The Hollow Men (4/4)
Title: The Hollow Men
Fandom: 2PM
Length: ~5700 words, chapter 4 of 4.
Character/pairing: All members, gen.
Ratings/warnings: I'm going to rate this as PG-13 for language and horror themes - there are zombies, and they kill people, and some of those people are in 2PM.
Notes: (Still) somewhat-AU zombie apocalypse crack. Thank you to insipid_paragon for being an initial sounding board, lookatmoiye7 for being such a thorough and supportive beta and making this the best fic it could be, and to everyone who took a chance on this weird zombie story and made it through to the end.
Summary: This is the way the world ends.
The plane doesn’t have any windows, but Jay knows what he’d see if it did, as they finally bank and tilt in preparation for touching down. They’re landing at Incheon instead of the Seoul Air Base - something to do again with their special non-military status - and he closes his eyes and remembers the spiral of the airport, all curves and steel and glass. Maybe it’s for the best, not being able to see where he’s going, because then he doesn’t have to think about where he’s been.
He opens his eyes to find Sid regarding him oddly, and returns his look with a challenging one of his own. After a beat Sid shrugs, then spins his laptop around so that Jay can see the screen. It’s a picture of Incheon taken from outside the departure terminal, and he’s about ask what the hell he’s supposed to be looking at when he notices the ticker tape running along the bottom.
“Shit, really?” he asks, after the message loops. He glances up, grinning, to find Sid’s expression unchanged.
“I don’t know what it says,” Sid replies, making Jay feel like a prize dick. Of course he doesn’t understand - the message is in Hangul, and there’s only one member of his current team who can read the damn thing. He keeps forgetting, he keeps remembering, and if he keeps it up, he’ll continue to make mistakes.
“Ah,” he says awkwardly, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “Sorry. It’s a broadcast to the survivors, tells them to meet at Incheon and get the vaccine.”
Hector frowns at the message like it’s algebra or something, and if he looks at it long enough it’ll start to make sense. “Is that really what it says?” he asks, eyeing Jay doubtfully.
“What? Of course that’s what it says, why the hell would I lie?” Jay gives him the variant of the are you fucking kidding me? look that he reserves for idiots, and Hector has the decency to look abashed.
“Just checking.”
Jay opens his mouth to say something pithy and cool, but then the pilot shouts something at them (in retrospect, it’s probably “hold on!”) and the plane is landing, bumping and skidding down the runway with about as much grace as you’d expect from a badass speed machine on the equivalent of airplane ‘roids.
That is to say, none at all, and Jay’s very relieved to stagger off the plane without having liquid-nitrogened himself in the face.
“Go back to flight school!” Penny yells as the pilot drives off towards the refuelling station. Clearly he misinterprets her one-fingered salute as a cheery wave, since he smiles at her through the tiny, plate-glass windshield and waves in return.
She sighs and shoulders her machine gun. “Right then.” Three sets of eyes turn to Jay expectantly. “Where do we go now?”
Jay scans the tarmac and picks a direction at random. “Um, we’re here, so...arrivals?”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Penny, and follows him anyway.
The others fall into step beside her and they march towards the arrivals lounge. It has been a while since Jay’s had to lead anything, and he discovers with a pang that he’s missed the trust.
“How do we get in from the runway?” Sid asks suddenly.
“Yeah!” pipes up Hector.
“Good question,” agrees Penny. “It’s not like there’s going to be pedestrian access from here.”
Jay bristles. “I was getting to that!” He spins on his heel and sets off in the opposite direction. Of course, there was that other side to leading (accountability) and he sure as hell hadn’t missed that.
- - -
The hatchback sputters and dies ten clicks from Incheon and Nichkhun finds that he can only express his true feelings through violence. He punches the steering wheel, gets out and kicks all four tyres, and when that doesn’t help, he picks up a rock from the side of the road and smashes both back windows for good measure.
That seems to do the trick; he stands there, rock in hand, eyes hot and chest heavy, and tries to calm down. It’s not easy; in fact, it’s very, very hard, and he harbours no illusions that things will work out anytime soon. In the space of a week he’s lost five of his best friends (his family were on holiday in the US at the time of the outbreak, and as of a few days ago they were all still fine), and two of those were killed before his very eyes. He figures that if anyone were alive to see him act like this they’d probably cut him a break.
He sighs and drops the rock, walking wearily to the front of the car and leaning his hands on the hood. He waits for his breathing to slow, for a bit of clarity to return, and then he lifts himself up onto the bonnet, sliding into the centre and trying to relax. He can feel the residual warmth of the engine even through the thick denim of his jeans and somehow that calms him more than anything else. Taking care to avoid the wipers, he arranges himself against the windscreen until he’s reclining on the car and staring up at the sky.
He considers asking God about the recent happenings, but guesses God probably wouldn’t answer (He’s got a lot to answer for anyway, so keeping quiet is probably a good move) and instead just looks up into the afternoon sky. He watches clouds drift around aimlessly and wishes for a few moments that he could be up there too, lazing around the open space without a care. Shifting slightly to find a more comfortable spot, he accidentally puts pressure on his wrist. He hisses as the sharp sting reminds him of his wound, and then he rolls up his sleeve to take a closer look.
The bite is still raw and puffy, and it doesn’t seem properly healed - one particularly deep puncture (from a canine? he wonders, with a touch of hysteria) still oozes thick, dark blood. He tugs the hem of one of his undershirts out and scrapes with it at the wound. It doesn’t seem to do much good, but it doesn’t make it any worse, either.
He rubs the thin cotton over the bite a few more times, the abrasion keeping his thoughts clear, and decides to face facts. There’s no way around it - he’s clearly been bitten by a zombie. And yet...he doesn’t seem to be a zombie himself. Or maybe he is a zombie, and he doesn’t realise it? No, Junsu and Junho couldn’t talk or even move properly once they’d been bitten, and he still has most of his faculties intact. Or does he?
Confused, he counts to ten, and then again in English, then Thai, then Mandarin. He does some quick multiplication, sings a few bars of Heartbeat, then names twenty countries and their capitals. By the time he’s finished he’s pretty certain he’s not a zombie, although he’s fairly sure he just sounded like a big fat dork. He’s almost glad no one was around to witness his self-testing and subsequent self-congratulation, but then he remembers and takes the rogue thought back.
The sun comes out from behind a cloud and he lifts a hand reflexively, keeping his fingers open to filter through the light. He waves his hand back and forth, feeling the sun hit his skin, noting a slight breeze moving about the cool air, hearing the distant call of a bird flying somewhere off the highway. And then, at first faintly, but gradually increasing in volume, he hears the unmistakable whine of an engine. He sits up and glances around for the source, checking the road in both directions, before tilting his head up and looking again to the sky. There - to his left and gaining there’s a fast-moving speck that grows larger, very quickly, before coalescing into an airplane and disappearing beneath the distant gleam of Incheon’s domes.
He’s not alone in the world after all. The realisation has him sliding off the bonnet, bending his knees and hurriedly brushing off his pants. He retrieves a couple of plastic bags from the car (“Sorry,” he whispers to it, and bows, feeling rather regretful now for his destructive outburst, however warranted it seemed at the time) and sets off on foot for the airport, buoyed by the thought of salvation waiting for him at the end of the road.
- - -
It takes them the better part of an hour to find their way into the airport proper, and Jay pretends not to be mortified at the way they eventually circle all the way around and walk straight through the front door.
“I wish the pilot had dropped us off here,” Penny says snippily, shooting him a dark look.
Jay slips his hand into his pocket so that he doesn’t give in to the overwhelming urge to slap himself in the face. They amble through the automatic doors (Jay has a moment to wonder at the sheer absurdity of automatic doors still working in the middle of a zombie outbreak) when an authoritative voice orders, “Halt!”
Jay stops in his tracks and looks towards the sound, and it’s only when the rest of the team mimic him and wait that he realises the command was in Korean.
There’s no one in sight, but Korean people are pro at hiding, even if they don’t have a history of ninjas. Jay slips back into formal language himself, and it’s been so long that it feels like a too-small glove - he can get his fingers in but there’s not quite enough room to wriggle around. “Um. Yeah. Hi? So we’re with the, um, Special Force Task, no, the Specialised, um -“
“The what?” The owner of the voice emerges from behind one of the check-in desks, a diminutive older Korean man who Jay is secretly delighted to find is shorter than himself. He’s wearing those round spectacles that crazy inventors and Confucian scholars really like, and he resettles them on his nose as he comes over to peer up at them, squinting through the lenses as if to make sure the four strange Americans are actually real.
“The Specialised Task Force for Infection Management and Civilian Protection,” Jay mumbles, wishing there was a Korean equivalent for Corpse Corps. If he had enough time he could probably think of one, but with the end of the world fast approaching his schedule is too tight right now. “We’re working with the US government and the UN to distribute vaccines and to, uh, take care of any immediate threats.”
The man gives him a surprisingly sharp look considering the thickness of his lenses.
“The cleanup crew, eh?” He glances over at the rest of the team, still standing awkwardly behind Jay, weighed down with weapons, ammo and provisions, four twenty-somethings failing to look intimidating at all. “Just the four of you, is it?”
Jay smiles tightly and nods. “For a start, yeah. We’re the first line of defence.”
“If you were the first line of defence you’d have been here a week ago, my boy.” The old man shakes his head and turns away. “It’s too late for defence now.”
The training, the flight, the sacrifices - Jay doesn’t want to believe it has all been for nothing. “What do you mean?!” he hisses, startling himself along with his team. “Not everyone’s dead, right? I saw the broadcast - if there are survivors here, there’ll be survivors in other places. What about rural areas? There’s bound to be pockets of people banding together, keeping safe. Human nature, right? Fight or flight?”
The old man glances back, and this time his expression is pitying. “Do you really not understand why you’re here?”
“What is he saying?” Penny whispers irritably, reaching over to tug at Jay’s sleeve.
Jay ignores her. “To protect you all,” he insists stubbornly. “We have a vaccine.”
“And weapons, yes?” The man points at Jay’s gun. “To ‘protect’ the survivors from the infected. Have you even fired your weapon before? Have you faced down one of these infected, these zombies,” he spits out the word like Jay would say fuck, “and pulled the trigger?”
Jay doesn’t answer. They did training, back in DC, shooting virtual enemies (“like Modern Warfare, man,” Jay boasted to Sid, headshot after headshot boosting his score) before graduating to paper cutouts and then to dummies, man-shaped and faceless and still. And then, the day before they left, they were taken into a special training room, one they’d never seen before, to face down ‘live specimens’ the lab ‘just happened’ to have on hand. Jay had tried not to think about where they’d found them, what they’d been doing, who they’d been; he’d just stared them down, aimed and fired. If his hands shook a little, if his grip was a bit slippery from sweat - well, no one seemed to notice, and it didn’t matter in the end. Accuracy wasn’t so much an issue with machine guns anyway.
“I see.” The man nods, wise like Mr Miyagi or something, picking up on undercurrents that even his mom would probably miss. “It is still difficult to kill something that was once a friend to you, or family, or more.”
He stares at Jay for a long moment, and Jay returns the look unblinkingly, feeling like he needs to prove his worth to this old guy he’s known for barely a minute, a thought which worries him less than it probably should.
“What are they doing?” Jay hears Hector whisper, and like a spell, or a charm, it ends the staring match, the man nodding and looking satisfied for the first time.
“Come with me, then,” he says, and gestures upstairs, towards one of the abandoned overpriced coffee lounges. “We have a survivor section in the non-smoking area, and you can leave the supplies there.” He gives them a haughty look. “Quite a few of the infected followed us here, you see. We managed to trap them in a hangar, but no one is willing to go in and take care of them.”
He sets off, pace surprisingly brisk for such an old dude, leading them towards a working escalator and riding up ahead. Jay stops at the bottom, eyeing the moving steps in another disconnected moment of what the fuck.
“So, what was that about?” presses Penny, clearly miffed about being left out.
Jay shrugs and takes the first step. “Nothing.”
Hector whistles appreciatively. “Whole lot of nothing,” he comments, and Jay can’t help but agree.
“Are there infected here?” Sid asks, straight to the point, quiet voice carrying easily over the rhythmic hum of the moving stairs.
Jay glances back. “Yeah.”
Sid nods, Hector gulps and Penny grips her gun more tightly, and they march as a team towards the safest place in Seoul.
- - -
Nichkhun feels he should have reached Incheon by now, so either his initial estimate of distance was wrong, or he’s getting slow at the ripe old age of 23. He alternates between jogging and walking, but he doesn’t want to drop the provisions, and the bags are made of thin plastic anyway - if he’s not careful, he’ll tear them, and he doesn’t know if he can carry everything by hand.
The glass domes do look a bit closer, but he’d hoped to be there already; the afternoon sun is dipping ever down to greet the horizon, and horror movies had it right all along - they really do come out at night. (Well, they come out whenever the hell they feel like it, but they’re definitely more active after dark. His personal theory is that sunlight puts stress on the dead muscles, but he’s an idol, not a scientist, and...well, he’s not even an idol any more.)
He’d be less concerned if it wasn’t so isolated - there are no abandoned cars on the road, no scattered belongings. There isn’t even any litter. The highway is empty, save for him, a long ribbon of bitumen carving him out a lonely path.
He shifts the bags from hand to hand and berates himself for his maudlin thoughts, although it’s hard not to be emo when it seems like you’re literally alone in the world.
“Maybe I should talk to myself?” he wonders aloud, guessing that the rules of madness no longer apply when zombies roam the earth. “That might help.”
It doesn’t have an immediate effect, but he’s a firm believer in sticking things out, so he tries again.
“Not much longer,” he tells himself encouragingly, picking up the pace a bit. “Another couple of hours and you’ll be there. And there’ll be other people to talk to! Maybe even someone you know!”
He pauses. “Okay, that’s just weird.” Referring to himself in second-person is not something he’s going to do again.
Nevertheless, his awkward self-dialogue manages to raise his spirits a little, so he rewards himself with a break to rearrange the items he took from the car. Crossing to a lamp post, he crouches and sets down the bags, before methodically unpacking them and stacking everything in neat clumps.
“Heavy things on the bottom,” he tells the bags, making stable bases in each of them with packets of rice. He sets some water bottles on top, in the middle, then pads the outsides with packets of noodles and herbs, and when he’s done he’s left with only the rock he smashed the car with (…why did he pack that, again?) and a leather-wrapped object the length of his forearm.
Junho had thrown it in at the last moment - Nichkhun can still see him smiling and saying that he hoped they wouldn’t need it. Reaching out with trembling fingers, he carefully undoes the knot, unrolling the leather and pulling out the large knife nestled within.
The blade gleams. It’s wicked sharp - Junho tested it before they left (“It would suck,” he’d said, slicing open his finger with a wince, “if we pulled it out to protect ourselves and had to hack and hack with a blunt knife”) and Nichkhun turns it over in his hands, looking for answers and finding nothing but his own reflection. He stares at his eye, still pink from crying, and moves the blade down until it shows the hard set of his mouth. He flattens his lips, then purses them, and he’s trying for a smile when he hears something - the first noise in eons that hasn’t been produced by him.
He stands and turns slowly, recognising the sound, tightening his grip on the knife until he thinks his fingers might crack.
They’re coming, from behind him - they must have poured out of Seoul after he left, because the sound is as he expected, the irregular shuffle of zombie feet. There’s a group closer than he’d expect, eight or so staring, sweaty faces, pale skin and red eyes and brown flakes of blood around their mouths and on their hands. The highway roils in the distance beyond them, the faintest shimmer suggesting movement of some kind, and he guesses there’ll be more on their way. He supposes he should get used to it - if he lives, there’ll always be more on their way, there’ll always be another hundred zombies ready to do him in.
He risks a glance to the bite on his arm - it still hasn’t healed, of course, but it’s starting to get the puckered look of knitting skin, and then checks quickly over his shoulder, but Incheon is still too far away. If he can get rid of this group then make a run for it (the food is suddenly low on his priority list) he can stay ahead of the rest of the pack and warn the airport survivors first.
Bending carefully, he picks up the rock from the second bag, clenching his fingers around it until they’re white and shaking and creaking from the strain. He backs up a few paces then takes a step forward, and then another, and then he’s running at the zombies, shouting a wordless battle cry, swinging his knife one way and his rock the other, slashing and crushing in wild, flailing arcs. He’d close his eyes, if he could; it would help to not think of them as they were, as people, it would help not to think of what he’s doing as murder, because it isn’t, not specifically, because they’re already dead. He tries not to flinch at the feel of the blade slicing through rotting flesh, tries not to hear the wet squelch of the rock as he cracks open a zombie’s skull and crushes the brain within. He tries to ignore the pain of their attacks as they fight back in their own way, clawing and biting at him with bloodied nails and teeth, and tries to remember what he’s doing this for, why he has to live.
And then it doesn’t matter if his eyes are open or shut, because the tears blur everything anyway, and he stops thinking, stops worrying, and just disengages and fights.
- - -
There are a couple hundred survivors in the safe rooms at Incheon, and Kim Won (the old man) explains that there are thousands more spread out over Seoul and beyond. The groups communicate via radio (Sid asks, reasonably, in Jay’s opinion, why they didn’t just use the Internet, and Won fixes him with a piercing look and asks him how they’d know where to look online, which makes sense) and while no one has done a proper head count yet, the estimates of the uninfected total about 5000. Not much, for a country that once held 50 million, but better than nothing.
They drop their supplies off, Sid staying behind to administer the vaccine, and then the rest of them head out towards the hangar where the Incheon survivors had managed to trap the infected that followed them here.
“It wasn’t easy,” Won admits immodestly, taking them part of the way, “but we did it.”
His face darkens after a moment, and Jay’s relieved when no one asks him how, since it’s clear someone had to lead them in, and it doesn’t seem like they came back out.
They go downstairs again, past a baggage wheel and through a metal detector (Jay gets a shock as it goes off, blaring and flashing in protest as it registers his weapons) before passing through a set of double doors and finding themselves on the tarmac again. It’s almost nighttime, the sun not much more than a sliver over the horizon, and the sky is stained the purple of a new bruise. Jay doesn’t believe in omens, for which he is suddenly very grateful, because if he did he’d be legging it to a cupboard right now, never to venture outside again.
“Shall we?” he says instead, hefting his machine gun and widening his stance, the better to balance his body, so that no one can see him shake.
Penny and Hector nod, falling in behind him, and they march towards the hangar.
When they get there, Jay distracts himself by noting stupid details, like how the doors are massive - he knows they have to be, so the planes can get through and everything, but seriously, they’re huge - and the skid marks on the tarmac (where did they come from, an out of control plane?) He positions himself directly in front of the hangar, Penny off to the left, as Hector goes to the switchbox in the bottom right corner and keys in the passcode. He presses the command button and then there’s a moment of silence as they all hold their breath, for some stupid reason, as they all wait to see what happens next.
What happens next is the doors jerk into motion, sliding open slowly and revealing a mass of red-eyed zombies shuffling towards them as one.
Jay might yell, “Fire!”, he might scream, “Go!”, or he might say nothing, speaking instead with bullets and pretending not to count the bodies where they fall.
- - -
It’s over in what feels like a minute and Jay thinks (retardedly) that his gun isn’t even warm - after all that carnage, all that ‘protection’, he thinks his gun should be too hot to touch. They go in to check for stragglers (two, both of which are dealt with immediately), and then they pile up the remains, trying hard not to look at what they’re touching and finding it impossible with hands all slippery and coated with blood. Somehow they manage it and then Penny lobs a special grenade at the tower of death, filled with chemicals and destruction and other things designed to melt down flesh and bone.
Jay should probably stay and watch out of respect or something, but the smell is too much like BBQ for him to handle, so he turns and sets back to the terminal alone.
His feet keep moving when he gets there, steering him through customs and away from the safe area, right out the front door to the set down area outside. He staggers over to the gutter and falls to his hands and knees, chucking his gun aside and heaving up everything in his stomach, coughing out bile and fear and lost innocence and rolling onto his back when he’s done.
The sky’s more night than day now - not quite full dark, but definitely getting that way. He can’t see the moon but the first star of the evening twinkles gently at him for a moment, before a generator chugs somewhere and the floodlights switch on.
“Shit!” Squeezing his eyes shut, he bolts back up, pressing a hand against his eyelids to combat the sudden burning flare. He counts to ten, trying to ignore the roughness of his throat and the acid taste of vomit in his mouth, before tentatively cracking his eyes open again. He keeps them as slits while he adjusts, and when he opens them fully, it’s to find a lone figure staggering across the empty car park towards him, too small to tell whether it’s a friend or foe.
Jay goes with the safe option (…foe) and reaches slowly for his gun, easing himself upright, crouching in position as the figure moves closer. It’s a guy, he decides when they’re about twenty metres away. Covered in blood, he realises, around the fifteen metre mark. Holding a knife, he registers at ten metres. And a…lump. A rock?
His finger curls around the trigger, and he waits.
At five metres away the other guy stops, staring at him with an expression of such dumbstruck amazement that it’s obvious even through the blood and gore speckling his skin and matting his hair to his forehead. Jay feels an identical expression spread over his own face and wonders at the fucking chances that a meeting like this would happen, at the one-in-five-billion odds that a guy like that would be in a place like this.
Because the guy standing across from him, covered in bleeding bites and scratches, clinging desperately to a red-soaked kitchen knife and hugging, of all things, a fist-sized rock to his bloodied chest, is raising a pair of eyebrows that Jay would recognise anywhere, and after what feels to Jay like a lifetime of shocked silence he manages to choke out a name he secretly thought he’d never have cause to say again.
“Khun?!”
Nichkhun - because it’s Nichkhun, it has to be Nichkhun, no one else in the entire world has that face, those eyes, those brows, drops his weapons and sprints towards him, teeth flashing in a grin that banishes the surprise from his face.
“Jay!”
Jay steps back and lifts his gun, forcing Nichkhun to skid to a halt. “Wait!” he calls out in warning. There’s nothing left in his stomach but he’s almost ready to throw up again if he has to go through with this. “Let me look at you for a sec.”
Nichkhun freezes obediently, grin fading down to a tired smile. “Checking out my body, huh?” The smile slips away entirely and then he just looks tired and lost. “I’ve been working out recently. Lots of running.”
Zombies, as far as Jay had been told, were incapable of intelligent conversation. They could grunt and moan, just like in the movies, but if Nichkhun could crack shitty jokes, he was probably okay.
Actually, he’d probably never be okay again, but at least he wasn’t undead.
Jay drops his gun. “Of course you’d be immune, you bitch.”
Nichkhun’s smile returns and he bounds the rest of the way over, enveloping Jay in a bear hug that Jay returns with interest, clapping him on the back and rubbing his shoulders and everything, until Won politely clears his throat behind them and sends Nichkhun off to get cleaned up.
- - -
After introductions to Jay’s crew (Sid nods, Hector goggles and Penny waggles her fingers in a coy manner that makes Jay want to vomit again), they throw around a few theories as to Nichkhun’s immunity, but nothing springs to mind. The researchers back at the Pentagon hadn’t found a specific cause for those naturally resistant to the zombie virus, just that there were a rare few lucky enough to be immune, and Jay isn’t even that surprised any more, because Nichkhun’s always been different, special; it’s not even that strange that his cells were unable to be turned.
Penny’s getting too close for Jay’s peace of mind (“And how do you spell your surname?”) so after a bit he pulls Nichkhun to his feet and tells the others they have some catching up to do. They grab some food from Air Japan (“their snap-frozen food is the best,” Won assures them) and go to an upstairs departure lounge to sit and hang out. Nichkhun asks him how he got here and Jay tells the story, leaving out a few details from training and exaggerating some of the more humorous situations. They joke and laugh like old times, skirting around the big questions, but Jay’s never been good at tact or bullshit, so he just fronts and says it when he can’t take the avoiding any more.
“So...what about everyone else?”
Nichkhun’s mouth tightens and his eyes grow haunted - it’s answer enough but he responds anyway. “They’re all gone.”
Jay had guessed as much. “Ah.”
“Yeah,” says Nichkhun.
“Yeah,” says Jay.
They sit in awkward silence for a bit longer as the impact of what they had and what they’ve lost finally registers. When Jay glances over next, it’s to find Nichkhun staring out the window, big fat tears rolling silently down his cheeks. Jay’s not good at crying either - he’s all blubbery and sniffly and it’s gross as fuck, so he’s grateful when Nichkhun doesn’t mention it and just passes him a napkin to blow his nose and wipe his face when he’s done.
Eventually Nichkhun scoots over and presses his shoulder against Jay, fitting their bodies together like he’s afraid Jay will disappear. He’s warm and real and alive, and Jay’s so damn thankful one of them made it through, one of his boys walked through the fire and came out the other side. With Nichkhun beside him, living and breathing and not being dead, he lets himself remember without censure, lets himself think back, to Taec’s big dorky smile, the shape of his eyes and his ears and the way his voice would deepen just when he was about to tell some lameass joke.
He lets himself remember Chansung, his usual dopey expression and easygoing nature, all big limbs and big features and that stupid, surprised bark of a laugh.
He doesn’t stop himself from thinking about Wooyoung, all prickles and sarcasm and straight, flat stares, or the way he’d delight in the smallest things, like chicken and ice cream and friends.
He thinks back to Junsu, to the early days, the way they’d fight over who got to stand where in the choreo when they both had solos, remembers how he went from weird and annoying to weird and a bro, and how all Jay had to do was look past his awkwardness to the uncertain guy inside.
And when the tears start again as he remembers Junho, he lets them fall, as he holds close the memories of that careful, hopeful kid, barely old enough to not be the maknae, but without any sort of label to fall back on, who held himself to exacting standards Jay could never understand, and who worked harder than anyone as he looked towards his dreams.
Jay realises their dreams are over now, gone forever, never to be realised, and he makes a sudden, fierce promise to do what he can for his fallen family, alongside the only member of that family that he has left.
And so they sit there for the rest of the night, faces pressed against the windows, staring out over the tarmac, lost in their own thoughts as they wait for the dawn. It comes as expected, the floodlights clicking off as the sun peeks over the horizon, and Jay finally gets to his feet and stretches, extending a hand to Nichkhun, who rises and stretches too.
“The next wave should be here soon,” Jay says, squinting out over the carpark, spotting a few shuffling bodies at the very outskirts of their range. He’s feeling better about everything now he’s remembered what he should never forget, and has Nichkhun here with him, ready to fight by his side. “I’ll get you a spare set of camo gear, and a gun of your own.”
Nichkhun looks saddened by the prospect. “Is that all we can do? Shoot the infected and vaccinate the survivors?”
Jay meets his eyes. “That’s all we can do, for now. Gotta protect those left behind, right?” He claps him on the shoulder and turns to lead the way.
Nichkhun takes a deep breath and straightens, before falling into step behind him. “Will it ever get better?”
Jay turns back to look at him just as the sun crests over the horizon, bathing everything around them in a startling golden glow. “Yeah,” he says, breaking out into a smile to rival the dawn. “One day.”
Fandom: 2PM
Length: ~5700 words, chapter 4 of 4.
Character/pairing: All members, gen.
Ratings/warnings: I'm going to rate this as PG-13 for language and horror themes - there are zombies, and they kill people, and some of those people are in 2PM.
Notes: (Still) somewhat-AU zombie apocalypse crack. Thank you to insipid_paragon for being an initial sounding board, lookatmoiye7 for being such a thorough and supportive beta and making this the best fic it could be, and to everyone who took a chance on this weird zombie story and made it through to the end.
Summary: This is the way the world ends.
The plane doesn’t have any windows, but Jay knows what he’d see if it did, as they finally bank and tilt in preparation for touching down. They’re landing at Incheon instead of the Seoul Air Base - something to do again with their special non-military status - and he closes his eyes and remembers the spiral of the airport, all curves and steel and glass. Maybe it’s for the best, not being able to see where he’s going, because then he doesn’t have to think about where he’s been.
He opens his eyes to find Sid regarding him oddly, and returns his look with a challenging one of his own. After a beat Sid shrugs, then spins his laptop around so that Jay can see the screen. It’s a picture of Incheon taken from outside the departure terminal, and he’s about ask what the hell he’s supposed to be looking at when he notices the ticker tape running along the bottom.
“Shit, really?” he asks, after the message loops. He glances up, grinning, to find Sid’s expression unchanged.
“I don’t know what it says,” Sid replies, making Jay feel like a prize dick. Of course he doesn’t understand - the message is in Hangul, and there’s only one member of his current team who can read the damn thing. He keeps forgetting, he keeps remembering, and if he keeps it up, he’ll continue to make mistakes.
“Ah,” he says awkwardly, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “Sorry. It’s a broadcast to the survivors, tells them to meet at Incheon and get the vaccine.”
Hector frowns at the message like it’s algebra or something, and if he looks at it long enough it’ll start to make sense. “Is that really what it says?” he asks, eyeing Jay doubtfully.
“What? Of course that’s what it says, why the hell would I lie?” Jay gives him the variant of the are you fucking kidding me? look that he reserves for idiots, and Hector has the decency to look abashed.
“Just checking.”
Jay opens his mouth to say something pithy and cool, but then the pilot shouts something at them (in retrospect, it’s probably “hold on!”) and the plane is landing, bumping and skidding down the runway with about as much grace as you’d expect from a badass speed machine on the equivalent of airplane ‘roids.
That is to say, none at all, and Jay’s very relieved to stagger off the plane without having liquid-nitrogened himself in the face.
“Go back to flight school!” Penny yells as the pilot drives off towards the refuelling station. Clearly he misinterprets her one-fingered salute as a cheery wave, since he smiles at her through the tiny, plate-glass windshield and waves in return.
She sighs and shoulders her machine gun. “Right then.” Three sets of eyes turn to Jay expectantly. “Where do we go now?”
Jay scans the tarmac and picks a direction at random. “Um, we’re here, so...arrivals?”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” says Penny, and follows him anyway.
The others fall into step beside her and they march towards the arrivals lounge. It has been a while since Jay’s had to lead anything, and he discovers with a pang that he’s missed the trust.
“How do we get in from the runway?” Sid asks suddenly.
“Yeah!” pipes up Hector.
“Good question,” agrees Penny. “It’s not like there’s going to be pedestrian access from here.”
Jay bristles. “I was getting to that!” He spins on his heel and sets off in the opposite direction. Of course, there was that other side to leading (accountability) and he sure as hell hadn’t missed that.
- - -
The hatchback sputters and dies ten clicks from Incheon and Nichkhun finds that he can only express his true feelings through violence. He punches the steering wheel, gets out and kicks all four tyres, and when that doesn’t help, he picks up a rock from the side of the road and smashes both back windows for good measure.
That seems to do the trick; he stands there, rock in hand, eyes hot and chest heavy, and tries to calm down. It’s not easy; in fact, it’s very, very hard, and he harbours no illusions that things will work out anytime soon. In the space of a week he’s lost five of his best friends (his family were on holiday in the US at the time of the outbreak, and as of a few days ago they were all still fine), and two of those were killed before his very eyes. He figures that if anyone were alive to see him act like this they’d probably cut him a break.
He sighs and drops the rock, walking wearily to the front of the car and leaning his hands on the hood. He waits for his breathing to slow, for a bit of clarity to return, and then he lifts himself up onto the bonnet, sliding into the centre and trying to relax. He can feel the residual warmth of the engine even through the thick denim of his jeans and somehow that calms him more than anything else. Taking care to avoid the wipers, he arranges himself against the windscreen until he’s reclining on the car and staring up at the sky.
He considers asking God about the recent happenings, but guesses God probably wouldn’t answer (He’s got a lot to answer for anyway, so keeping quiet is probably a good move) and instead just looks up into the afternoon sky. He watches clouds drift around aimlessly and wishes for a few moments that he could be up there too, lazing around the open space without a care. Shifting slightly to find a more comfortable spot, he accidentally puts pressure on his wrist. He hisses as the sharp sting reminds him of his wound, and then he rolls up his sleeve to take a closer look.
The bite is still raw and puffy, and it doesn’t seem properly healed - one particularly deep puncture (from a canine? he wonders, with a touch of hysteria) still oozes thick, dark blood. He tugs the hem of one of his undershirts out and scrapes with it at the wound. It doesn’t seem to do much good, but it doesn’t make it any worse, either.
He rubs the thin cotton over the bite a few more times, the abrasion keeping his thoughts clear, and decides to face facts. There’s no way around it - he’s clearly been bitten by a zombie. And yet...he doesn’t seem to be a zombie himself. Or maybe he is a zombie, and he doesn’t realise it? No, Junsu and Junho couldn’t talk or even move properly once they’d been bitten, and he still has most of his faculties intact. Or does he?
Confused, he counts to ten, and then again in English, then Thai, then Mandarin. He does some quick multiplication, sings a few bars of Heartbeat, then names twenty countries and their capitals. By the time he’s finished he’s pretty certain he’s not a zombie, although he’s fairly sure he just sounded like a big fat dork. He’s almost glad no one was around to witness his self-testing and subsequent self-congratulation, but then he remembers and takes the rogue thought back.
The sun comes out from behind a cloud and he lifts a hand reflexively, keeping his fingers open to filter through the light. He waves his hand back and forth, feeling the sun hit his skin, noting a slight breeze moving about the cool air, hearing the distant call of a bird flying somewhere off the highway. And then, at first faintly, but gradually increasing in volume, he hears the unmistakable whine of an engine. He sits up and glances around for the source, checking the road in both directions, before tilting his head up and looking again to the sky. There - to his left and gaining there’s a fast-moving speck that grows larger, very quickly, before coalescing into an airplane and disappearing beneath the distant gleam of Incheon’s domes.
He’s not alone in the world after all. The realisation has him sliding off the bonnet, bending his knees and hurriedly brushing off his pants. He retrieves a couple of plastic bags from the car (“Sorry,” he whispers to it, and bows, feeling rather regretful now for his destructive outburst, however warranted it seemed at the time) and sets off on foot for the airport, buoyed by the thought of salvation waiting for him at the end of the road.
- - -
It takes them the better part of an hour to find their way into the airport proper, and Jay pretends not to be mortified at the way they eventually circle all the way around and walk straight through the front door.
“I wish the pilot had dropped us off here,” Penny says snippily, shooting him a dark look.
Jay slips his hand into his pocket so that he doesn’t give in to the overwhelming urge to slap himself in the face. They amble through the automatic doors (Jay has a moment to wonder at the sheer absurdity of automatic doors still working in the middle of a zombie outbreak) when an authoritative voice orders, “Halt!”
Jay stops in his tracks and looks towards the sound, and it’s only when the rest of the team mimic him and wait that he realises the command was in Korean.
There’s no one in sight, but Korean people are pro at hiding, even if they don’t have a history of ninjas. Jay slips back into formal language himself, and it’s been so long that it feels like a too-small glove - he can get his fingers in but there’s not quite enough room to wriggle around. “Um. Yeah. Hi? So we’re with the, um, Special Force Task, no, the Specialised, um -“
“The what?” The owner of the voice emerges from behind one of the check-in desks, a diminutive older Korean man who Jay is secretly delighted to find is shorter than himself. He’s wearing those round spectacles that crazy inventors and Confucian scholars really like, and he resettles them on his nose as he comes over to peer up at them, squinting through the lenses as if to make sure the four strange Americans are actually real.
“The Specialised Task Force for Infection Management and Civilian Protection,” Jay mumbles, wishing there was a Korean equivalent for Corpse Corps. If he had enough time he could probably think of one, but with the end of the world fast approaching his schedule is too tight right now. “We’re working with the US government and the UN to distribute vaccines and to, uh, take care of any immediate threats.”
The man gives him a surprisingly sharp look considering the thickness of his lenses.
“The cleanup crew, eh?” He glances over at the rest of the team, still standing awkwardly behind Jay, weighed down with weapons, ammo and provisions, four twenty-somethings failing to look intimidating at all. “Just the four of you, is it?”
Jay smiles tightly and nods. “For a start, yeah. We’re the first line of defence.”
“If you were the first line of defence you’d have been here a week ago, my boy.” The old man shakes his head and turns away. “It’s too late for defence now.”
The training, the flight, the sacrifices - Jay doesn’t want to believe it has all been for nothing. “What do you mean?!” he hisses, startling himself along with his team. “Not everyone’s dead, right? I saw the broadcast - if there are survivors here, there’ll be survivors in other places. What about rural areas? There’s bound to be pockets of people banding together, keeping safe. Human nature, right? Fight or flight?”
The old man glances back, and this time his expression is pitying. “Do you really not understand why you’re here?”
“What is he saying?” Penny whispers irritably, reaching over to tug at Jay’s sleeve.
Jay ignores her. “To protect you all,” he insists stubbornly. “We have a vaccine.”
“And weapons, yes?” The man points at Jay’s gun. “To ‘protect’ the survivors from the infected. Have you even fired your weapon before? Have you faced down one of these infected, these zombies,” he spits out the word like Jay would say fuck, “and pulled the trigger?”
Jay doesn’t answer. They did training, back in DC, shooting virtual enemies (“like Modern Warfare, man,” Jay boasted to Sid, headshot after headshot boosting his score) before graduating to paper cutouts and then to dummies, man-shaped and faceless and still. And then, the day before they left, they were taken into a special training room, one they’d never seen before, to face down ‘live specimens’ the lab ‘just happened’ to have on hand. Jay had tried not to think about where they’d found them, what they’d been doing, who they’d been; he’d just stared them down, aimed and fired. If his hands shook a little, if his grip was a bit slippery from sweat - well, no one seemed to notice, and it didn’t matter in the end. Accuracy wasn’t so much an issue with machine guns anyway.
“I see.” The man nods, wise like Mr Miyagi or something, picking up on undercurrents that even his mom would probably miss. “It is still difficult to kill something that was once a friend to you, or family, or more.”
He stares at Jay for a long moment, and Jay returns the look unblinkingly, feeling like he needs to prove his worth to this old guy he’s known for barely a minute, a thought which worries him less than it probably should.
“What are they doing?” Jay hears Hector whisper, and like a spell, or a charm, it ends the staring match, the man nodding and looking satisfied for the first time.
“Come with me, then,” he says, and gestures upstairs, towards one of the abandoned overpriced coffee lounges. “We have a survivor section in the non-smoking area, and you can leave the supplies there.” He gives them a haughty look. “Quite a few of the infected followed us here, you see. We managed to trap them in a hangar, but no one is willing to go in and take care of them.”
He sets off, pace surprisingly brisk for such an old dude, leading them towards a working escalator and riding up ahead. Jay stops at the bottom, eyeing the moving steps in another disconnected moment of what the fuck.
“So, what was that about?” presses Penny, clearly miffed about being left out.
Jay shrugs and takes the first step. “Nothing.”
Hector whistles appreciatively. “Whole lot of nothing,” he comments, and Jay can’t help but agree.
“Are there infected here?” Sid asks, straight to the point, quiet voice carrying easily over the rhythmic hum of the moving stairs.
Jay glances back. “Yeah.”
Sid nods, Hector gulps and Penny grips her gun more tightly, and they march as a team towards the safest place in Seoul.
- - -
Nichkhun feels he should have reached Incheon by now, so either his initial estimate of distance was wrong, or he’s getting slow at the ripe old age of 23. He alternates between jogging and walking, but he doesn’t want to drop the provisions, and the bags are made of thin plastic anyway - if he’s not careful, he’ll tear them, and he doesn’t know if he can carry everything by hand.
The glass domes do look a bit closer, but he’d hoped to be there already; the afternoon sun is dipping ever down to greet the horizon, and horror movies had it right all along - they really do come out at night. (Well, they come out whenever the hell they feel like it, but they’re definitely more active after dark. His personal theory is that sunlight puts stress on the dead muscles, but he’s an idol, not a scientist, and...well, he’s not even an idol any more.)
He’d be less concerned if it wasn’t so isolated - there are no abandoned cars on the road, no scattered belongings. There isn’t even any litter. The highway is empty, save for him, a long ribbon of bitumen carving him out a lonely path.
He shifts the bags from hand to hand and berates himself for his maudlin thoughts, although it’s hard not to be emo when it seems like you’re literally alone in the world.
“Maybe I should talk to myself?” he wonders aloud, guessing that the rules of madness no longer apply when zombies roam the earth. “That might help.”
It doesn’t have an immediate effect, but he’s a firm believer in sticking things out, so he tries again.
“Not much longer,” he tells himself encouragingly, picking up the pace a bit. “Another couple of hours and you’ll be there. And there’ll be other people to talk to! Maybe even someone you know!”
He pauses. “Okay, that’s just weird.” Referring to himself in second-person is not something he’s going to do again.
Nevertheless, his awkward self-dialogue manages to raise his spirits a little, so he rewards himself with a break to rearrange the items he took from the car. Crossing to a lamp post, he crouches and sets down the bags, before methodically unpacking them and stacking everything in neat clumps.
“Heavy things on the bottom,” he tells the bags, making stable bases in each of them with packets of rice. He sets some water bottles on top, in the middle, then pads the outsides with packets of noodles and herbs, and when he’s done he’s left with only the rock he smashed the car with (…why did he pack that, again?) and a leather-wrapped object the length of his forearm.
Junho had thrown it in at the last moment - Nichkhun can still see him smiling and saying that he hoped they wouldn’t need it. Reaching out with trembling fingers, he carefully undoes the knot, unrolling the leather and pulling out the large knife nestled within.
The blade gleams. It’s wicked sharp - Junho tested it before they left (“It would suck,” he’d said, slicing open his finger with a wince, “if we pulled it out to protect ourselves and had to hack and hack with a blunt knife”) and Nichkhun turns it over in his hands, looking for answers and finding nothing but his own reflection. He stares at his eye, still pink from crying, and moves the blade down until it shows the hard set of his mouth. He flattens his lips, then purses them, and he’s trying for a smile when he hears something - the first noise in eons that hasn’t been produced by him.
He stands and turns slowly, recognising the sound, tightening his grip on the knife until he thinks his fingers might crack.
They’re coming, from behind him - they must have poured out of Seoul after he left, because the sound is as he expected, the irregular shuffle of zombie feet. There’s a group closer than he’d expect, eight or so staring, sweaty faces, pale skin and red eyes and brown flakes of blood around their mouths and on their hands. The highway roils in the distance beyond them, the faintest shimmer suggesting movement of some kind, and he guesses there’ll be more on their way. He supposes he should get used to it - if he lives, there’ll always be more on their way, there’ll always be another hundred zombies ready to do him in.
He risks a glance to the bite on his arm - it still hasn’t healed, of course, but it’s starting to get the puckered look of knitting skin, and then checks quickly over his shoulder, but Incheon is still too far away. If he can get rid of this group then make a run for it (the food is suddenly low on his priority list) he can stay ahead of the rest of the pack and warn the airport survivors first.
Bending carefully, he picks up the rock from the second bag, clenching his fingers around it until they’re white and shaking and creaking from the strain. He backs up a few paces then takes a step forward, and then another, and then he’s running at the zombies, shouting a wordless battle cry, swinging his knife one way and his rock the other, slashing and crushing in wild, flailing arcs. He’d close his eyes, if he could; it would help to not think of them as they were, as people, it would help not to think of what he’s doing as murder, because it isn’t, not specifically, because they’re already dead. He tries not to flinch at the feel of the blade slicing through rotting flesh, tries not to hear the wet squelch of the rock as he cracks open a zombie’s skull and crushes the brain within. He tries to ignore the pain of their attacks as they fight back in their own way, clawing and biting at him with bloodied nails and teeth, and tries to remember what he’s doing this for, why he has to live.
And then it doesn’t matter if his eyes are open or shut, because the tears blur everything anyway, and he stops thinking, stops worrying, and just disengages and fights.
- - -
There are a couple hundred survivors in the safe rooms at Incheon, and Kim Won (the old man) explains that there are thousands more spread out over Seoul and beyond. The groups communicate via radio (Sid asks, reasonably, in Jay’s opinion, why they didn’t just use the Internet, and Won fixes him with a piercing look and asks him how they’d know where to look online, which makes sense) and while no one has done a proper head count yet, the estimates of the uninfected total about 5000. Not much, for a country that once held 50 million, but better than nothing.
They drop their supplies off, Sid staying behind to administer the vaccine, and then the rest of them head out towards the hangar where the Incheon survivors had managed to trap the infected that followed them here.
“It wasn’t easy,” Won admits immodestly, taking them part of the way, “but we did it.”
His face darkens after a moment, and Jay’s relieved when no one asks him how, since it’s clear someone had to lead them in, and it doesn’t seem like they came back out.
They go downstairs again, past a baggage wheel and through a metal detector (Jay gets a shock as it goes off, blaring and flashing in protest as it registers his weapons) before passing through a set of double doors and finding themselves on the tarmac again. It’s almost nighttime, the sun not much more than a sliver over the horizon, and the sky is stained the purple of a new bruise. Jay doesn’t believe in omens, for which he is suddenly very grateful, because if he did he’d be legging it to a cupboard right now, never to venture outside again.
“Shall we?” he says instead, hefting his machine gun and widening his stance, the better to balance his body, so that no one can see him shake.
Penny and Hector nod, falling in behind him, and they march towards the hangar.
When they get there, Jay distracts himself by noting stupid details, like how the doors are massive - he knows they have to be, so the planes can get through and everything, but seriously, they’re huge - and the skid marks on the tarmac (where did they come from, an out of control plane?) He positions himself directly in front of the hangar, Penny off to the left, as Hector goes to the switchbox in the bottom right corner and keys in the passcode. He presses the command button and then there’s a moment of silence as they all hold their breath, for some stupid reason, as they all wait to see what happens next.
What happens next is the doors jerk into motion, sliding open slowly and revealing a mass of red-eyed zombies shuffling towards them as one.
Jay might yell, “Fire!”, he might scream, “Go!”, or he might say nothing, speaking instead with bullets and pretending not to count the bodies where they fall.
- - -
It’s over in what feels like a minute and Jay thinks (retardedly) that his gun isn’t even warm - after all that carnage, all that ‘protection’, he thinks his gun should be too hot to touch. They go in to check for stragglers (two, both of which are dealt with immediately), and then they pile up the remains, trying hard not to look at what they’re touching and finding it impossible with hands all slippery and coated with blood. Somehow they manage it and then Penny lobs a special grenade at the tower of death, filled with chemicals and destruction and other things designed to melt down flesh and bone.
Jay should probably stay and watch out of respect or something, but the smell is too much like BBQ for him to handle, so he turns and sets back to the terminal alone.
His feet keep moving when he gets there, steering him through customs and away from the safe area, right out the front door to the set down area outside. He staggers over to the gutter and falls to his hands and knees, chucking his gun aside and heaving up everything in his stomach, coughing out bile and fear and lost innocence and rolling onto his back when he’s done.
The sky’s more night than day now - not quite full dark, but definitely getting that way. He can’t see the moon but the first star of the evening twinkles gently at him for a moment, before a generator chugs somewhere and the floodlights switch on.
“Shit!” Squeezing his eyes shut, he bolts back up, pressing a hand against his eyelids to combat the sudden burning flare. He counts to ten, trying to ignore the roughness of his throat and the acid taste of vomit in his mouth, before tentatively cracking his eyes open again. He keeps them as slits while he adjusts, and when he opens them fully, it’s to find a lone figure staggering across the empty car park towards him, too small to tell whether it’s a friend or foe.
Jay goes with the safe option (…foe) and reaches slowly for his gun, easing himself upright, crouching in position as the figure moves closer. It’s a guy, he decides when they’re about twenty metres away. Covered in blood, he realises, around the fifteen metre mark. Holding a knife, he registers at ten metres. And a…lump. A rock?
His finger curls around the trigger, and he waits.
At five metres away the other guy stops, staring at him with an expression of such dumbstruck amazement that it’s obvious even through the blood and gore speckling his skin and matting his hair to his forehead. Jay feels an identical expression spread over his own face and wonders at the fucking chances that a meeting like this would happen, at the one-in-five-billion odds that a guy like that would be in a place like this.
Because the guy standing across from him, covered in bleeding bites and scratches, clinging desperately to a red-soaked kitchen knife and hugging, of all things, a fist-sized rock to his bloodied chest, is raising a pair of eyebrows that Jay would recognise anywhere, and after what feels to Jay like a lifetime of shocked silence he manages to choke out a name he secretly thought he’d never have cause to say again.
“Khun?!”
Nichkhun - because it’s Nichkhun, it has to be Nichkhun, no one else in the entire world has that face, those eyes, those brows, drops his weapons and sprints towards him, teeth flashing in a grin that banishes the surprise from his face.
“Jay!”
Jay steps back and lifts his gun, forcing Nichkhun to skid to a halt. “Wait!” he calls out in warning. There’s nothing left in his stomach but he’s almost ready to throw up again if he has to go through with this. “Let me look at you for a sec.”
Nichkhun freezes obediently, grin fading down to a tired smile. “Checking out my body, huh?” The smile slips away entirely and then he just looks tired and lost. “I’ve been working out recently. Lots of running.”
Zombies, as far as Jay had been told, were incapable of intelligent conversation. They could grunt and moan, just like in the movies, but if Nichkhun could crack shitty jokes, he was probably okay.
Actually, he’d probably never be okay again, but at least he wasn’t undead.
Jay drops his gun. “Of course you’d be immune, you bitch.”
Nichkhun’s smile returns and he bounds the rest of the way over, enveloping Jay in a bear hug that Jay returns with interest, clapping him on the back and rubbing his shoulders and everything, until Won politely clears his throat behind them and sends Nichkhun off to get cleaned up.
- - -
After introductions to Jay’s crew (Sid nods, Hector goggles and Penny waggles her fingers in a coy manner that makes Jay want to vomit again), they throw around a few theories as to Nichkhun’s immunity, but nothing springs to mind. The researchers back at the Pentagon hadn’t found a specific cause for those naturally resistant to the zombie virus, just that there were a rare few lucky enough to be immune, and Jay isn’t even that surprised any more, because Nichkhun’s always been different, special; it’s not even that strange that his cells were unable to be turned.
Penny’s getting too close for Jay’s peace of mind (“And how do you spell your surname?”) so after a bit he pulls Nichkhun to his feet and tells the others they have some catching up to do. They grab some food from Air Japan (“their snap-frozen food is the best,” Won assures them) and go to an upstairs departure lounge to sit and hang out. Nichkhun asks him how he got here and Jay tells the story, leaving out a few details from training and exaggerating some of the more humorous situations. They joke and laugh like old times, skirting around the big questions, but Jay’s never been good at tact or bullshit, so he just fronts and says it when he can’t take the avoiding any more.
“So...what about everyone else?”
Nichkhun’s mouth tightens and his eyes grow haunted - it’s answer enough but he responds anyway. “They’re all gone.”
Jay had guessed as much. “Ah.”
“Yeah,” says Nichkhun.
“Yeah,” says Jay.
They sit in awkward silence for a bit longer as the impact of what they had and what they’ve lost finally registers. When Jay glances over next, it’s to find Nichkhun staring out the window, big fat tears rolling silently down his cheeks. Jay’s not good at crying either - he’s all blubbery and sniffly and it’s gross as fuck, so he’s grateful when Nichkhun doesn’t mention it and just passes him a napkin to blow his nose and wipe his face when he’s done.
Eventually Nichkhun scoots over and presses his shoulder against Jay, fitting their bodies together like he’s afraid Jay will disappear. He’s warm and real and alive, and Jay’s so damn thankful one of them made it through, one of his boys walked through the fire and came out the other side. With Nichkhun beside him, living and breathing and not being dead, he lets himself remember without censure, lets himself think back, to Taec’s big dorky smile, the shape of his eyes and his ears and the way his voice would deepen just when he was about to tell some lameass joke.
He lets himself remember Chansung, his usual dopey expression and easygoing nature, all big limbs and big features and that stupid, surprised bark of a laugh.
He doesn’t stop himself from thinking about Wooyoung, all prickles and sarcasm and straight, flat stares, or the way he’d delight in the smallest things, like chicken and ice cream and friends.
He thinks back to Junsu, to the early days, the way they’d fight over who got to stand where in the choreo when they both had solos, remembers how he went from weird and annoying to weird and a bro, and how all Jay had to do was look past his awkwardness to the uncertain guy inside.
And when the tears start again as he remembers Junho, he lets them fall, as he holds close the memories of that careful, hopeful kid, barely old enough to not be the maknae, but without any sort of label to fall back on, who held himself to exacting standards Jay could never understand, and who worked harder than anyone as he looked towards his dreams.
Jay realises their dreams are over now, gone forever, never to be realised, and he makes a sudden, fierce promise to do what he can for his fallen family, alongside the only member of that family that he has left.
And so they sit there for the rest of the night, faces pressed against the windows, staring out over the tarmac, lost in their own thoughts as they wait for the dawn. It comes as expected, the floodlights clicking off as the sun peeks over the horizon, and Jay finally gets to his feet and stretches, extending a hand to Nichkhun, who rises and stretches too.
“The next wave should be here soon,” Jay says, squinting out over the carpark, spotting a few shuffling bodies at the very outskirts of their range. He’s feeling better about everything now he’s remembered what he should never forget, and has Nichkhun here with him, ready to fight by his side. “I’ll get you a spare set of camo gear, and a gun of your own.”
Nichkhun looks saddened by the prospect. “Is that all we can do? Shoot the infected and vaccinate the survivors?”
Jay meets his eyes. “That’s all we can do, for now. Gotta protect those left behind, right?” He claps him on the shoulder and turns to lead the way.
Nichkhun takes a deep breath and straightens, before falling into step behind him. “Will it ever get better?”
Jay turns back to look at him just as the sun crests over the horizon, bathing everything around them in a startling golden glow. “Yeah,” he says, breaking out into a smile to rival the dawn. “One day.”