says, baring his teeth, and Seunghyun flips him off.
The kid throws his hands up in a gesture of peace. “Hey, it’s my city, gotta look out for her.”
Daejeon had evacuated early. Parents dragging their crying children out the door, the commotion of a thousand bodies huddled together and waiting. Anyone who refused to leave, or couldn’t, was put down. One shot, clean through the head. In the city’s main hospital, nurses administered sleeping pills in bulk and locked the exits. The smell of rot carried out into the city, where cars were still parked at schools, newspaper stands half-empty, “open” signs hung over shop windows.
Kid has a perfect bird’s eye from the roof. At eye level, the tranquility is almost believable. Like the city was asleep, and the monsters were the dream, something out of a Goya painting. “Don’t look down,” Jiyong says, drawing up next to him, and Seunghyun kind of laughs, turning away from the edge.
Turns out the kid is also packing all kinds of heat. Seunghyun whistles, low and impressed, and picks up one of the shotguns. “You the fail-safe or something?”
“Or something.” He points out the gas stations and safe - “clean” is the word he uses - streets to Jiyong, finishes talking him through back-end alley routes and Plan Bs and reverts to the weather: post-apocalyptic small talk. “Gwangju’s a clusterfuck, if that’s where you’re headed,” he says.
Neither of them ask if that’s where he’s from. Instead, Jiyong tips out a cigarette, holding out the carton to the kid after a moment’s consideration, and just shrugs when he declines.
At some point, the motorway empties out. A couple hundred kilometres after the last lone car, Jiyong pulls over, gets out. Through the backseat window, Seunghyun watches Jiyong slam the door shut, open the adjacent rear door. He starts to draw his legs up to make room, but Jiyong gets an arm bracketed on either side of the seats, knocking knees with Seunghyun, and yanks the door shut with a foot.
When he gets to it, Jiyong’s mouth is warm, unhurried. “Been thinking about this,” Jiyong admits, doesn’t say how long. Seunghyun has his thumbs pressed into the naked dip of Jiyong’s hipbones when Jiyong leans back, punches the lock on the door. The open fly of his jeans makes a wide V, cast in the hazy shadow of the car interior. The sun is coming in low, eclipsed by Jiyong’s shoulder, the line of his neck: the illusion of time.
g-dragon/top, pg-13, 2100ⓦ
Note: Set in an AU where there is no Big Bang, only GD&TOP and zombies.
“Shit,” Jiyong says, ducking as the soldier snarls and lurches toward him. He gets him with a bullet under the chin. His head explodes, bits of bone fragment and brain matter flying, and the body falls at his feet with the wet, sepulchral sound of grey flesh. “Breakfast,” he calls.
“Don't be disgusting,” Seunghyun calls back, but he laughs. He nudges a body aside with a boot and grimaces a little when the toe comes away dirtied. Underfoot, the shattered glass crunches. He ducks warily into the gas station’s tiny convenience store, but it’s quiet, the hollowed-out silence of a bomb shelter. The cabinet behind the counter is open, door wrenched half out of its hinges: the alcohol’s predictably all gone, but there’s a decent array of cigarettes, and Seunghyun considers for a moment before he thinks, might as well, and grabs a pack of Lucky Sevens, Marlboros for Jiyong, jams them both in his pocket and gets to work.
Jiyong appears in the doorway a while later, scrubbing a hand through his hair. He smells like adrenaline and motor oil. “Half a tank in the Mazda, and Sgt. Hungry had some ammo and a grenade. Not bad.” Seunghyun looks up and grins: paydirt. Jiyong hums as he walks up and down the aisles, surveying the meagre offerings. He grabs a pack of gum, unwraps one and folds it into his mouth. He’d stopped feeling bad about this part a long time ago. He moves onto the next aisle, looks into Seunghyun’s bag. “That’s not food,” he says.
Seunghyun, testing the water taps, mumbles something like semantics. A couple raids and people stopped being nice, stopped leaving money on the counter, stopped working under the assumption that anyone else was alive to leave supplies for. The first aid section is gone. Seunghyun had scrounged up a crushed cup of Jagabee, a dusty bottle of unsweetened black tea, and a three-pack of laver seaweed. Fresh was out, preservatives were in.
The sun is full and high by the time they’re done. His stomach is empty. There’s a body laid out beside the Mazda, face blank but for an echo of thirst. The flies, buzzing for a taste, have descended. “Hey,” Seunghyun says, and tosses him the Marlboros. The pads of Jiyong’s fingers are dirty, blackened. He holds the cigarette between a forefinger and a thumb, close to the filter, and nurses the flame from the lit end of Seunghyun’s cigarette.
Five months ago, a scientist working on recombinant DNA for animal viruses had gone home with a violent fever, numbness in his extremities. He’d returned to work the next day, died during the lunch hour and clocked back in along with everyone else.
The government’s response had been predictably military, with the result that most of what they called the first wave were soldiers. It’s a good thing, Seunghyun had grunted, heel crunching through nose bone, they don’t retain any of their tactical training. Instead, they were slow, vicious but uncoordinated, scenting out the weakest targets. Maybe I just taste better, Jiyong said, a little bit affronted. Don’t be jealous.
You probably taste like squirrel, Seunghyun got out, before he had to clamp his mouth shut to avoid a spray of blood.
These days, more of them were civilians. Ammo was getting scarce. The president of South Korea had gone into hiding. The virus had gone global. GD&TOP had been in the middle of a tour after their third album. For weeks, they’d travelled around in their tour bus. For the second concert in Seoul, their biggest fansites had held a support project, with the result that their mini-fridge was crammed with little fruit parfaits and water bottles with custom labels, chocolate croissants and madeleines, a three-tier cake with their fondant likenesses. One side of the bus was crammed with clothes racks, boxes of accessories and a tumult of shoes. “I feel a little bad,” Seunghyun had said, tearing open a bag of gummy bears. The black and gold sticker flashed as Jiyong made a haphazard turn. “For never holding that concert.”
The venue had been sold out, but the curtains never rose. Backstage, a girl had burst through security, looked up at Seunghyun, and said, “Oppa.” When her jaws widened like a hinge, Chaerin had grabbed a shoehorn, swung hard at her head, and said, “The concert’s off.”
It would be the third time they’d tried to run from a schedule and the first time they succeeded. Jiyong, going over last-minute logistics with a pyrotechnics specialist across the room, hadn’t seen it happen, but it was hard to miss the crack of metal against bone. When he got to Seunghyun afterward, Seunghyun was still staring at the body, the unnaturally bent arm and crushed skull, eyes still human enough to express something more tender than hunger.
The show had been sold out for weeks, fans streaming into the venue even as they’d ducked out the back door, but Jiyong knew it wasn’t them Seunghyun was really sorry to. When he looked over, gave Seunghyun a careful once-over, he was spearing the gummy bears with a fork, eating them tine by tine. It felt oddly cannibalistic to watch, even stranger to feel reassured by it. “Give me a white one,” he said, at last.
Once most of the food was gone, they’d gone for his Audi, parked in his parents’ villa. Seunghyun had argued the admittedly-significant benefit of having what amounted to a moving house, but shrugged and deferred without hearing out Jiyong’s reasoning. The tour bus ate up gas faster than they could get it; when they reached Pucheon, he pulled into park and watched the fuel indicator swing down past the E and die. After that, he started tapping unleaded, any grade, from every car they could get to, draining every gas station pump that still had something left to give.
He hasn’t showered in an age. He keeps his face and his hands clean when he can, but everything else mostly stays in a permanent state of grime and sweat so thick he could feel it on him like a second skin. He avoids mirrors. At any given time, Jiyong is a pretty good approximation of what he must look like: the dirty fingernails, the matted hair, the same haunted look Jiyong gets when he’s startled awake - which is pretty easy, these days, shying away from noise and movement, one hand tight on his crowbar, the other reaching out for Seunghyun before he’s cracked open an eye.
Jiyong’s best with a knife, going from nought to sixty, opening up a sickle curve on a throat, angled so that the blood sprays away from him. The carotid artery spills fast, like something wild, trapped under all those layers of skin. Seunghyun’s still holding onto the baseball bat he’d picked off some dead kid in Suwon. Between the two of them, they have a semi-automatic each and a pistol neither of them use. He’s the better shot of the two, but Jiyong had shrugged, said, better save the ammo. For emergencies was the implication: Jiyong, after all, always adjusted faster. It was Seunghyun who kept forgetting, had to keep waking up and remembering, we’re not in goddamned Kansas anymore. Holding onto an antiquated idea of normalcy like a grudge.
Things go to shit around Cheongju. It’s impossible to get into the city, cars backed up like a fleet, everyone trying to get a flight out. The exit ramp is a mass grave: bodies fighting to get in, bodies fighting to get out. There are walkers all over the place, swelling out past the barricade of cars. Jiyong makes a U-turn in the middle of the road and pulls off at a rest stop.
Seunghyun watches him walk out, shaking out the stiffness of the drive, then tries to get some shut-eye. He’s still in the car when he hears Jiyong shout, eyes snapping open as a body slams against the passenger window, snarling. “Jesus,” he curses, his elbow slamming into the door hard as he shoves it open, knocking the body off, and drives his machete into it. There are four of them, starting to swarm around Jiyong, who drives his knife into an eye socket, jerking away when a hand clamps down on his arm. “Ji.”
He drops another one, machete snug in its skull, in time to see Jiyong stab one in the throat and go down under another, its head ducking to clamp down on his neck. It takes two steps to reach him, yank the body away from him and pull out his semi-automatic. It tumbles down next to Jiyong, and Seunghyun pins it down with a foot across its protruding collarbones, leaning over it so that the shot meets its face point-blank.
For a moment he feels as wild as anything else out there, narrowed down to one purpose, breath heaving, seeking out flesh and bone: Jiyong’s palm warm and clammy against his, his pulse jumping frantically under his grip. Like he could smell the fear, the adrenaline, how alive Jiyong is. He pulls Jiyong to his feet.
They had one rule: stay fucking alive. “Sorry,” Jiyong says, quietly. He’s shaking. Seunghyun’s thumb brushes over the inside of Jiyong’s wrist again, unconsciously. His heart is still hammering in his chest, so loud he can’t hear properly; he feels like he’s been cut open, laid out and raw. Then Jiyong shakes free, crouching back down to retrieve his knife, fingers slippery with thick, viscous blood, and the moment passes.
They meet some kid gunning it alone in Daejeon, brass and mouthy, rifle slung over his shoulder. They cut a path through city central, dealing with strays. They’re halfway through when he appears on the other end of the street, swinging a hatchet casually as he calls out, “Everyone all right? Anyone need a mercy killing?”
“Bite me,” Jiyong says, baring his teeth, and Seunghyun flips him off.
The kid throws his hands up in a gesture of peace. “Hey, it’s my city, gotta look out for her.”
Daejeon had evacuated early. Parents dragging their crying children out the door, the commotion of a thousand bodies huddled together and waiting. Anyone who refused to leave, or couldn’t, was put down. One shot, clean through the head. In the city’s main hospital, nurses administered sleeping pills in bulk and locked the exits. The smell of rot carried out into the city, where cars were still parked at schools, newspaper stands half-empty, “open” signs hung over shop windows.
Kid has a perfect bird’s eye from the roof. At eye level, the tranquility is almost believable. Like the city was asleep, and the monsters were the dream, something out of a Goya painting. “Don’t look down,” Jiyong says, drawing up next to him, and Seunghyun kind of laughs, turning away from the edge.
Turns out the kid is also packing all kinds of heat. Seunghyun whistles, low and impressed, and picks up one of the shotguns. “You the fail-safe or something?”
“Or something.” He points out the gas stations and safe - “clean” is the word he uses - streets to Jiyong, finishes talking him through back-end alley routes and Plan Bs and reverts to the weather: post-apocalyptic small talk. “Gwangju’s a clusterfuck, if that’s where you’re headed,” he says.
Neither of them ask if that’s where he’s from. Instead, Jiyong tips out a cigarette, holding out the carton to the kid after a moment’s consideration, and just shrugs when he declines.
At some point, the motorway empties out. A couple hundred kilometres after the last lone car, Jiyong pulls over, gets out. Through the backseat window, Seunghyun watches Jiyong slam the door shut, open the adjacent rear door. He starts to draw his legs up to make room, but Jiyong gets an arm bracketed on either side of the seats, knocking knees with Seunghyun, and yanks the door shut with a foot.
When he gets to it, Jiyong’s mouth is warm, unhurried. “Been thinking about this,” Jiyong admits, doesn’t say how long. Seunghyun has his thumbs pressed into the naked dip of Jiyong’s hipbones when Jiyong leans back, punches the lock on the door. The open fly of his jeans makes a wide V, cast in the hazy shadow of the car interior. The sun is coming in low, eclipsed by Jiyong’s shoulder, the line of his neck: the illusion of time.