Work Text:
[8:17]
There is Before and there is After.
The bridging point between the two is known as The End.
It is in the circles they have run, at least, and so Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk have picked it up as fact. History seems easier to quantify when events have names, and though they doubt they’ll be around for the future, they’re aware that they’re part of history.
When humanity verges on extinction, after all, each surviving member of humankind is granted a certain level of significance. Before it happened, before The End, many people believed that they were special.
They were not.
Infinitesimally small fractions of a wider population have little chance of making a mark on history.
Joonghyuk knows that he is special, for he is one of few to survive even the beginning of The End, and one of fewer still to survive this long.
Today marks exactly eight years and seventeen days After.
Joonghyuk knows, for he tallied it in his journal as they woke with the sunrise.
Time at its most calculated no longer exists for the two of them, as they see little point in seconds and hours these days. Instead, they measure life by dawn. Perhaps it’s fruitless, but if it serves no other purpose it at least reminds them of their age, and of how long it has been since The End.
If there comes a point past After, perhaps Joonghyuk’s diaries will serve invaluable for documenting this time.
He likes to think so, at least, as he buries them in sealed boxes when they become all filled up. Carrying them around would probably be the death of him, the added weight of dozens of journals dragging his feet as he runs from the corpses. Perhaps he’d take his companion with him, and that would never do.
Joonghyuk shows emotion to few these days, and shows true emotion to only one.
Dokja is much the same. It’s easier that way. Joonghyuk really would hate himself, if there’s an afterlife in which to do so, if he was the beginning of Dokja’s end.
He thinks he soon might be.
-·=»‡«=·-
[0:64]
Yoo Joonghyuk first met Kim Dokja sixty-four days After.
He’d met other people before then from the dwindling pool of humanity, and he’d meet more after him too.
Dokja, however, has proved the only constant.
At the time, Joonghyuk had wondered how someone like Dokja had made it so long. He found him standing on the roof of a car, holding an empty gun and a pen-knife.
As tempting an appeal as guns were to society immediately After The End, they were also an almost certain death sentence if you built up a reliance.
Guns are loud, guns draw the undead like their corpses draw the flies.
Kim Dokja, on the run from one of the initial facilities after infighting had bled into something like war, had been spooked by a corpse and used his last two bullets to shoot it in the chest.
In the chest. And his last two bullets, at that.
Firstly, shooting a zombie in the chest does jackshit, and secondly, it’s common sense to keep one bullet for yourself if you need it. Dokja could have done with a bullet, if he hadn’t come along. The zombies would have pulled him off that car roof had Joonghyuk arrived there even minutes later to check out the source of the gunshot.
He’d been crashing in the area, and the noise meant he’d have to leave before the swarm hit. Feeling charitable, he had cut the small grouping of them down, saving Dokja from a guaranteed death and probable reanimation after the fact.
Yoo Joonghyuk had been smart from the start— as a fencing student who probably would have gone all the way to the Olympics back Before, Joonghyuk had adapted to using a sword. Much less of a siren to attract the undead than Dokja’s stupid little gun.
-·=»‡«=·-
[8:17]
“What’re you thinking about?”
Kim Dokja asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken in the past twenty minutes or so— they’ve been watching the horde under their rooftop. To speak will likely lead to discussing the reality of their situation, and Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t really wish to do so.
Still, Dokja asks, so Joonghyuk replies. He can deny anyone else in this miserable world, but not him. “Your gun.”
“Are we talking innuendos or 0:64?”
Joonghyuk crinkles his nose. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not go out with a bang, darling. Corpses make the most unwelcome form of voyeurs. I doubt I could keep it up.”
“You mean 0:64, then?”
“You were a fool back then.”
“I’m a fool now.”
“By large, that’s only when I’m concerned.”
“True.” Dokja throws back a mouthful of soju. They’d snagged a couple bottles on the way up here after barricading the doors. Drinking is foolish after The End, but it bears little consequence when their own end seems nigh.
Joonghyuk had been right, that talking would serve a reminder of reality, but he likes the sound of Dokja’s voice, so he doesn’t regret.
“So, my gun?”
“I like your bat more.”
It lays on the ground next to where they sit, along with Joonghyuk’s sword. A baseball bat, with nails sticking out of it for maximum efficiency. Dokja scoffs, and Joonghyuk realizes he’s thinking of another dick joke. He hadn’t made nearly so many Before, Dokja had confessed to Joonghyuk once, but humour is how he deals with stress.
And Dokja is clearly stressed at present, and understandably so.
Death is beating at the barricaded doors of their abandoned supermarket.
They’ve survived worse against the odds, but something in Joonghyuk registers this as final. He doesn’t know why this time, why now, but it feels different. The soju in Dokja’s hand shows that he feels it too.
He digs his latest notebook out of his backpack.
Part of him sits dissatisfied with the fact he’s only halfway through it. It doesn’t feel like a proper ending.
Life is unreliable that way— you never know when it’ll be over.
-·=»‡«=·-
[Yoo Joonghyuk, 8:17 After. Some point nearer to sunset than sunrise.]
Today, above all other days, feels like the end. Not The End, but the end. A markedly less significant end, but one of personal importance. My own. And, while I regret to notate this, his as well.
Sunrise was like any other, nondescript in its normalcy. Morning was fine, meeting only a few of the undead. It was unfortunate, what happened with that gunshot. More unfortunate still how I find myself (and my beloved) on a rooftop watching death trickle closer. I suppose I should explain.
-·=»‡«=·-
[0:121]
Outside, a bell rings, signifying that one of the traps has been triggered. As Yoo Joonghyuk shakes Kim Dokja awake, it rings again, and again. There’s multiple, and they need to go.
Dokja stumbles into consciousness with Joonghyuk pulling him to his feet. Used to the privileged camp life afforded by being the son of a diplomat, Dokja isn’t yet accustomed to the need for restlessness as Joonghyuk is.
“Dead outside,” Joonghyuk tells him, and that seems to wake Dokja up. “Trap triggered at least twice.”
They head out the back. Dokja doesn’t speak, because he gets louder when he’s nervous and that’ll only draw the corpses closer. He’ll get past that eventually, but he hasn’t yet had time to learn. Joonghyuk glares at Dokja as he dares to draw his gun when a zombie surprises them on the back-route.
All that would do is draw more their way, as Joonghyuk keeps telling him.
They need to find him another weapon that’s less dangerously conspicuous.
Joonghyuk slices the body down with his sword, Dokja watching him in a fascinated state of awe, and they hurry away to the sound of the dead breaking down their crash house’s front door.
“You look so cool like that,” Dokja admits, somewhat shyly. Joonghyuk’s first instinct is to blush, because the other man is pretty in a way he hasn’t dealt with for a while.
He pushes it down. “It’s not cool, it’s necessary.”
“Can’t it be both?”
Joonghyuk doesn’t really have an answer to that.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir,” Dokja mocks. He’s getting comfortable around Joonghyuk now, enough so to tease him, at least. That probably isn’t a good thing, given either or both of them may die any day now.
He can’t make himself tell Dokja to stop, though, for some reason.
-·=»‡«=·-
As I say, today began like any other. It doesn’t surprise me, because in the After any day is a day well enough to kill you. We finished off the last of our tins this morning, meaning we knew we had to make a run for more, lest we end up hunting pigeons again.
I wish we had now, of course, but hindsight is useless. We knew of a store we’d been to once before in the area, and figured hitting it was our best chance unless anyone had been there since our last visit, when there had been cans enough that we had to leave some behind.
When we arrived, the store was not empty.
-·=»‡«=·-
[0:123]
There’s a sports store on this abandoned street, and it doesn’t look like it’s been looted too badly yet. Yoo Joonghyuk goes inside first, and upon discovering no dead, he urges Kim Dokja to follow.
When they leave, it’s with Dokja holding a baseball bat.
“Hey, you know in the zombie films,” he says, “where they have the, you know, spikes?”
He swings the bat dramatically as he’s in one of those movies himself. In reality, it needs much more force, but Joonghyuk doesn’t break his bubble.
“You want a spiky bat?”
“Yeah, nails and all that,” Dokja smiles like an excited child, and it’s cute in a way Joonghyuk would normally be irritated by. An apocalypse can give anyone a short temper. With him, though, he finds himself strangely endeared, though he doesn’t let himself think about what the repercussions of that may be.
Anyway, Yoo Joonghyuk had been into design, arts and crafts and the like, Before The End. When he tells Kim Dokja, the other man laughs.
“What?” Joonghyuk retorts, hackles up and defensive.
"Can’t a man have range?"
“Sorry, sorry,” Dokja placates, “It’s just, I bet you were so cute like that.”
Dokja really needs to stop calling Joonghyuk cute, for the good of them both. Distraction equals death in the After. Everyone knows that, or aren’t alive to be so informed.
“Stop that.”
“I’ll make you admit you’re cute someday,” Dokja sing-songs, and pinches Joonghyuk’s cheek. Joonghyuk points his sword at him in response. He reminds him of how carefree he used to be too, Before.
Dokja hasn’t been out of the gated facility for all that long, so Joonghyuk supposes his light-heartedness will fade.
It’ll be a shame, seeing the spark in his eyes dull, but it’ll be necessary just the same.
“What?” Dokja jibes at him. “Gonna tilt my chin with that thing?”
“Do you want me to?” he replies, hoping it’ll make him stop.
“Hmm…” there’s a moment of consideration. “It’d be hot, if it were a little less bloody.”
Joonghyuk realizes, in that sharp moment of clarity borne of spending far too long in denial, that Dokja is flirting with him. That complicates things, rather.
“Anyone would think you like to be intimidated,” he responds lightly, nonetheless.
Kim Dokja is pretty, unfortunately so.
The man stares, looking a little shaken by Joonghyuk actually reacting. He gulps, then hardens his expression in a way that fools neither of them. “Maybe I do— what about it?”
“Oh, nothing.” Joonghyuk opts to let the subject go, as much as part of him wants to see how far Dokja can be pushed.
Distraction equals death.
And his companion looks disappointed.
-·=»‡«=·-
[0:210]
“Are you straight?” Kim Dokja asks out of nowhere.
They’re fishing, having found a river with no corpses nearby. It’s a godsend, food that hasn’t come from a can.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s chest tightens up a little for reasons he doesn’t go into, even in his own mind. “I have no gender preference,” he says blithely, lifting a fish from the water with their makeshift fishing rods. Dokja’s rich-boy summer camp knowledge comes in handy, sometimes. “What gave you that idea?”
“Oh, I didn’t think you were,” Dokja replies, all too casual. Joonghyuk wonders how it’s so easy for him to be this way. He wonders how he doesn’t spend every second overthinking every step he takes in the After, the way Joonghyuk always does. They balance each other out, somewhat. “I just wanted to make sure.”
Dokja doesn’t say why he wants to know.
He gulps, and swallows his pride.
“Why?”
“You know why, Joonghyuk-ah.”
Joonghyuk doesn’t— that’s why he’d asked. Or perhaps he does, and just doesn’t want to admit it, because admitting leads to worse, and he overthinks the implications.
“I don’t,” he answers, but doesn’t push the issue.
In turn, the other man doesn’t elaborate. “I’m not straight either, you know. Just putting that out there.”
Yoo Joonghyuk does know, but pretends it’s news. No straight man’s eyes linger the way Kim Dokja's does.
“Oh, okay.”
Then again, he himself is also fooling no one.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?” Dokja’s bluntness shakes a little in his throat, reedy in insecurity.
Focusing intensely on the fish in his hands, Joonghyuk shakes his head.
“No, I’m not.”
-·=»‡«=·-
There were only a few dead there, and we took them out quietly enough, heading to where we knew there were tins. There, we found disarray — either someone else had raided there, or a corpse had walked around knocking things over. The latter would have had less consequence, but unfortunately our question was soon answered by the sound of a car outside. There was some shuffling, and then a scream, and the car pulled away.
In walked a woman, who was still a woman at the time. She had a chunk missing from her arm, and that’s around the time our day turned south. She didn’t seem to be armed, and like a fool I wanted to put her out of her misery. Nobody deserves to become one of them, but I selfishly wish I’d left her to such a fate.
-·=»‡«=·-
[0:365]
It’s one year After, and they treat it like New Year’s Eve.
Time may have no meaning, but perhaps their sanity will cling on in this post-human world if they cling onto some things from Before.
They don’t drink, because like many things that is a death sentence with the wrong set of circumstances, but Yoo Joonghyuk and Kim Dokja share a few cans of soda that they’ve saved in their current hideout for tonight. There aren’t many dead in the area, and they’ve killed the remnants of a family that still remained in this quiet suburban house.
It has a balcony, and that’s why Joonghyuk picked it.
For now, at night. To watch the stars in a clear sky.
Pollution lingers on their planet, but they’re not in a city at the moment. A foggy grassland bathed in ivy and gnarled trees. It’s late, in some sense of the word, when Joonghyuk pops the last of his cans open. Past midnight, for sure.
“We’ve made it a whole year, huh?” he remarks. It feels morbid to say. “I wonder how long we’ll last.”
“Don’t be depressing, Joonghyukie,” Dokja complains.
He started calling Yoo Joonghyuk that a while ago, and he has given up on trying to make him stop. He’d even introduced him as such to a group of travellers they’d run into a few weeks ago, and Joonghyuk threatened to throttle him for it.
Unfortunately, the threat had lost its edge somewhat when Dokja bared his neck and replied, I dare you.
“Hard not to be. It’s a depressing world.”
“It is what we make of it.”
“Maybe to you.”
“I’d like to actually live for however long I last.”
He sounds like he has something in mind. The edge to Dokja’s voice goosepimples against Joonghyuk’s skin. It isn’t cold— The End had happened in the summer.
Dokja sees him shiver, and smiles as Joonghyuk asks,
“What do you mean?”
“You said we should keep some traditions alive, yeah?” Kim Dokja remains annoyingly vague and Yoo Joonghyuk nods.
“Well,” he continues, “We haven’t ticked off the most memorable one for New Year’s, have we?”
Joonghyuk pretends not to understand. “Fireworks would kill us.”
“Not the kind I want, they wouldn’t.”
“Debatable,” he retorts. Dokja seems closer than before and Joonghyuk realizes that he is. The man leans closer still. “Distraction equals-”
“Death,” He parrots Joonghyuk’s usual phrase with a roll of his eyes. His lips look nice up close. Joonghyuk isn’t quite sure what it is to breathe— perhaps he’s already dying. “But a little death isn’t so bad, is it?”
He knows what he means, and he aches to give in. Has Kim Dokja always been this clever, this wishful for pain just as he has?
“We shouldn’t.”
“But do you want to?” Dokja asks, “Be honest with me.”
“I-” Joonghyuk’s voice cracks. He’s equal parts wanting and scared. Looking back at those pretty moonlit eyes, the scales tip, and he almost can’t catch his breath.
“Yes.”
“Happy New Year, Yoo Joonghyuk,” Dokja exhales softly. And he feels it wash over his lips, the both of them frozen in place, neither feeling quite brave enough.
But Joonghyuk wants to be brave, just like he’s always forced himself to be.
“And to you, Kim Dokja.”
Though his good sense screams at him to stop, he pushes down his calculated caution.
In the silence of a world rotting away, Joonghyuk lets his universe centre around one selfish moment, around softly parted lips and a gaze of melted stars. It’s not quite la petite mort, but it’s something damn near close.
-·=»‡«=·-
[8:17]
Yoo Joonghyuk reaches out one hand, and Kim Dokja passes him the soju. After one swallow, he winces and decides against it. “I remember growing up and being so excited about being old enough for this stuff,” he reminisces, handing it back over. “Wished our years away, didn’t we?”
“We were just kids,” Dokja replies. “We didn’t know what sort of future we were really wishing for.” He sips at the soju again, and grimaces. “This stuff really is disgusting.”
“What kind of future did you want?” Joonghyuk asks. It feels strange that they haven’t talked about this before, when they’ve discussed pretty much everything under the sun these past eight years or so. “Before you knew the world would end, I mean.”
“Honestly?...” Dokja trails off, “I was never really sure. You know I like to sing, so maybe that.”
Joonghyuk doesn’t get to hear him often, the two of them usually worried about what singing might attract. They’ve attracted plenty regardless, so it can’t hurt.
“Sing me something pretty, baby?”
Dokja looks at him with the kind of intense emotion that people often go their lives wanting. Joonghyuk feels so lucky, even now, even here.
“Anything,” he replies.
After a moment, Joonghyuk picks his favourite song. It’s nicer to focus on than the snarls in the streets below.
-·=»‡«=·-
[1:0]
They wake in a bed that had once belonged to someone else, but Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t think about that.
Kim Dokja is bare-chested and beautiful, dark bruises trailing across his torso.
Joonghyuk had grown overenthusiastic in his possessiveness, like there’s anyone around for miles who would try to take away what’s newly his. Still, Joonghyuk decides he likes seeing him like this. Dokja likes himself like this too, if the begging had been any indicator when Joonghyuk’s lips mapped his skin.
Newly his.
Is Dokja his?
The man shifts, bleary eyed. “What’re you thinking about so hard, Joonghyukie?”
And maybe Joonghyuk likes it when he calls him that.
"Nothing.”
“Liar.” Dokja sits up, grabbing at him and crowding closer. It should be more awkward than it is, just a slight heating up of Joonghyuk’s cheeks. It feels natural to be with him like this, to see that tousled black hair and the pads of his fingers pressed soft against skin.
"Tell me, love.”
Love. So it’s like that.
“What does this mean?”
“You’re asking awfully cliché questions for one of the few people left on this planet.”
“I’ll push you out of this bed, Kim Dokja, don’t think I won’t.”
He smiles. “You’re so attractive when you threaten me.”
“Answer me,” Joonghyuk’s voice comes out petulant. He’s embarrassed enough that he tries to look away, but Dokja turns him back with hands cupping his face.
“It means forever, or as much of it as we can buy.” Dokja kisses him square on the mouth, initiating it this time, and Joonghyuk ends up in his lap somewhere along the way, Dokja fluidly pliant beneath him as their lips meet over and over. “I’m all yours, know that this is my only truth.”
Joonghyuk could get used to this.
-·=»‡«=·-
[8:17]
Something crashes downstairs. Yoo Joonghyuk supposes it’s the door, though he feels an odd sense of calm despite that. “Do you have more than one?”
The sword will do, if not.
“We do everything together, you fool,” Kim Dokja replies with their signature insult, though it’s bittersweet. “I always save two.”
“Kiss me?” Joonghyuk’s voice cracks a little. His body is more scared than his mind, so it seems.
Dokja scoots closer to comply, and he is glad of their proximity.
Their legs dangle over the roof, but Joonghyuk doesn’t look down. He doesn’t want to see whether or not the horde is swarming inside. Dokja tastes like soju and desperation and he drinks him in until he’s high off the feeling.
-·=»‡«=·-
She was armed, after all. Did it right there in front of us, even as we begged her not to. There were a lot drawn in already from when she screamed, but we probably could have escaped them. With the gunshot, all we could do was barricade the door and hope.
They haven’t gone away. Need I say what that means for him and I?
I’m sorry that my writing is growing messier, but I want to get this down without spending undue portions of what may be final moments on doing so. There’s not much else to recount, really, other than a final list of hiding places, in case someone survives past After and wants to link up my diaries. I keep them on a separate piece of paper, but I’ll tuck it in the back of this one.
I do hope there’s a time that I can be part of history. Is that selfish to say? Perhaps.
Farewell for now (I leave you with optimism ill-befitting our situation).
Signing off.
— Yoo Joonghyuk.
And scrawled beneath it in another’s hand, like a last edition to this testament:
Kim Dokja.
-·=»‡«=·-
[2:164]
“I think I’m in love with you.” Yoo Joonghyuk breathes it into the night sky. They’re sitting in an abandoned tree-house they’ve found in the country after traveling through the city ruins, and there’s a hole in the roof. It keeps them off the ground, at least.
Perhaps if you dwell in a house that lacks the feeling of a home, you can become overly attached to the material things, the people. In their case, he is well aware that they have yet a place to truly call their own home. They are eternal travelers, a constant in the vicious cycle of mortality. Or rather, immortality. In a way, they've managed to cheat death. Their day of judgment should have descended upon them ages ago.
Truly, it’s not fair. He should be angered with the fates, but Joonghyuk feels nothing for the torn seams of his jaded heart, he doesn't try to mend what is already irreparably damaged. Borne of false purpose and retribution at the past desire to fulfill human nature without complaint, as there would be no purpose in arguing.
So now, he instead finds himself a victim of love. That is what’s left of his nature and that is what he must call his home.
“I’d hope so, by now.” The other man doesn’t sound surprised, though Joonghyuk isn’t really the most subtle person. “Oh, and I love you too. Obviously.”
“Shut up, Kim Dokja.”
“Make me,” Dokja replies, and when Joonghyuk turns to look at him, he’s even sticking his tongue out.
“I’m not sure this treehouse could withstand me shutting you up, darling,” Joonghyuk replies amusedly,
“Tempting though you are.”
They end up cuddled together instead, underneath the hole in the roof because the sky is so lovely tonight. Dokja also looks pretty in the pale shafts of heaven streaming down from above as he always does. If they’re woken by rainfall, then that’s a problem for future them.
Dokja’s breathing falters, and Joonghyuk can tell there’s something he wants to say.
He’s tense where a strong arm wraps around him.
“What is it?”
“I’m an open book to you, huh?” Dokja laughs lightly.
“I’d hope so, by now,” Joonghyuk mirrors his earlier words.
“Touché. I’m just thinking.”
“What about?”
“The future.”
Future is a strong word in times like theirs, but Joonghyuk bites his tongue on pointing that out. “What about the future?”
“We’ll make it, right?”
Yoo Joonghyuk knows that Kim Dokja isn’t asking for an honest answer. He’s tensed up and anxious, and wants to find solace in a white lie.
And so Joonghyuk indulges him, with lips pressed to a precious temple so his lover can’t see the truth written upon his face. He’s always said that he can read every falsity in his eyes, and Dokja would be far from comforted by what he’d see there now.
“Yeah,” Joonghyuk promises, futile, “We’ll make it...."