(for pastelseas) saudade
❊ for: pastelseas
❊ title: saudade
❊ pairings: kai/d.o
❊ rating: pg13
❊ warnings: this story does not include any smut[Spoiler (click to open)]minor character death, disturbing descriptions of illness/death, terminal illness/plague/epidemic, references to possible implied suicide thoughts
❊ word count: 4,141
❊ summary: Kyungsoo is alone after the world has ended. Then he hears Jongin's voice.
❊ a/n: To the mods, thank you so much for your patience and understanding. To my recipient, I hope this is something you can like. To everyone who helped me and brainstormed with me and picked me up over and over and over again, a thank you of the highest order.
The cut text is from New World by Lauri Lyönen.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
― Rumi
Kyungsoo is used to being alone.
The world is a silent place, after all. There's no one left, just broken buildings, thick forests and vast plains and lakes, solitary shapes against the horizon.
"What will I do without you?" he remembers asking, Seungsoo was the only one left and he was too old too.
Seungsoo was already looking at something Kyungsoo couldn't see, blood bubbling between his lips, the shining film of transparent saliva tinted red by the ripped rawness inside his chest where the tomb death was eating him from the inside out, a shimmering pink bubble busting with his opening mouth, tiny dots of crimson spotting his face like freckles.
He didn't answer, only breathed, the sound wet and rattling in his chest for the last time. Kyungsoo sat beside him and held his hand, until the lights in his eyes went out.
He doesn't think about it anymore, or that's what he tells himself anyway. About how the older people were the first to go, and then the adults, and then the teenagers. Kyungsoo was nine when his brother died. He's eighteen now. Maybe. It's hard to tell sometimes, but all the things scattered around, all the broken pieces of lives left to fall on the ground, televisions buzzing with static, telephones with humming dialtones, the occasional air raid siren that continues to scream the warning after death has already come and gone, everything still works. It's been nine years, and they still keep going, a few more dropping into the silence each time, a growing quiet that swells its throat, spreads wings.
Kyungsoo has been alone for as much time as he's been with anybody.
There's not much to do, in this new world. Eating isn't hard, there are canned and preserved foods everywhere, and all the things that have grown since people stopped poisoning the ground, the water, the sky. Sure there's enough death left tucked into the soil, seeping from buildings filled with barrels labelled toxic waste, but Kyungsoo isn't dead yet. He figures he can take it, rigging up the old fishing rod he found about a month ago, maybe, he can't remember. There's a lot of line on this one, and the tip isn't broken off yet. It was a good find.
He casts out into the lake, maybe there'll be a fish today. He's not sure what kind of fish might live in the water, or what bait to throw, but he has a jig on the line and a worm, and maybe he'll get lucky today.
The sand under his toes is warm in the afternoon sun, fish bite best in the rain he remembers someone saying, the face is lost but the words remain.
It would be nice to touch someone, sometimes; he remembers hugs from his father, his mother ruffling his hair, smudging dirt off his face, Seungsoo throwing fake punches but laughing the whole time. Kyungsoo remembers not thinking much of it at all.
It means more, in retrospect.
The sky is blue, the sky is always blue now, after the people are gone. Birds fly overhead and a wind rustles through the leaves of the trees; Kyungsoo is a little sleepy and finds his eyelids drooping as his head slips forward, only to jerk backward as he wakes up, blinks, pretends to bob his line, rinse, repeat.
When he wakes up, cold, lying on the sand whose heat has leached out into the night, he's mad at himself for losing the fishing rod, but there's no use swearing, there's no one to hear anyway.
Kyungsoo hasn't said anything in nine years, ever since he asked Seungsoo a question that never got answered.
The moon is full and it's such a waste of a good fishing rod, Kyungsoo really can't let it go. He ends up stripping off his clothes, shirt, pants, and finally underwear, because there's no one to see anyway.
The water is cold when he dives in, and tastes. . .sweet. Kyungsoo holds his breath, eyes wide open even though the water stings a little, and looks for the fishing rod. It's lying alone, on the sandy bottom, and he kicks towards it, glad he still remembers how to swim. Remembers what Seungsoo taught him, in swimming pools that don't exist anymore, the foundations cracked, water slowly draining out, green moss and other things creeping out of the cracks to cover the blue paint, reclaim the cement jungles of cities.
He gets the fishing rod on the first try, but something else catches his eye. It looks like a walkie-talkie or something, those old fashioned things, Kyungsoo remembers playing with Seungsoo and his friends with them in the summer, running around in the heat, sweat dripping from their hairlines down to roll off their chins. He breaks the surface, dumps the fishing rod on the shore and dives back in.
It probably doesn't work anymore anyway, but he remembers Seungsoo begging for the new water-proof ones and his mother sighing and asking what on earth he wanted those for, they only played in the park anyway.
Kyungsoo hopes that someone else's mother listened and bought the waterproof one anyway.
The black plastic is hard under his fingers, solid, and Kyungsoo sets it on a rock to air out while he tries to brush off as much moisture as he can before pulling his clothes on again. There's no mother to dry him off with fuzzy towels, no brother to flick his bare skin, only silence and the lone chirping of a solitary cricket.
It's okay. The night air is dry even if it's cool, and he isn't too damp in his clothes when he sits down on the rock by the lake, stars stretched overhead, pulling the fabric of the sky thin. Kyungsoo examines the walkie-talkie in this hands, turning it over, his fingertips leaving tiny circles of moisture behind.
There's a button along the side, and Kyungsoo remembers bright packaging, florescent lights, the sound of laughter off to the right. He pushes the button and hears static.
Is it working or is it broken? it's hard to tell. He lifts the walkie-talkie to his mouth and presses the speaking grip, as the static cuts.
"Hello?" he says, his voice rusty in the dark, it's been so long and he's had nothing to say. He releases the grip and the static returns, empty like snow falling on silence.
Either it's broken or there's no one left, Kyungsoo thinks, as he lets the walkie-talkie slip out of his fingers, barely making a sound as it lands on the sand. He stretches out his left arm, stands up slowly, shaking his head as damp tendrils of hair cling to his face.
There's a hiccough in the static, a faint crackle, and Kyungsoo wonders if it's finally broken.
And then a voice, stretched out, strange, sound waves compressed but still very much human, cuts through the silence.
"Hello?" it says, echoing Kyungsoo's wonders, but it's not his voice, that's not my voice, he thinks, turning slowly back to the lake and and the sand and the walkie-talkie lying on the ground by the rock.
"Who are you?" Kyungsoo asks into the walkie-talkie, this is the real test, whether there's a person on the other side or something else, maybe a glitch or some kind of dysfunction. He's not even really hoping, standing here, the moon casting a shadow before him that falls into the water.
"Jongin," the voice replies, crackling with interference or distance, Kyungsoo isn't sure, but it's so real somehow, he almost drops the walkie-talkie again. "Who are you?"
"Kyungsoo," Kyungsoo says into the microphone, and it feels like a dream, like he's talking to his imagination, maybe that's why he asks the next question, bursting out of his chest like the red bubbles that burst from Seungsoo's mouth as he tried to say what he couldn't. "Are you real?"
There's a laugh, when the static cuts back in again as he releases the speaking grip, and the voice is lighter when it replies a moment later,
"Are you?"
Kyungsoo nods, and then remembers that the voice, Jongin, can't see him.
"Yes," he says. There's a sigh then, and Jongin sounds sad, over the static, though Kyungsoo's not really sure how he can tell.
"Where are you?" he asks, because he wants to know; everything has been the same for so long but it feels like the world is shifting beneath his feet.
"Where are you?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo realizes he doesn't know. And then he looks at the walkie-talkie and wonders how it got into the lake in the first place.
"Can you find me?" he asks, because he still doesn't know who Jongin is. The night wind is cold on his face, sending icy tendrils through his damp hair.
"I can't leave," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo doesn't know him but it sounds like the truth. "I just look through the window at the moon." Kyungsoo thinks about Seungsoo, lying in bed, at the end, and it's probably not wise but he finds the words falling out of his mouth like a confession, a loneliness he's been saving up, unable to express, so that of course he would explode all over the first voice he heard in years.
"Let me find you," Kyungsoo says, and it sounds like a bad idea but it also sounds like something he's always wanted to do, just that there's never been anyone to find.
Kyungsoo used to think about picking up and just going, not wandering around, living here and there like he has been, but actually getting up one morning and going somewhere with a purpose, with direction. There's never been a direction for him to go before though, just horizons past horizons, an endless stretch of more and more and more emptiness.
Now his feet keep walking, one in front of the other, as he stares ahead, not side to side, wondering if there will ever be anyone. There is someone.
It's not hard to figure out where Jongin is; there's a gps feature on the walkie-talkie and it somehow still works; Kyungsoo looks up at the sky, grey clouds obscuring space, and wonders how many lonely satellites are still circling, beaming down signals to things that don't need them anymore. He doesn't linger though, tracing the sky with his eyes, because he has somewhere to be.
It's liberating, to have a responsibility.
Jongin tells him stories, over the walkie-talkie, and Kyungsoo is half afraid the small thing that fits into just one hand, so insignificant and yet powerful, will run out of batteries, but he can't stop listening, can't turn it off.
"What do you think about, when you look at the moon?" he asks into the static and then waits for the response.
"I think I'd like to go outside," Jongin says, his voice trailing off, and Kyungsoo, standing under the moon, doesn't know what to say, but Jongin keeps talking anyway, after a pause that stretches a field of hushed footsteps. "Can you tell me what it's like?"
So Kyungsoo talks about the dirt beneath his feet, dry and dusty on the crumbling concrete of the roads, the way he avoids cities because they're overgrown jungles of holes and unsteady buildings and the way the bodies are mostly gone now, just skeletons remain. Cities are like open air tombs, and he should probably be more bothered by the idea but he isn't.
"It's not like I knew them," Kyungsoo says without thinking, and then he pauses and wonders if Jongin will think less of him for saying something like that. When everyone is gone, anyone is precious, right? That's not how it feels.
"They can't help us now," Jongin says, and there's something in his voice that Kyungsoo doesn't understand but it's not directed at him.
"It doesn't matter anyway," Kyungsoo says.
"How do you find food and clothes?" Jongin asks one time; Kyungsoo is drawing closer now, his dot on the LCD display so very close-Kyungsoo doesn't know the scale but the space between them is only a few pixels apart. It's almost scary; Kyungsoo hasn't seen anyone in so long and the anticipation and rightness of the journey is dissolving into questions that he can't ask.
Why you?
"There's so much canned and processed food," Kyungsoo says, "if I want to go to the cities, and fruit and vegetables and things from gardens in the summertime."
He picks his way carefully over the rubble of a collapsed structure-he's not sure what it was, the red and purple overlaying the concrete is flaking, tiny scrapes of colour drifting on the wind and the exposed metal rods like broken bones, exposed under the grey sky. The air is quiet and still, hanging heavy and only a lost seagull circles overhead, crying. A storm is coming.
"What do you do in the winter?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo shivers at the thought. This world is so empty; it's not really dangerous and yet there are things like bears and coyotes and hungry red eyes flashing in the dark of winter.
"I find somewhere to stay and canned food and cross my fingers," he says, and wonders if Jongin will asks why Kyungsoo doesn't do anything more permanent. If there's nowhere to go, why go anywhere? But there's nowhere to stay either.
Seungsoo, lying in the bed, Kyungsoo leaning forward to gently shut his eyes.
There's nowhere to go, and no reason to stay.
"That sounds cozy," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo wonders what Jongin does. He doesn't feel, somehow, like it's something he can ask.
His dot on the screen has merged with Jongin's.
There's a cement block, like a cube, like a mass of concrete that someone dropped from the sky and abandoned and nothing will approach now. The ground around it is bare, wind whistling over the emptiness. Kyungsoo looks at the words over the heavy metal doors but he can't read the words. They're not in a language he understands; sharp edges and circular gouges in the surface of the wall.
"You're here?" Kyungsoo asks, and there's static on the other end, before Jongin's voice comes out, strangely more garbled than when he was further away.
"Yes," Jongin says. "Just come in, they won't stop you."
"They?" Kyungsoo asks, but there's no answer. But he's here, now, and this is where the journey ends, even if he doesn't understand. Why hasn't the building fallen down? People never built things to last, before the end, only the oldest places were left. But this place is disturbing in its wholeness.
He walks up the steps, walkie-talkie still clutched in his hand, and slowly pushes the heavy door open, slipping in away from the wind.
White is the first thing he thinks, blinking at the onslaught of artificial light, something he hasn't really seen for so long, at least not like this, not harsh and clear and bright. The closest he's come was the trailing flickering florescent lights of buildings still hooked up to solar generator systems, though as the years have gone on, more and more lights have blinked out. By the time I'm old, Kyungsoo thinks, the world will be dark.
The next thing he notices is people. People. Everyone is dead, it doesn't make any sense, if it hadn't been for Jongin's cryptic comment Kyungsoo would have taken off running and regrouped later.
It's downright horrifying, all the adults walking around with clipboards and white coats and shining eyes behind spectacles and Kyungsoo waits for one of them to notice him and ask him what he's doing here. Why he's trespassing.
But no one says anything at all, or even stops, or turns, or meets his eye, or shows any sign of acknowledging his existence.
Do I exist?
It's strange, how being alone can strip you of the ability to process others.
"Are you there?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo blinks, relaxing his clenched fists; his knuckles pinken again from the white they were before, without him even realizing it.
"Yeah," Kyungsoo replies.
"Follow the signs to the containment room," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo starts walking so that he can get to the end of this thing he's doing, so that he can figure out what is going on and why he's even here.
The adults don't pay any attention to him and all, even when he bumps into them or brushes their arms accidentally, and finally Kyungsoo stops and gives one a push, expecting an angry remark or something. Something.
He's not expecting the woman in the white coat to topple over backwards, landing with a crash in the corridor, none of the other adults reacting at all as she lies on the ground, hands up, reaching towards the ceiling for a moment before she straightens herself and pops up into a standing position, walking away without a second glance.
They're not real, Kyungsoo thinks, and he doesn't know whether he should be scared or sad.
The door to the containment room is open, when he reaches the end of the signs, bright red wording leading the way.
CONTAINMENT ROOM -->
Kyungsoo doesn't know what he's expecting but he's not expecting an empty room, empty except for the narrow white hospital bed pushed against the wall, next to a window looking east, over a ruined city.
There's a boy in the bed, he looks like Kyungsoo's age, hand curled protectively around a walkie-talkie-the boy is looking out the window, but as Kyungsoo steps into the room the boy turns and Kyungsoo's breath jumps as his heart skips a beat.
Jongin looks like Kyungsoo but he looks like Seungsoo too, like Seungsoo before the end.
"Are you sick?" Kyungsoo asks, the words falling out of his mouth before he can stop them, bottle them back in his chest.
"What will I do without you?" he'd asked Seungsoo, and Seungsoo hadn't answered.
Jongin looks at him for a moment, staring into his eyes, and Kyungsoo can see the red on his mouth, the hollows under his eyes.
"I'm alive," he says, and gestures to the bed. Kyungsoo notices, now, the tubes trailing out of his arms, the soft beep beep beep of a green screen on the wall, the clear mask that Jongin has pushed aside, hovering around his neck.
How long have you been dying? Kyungsoo wants to ask, but he doesn't. There aren't any red spots on Jongin's face, just pink dotting his lips.
"You can ask," Jongin says, "I know you want to." But Kyungsoo doesn't know what to ask, when everything is all a huge question, whose answer won't change anything.
"How did you get sick?" he finally says, not really a question, because kids didn't catch it, or at least, Kyungsoo is still alive. He's tried not to wonder, over the years, why he hasn't found other children wandering the vast emptiness of existence.
Sometimes it's best not to think.
"How did you stay healthy?" Jongin asks. There's an awkward pause; Kyungsoo doesn't know what to say, whether he should apologize or not say anything at all. Jongin's face wrinkles up then in a smile, and Kyungsoo can tell he was joking, as his mouth bursts with a sharp laugh that looks like it hurts, pink bubbling from his lips, which he wipes away with a tissue from the nightstand, tossing it in a wastebin after his lips are clear.
"I'm the first one," Jongin says. "I can't remember not being here, not being sick. I'm the one who started this." Kyungsoo's eyes widen. You're patient X? But it doesn't make any sense.
"But you're not dead?" he asks. Jongin flinches, and Kyungsoo wants to step forward and rest his hand on Jongin's shoulder, like he tried to comfort Seungsoo, at the end. He doesn't know if it's allowed.
"They thought they could use me to find a cure," Jongin says, and coughs, red dotting his sheets. "They died instead, leaving me here, alone, in this tomb of androids that keep everything just the same, time will never move past this present." He sounds angry, but more than that he sounds so very lonely. He looks at Kyungsoo then, catches him in his brown eyes, rimmed with red.
"They should have looked for you," he says, and Kyungsoo realizes what Jongin is trying to say.
"But. . .?" he begins, because he doesn't know, he hadn't thought about it-
"It doesn't matter," Jongin says, "It's all over anyway. There's no one left." And with the way his tone doesn't deviate, neither sad nor happy nor anything at all, Kyungsoo thinks it must be true.
He wonders what now.
"Can we go outside?" Jongin says, and Kyungsoo looks up, startled out of his thoughts, sitting on a stool in the room, both of them engulfed in silence.
"Outside?" Kyungsoo asks, and his eyes flicker over all the tubes attached to Jongin, all the things that are presumably keeping him alive.
"I want to go outside," Jongin says. "I've been waiting." Kyungsoo looks at him.
"Why didn't you just leave before?" It doesn't make any sense. Kyungsoo just walked in, he's pretty sure Jongin could just walk out.
"I can't get out of this," Jongin says. "I tried and only got tangled and I still couldn't, waiting with the IV dripping blood until the nurse came back in and straightened me out." His eyes look dark, as though he's considered doing that again, for different reasons, and Kyungsoo frowns. No.
"Fine," he says, eyeing the oxygen mask that Jongin isn't breathing into. Jongin notices where he's looking, and drops his gaze. Kyungsoo doesn't say anything.
Jongin shows him how to switch off the heart monitor, gently pull out the IV and other tubes, peel off the electrodes and reach up the wall, unhooking everything gently and laying it all in lines on the mostly white sheets until there's only Jongin left. His skin is paler now, a faint bluish tinge hovering beneath the red dotting the inside of his mouth, but he just runs a tongue over his lips and stares at Kyungsoo defiantly.
"You might need to help me walk," he says, perched on the end of the bed, and Kyungsoo looks at Jongin's bare feet and gets the wheelchair in the corner of the room.
There's an elevator, luckily, with roof access; it doesn't make any sense but Kyungsoo isn't asking any questions when he can hear the way Jongin is breathing. He wants to go back to the room and attach him to everything again, but he remembers Seungsoo's expression, eyes staring up at the dark square of the window, and he keeps walking, rolling the chair in front of him. Jongin's fingers clenched around the arm rests are white.
The elevator doors open on a small vestibule, clear glass doors sliding open silently on the outside, where a wind is blowing. It's afternoon, darkening to evening, and the sky is shadowed with clouds, red and orange and pink streaks flooding the sky with almost violent colour. It smells like a storm is coming; it smells alive, here on this planet that's everything except filled with people.
This is not a dying planet, Kyungsoo realizes again, just a lonely one. Beside him he can hear Jongin breathing in a raspy breath. It sounds like it hurts, but looking at Jongin's face, it looks like happiness. His skin is flushed pink by the light, his eyes too bright, he looks like only a thin thread is holding him on the ground, fingers twitching before he dissolves into thin air, his face fierce with joy.
"Closer," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo wheels him to the edge of the building, where they can look over, not the ruined city but the bare ground sloping towards the sea, a few seagulls spinning, swooping through the air before the coming storm. Jongin breathes, exhaling in rasping coughs as he covers his mouth with his sleeve, tucking the white fabric against his chest before Kyungsoo can see, but the flash of red is unmistakable.
"Should we go back inside?" he asks, but Jongin shakes his head, smiling up at Kyungsoo, who smiles back, he has to, Jongin's happiness might be poised on the edge of a knife but the metal sparkles shiny.
"Thank you," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo sinks down to crouch next to him, resting his arms on the low wall around the roof as they watch the tide rush in, waves and waves of dark blue power, white cresting the tops with foam.
Kyungsoo imagines swimming in this water, imagines the riptide snatching at his feet, ankles, legs.
As Jongin rests his head on Kyungsoo's shoulder, warmth against his skin through the thin layer of fabric, it begins to rain.
Don't be afraid,
I just wanted to see the sun,
hold it, for one last time.
I just wanted to touch the sky,
I wanted to feel the rain, to shine,
one more time.
― L.L.
❊ title: saudade
❊ pairings: kai/d.o
❊ rating: pg13
❊ warnings: this story does not include any smut[Spoiler (click to open)]minor character death, disturbing descriptions of illness/death, terminal illness/plague/epidemic, references to possible implied suicide thoughts
❊ word count: 4,141
❊ summary: Kyungsoo is alone after the world has ended. Then he hears Jongin's voice.
❊ a/n: To the mods, thank you so much for your patience and understanding. To my recipient, I hope this is something you can like. To everyone who helped me and brainstormed with me and picked me up over and over and over again, a thank you of the highest order.
The cut text is from New World by Lauri Lyönen.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
― Rumi
Kyungsoo is used to being alone.
The world is a silent place, after all. There's no one left, just broken buildings, thick forests and vast plains and lakes, solitary shapes against the horizon.
"What will I do without you?" he remembers asking, Seungsoo was the only one left and he was too old too.
Seungsoo was already looking at something Kyungsoo couldn't see, blood bubbling between his lips, the shining film of transparent saliva tinted red by the ripped rawness inside his chest where the tomb death was eating him from the inside out, a shimmering pink bubble busting with his opening mouth, tiny dots of crimson spotting his face like freckles.
He didn't answer, only breathed, the sound wet and rattling in his chest for the last time. Kyungsoo sat beside him and held his hand, until the lights in his eyes went out.
He doesn't think about it anymore, or that's what he tells himself anyway. About how the older people were the first to go, and then the adults, and then the teenagers. Kyungsoo was nine when his brother died. He's eighteen now. Maybe. It's hard to tell sometimes, but all the things scattered around, all the broken pieces of lives left to fall on the ground, televisions buzzing with static, telephones with humming dialtones, the occasional air raid siren that continues to scream the warning after death has already come and gone, everything still works. It's been nine years, and they still keep going, a few more dropping into the silence each time, a growing quiet that swells its throat, spreads wings.
Kyungsoo has been alone for as much time as he's been with anybody.
There's not much to do, in this new world. Eating isn't hard, there are canned and preserved foods everywhere, and all the things that have grown since people stopped poisoning the ground, the water, the sky. Sure there's enough death left tucked into the soil, seeping from buildings filled with barrels labelled toxic waste, but Kyungsoo isn't dead yet. He figures he can take it, rigging up the old fishing rod he found about a month ago, maybe, he can't remember. There's a lot of line on this one, and the tip isn't broken off yet. It was a good find.
He casts out into the lake, maybe there'll be a fish today. He's not sure what kind of fish might live in the water, or what bait to throw, but he has a jig on the line and a worm, and maybe he'll get lucky today.
The sand under his toes is warm in the afternoon sun, fish bite best in the rain he remembers someone saying, the face is lost but the words remain.
It would be nice to touch someone, sometimes; he remembers hugs from his father, his mother ruffling his hair, smudging dirt off his face, Seungsoo throwing fake punches but laughing the whole time. Kyungsoo remembers not thinking much of it at all.
It means more, in retrospect.
The sky is blue, the sky is always blue now, after the people are gone. Birds fly overhead and a wind rustles through the leaves of the trees; Kyungsoo is a little sleepy and finds his eyelids drooping as his head slips forward, only to jerk backward as he wakes up, blinks, pretends to bob his line, rinse, repeat.
When he wakes up, cold, lying on the sand whose heat has leached out into the night, he's mad at himself for losing the fishing rod, but there's no use swearing, there's no one to hear anyway.
Kyungsoo hasn't said anything in nine years, ever since he asked Seungsoo a question that never got answered.
The moon is full and it's such a waste of a good fishing rod, Kyungsoo really can't let it go. He ends up stripping off his clothes, shirt, pants, and finally underwear, because there's no one to see anyway.
The water is cold when he dives in, and tastes. . .sweet. Kyungsoo holds his breath, eyes wide open even though the water stings a little, and looks for the fishing rod. It's lying alone, on the sandy bottom, and he kicks towards it, glad he still remembers how to swim. Remembers what Seungsoo taught him, in swimming pools that don't exist anymore, the foundations cracked, water slowly draining out, green moss and other things creeping out of the cracks to cover the blue paint, reclaim the cement jungles of cities.
He gets the fishing rod on the first try, but something else catches his eye. It looks like a walkie-talkie or something, those old fashioned things, Kyungsoo remembers playing with Seungsoo and his friends with them in the summer, running around in the heat, sweat dripping from their hairlines down to roll off their chins. He breaks the surface, dumps the fishing rod on the shore and dives back in.
It probably doesn't work anymore anyway, but he remembers Seungsoo begging for the new water-proof ones and his mother sighing and asking what on earth he wanted those for, they only played in the park anyway.
Kyungsoo hopes that someone else's mother listened and bought the waterproof one anyway.
The black plastic is hard under his fingers, solid, and Kyungsoo sets it on a rock to air out while he tries to brush off as much moisture as he can before pulling his clothes on again. There's no mother to dry him off with fuzzy towels, no brother to flick his bare skin, only silence and the lone chirping of a solitary cricket.
It's okay. The night air is dry even if it's cool, and he isn't too damp in his clothes when he sits down on the rock by the lake, stars stretched overhead, pulling the fabric of the sky thin. Kyungsoo examines the walkie-talkie in this hands, turning it over, his fingertips leaving tiny circles of moisture behind.
There's a button along the side, and Kyungsoo remembers bright packaging, florescent lights, the sound of laughter off to the right. He pushes the button and hears static.
Is it working or is it broken? it's hard to tell. He lifts the walkie-talkie to his mouth and presses the speaking grip, as the static cuts.
"Hello?" he says, his voice rusty in the dark, it's been so long and he's had nothing to say. He releases the grip and the static returns, empty like snow falling on silence.
Either it's broken or there's no one left, Kyungsoo thinks, as he lets the walkie-talkie slip out of his fingers, barely making a sound as it lands on the sand. He stretches out his left arm, stands up slowly, shaking his head as damp tendrils of hair cling to his face.
There's a hiccough in the static, a faint crackle, and Kyungsoo wonders if it's finally broken.
And then a voice, stretched out, strange, sound waves compressed but still very much human, cuts through the silence.
"Hello?" it says, echoing Kyungsoo's wonders, but it's not his voice, that's not my voice, he thinks, turning slowly back to the lake and and the sand and the walkie-talkie lying on the ground by the rock.
"Who are you?" Kyungsoo asks into the walkie-talkie, this is the real test, whether there's a person on the other side or something else, maybe a glitch or some kind of dysfunction. He's not even really hoping, standing here, the moon casting a shadow before him that falls into the water.
"Jongin," the voice replies, crackling with interference or distance, Kyungsoo isn't sure, but it's so real somehow, he almost drops the walkie-talkie again. "Who are you?"
"Kyungsoo," Kyungsoo says into the microphone, and it feels like a dream, like he's talking to his imagination, maybe that's why he asks the next question, bursting out of his chest like the red bubbles that burst from Seungsoo's mouth as he tried to say what he couldn't. "Are you real?"
There's a laugh, when the static cuts back in again as he releases the speaking grip, and the voice is lighter when it replies a moment later,
"Are you?"
Kyungsoo nods, and then remembers that the voice, Jongin, can't see him.
"Yes," he says. There's a sigh then, and Jongin sounds sad, over the static, though Kyungsoo's not really sure how he can tell.
"Where are you?" he asks, because he wants to know; everything has been the same for so long but it feels like the world is shifting beneath his feet.
"Where are you?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo realizes he doesn't know. And then he looks at the walkie-talkie and wonders how it got into the lake in the first place.
"Can you find me?" he asks, because he still doesn't know who Jongin is. The night wind is cold on his face, sending icy tendrils through his damp hair.
"I can't leave," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo doesn't know him but it sounds like the truth. "I just look through the window at the moon." Kyungsoo thinks about Seungsoo, lying in bed, at the end, and it's probably not wise but he finds the words falling out of his mouth like a confession, a loneliness he's been saving up, unable to express, so that of course he would explode all over the first voice he heard in years.
"Let me find you," Kyungsoo says, and it sounds like a bad idea but it also sounds like something he's always wanted to do, just that there's never been anyone to find.
Kyungsoo used to think about picking up and just going, not wandering around, living here and there like he has been, but actually getting up one morning and going somewhere with a purpose, with direction. There's never been a direction for him to go before though, just horizons past horizons, an endless stretch of more and more and more emptiness.
Now his feet keep walking, one in front of the other, as he stares ahead, not side to side, wondering if there will ever be anyone. There is someone.
It's not hard to figure out where Jongin is; there's a gps feature on the walkie-talkie and it somehow still works; Kyungsoo looks up at the sky, grey clouds obscuring space, and wonders how many lonely satellites are still circling, beaming down signals to things that don't need them anymore. He doesn't linger though, tracing the sky with his eyes, because he has somewhere to be.
It's liberating, to have a responsibility.
Jongin tells him stories, over the walkie-talkie, and Kyungsoo is half afraid the small thing that fits into just one hand, so insignificant and yet powerful, will run out of batteries, but he can't stop listening, can't turn it off.
"What do you think about, when you look at the moon?" he asks into the static and then waits for the response.
"I think I'd like to go outside," Jongin says, his voice trailing off, and Kyungsoo, standing under the moon, doesn't know what to say, but Jongin keeps talking anyway, after a pause that stretches a field of hushed footsteps. "Can you tell me what it's like?"
So Kyungsoo talks about the dirt beneath his feet, dry and dusty on the crumbling concrete of the roads, the way he avoids cities because they're overgrown jungles of holes and unsteady buildings and the way the bodies are mostly gone now, just skeletons remain. Cities are like open air tombs, and he should probably be more bothered by the idea but he isn't.
"It's not like I knew them," Kyungsoo says without thinking, and then he pauses and wonders if Jongin will think less of him for saying something like that. When everyone is gone, anyone is precious, right? That's not how it feels.
"They can't help us now," Jongin says, and there's something in his voice that Kyungsoo doesn't understand but it's not directed at him.
"It doesn't matter anyway," Kyungsoo says.
"How do you find food and clothes?" Jongin asks one time; Kyungsoo is drawing closer now, his dot on the LCD display so very close-Kyungsoo doesn't know the scale but the space between them is only a few pixels apart. It's almost scary; Kyungsoo hasn't seen anyone in so long and the anticipation and rightness of the journey is dissolving into questions that he can't ask.
Why you?
"There's so much canned and processed food," Kyungsoo says, "if I want to go to the cities, and fruit and vegetables and things from gardens in the summertime."
He picks his way carefully over the rubble of a collapsed structure-he's not sure what it was, the red and purple overlaying the concrete is flaking, tiny scrapes of colour drifting on the wind and the exposed metal rods like broken bones, exposed under the grey sky. The air is quiet and still, hanging heavy and only a lost seagull circles overhead, crying. A storm is coming.
"What do you do in the winter?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo shivers at the thought. This world is so empty; it's not really dangerous and yet there are things like bears and coyotes and hungry red eyes flashing in the dark of winter.
"I find somewhere to stay and canned food and cross my fingers," he says, and wonders if Jongin will asks why Kyungsoo doesn't do anything more permanent. If there's nowhere to go, why go anywhere? But there's nowhere to stay either.
Seungsoo, lying in the bed, Kyungsoo leaning forward to gently shut his eyes.
There's nowhere to go, and no reason to stay.
"That sounds cozy," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo wonders what Jongin does. He doesn't feel, somehow, like it's something he can ask.
His dot on the screen has merged with Jongin's.
There's a cement block, like a cube, like a mass of concrete that someone dropped from the sky and abandoned and nothing will approach now. The ground around it is bare, wind whistling over the emptiness. Kyungsoo looks at the words over the heavy metal doors but he can't read the words. They're not in a language he understands; sharp edges and circular gouges in the surface of the wall.
"You're here?" Kyungsoo asks, and there's static on the other end, before Jongin's voice comes out, strangely more garbled than when he was further away.
"Yes," Jongin says. "Just come in, they won't stop you."
"They?" Kyungsoo asks, but there's no answer. But he's here, now, and this is where the journey ends, even if he doesn't understand. Why hasn't the building fallen down? People never built things to last, before the end, only the oldest places were left. But this place is disturbing in its wholeness.
He walks up the steps, walkie-talkie still clutched in his hand, and slowly pushes the heavy door open, slipping in away from the wind.
White is the first thing he thinks, blinking at the onslaught of artificial light, something he hasn't really seen for so long, at least not like this, not harsh and clear and bright. The closest he's come was the trailing flickering florescent lights of buildings still hooked up to solar generator systems, though as the years have gone on, more and more lights have blinked out. By the time I'm old, Kyungsoo thinks, the world will be dark.
The next thing he notices is people. People. Everyone is dead, it doesn't make any sense, if it hadn't been for Jongin's cryptic comment Kyungsoo would have taken off running and regrouped later.
It's downright horrifying, all the adults walking around with clipboards and white coats and shining eyes behind spectacles and Kyungsoo waits for one of them to notice him and ask him what he's doing here. Why he's trespassing.
But no one says anything at all, or even stops, or turns, or meets his eye, or shows any sign of acknowledging his existence.
Do I exist?
It's strange, how being alone can strip you of the ability to process others.
"Are you there?" Jongin asks, and Kyungsoo blinks, relaxing his clenched fists; his knuckles pinken again from the white they were before, without him even realizing it.
"Yeah," Kyungsoo replies.
"Follow the signs to the containment room," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo starts walking so that he can get to the end of this thing he's doing, so that he can figure out what is going on and why he's even here.
The adults don't pay any attention to him and all, even when he bumps into them or brushes their arms accidentally, and finally Kyungsoo stops and gives one a push, expecting an angry remark or something. Something.
He's not expecting the woman in the white coat to topple over backwards, landing with a crash in the corridor, none of the other adults reacting at all as she lies on the ground, hands up, reaching towards the ceiling for a moment before she straightens herself and pops up into a standing position, walking away without a second glance.
They're not real, Kyungsoo thinks, and he doesn't know whether he should be scared or sad.
The door to the containment room is open, when he reaches the end of the signs, bright red wording leading the way.
CONTAINMENT ROOM -->
Kyungsoo doesn't know what he's expecting but he's not expecting an empty room, empty except for the narrow white hospital bed pushed against the wall, next to a window looking east, over a ruined city.
There's a boy in the bed, he looks like Kyungsoo's age, hand curled protectively around a walkie-talkie-the boy is looking out the window, but as Kyungsoo steps into the room the boy turns and Kyungsoo's breath jumps as his heart skips a beat.
Jongin looks like Kyungsoo but he looks like Seungsoo too, like Seungsoo before the end.
"Are you sick?" Kyungsoo asks, the words falling out of his mouth before he can stop them, bottle them back in his chest.
"What will I do without you?" he'd asked Seungsoo, and Seungsoo hadn't answered.
Jongin looks at him for a moment, staring into his eyes, and Kyungsoo can see the red on his mouth, the hollows under his eyes.
"I'm alive," he says, and gestures to the bed. Kyungsoo notices, now, the tubes trailing out of his arms, the soft beep beep beep of a green screen on the wall, the clear mask that Jongin has pushed aside, hovering around his neck.
How long have you been dying? Kyungsoo wants to ask, but he doesn't. There aren't any red spots on Jongin's face, just pink dotting his lips.
"You can ask," Jongin says, "I know you want to." But Kyungsoo doesn't know what to ask, when everything is all a huge question, whose answer won't change anything.
"How did you get sick?" he finally says, not really a question, because kids didn't catch it, or at least, Kyungsoo is still alive. He's tried not to wonder, over the years, why he hasn't found other children wandering the vast emptiness of existence.
Sometimes it's best not to think.
"How did you stay healthy?" Jongin asks. There's an awkward pause; Kyungsoo doesn't know what to say, whether he should apologize or not say anything at all. Jongin's face wrinkles up then in a smile, and Kyungsoo can tell he was joking, as his mouth bursts with a sharp laugh that looks like it hurts, pink bubbling from his lips, which he wipes away with a tissue from the nightstand, tossing it in a wastebin after his lips are clear.
"I'm the first one," Jongin says. "I can't remember not being here, not being sick. I'm the one who started this." Kyungsoo's eyes widen. You're patient X? But it doesn't make any sense.
"But you're not dead?" he asks. Jongin flinches, and Kyungsoo wants to step forward and rest his hand on Jongin's shoulder, like he tried to comfort Seungsoo, at the end. He doesn't know if it's allowed.
"They thought they could use me to find a cure," Jongin says, and coughs, red dotting his sheets. "They died instead, leaving me here, alone, in this tomb of androids that keep everything just the same, time will never move past this present." He sounds angry, but more than that he sounds so very lonely. He looks at Kyungsoo then, catches him in his brown eyes, rimmed with red.
"They should have looked for you," he says, and Kyungsoo realizes what Jongin is trying to say.
"But. . .?" he begins, because he doesn't know, he hadn't thought about it-
"It doesn't matter," Jongin says, "It's all over anyway. There's no one left." And with the way his tone doesn't deviate, neither sad nor happy nor anything at all, Kyungsoo thinks it must be true.
He wonders what now.
"Can we go outside?" Jongin says, and Kyungsoo looks up, startled out of his thoughts, sitting on a stool in the room, both of them engulfed in silence.
"Outside?" Kyungsoo asks, and his eyes flicker over all the tubes attached to Jongin, all the things that are presumably keeping him alive.
"I want to go outside," Jongin says. "I've been waiting." Kyungsoo looks at him.
"Why didn't you just leave before?" It doesn't make any sense. Kyungsoo just walked in, he's pretty sure Jongin could just walk out.
"I can't get out of this," Jongin says. "I tried and only got tangled and I still couldn't, waiting with the IV dripping blood until the nurse came back in and straightened me out." His eyes look dark, as though he's considered doing that again, for different reasons, and Kyungsoo frowns. No.
"Fine," he says, eyeing the oxygen mask that Jongin isn't breathing into. Jongin notices where he's looking, and drops his gaze. Kyungsoo doesn't say anything.
Jongin shows him how to switch off the heart monitor, gently pull out the IV and other tubes, peel off the electrodes and reach up the wall, unhooking everything gently and laying it all in lines on the mostly white sheets until there's only Jongin left. His skin is paler now, a faint bluish tinge hovering beneath the red dotting the inside of his mouth, but he just runs a tongue over his lips and stares at Kyungsoo defiantly.
"You might need to help me walk," he says, perched on the end of the bed, and Kyungsoo looks at Jongin's bare feet and gets the wheelchair in the corner of the room.
There's an elevator, luckily, with roof access; it doesn't make any sense but Kyungsoo isn't asking any questions when he can hear the way Jongin is breathing. He wants to go back to the room and attach him to everything again, but he remembers Seungsoo's expression, eyes staring up at the dark square of the window, and he keeps walking, rolling the chair in front of him. Jongin's fingers clenched around the arm rests are white.
The elevator doors open on a small vestibule, clear glass doors sliding open silently on the outside, where a wind is blowing. It's afternoon, darkening to evening, and the sky is shadowed with clouds, red and orange and pink streaks flooding the sky with almost violent colour. It smells like a storm is coming; it smells alive, here on this planet that's everything except filled with people.
This is not a dying planet, Kyungsoo realizes again, just a lonely one. Beside him he can hear Jongin breathing in a raspy breath. It sounds like it hurts, but looking at Jongin's face, it looks like happiness. His skin is flushed pink by the light, his eyes too bright, he looks like only a thin thread is holding him on the ground, fingers twitching before he dissolves into thin air, his face fierce with joy.
"Closer," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo wheels him to the edge of the building, where they can look over, not the ruined city but the bare ground sloping towards the sea, a few seagulls spinning, swooping through the air before the coming storm. Jongin breathes, exhaling in rasping coughs as he covers his mouth with his sleeve, tucking the white fabric against his chest before Kyungsoo can see, but the flash of red is unmistakable.
"Should we go back inside?" he asks, but Jongin shakes his head, smiling up at Kyungsoo, who smiles back, he has to, Jongin's happiness might be poised on the edge of a knife but the metal sparkles shiny.
"Thank you," Jongin says, and Kyungsoo sinks down to crouch next to him, resting his arms on the low wall around the roof as they watch the tide rush in, waves and waves of dark blue power, white cresting the tops with foam.
Kyungsoo imagines swimming in this water, imagines the riptide snatching at his feet, ankles, legs.
As Jongin rests his head on Kyungsoo's shoulder, warmth against his skin through the thin layer of fabric, it begins to rain.
Don't be afraid,
I just wanted to see the sun,
hold it, for one last time.
I just wanted to touch the sky,
I wanted to feel the rain, to shine,
one more time.
― L.L.