[ys] Brave New World
A/N: unfeignedfaith prompted, "Storm's coming" from my old prompt exercise. This is a throwback to my gamer roots (L4D!) and I've always wanted to do Yongseo in dystopian settings, so killing two birds with one stone. I hope you guys like this even though it's a little unorthodox for me, but I just had so much fun writing this. Best piece of writing I've done in a while personally.
“Storm’s coming.”
True to form, the dark clouds are rolling in, fierce, like the first wave of soldiers sent forth in battle. Jung Yong-hwa watches from being a miraculously unbroken window, watching the sky attain that coppery, filtered sheen that announces the impending arrival of a storm.
His eyes skate over his companion, slumped on the floor, who manages to lift her head. Her eyes though dull, sparkle with the first real sign of emotion in days-relief and her lips part to release an exhaled “yes”. The temperature has been racheting up in the past couple of days, and the rain is a welcome catalyst to cool things down.
Yong-hwa’s almost sure that her eyes roll heavenward in further expression of her relief, but Seo Joo-hyun turns away before he can ascertain that. Nonetheless, he lets himself grin a little, because surely, day by day, this girl is unbending to feel more like a real person to him.
Which is of course, completely ironic, given the circumstances at hand.
To explain this story, they need to rewind a couple of months. Maybe 3 months. Yong-hwa can’t exactly be sure, given that it took every mobile device less than one week to run out of battery completely, and two weeks for the mechanical clocks to stop working-given that there was no longer anyone who would bother to wind them. There is only an impossibly endless stretch of time now, marked by the rising of the sun and the falling of darkness each day.
Yong-hwa had been invited to play guitar for a wedding of a friend’s brother. It was almost like any other wedding gig he’d been invited to do. He’d set up a few hours before, went through the short and simple set with the other ragtag musicians in the band (all mutual friends or in some way related to the bride and groom). He was plucking at the strings of his guitar lightly as he went through the first few notes of Pachabel’s Canon in D, idly admiring the rose-pink dress on the first bridesmaid, a tall slim girl, who although had not spared him either a glance or a smile, had been humming under her breath as he played, head swaying ever so slightly to the music. He thought he might chat her up later, get her a drink, whirl her around on the floor.
But all that was about to change, when the minister lunged forward, midway through the recitation of the vows, his teeth clamping onto the shoulder of the groom.
To this day, Yong-hwa cannot fathom or even remember that exact moment when he felt the world around him as he knew it change. Maybe it was in the shrill scream of the bride as she watched her groom get eaten, maybe it was the sudden way in which a cacophony of yells and shouts filled the church like a rush of flame and then everyone was turning on everybody.
So Yong-hwa did the only thing he could.
He ran.
But it was something-not a scream; the air was full of them already-coherent speech that made him still in his tracks. “Stop! Stop it, please!”
He likes to think that it was that word, please that made him turn around. Please. A ridiculous word, a word of decency, politeness that had no use in the new mindless and bloodthirsty world they were about to find themselves plunged into.
Whatever it was, there was only one clear thought ringing in his mind, silencing the whirlwind of thoughts clouding up his brain. She’s still human.
He remembers another thought, just before it all happened. Before he met Seo Joo-hyun. Before he saved her. He’s not as proud of this thought.
He remembers thinking, Good-bye, baby.
Yong-hwa slung the guitar still strapped to his back so that its neck was in his hands, like a baseball bat. The voice, the cry, the please had come from her, the first bridesmaid, who miracle of miracles, had not been bitten, but was thrashing against her hungry captor, hitting him repeatedly on the head with her enormous bouquet.
If he hadn’t been so frightened, he would have laughed.
But Yong-hwa’s hands were trembling, as he brought his trusted Maestro down on the head of the man turned zombie, watched as the figure crumpled and as the eyes of one Seo Joo-hyun turned to him, wide, frightened… and in that moment, wholly trusting.
The remains of his Maestro were long gone by now, as was the rose-pink floor-length dress that he had admired on Joo-hyun. It was probably lying on the floor of a changing room in that mall they’d visited before skipping town; he’d kept watch right outside the flimsy wooden door as Seo Joo-hyun changed hurriedly into a pair of jeans that were a size too loose and a plain T-shirt. Clothes suitable for being on the run in.
He doesn’t realize his eyes are still resting on her and has to make himself look away. But Joo-hyun doesn’t notice any of this; she remains slumped against the wall in a way that is almost unlike her-which shows how tired she is. Her eyes are faraway, not glassy with lack of sleep, which possibly means that she’s thinking ahead, always, always planning ahead and in spite of himself, in spite of it all, Yong-hwa smiles.
He’s starting to understand who Seo Joo-hyun is.
For starters, she’s always unbelievably polite and reserved, which borders on ridiculous, given the state of their world right now-that is a world infested by what is undeniably, the living dead, and the two of them being thus far the only two immune to whatever this virus is. They never sleep in separate rooms, but if there’s an available couch, she takes it, opting never to sleep in the same bed as him if she can afford it. When she has no choice, she snoozes fitfully and sports dark eye circles for days running.
It’s almost cute, the way she draws these lines between the two of them, lines that would matter in the world before, but not as much in the world after, where survival is their only instinct and goal.
She never swears, not even in a fight, or when they’re caught in a tight situation. She never appears to be taken aback; Yong-hwa can only tell by the shade of her face how she’s feeling-she pales considerably when she’s under stress, but other than that, she is quiet, compliant, never complaining even when they exist on weeks of canned sardines and half-rotten tomatoes. She never cries, although sometimes he thinks he can feel her shake, when she’s lying in bed next to him.
There was that one time though. A scare. He still remembers it vividly. A sudden rush of zombies as they exited one of the abandoned homes they’d spent the night in. The zombies must have smelt the pair of them, laid in wait. Yong-hwa had been sick that week, down with a flu that had been the result of trudging in the rain and then in the sun the next day. Joo-hyun had had her hands full with taking care of him and planning their next move and they walked right into it. It might almost have been termed an ambush if he didn’t know better that these zombies had no more capacity for rational thought.
They managed to fight their way out of it, lose the stragglers as they barricaded themselves in another rest spot in another quarter of town. Yong-hwa had been ready to drop by then; he was burning up without a strong enough dosage of medicine to cure his fever and his head swam, but Joo-hyun’s gasp was clear enough to shock him back into a few moments of clarity.
There, on the back of his arm, plain as day-a bite mark, teeth and all. It was a wonder he'd missed the pain of it all in the midst of the fight.
Even though his head was swimming, he’d forced his rifle (picked up in a house that hadn’t been ransacked) into Joo-hyun’s hands, making her aim it at his head. This was it. This was over. A gunshot would be quicker than turning into one of them, being denied even the stillness and aftermath of death. Yong-hwa would deny it if he were ever asked, but on days, Yong-hwa almost felt sorry for the zombies that roamed the earth.
He must have passed out, or died, but he woke instead to find himself tied up. His hands were trussed to the metal grilles of a window, drawing him up into a half kneeling position. The room had been cleared, the table pushed haphazardly aside and the white face and wide eyes of Seo Joo-hyun, sitting cross-legged across the room from him sharpened in his vision.
Joo-hyun explained that he hadn’t turned that first day in church and so there was a high chance that he (and she) were immune to the virus turning everyone into zombies. She couldn’t be sure if he would turn, now that he received the bite, but she wasn’t willing to simply shoot him dead on the spot either. She spoke in a level, hushed voice that almost made him feel as though they were discussing the weather or something completely normal and mundane, not the fact that his life, his human life was hanging in the balance.
But even in his state of feverishness, he could hear the undercurrent of fear in her words, the unspoken questions and doubts that were most certainly running through her mind. What will I do if you turn? Will I have to shoot you? Where will I go from here?
Nonetheless, the long rifle balanced neatly across her knees was warning enough of what she would do if her hand was forced.
She wouldn’t get close to him that night, even as the fever burned through him, making him thirsty, but he wouldn’t have let her anyway. Instead, he closed his eyes, letting the heat bake his skin from the inside out, allowing the memories from his life before run amok in his mind in a way he never let himself on a daily basis. His father. His mother. His brother. Jong-hyun and the boys. Music. Playing on stage. Memories of life that seemed so completely separate and distant; they might as well have belonged to someone other than Jung Yong-hwa.
He just remembered praying, over and over again for it all to be over.
He must have passed out, but when he awoke with a raging thirst, the light streaming through the window, heating up his back informed him that a great deal of time had elapsed. But he didn’t have time to contend with any of that, because Seo Joo-hyun was right there, kneeling at his side, undoing his bonds frantically, her hair brushing his face and her sudden closeness and warmth making him feel incredibly dizzy.
And then, just like that, he was in her arms, and Seo Joo-hyun was full out crying, shaking in his arms, even as she held him tight for the first time in the 1 month that they had been on the road together. He barely registered what she said about the incubation period of the disease, how that much time had elapsed and he hadn’t turned into one of them, how glad she was that he was okay, and how glad she was that he was going to be fine.
They spent almost two weeks in that particular hideout, the longest they’d ever spent in a place, but ever since then, Yong-hwa knew better than to question his and Joo-hyun’s relationship whatever things might be superficially. They needed each other if they were going to survive in this brave new world. It was as simple as that.
Meanwhile, Joo-hyun speaks.
Her brows are furrowed in thought as she turns to him. “I think we should get moving, find a new place before the storm hits.” She announces as he turns to look at her from the window. “It’s too risky to stay here.” Her eyes flicker to the broken down door, two of them leading into this room.
Yong-hwa nods. As usual, she is right. They are too exposed here with too many entrances and exits, and all weak entry points easy for the zombies to break through. They need to seek better shelter.
He walks the few steps over to her, offers her his hand to help her up. “I guess we better get moving.”
It’s funny, but in the moment that their hands meet, Yong-hwa sees it-a tangling of lines, an overlapping of possibilities. A rose pink dress. A smashed guitar. A dance. A gunshot. A fruity drink. A raging thirst. A kiss. A bite. A girl. A boy. Hands extended. Hands clasped. Always, always together, meeting, tangling.
He smiles.
Joo-hyun cocks her head to the side, pausing. “What? What are you thinking of?”
He gentles his smile, shakes his head. “Nothing."
“Storm’s coming.”
True to form, the dark clouds are rolling in, fierce, like the first wave of soldiers sent forth in battle. Jung Yong-hwa watches from being a miraculously unbroken window, watching the sky attain that coppery, filtered sheen that announces the impending arrival of a storm.
His eyes skate over his companion, slumped on the floor, who manages to lift her head. Her eyes though dull, sparkle with the first real sign of emotion in days-relief and her lips part to release an exhaled “yes”. The temperature has been racheting up in the past couple of days, and the rain is a welcome catalyst to cool things down.
Yong-hwa’s almost sure that her eyes roll heavenward in further expression of her relief, but Seo Joo-hyun turns away before he can ascertain that. Nonetheless, he lets himself grin a little, because surely, day by day, this girl is unbending to feel more like a real person to him.
Which is of course, completely ironic, given the circumstances at hand.
To explain this story, they need to rewind a couple of months. Maybe 3 months. Yong-hwa can’t exactly be sure, given that it took every mobile device less than one week to run out of battery completely, and two weeks for the mechanical clocks to stop working-given that there was no longer anyone who would bother to wind them. There is only an impossibly endless stretch of time now, marked by the rising of the sun and the falling of darkness each day.
Yong-hwa had been invited to play guitar for a wedding of a friend’s brother. It was almost like any other wedding gig he’d been invited to do. He’d set up a few hours before, went through the short and simple set with the other ragtag musicians in the band (all mutual friends or in some way related to the bride and groom). He was plucking at the strings of his guitar lightly as he went through the first few notes of Pachabel’s Canon in D, idly admiring the rose-pink dress on the first bridesmaid, a tall slim girl, who although had not spared him either a glance or a smile, had been humming under her breath as he played, head swaying ever so slightly to the music. He thought he might chat her up later, get her a drink, whirl her around on the floor.
But all that was about to change, when the minister lunged forward, midway through the recitation of the vows, his teeth clamping onto the shoulder of the groom.
To this day, Yong-hwa cannot fathom or even remember that exact moment when he felt the world around him as he knew it change. Maybe it was in the shrill scream of the bride as she watched her groom get eaten, maybe it was the sudden way in which a cacophony of yells and shouts filled the church like a rush of flame and then everyone was turning on everybody.
So Yong-hwa did the only thing he could.
He ran.
But it was something-not a scream; the air was full of them already-coherent speech that made him still in his tracks. “Stop! Stop it, please!”
He likes to think that it was that word, please that made him turn around. Please. A ridiculous word, a word of decency, politeness that had no use in the new mindless and bloodthirsty world they were about to find themselves plunged into.
Whatever it was, there was only one clear thought ringing in his mind, silencing the whirlwind of thoughts clouding up his brain. She’s still human.
He remembers another thought, just before it all happened. Before he met Seo Joo-hyun. Before he saved her. He’s not as proud of this thought.
He remembers thinking, Good-bye, baby.
Yong-hwa slung the guitar still strapped to his back so that its neck was in his hands, like a baseball bat. The voice, the cry, the please had come from her, the first bridesmaid, who miracle of miracles, had not been bitten, but was thrashing against her hungry captor, hitting him repeatedly on the head with her enormous bouquet.
If he hadn’t been so frightened, he would have laughed.
But Yong-hwa’s hands were trembling, as he brought his trusted Maestro down on the head of the man turned zombie, watched as the figure crumpled and as the eyes of one Seo Joo-hyun turned to him, wide, frightened… and in that moment, wholly trusting.
The remains of his Maestro were long gone by now, as was the rose-pink floor-length dress that he had admired on Joo-hyun. It was probably lying on the floor of a changing room in that mall they’d visited before skipping town; he’d kept watch right outside the flimsy wooden door as Seo Joo-hyun changed hurriedly into a pair of jeans that were a size too loose and a plain T-shirt. Clothes suitable for being on the run in.
He doesn’t realize his eyes are still resting on her and has to make himself look away. But Joo-hyun doesn’t notice any of this; she remains slumped against the wall in a way that is almost unlike her-which shows how tired she is. Her eyes are faraway, not glassy with lack of sleep, which possibly means that she’s thinking ahead, always, always planning ahead and in spite of himself, in spite of it all, Yong-hwa smiles.
He’s starting to understand who Seo Joo-hyun is.
For starters, she’s always unbelievably polite and reserved, which borders on ridiculous, given the state of their world right now-that is a world infested by what is undeniably, the living dead, and the two of them being thus far the only two immune to whatever this virus is. They never sleep in separate rooms, but if there’s an available couch, she takes it, opting never to sleep in the same bed as him if she can afford it. When she has no choice, she snoozes fitfully and sports dark eye circles for days running.
It’s almost cute, the way she draws these lines between the two of them, lines that would matter in the world before, but not as much in the world after, where survival is their only instinct and goal.
She never swears, not even in a fight, or when they’re caught in a tight situation. She never appears to be taken aback; Yong-hwa can only tell by the shade of her face how she’s feeling-she pales considerably when she’s under stress, but other than that, she is quiet, compliant, never complaining even when they exist on weeks of canned sardines and half-rotten tomatoes. She never cries, although sometimes he thinks he can feel her shake, when she’s lying in bed next to him.
There was that one time though. A scare. He still remembers it vividly. A sudden rush of zombies as they exited one of the abandoned homes they’d spent the night in. The zombies must have smelt the pair of them, laid in wait. Yong-hwa had been sick that week, down with a flu that had been the result of trudging in the rain and then in the sun the next day. Joo-hyun had had her hands full with taking care of him and planning their next move and they walked right into it. It might almost have been termed an ambush if he didn’t know better that these zombies had no more capacity for rational thought.
They managed to fight their way out of it, lose the stragglers as they barricaded themselves in another rest spot in another quarter of town. Yong-hwa had been ready to drop by then; he was burning up without a strong enough dosage of medicine to cure his fever and his head swam, but Joo-hyun’s gasp was clear enough to shock him back into a few moments of clarity.
There, on the back of his arm, plain as day-a bite mark, teeth and all. It was a wonder he'd missed the pain of it all in the midst of the fight.
Even though his head was swimming, he’d forced his rifle (picked up in a house that hadn’t been ransacked) into Joo-hyun’s hands, making her aim it at his head. This was it. This was over. A gunshot would be quicker than turning into one of them, being denied even the stillness and aftermath of death. Yong-hwa would deny it if he were ever asked, but on days, Yong-hwa almost felt sorry for the zombies that roamed the earth.
He must have passed out, or died, but he woke instead to find himself tied up. His hands were trussed to the metal grilles of a window, drawing him up into a half kneeling position. The room had been cleared, the table pushed haphazardly aside and the white face and wide eyes of Seo Joo-hyun, sitting cross-legged across the room from him sharpened in his vision.
Joo-hyun explained that he hadn’t turned that first day in church and so there was a high chance that he (and she) were immune to the virus turning everyone into zombies. She couldn’t be sure if he would turn, now that he received the bite, but she wasn’t willing to simply shoot him dead on the spot either. She spoke in a level, hushed voice that almost made him feel as though they were discussing the weather or something completely normal and mundane, not the fact that his life, his human life was hanging in the balance.
But even in his state of feverishness, he could hear the undercurrent of fear in her words, the unspoken questions and doubts that were most certainly running through her mind. What will I do if you turn? Will I have to shoot you? Where will I go from here?
Nonetheless, the long rifle balanced neatly across her knees was warning enough of what she would do if her hand was forced.
She wouldn’t get close to him that night, even as the fever burned through him, making him thirsty, but he wouldn’t have let her anyway. Instead, he closed his eyes, letting the heat bake his skin from the inside out, allowing the memories from his life before run amok in his mind in a way he never let himself on a daily basis. His father. His mother. His brother. Jong-hyun and the boys. Music. Playing on stage. Memories of life that seemed so completely separate and distant; they might as well have belonged to someone other than Jung Yong-hwa.
He just remembered praying, over and over again for it all to be over.
He must have passed out, but when he awoke with a raging thirst, the light streaming through the window, heating up his back informed him that a great deal of time had elapsed. But he didn’t have time to contend with any of that, because Seo Joo-hyun was right there, kneeling at his side, undoing his bonds frantically, her hair brushing his face and her sudden closeness and warmth making him feel incredibly dizzy.
And then, just like that, he was in her arms, and Seo Joo-hyun was full out crying, shaking in his arms, even as she held him tight for the first time in the 1 month that they had been on the road together. He barely registered what she said about the incubation period of the disease, how that much time had elapsed and he hadn’t turned into one of them, how glad she was that he was okay, and how glad she was that he was going to be fine.
They spent almost two weeks in that particular hideout, the longest they’d ever spent in a place, but ever since then, Yong-hwa knew better than to question his and Joo-hyun’s relationship whatever things might be superficially. They needed each other if they were going to survive in this brave new world. It was as simple as that.
Meanwhile, Joo-hyun speaks.
Her brows are furrowed in thought as she turns to him. “I think we should get moving, find a new place before the storm hits.” She announces as he turns to look at her from the window. “It’s too risky to stay here.” Her eyes flicker to the broken down door, two of them leading into this room.
Yong-hwa nods. As usual, she is right. They are too exposed here with too many entrances and exits, and all weak entry points easy for the zombies to break through. They need to seek better shelter.
He walks the few steps over to her, offers her his hand to help her up. “I guess we better get moving.”
It’s funny, but in the moment that their hands meet, Yong-hwa sees it-a tangling of lines, an overlapping of possibilities. A rose pink dress. A smashed guitar. A dance. A gunshot. A fruity drink. A raging thirst. A kiss. A bite. A girl. A boy. Hands extended. Hands clasped. Always, always together, meeting, tangling.
He smiles.
Joo-hyun cocks her head to the side, pausing. “What? What are you thinking of?”
He gentles his smile, shakes his head. “Nothing."