Archive of Our Own

Renjun half wishes he’d kept Donghyuck bent over his own knees on their mattress, he half wishes he’d never even started fucking him tonight in the first place. He won’t stop trying to look at him… he won’t stop preening for his attention beyond whatever he has to give him now… and Renjun almost smacks him across the face when he arches into his touch the second he finally takes him into his hand. Donghyuck’s mouth hangs open in a moan too precious for it as he comes across his stomach again.

“Baby—”

“Don’t call me that,” he snaps, stopping the movement of his hand and daring Donghyuck to force his cock through the too-tight squeeze of his fist. He squirms and shrinks against the bed just as Renjun knew he would.

Donghyuck offers Renjun his long neck and he takes the hint, tempted to steal his breath when he presses down on the sides of his throat. His eyes flutter when he starts to move against and inside of him again, whining and whimpering when he coaxes another out of him and the first out of himself.

Renjun rubs over his tip with his thumb, smiling the worse he shakes. “God you’re so fucking pathetic like this, so hot.”

His own body spasms the longer he takes to pull him apart and Donghyuck’s desperate hands snake beneath his shirt and pinch his waist. “Junnie, pull out,” his voice shakes. “I’m gone… too damn sensitive.”

Renjun rolls his eyes but complies. He already can feel himself softening with every syllable out of his mouth, tired and irritated and with a snarky little ache threatening his brain matter. Donghyuck catches his breath, chest heaving, and Renjun’s eyes linger on the slice in the middle of it. It seemed to be healing well, still tender, still red around the edges, and Renjun finds himself reaching for it with rough fingers.

Donghyuck hisses when he makes contact and he grabs his wrist.

“Don’t…”

“Why? I’m not allowed to touch?” In truth, Renjun has no idea why he is suddenly so defensive over the wound between Donghyuck’s pecs, why he needs to touch, but the itch burns beneath his nails. The ache in his head turns into a scratchy voice that urges his sickness further, urges him to sweeten the deal.

He mouths over each of Donghyuck’s nipples, tracing the jagged scar up and down every time he swirls his tongue, making him writhe.

“Renjun… please, it’s still sore.”

A trail of kisses down to his navel, pressing harder on the raised flesh.

“You’re not gonna butter me up by— dammnit— by touching me all sweet like this again.”

Renjun rolls his eyes again with a scoff and snatches his own hands away from him. “Fine.”

“No, hey—”

“You stink, by the way. Like garbage,” he stands up off of the bed and stretches out his cramping limbs. “Get in the shower with me before we ruin the sheets even more.”

Behind him he hears Donghyuck sigh. “Why do you always have to be mean after we’re done, huh?”

“I’m being mean by telling you to shower? To clean up long and nice while we’re in this fucking fortress of a house that thankfully still has warm water running through its pipes and most of the supplies we’ve been begging for?”

“You aren’t just doing that though,” the mattress creaks when he swings his legs over the side of the bed and gathers his discarded shorts. Renjun can see him staring from the corner of his eye. “You’re insulting me.”

“Oh sorry, was I supposed to be in love with the idea of you choosing to continue to reek like ripe pits and cum?” He laughs, grabbing one of the towels from the closet. “And I was ‘insulting’ myself too. But sure, whatever man, I’ll just use our shower alone.”

“Jun.”

He turns and leans against the wall, exhaling with a bit too much flare and he rubs at his temple. “You’re acting stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were I said you’re acting like it. Grow up, Donghyuck. I don’t even get why you’re being like this…you’re never pissy after sex but lately—”

“Because you know how I feel!” Donghyuck’s voice breaks in the middle of it and Renjun’s stomach fills with cement.
“I’m— god, Renjun, I don’t just want you to fuck me like I’m a useless whore when you’re not okay… it’s hurting me. Is this all really about me not wanting you to touch the scar? You couldn't even stand to look at me two weeks ago because of it, so what's the real problem?”

Renjun gapes. The cement works its way through his intestines and floods across his tongue. That damned scar stares him down as Donghyuck waits for his answer.

Where are you… help me, give me something to say. Let me feel something other than whatever this is.

“I-I don’t have time for this.”

“I think all we have out here is time, you just don’t want to listen to me.” Donghyuck’s eyes are gleaming in all the wrong ways. He hates him more and more by the second.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Renjun digs through the dresser and pulls out a giant shirt and some underwear. Get out… get me out of here, get him out of here. “But I didn’t pick you up and force you to take my cock. You could have said no if you didn’t want to keep having sex.”

“It’s not that, you know how I feel, I just…” he trails off, standing beside him to to look for something to wear for himself. His closeness puts an uncomfortable pressure on his nerves, under his skin and behind his eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyways, right? You don’t want that with me anymore, right?”

Renjun throws his bundle of clothing and towels on the bed. “Be quiet before I do something we’ll both regret.”

“I know you blame me for what happened. I’m sorry, Renjun, you know I am, fucking hell I miss him too.”

Renjun can feel his heart rate picking up, the pressure threatens to rip his body apart, hot liquid stinging his tear ducts and his waterline. It blocks Donghyuck out of his sight.

“I didn’t ask to get attacked by those guys y’know, and you’re allowed to be mad at me or whatever for right now if it will make you feel better, but I also didn’t ask for him to go out and hunt them down. He did that on his own.”

His breathing turns into something not unlike a growl when Donghyuck walks into his space.

“Get the fuck away from me. I’m serious, Hyuck.”

“Jaemin would be so dis—”

Renjun’s body tenses all at once, vision spotting over at the words in Donghyuck’s stupid fucking voice, the letters taking shape on his tongue and hitting the backs of his teeth. His jaw and throat grow tighter when Donghyuck takes another step closer to him and his knuckles warp into boulders until he’s rearing his left arm back behind his head and…

And Donghyuck whimpers, hand holding his cheek, back pressed against the mattress as he stumbles backward from the force of him.
And it feels good.
Renjun can hear his own breath banging around in his skull along with his brain and he uncurls his fist, checking the crescent marks left behind on his palm.

Donghyuck looks at Renjun with shining, red eyes. “I-I’m sorry. Junnie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean— I shouldn’t have said that.”

He wishes he could leave deeper moons around Donghyuck’s throat.

“You’ve never been sorry for anything in your life, you piece of shit. But since we’re both trying to be mean here,” he leans in close to Donghyuck’s ear. “I would be a lot happier right now if…if it had been you instead of him. Fuck you.”

Renjun gathers the saliva from his mouth and hocks it across Donghyuck’s pathetic face and practically runs into the bathroom, slamming the door as hard as he can, locking it before he gets any idea to come after him. His chest burns just like his lungs and just like his eyes.

He turns on the water to drown out the sound of himself hyperventilating, sudden tears pouring down his face. In the mirror he looks foreign to himself— smaller than ever, shakier than ever, angrier than ever— and he watches his reflection disappear behind the condensation.

The floor still vibrates with the heavy wheels of the tanks and the quick propellers of the helicopters all heading back and forth from the city.

Renjun can see the orange fires from the explosives even in the high-rise windows. The smoke looks thick, black and red swirling into the clouds, and it must stink more like flesh than ruin out there, everyone worth saving already in the library right on the country line. He holds onto Donghyuck’s skinny bicep beneath their bed where they hide from not only the chance of one of those… things… breaking in, but also the military man in charge of their shelter.

His boots stomp along the linoleum as he passes just in front of the bed and they come to a stop a few inches ahead. He claps his hands and Donghyuck jumps beside him, knocking his head into the curve of Renjun’s skull. Mr. Mann yells as if the room was full of noise but aside from a few mumbled conversations in different corners of the room, it’s quiet… still, everyone directs their focus to him where he is against the back wall.

“Alright! Good morning, everyone,” he claps his hands together. “We are aware that all of you may be in shock and that this is a huge adjustment to make… but we will need full cooperation to make your temporary stay here as bearable as possible. Is that clear—”

Renjun holds Donghyuck tighter, closer, and another explosive drops in the distance, sending more vibrations through the ground. It causes a stir among the others, a couple of the officers spreading to different corners within the library.

Donghyuck tears the skin off of the thumb in his mouth. “I’m scared, Junnie…”

“We… they’ll be moving us all further away next week, remember?” Renjun takes his hand in his own, squeezing the thumb with the sleeve of his sweater to help the bleeding. “Everything is gonna be fine, Duckie.”

Renjun scrubs at his skin, turning bright pink beneath boiling water and a rough cloth.

He needs to get Donghyuck’s smell off of him. He needs to strip himself of his own scent, needs to shed every layer of skin until he’s sure that he is brand new, hyper-aware of the meat sticking to his bones and everything about himself makes him want to spew. His breathing hasn’t let up since their fight and it shows no signs of leveling any time soon… not even with /his/ old bottles from their last shelter staring him in the face. Their musky, warm essence mixes with the steam but it only breaks him down farther.

The plain bar works well enough to melt away the grime, Renjun isn’t sure he wants to smell like him either.

Harsh knocking on the bathroom door raises over the sound of the water and continues even after he’s turned it off. Renjun sighs, ignoring it for just a minute longer until he can properly dry and at least get his underwear on before calling out.

“Go away, Donghyuck. I don’t want to be anywhere near you right now…”

There’s a scoff on the other side of the door. “It’s just me, chill.” Tsuki jostles the doorknob and bangs on the door again. “You better hurry up. I need to talk to you.”

Renjun rolls his shoulders and stares at himself in the mirror again, notices all of the marks on his face and body now that he’s all raw. Tsuki taps on the wood with her nails and he grunts, slipping into a pair of too big shorts and opening the door to be met with a cocked eyebrow. He shrugs, moving past her to the bed to shove off his load of soiled clothes.

Tsuki sits on the edge of the bed. He can feel her eyes on him as he makes pretend work of folding the garments and tossing them on the ground in a neat stack, invisible bugs crawling all over him.

“Where is he anyways?”

She clicks her tongue. “Showering in the communal bathroom.”

“Right… You’re gonna have to keep him in your room for a bit, sorry.”

“Oh my god, Jun,” she says and flings herself back on the mattress, irritated. “What the fuck is up your ass about him? You were not this bad until we got back on the road.”

Renjun stays silent.

“Why did you hit him?”

“He tried to say his name, Tsuki. He has no fucking right— he deserved it.”

It’s her turn to be silent now, shifting into her side to look at him directly. She bites on her lip and Renjun’s eyeballs feel hot.

“It’s all his fault. That we lost him, I mean… you know it’s the truth.”

“What if it had been me, then?” Tsuki pats the part of the bed beside her and practically pulls Renjun down to lay down. “Would you be reacting so badly if I was in Hyuck’s place?”

“I…I don’t know,” he drags his hands down his cheeks and huffs. “Prob—”

“Don’t lie.” She cuts him off. “Renjun, you cannot keep doing this to him. It’s not fair.”

“Yes it is! All of this is his fault. I-I hate him, Tsuki… you don’t understand, you haven’t had someone ripped away from you on the same level. I should have hit him harder, everything— Jaemin— would still be here if we had just given him to them. It’s his fault. I hate him…”

Renjun isn’t even sure how he spoke with the suffocating tantrum threatening to rip out of him in full force. He hits balled fists against his own head as he screams and cries, mumbling over and over again how much he hated Donghyuck, how much he loved him, how much he needed Jaemin and needed no one all at once. A pair of overly warm hands curl around his forearms and Renjun knows, he finds some remnants of a voice to tell him to go fuck himself, to get the hell out, wriggling his arms free and shoving a palm deep into the pit of his belly to get him moving until he retreats with sniffles of his own ringing in Renjun’s ears.

He cannot really find it in himself to care.

Renjun can’t shake the chill on the back of his neck. He sits with a few of the other kids in the library at a table in the corner, chess board discarded in their 15 year old boredom and instead playing a round of Slap Jack, and the fine hairs on his nape have been on end since dinner.

He is on high alert, and every little noise out of the walkie talkie’s at the hip of the officers has him hiking his shoulders higher and higher. Renjun misses catching the Jack of Hearts during his turn in favor of eyeing Donghyuck curled up on the bottom bunk with his back turned to the room full of people, he looks peacefully asleep and Renjun finds himself slightly jealous of him tucked beneath his quilt unable to feel so on edge. One of the boys snaps in his face and pulls him back to the game for a moment just so he can put another card down.

The attention doesn’t stay long, because Mr. Mann says something hushed into his radio and into the ear of his right-hand, shuffling with hurried feet across the floor and into the small office near the front doors.

And then there’s a loudness just outside the building. Gun fire and screams, more specifically, and Renjun finds his footing upright and bolts straight toward their bed. He bumps into one of the female officers as she runs with her hand on her gun to the doors with the others.

“Hyuck, wake up,” he says, shaking his shoulders. “Get the fuck up! There’s… something is wrong.”

“What?” His voice is rough and tired, but Renjun doesn’t wait for him to wake up enough before he is pulling him up and stuffing their shit into a bag.

A loud voice sounds out over the radio along with hard banging on the doors, growling through the cracks.

Attention all residents. This is not a drill, I repeat, this is not a drill.

Remain inside and barricade all entrances near the ground. A group of Infected individuals have gathered on the grounds, two officers have been killed, please group together and prepare to move, prepare to kill if necessary.

This is not a drill. Remain close, remain safe. Prepare to kill if absolutely necessary.

In only 30 minutes, the safety of their shelter is destroyed. The Infected that had managed to escape a bullet pounce on anyone they can get their hands on, teeth breaking flesh, blood pooling over the tiles. No one can find the room to scream before they are killed or rushed out through the back where two large trucks are parked for survivors to load into the beds.

Renjun keeps his hand fisted in the front of Donghyuck’s shirt. He doesn’t dare let him go even as the truck they board drives down the road and the library turns orange with fire.

The left side of their bed is cold.

Renjun feels the emptiness with his hand before he sees it, palm stretching over the invisible body there out of instinct, the ghost of care still haunting him even though the bitter taste of him is still lingering on his fingertips.

Everything is silent and still. Tsuki will certainly be asleep until noon as usual, but sitting up alone in a king mattress feels unnatural. Donghyuck’s body clock was well tuned to Renjun’s own, 5am or nothing most days, and he shakes the thought out of his head, shoving his feet into a pair of socks before he walks himself down the stairs toward the living room.

“Donghyuck…” he whispers his name in case he finds him laying on the couch. “Hello?”

The home is really and truly empty, cold, moonlight hitting the half-empty glass of alcohol on the coffee table. It’s watered down enough that it has begun to separate from itself, and he notices that Donghyuck’s shoes are missing from their spot near the front door along with his bag. The cold settles in his nerves, and Renjun can’t decide if he liked it or not. Their last words replay in his head, his hand still tingles from how he’d hit the soft warmth of his stomach against his own guts and told him to leave.

And he did.

Renjun shivers, morning wind seeping through the crack in the door, left from Donghyuck’s sneaking. The settling sounds from the house make him jumpy, that and the stairs creaking beneath Tsuki’s feet as she freezes caught in them.

“You’re up?”

“Barely… he’s not?”

Renjun looks back at the couch and shakes his head. “He’s not down here. I guess he took off, maybe a few hours ago?”

She enters the living room and takes a peek for herself, tugging on the curl on the end of her braid. “Oh, shit. Do you,” she clears her throat. “Do you want to go look for him?”

“No.”

The answer slips from his lips too quickly, too easily, but he finds that it’s only a sliver of truth. The spot on the couch still has the tiniest bit warmth left behind by Donghyuck and it makes Renjun’s intestines curl around themselves when he sits there.

“We can go tomorrow if he doesn’t come back, maybe the day after.”

Tsuki’s eyes sear the side of his face. He can see her shrug from the corner of his vision and retreat back to her room, and he settles deeper into the cushion.

Fuck you, Donghyuck.

… Keep him safe, Minnie.

Jaemin Na is the captain’s son. He’s newly 18 and smug as ever in their classes.

Donghyuck rolls his eyes when Jaemin winks at him during their spar, feeling the burn beneath his cheekbones when he realizes the power he gives Jaemin when he physically cannot meet his gaze. He makes a kissing sound when his fist connects with his jaw and knocks him on his ass on the mats and their trainer claps when he uses the tip of his shoe against Donghyuck’s chest to keep him down.

“That’s how you do it, kiddos! Daddy’s name can only get someone so far, but the power must be worked towards, as so…” he gestures over Jaemin’s figure to prove his point and Donghyuck scoffs.

He doesn’t let Jaemin gloat when they’ve finished showering after the session, rushing out of the locker room with hair that soaks his shirt as it drips. Renjun is waiting for him in their room anyway, so what would it matter if there are little worms crawling through his belly making him shiver when he smells Jaemin’s cologne right behind him.

“What the fuck are you following me for?”

“I’m not,” he says simply. “My room is at the end of the hall… did you want me to be following you?”

“No.” Liar.

Donghyuck stops and leans against the wall just outside of his room. Jaemin is burning a hole through his head and smiling when Donghyuck still can’t look at him directly. He finds himself spacing out, zoned in on the lean muscle of his shoulder line, only gathering himself when Jaemin’s fingers press against the light bruise he’d been the one to leave on his chin, hissing at the tenderness.

“You look cute when you’re all bruised up, y’know? You should get your ass beat more often…”

The buzz of the generator on the wall is the only thing keeping Donghyuck from thinking. Renjun’s music bleeds out from beneath their door and he reaches behind him, missing the doorknob each time.

“Fuck off.”

He blows Donghyuck a kiss and keeps walking further down the hall, but he only allows himself to breathe once he’s inside of his own room and Renjun is looking at him with a cocked eyebrow.

“Everything good?”

“Jaemin says he wants you to rough me up.”

Why the fuck are you telling him that… idiot.

The corner of Renjun’s mouth quirks as he switches his radio off. Donghyuck’s veins burn when he gets closer to him until he’s backed up enough to have sat on his bed.

“Yeah?”

“I—”

He kisses Donghyuck’s bruise and scratches at his still wet scalp. “You know I love you, right?”

“Of course, Jun. I love you too.”

“And if you like him too… that’s okay.” He pushes Donghyuck back so that he’s laying down and he can hover over him with a hand on his chest. “We can share like good boys, hm?”

“What?”

Donghyuck swallows. His mind blows out the second Renjun slides a knee between his legs and leaves it there.

“Junnie…”

“I like you so much,” he kisses his nose. “I think I have enough love in me to have you both if you wanna try.”

Is he truly that easy to read? Donghyuck supposes that he was, laying at the mercy of Renjun’s bitey mouth and feeling the phantom tooth marks on the other side of his neck, a certain wild card toying with his head just as much as he toyed with his.

Donghyuck drags Jaemin by the wrist to the corner of the library after breakfast the next morning.

“What—”

“Do you… want to be with me and Renjun?”

Jaemin smiles like a wolf and blows his house down.

“Baby…”

Renjun opens his eyes and squints to see around the black smoke covering the scene. The voice continues to call out to him, guiding him towards the clearing in the distance until the owner's hand pulls him out in the open.

“Renjun.”

“Jaem?” Renjun doesn’t want to let himself believe in this, hearing him, seeing him. It feels too far away even while he’s sitting on the grass beneath the stars.

Jaemin holds his hand and brings it to rest against his cheek, thumb rubbing at the birthmark on the back of it. His lips brush his palm in a prickly, gentle way. “Been a while, huh? I’ve missed you…”

There’s a wobble in his chin and a familiar sting in his nose and eyes. Jaemin looks so beautiful here, it had only been a few weeks since Renjun had lost him, but his heart misses him like it had been 30 years.

“What are you doing here? Where are we?”

“I’ve been here for a few weeks now, baby. It’s stuffy down there, y’know… I miss breathing in your perfume. His too.”

Oh.

“I don’t like it here, Jaem. I can’t be here, it’s not— the air feels so heavy whenever I come to visit.”

“I know,” Jaemin kisses each of his fingertips. “But I appreciate it when you try. You always leave the prettiest flowers for me. It’s almost morning… you should get going soon.”

Renjun hums and looks up. The sky is turning a light morning-kissed blue now, tiny stars and the crescent moon hung like little ornaments above them. “Okay.” He doesn’t move even a muscle. “Can I kiss you?”

“I wish you could, my love. I think I’d get you sick if you did, though, but I can give you a gift. It’s really special.” He kisses his own hands and pushes them over Renjun’s eyes. “Don’t peek.”

Jaemin pulls away once he deems Renjun trustworthy enough to keep his eyes closed and he reaches behind him, grunting when he grabs hold of whatever could possibly be in his hands.

“Okay… open.”

In his hands is a bloody human heart, barely beating, slightly grey. Renjun gags at the back of his throat, and when he looks back at Jaemin he looks like a monster.

“What the fuck?”

“He begged me to give this to you, said it would always be yours. Go on,” he puts it in Renjun’s lap. “He let me dig it out of him. He won’t need it for very much longer, anyways…

The sun is rising, baby.

Wake up.”

Donghyuck was always so fucking loud. He could practically hear him from down the street, letting his own sick imagination run wild the entire time it took him and Tsuki to get back to the house with the deer… all of the things Jaemin could be doing to him to have him screaming like another kind of animal. He curls and uncurls his fingers as he climbs farther up the stairs, glancing behind him every so often to make sure Tsuki hasn’t come back from the kitchen yet, hoping she takes longer finishing Jaemin’s soup so she doesn’t smell the stink of his brain.

Renjun moves up off of the steps and keeps listening through the door. There is a small crack, enough to see inside with one eye closed, and Renjun finds himself seething.

Jaemin has him face down on their bed. His hand is in his hair tight enough to rip it out in one pull, the other slapping his skin until it’s a true and real red, and Donghyuck won’t stop fucking whining. The sound makes him hot, makes him angry enough to shove the door open right when Jaemin is at his deepest inside of him, the doorknob leaving a dent in the drywall.

He smiles when he tosses his jacket against the floor. Jaemin always looked crazy while he fucked but his voice was always soft and sweet even while he pushed the limits.

The burning in his muscles and joints only gets worse when Jaemin calls him over, moving Donghyuck onto his back and pulling out of him. He bites his bottom lip when Donghyuck cries at the loss, trying to keep the satisfaction of seeing him so momentarily ignored at bay.

“C’mere, baby.”

Renjun gets out of his clothes in all but a second. He rolls Donghyuck’s body over so that he lay in a sweaty pathetic heap on the far left side of the bed and he lets Jaemin handle him any which way he pleases, opting for a more soft, more gentle rhythm. If not for his own personal knowledge of Donghyuck’s sick and twisted masochism, of his almost crazed need to be pushed and pulled and hit and spit on, he’d have felt proud to be treated so nice. But seeing him cast to the side fills him with a new found type of heat and need and sickness of his own.

Sunlight leaks through the window right beside the bed and Renjun’s back is cold without Jaemin curled around him. His chest, however, is boiling hot to an almost unbearable degree. Donghyuck had always ran on the hot side of the body temperature scale, but fucked-out-morning-after Donghyuck was a furnace and where it used to be sweet, it now coats Renjun’s mind with something new and salty. He squeezes out of the arms locked around his waist and stumbles into the bathroom.

Fuck…

Are we okay?”

Donghyuck comes to sit beside him on the stoop out front. He wraps his arms around his too long legs and balls up, resting his cheek on his forearm. His eyes look glassy and sleepy and Renjun’s skeleton shivers in his body.

“Why wouldn’t we be?”

He shrugs and adjusts the glasses on his nose. “Feels like I haven’t seen you at all since Saturday…like you’ve been trying to avoid me or something.”

Renjun sets down his notebook and huffs, too much attitude seeping through both actions that has Donghyuck shrinking. An ache stings at his heart.

“I’m not avoi—”

“I’m not dumb, Junnie, I know you. You always shut down when you’re mad at something or made uncomfortable… and every time I come into a room or get too close you take off. You haven’t touched me since Saturday either. You like being more regularly… active… than Jaem usually.” Donghyuck brushes a particularly long chunk of bang out of Remjun’s eyes with his pinky, gentle as always. “How can I fix what’s wrong if I don’t know?”

“I just— I think I’m starting to love Jaemin.”

The way his eyes light up makes Renjun’s joints feel like styrofoam plates between his bones.

More than you doesn’t make it out. Not when he looks so happy… and he feels sick when that happiness makes him want to smack the smile off of his features. There was nothing gradual about the way this new emotion poisoning his heart had progressed, there was no warning, nothing that Donghyuck did to deserve it, and yet there it was. And when Donghyuck tries to push for more details, just trying to gush with him, he feels himself harden, palms shoving Donghyuck against the rail when he tries to kiss him, Donghyuck shoving him back when he gets too aggressive, making Donghyuck to gag on him when he practically drags his pants down to his ankles both as an apology to the other.

“Fine, keep the stupid fucking vermin… just give us the one who caught them instead.”

Changmin licks his bottom lip, fingers clawed around nothing hanging by his sides. He looks rabid as he inches in towards their semi-circle, towards Donghyuck who holds the bundle of kill, and Jaemin shoves the center of his chest hard with the butt of their gun, sending him on his back to the dry dirt.

“You need to leave now, Q. Go back to your own camp.” He stands in front of Donghyuck’s form, blocking him completely. “You guys are the ones who split off from us, remember? We haven’t heard or seen anything from you in almost two months. You don’t get to take our meat or our hunter, you are not entitled to the agreements of the merge anymore. Beat it.”

Mingi scoffs and steps over Changmin where he still lies on the ground. “I think you’re misunderstanding us, Jae. We don’t want him for his hunting— our guy was more than capable before his accident— we want him for food.”

“Excuse you?”

Jisung finally speaks up, beating his bat against the tree he leans on. The nails in it leave ugly scratches on the bark. “Everyone’s gotta eat, right? It’s a very fair trade. Hand him over or we’ll have to use force…you know we’re good at that.” His eyes are dark in the way they search through Donghyuck’s own.

Jaemin notices how Donghyuck tries to puff his chest, though the shake in his limbs is obvious to anyone with open eyes. His voice trembles in his throat, hand on Jaemin’s shoulder to push him out of the way. “Look y-you can have two of the squirrels. I’ll come tomorrow and hunt with you guys, we can— we don’t have to do anything drastic, okay?”

“No,” Changmin says, dusting his pants off and pulling the knife out of his pocket. “That’s not gonna work. Two squirrels out of four versus one man… seems like only one of those options will keep us fed for long enough for our hunter’s leg to fully heal.”

He lunges towards them and Jaemin grabs his wrist, throwing him on the ground and stomping on his hand. The bones give with a disgusting crunch in less than five seconds. Changmin drops the blade with a curdling screech as some bone pieces show through his skin and drip dark blood over the dirt and grass and rocks. He takes the moment of panic between the two other men to snatch the back of Donghyuck’s shirt and start running.

Jisung pulls Donghyuck’s upper body out of the lake for the third time and forces his flailing arms into the dirt above his head with one hand. Spit flies from his mouth all over him and mixes with the tears and water baiting his face, his free hand flicking open the pocketknife and trailing it up and down his torso.

“I’ll cut your fucking heart out myself,” he laughs. “I’m starving, baby, don’t let me starve.”

“No—”

He holds the knife between his teeth, destroying the buttons of Donghyuck’s shirt as he rips it open to showcase his chest. He takes it back into his hand and the sharp tip pricks his skin.

“I’ve missed thinking of you like this… torn open for me, that part of the merge deal in my dreams was my favorite.”

Donghyuck holds his breath, bites on the scream that threatens his larynx when the blade slides through him just a few inches. “Y-You don’t have to… Ji, please.”

“I’ve missed imagining your begging too. Let me hear more of it, Donghyuck.”

He can’t hold back his sounds as he’s pierced deeper. The back of his throat is already near raw from how harshly he’d been screaming, and the blade slices him from just below the pecs to the little mole near his clavicle, separating the layers of tissue, burning until he passes out.

“Junnie? Why are you here?”

“I don’t know… if I could control these things I wouldn’t choose to summon you.”

Donghyuck’s eyes drop to his hands in his lap, twiddling with the loose thread from his shirt. It’s not as dark this time and he can see the stars brighter than before, the sky completely blue and purple above them. Renjun shifts awkwardly away from Donghyuck.

“I wish I knew what I did to make you hate me…”

“You—”

“Other than that, Junnie,” he tries to smile but it looks more like he’s trying to keep it together, seconds away from breaking, and Renjun shakes his head.

He rests his hand against Renjun’s knee. “I love you so much, but you already know that don’t you? I made sure to tell you everyday… even when we fought— especially when we did, when I could feel you starting to push me out.
… Junnie, I think I’m gonna get hurt real bad.”

When Renjun finally meets his eyes, he jolts backward. His nose is pouring blood, and when he turns away he sees nothing but darkness.

“I’m so scared, Renjun.

I love you, I promise I do.

I know the sun isn’t up yet

Please wake up, now…”

Donghyuck writhes on the couch, biting on Tsuki’s belt as Jaemin finishes the last of his stitches. She and Renjun hold him down when he pours more rubbing alcohol over his skin after he knots and cuts the thread, gently spreads ointment on in semi-thick proportions and dresses the wound with gauze.

He is heaving and half-asleep by the time everything is done, trembling with the aftershocks from any movement of his upper body.

The morning is worse for him, sitting in the bathtub while he cleans him and doses him properly. Jaemin’s gut swirls with fury and anxiety, and as the night nears, after he’s successfully gotten Donghyuck into the actual bed, he makes a bag.
A bag full of their weapons and a day's worth of snack food. He pushes it towards the front door and makes his way back upstairs, but the clearing of a throat startles him from the upstairs hallway.

“What the fuck are you doing awake?”

Renjun taps his toe on the carpet and Jaemin is almost quiet long enough to give himself away. Almost.

“Just checking the locks, baby. Everything is snug.”

A beat. And then Renjun nods his head slowly, but holds his hand out to him anyway. “Come to bed, then, Jaemie.”

“Sure…”

He follows Renjun into their room, quiet, and he crawls in behind Renjun with a hand high up on his waist. And he sits there until he’s sure that he has begun snoring, rolling out of the covers, out into the hall, out of the front door.

Where’s Jaem?”

Renjun shrugs and slowly peels the gauze away from the wound, tossing it into the trash bag beside him. He wrinkles his nose when Donghyuck grabs the hand on the edge of the bathtub while he uses the rag to clean it with alcohol and plain water and soap. Donghyuck whimpers when he slathers the ointment on with a bit of a heavy hand.

“Ease up, ease up, Junnie…”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, laying clean dressing over the angry red and purple gash. “I’ll put ice on it once you're in bed.”

Donghyuck hums and takes a deep breath, his chest rising beneath Renjun’s fingertips. He helps him out if the tub, sitting him on the toilet lid as he dries and clothes him, drugs him up with half of a pill, and puts him back in bed, keeping him on his back and the blankets at his waist.

The kitchen is empty when he goes to break the bag of frozen water in the ground to wrap up in a towel. It’s loud and the sound of it not breaking right away grinds his teeth together. He looks at the door and curses, throwing the bag at the hard wood against it.

The ice finally smashes up.

Upstairs, once Donghyuck is out cold, he sits in the ground at the foot of the bed and cries. The book he had grabbed up lays closed and untouched, tossed somewhere on the right side of the room.

The night is cold and dark, damp with fog. His flashlight and the street lights are just enough to guide him through the opening of the forest, though the gun slung over his shoulder feels increasingly heavier the farther he ventures into the green and black of the woods.

He’s sure he hears slow, scraping footsteps behind him, but he can’t bring himself to pay much attention to it, can’t be aware of anything other than Jaemin being gone. It’s been two days by now, that should have been enough time to get back to the house if he’d gone on some hunting trip, but two days now means something else… something dangerous.

Renjun walks with his eyes closed for a moment, trying to conjure anything to direct him to the right place. The footsteps behind him stop and he hears a strange squishing sound ahead of him, and he opens his eyes once he trips up over an overturned pot in the dirt. What the fuck…

He shines his flashlight on the ground and follows the messy trail of blood leading into a clearing just behind the trees, like something had been dragged all the way there, and he finds a camp there. Ransacked and destroyed, the tent torn open like whatever attacked these people was desperate to catch them, toiletries and canned food spilled and scattered all over the place. There is so much fucking blood soaking into the grass and the dirt and the water, and Renjun finds himself hoping on stones in the lake to follow the trail once again, rifle in hand prepared for anything to jump out at him.

A body is draped over the rocks beside a bush and Renjun clocks their face immediately, even without one of its cheeks. Changmin Ji— Q, as he preferred to be known— is bleeding out into the lake, long dead with one side of his face eaten off and stomach ripped open. He chokes back a gag at the entrails starting a path of their own but stopping into a few inches ahead.

Renjun pushes forward, more blood leading him to a clear part of the forest, a spotless little circulation where he sees Jisung Park’s dark eyes shining as they stare perpetually ahead, the monster crouched over him slurping on his blood and chewing through the flesh of his shoulder. He assumes the other two from the gang are dead in their fucked up tent.

Renjun steps on a twig and the Infected thing turns its head to look at him and…

And Renjun drops the gun to the ground.

Jaemin is yellow and purple, blood from the bodies smeared all over his face and his clothes, a sour stream pouring from his nose as he stalks towards Renjun, slowly for a moment, and then in the blink of an eye. He pins Renjun down and he screams, instinctively trying to claw at his face.

Those teeth he used to love so much are snapping and snarling over his throat, hands grabbing his shoulders and pushing him into the ground over and over again and suddenly there’s a shot.

Jaemin’s blood and brain matter sprays all over his face, and his savior screams at the top of their lungs, falling backwards into a bush.

“Oh my god… you— you…”

He pushes the body off of him and slips free, kneeling there for a second before finding balanced footing and he shakes. Looking straight forward at him.

Donghyuck pulls himself out of the bush and his gauze seeps through with fresh blood from the recoil hit by the force of shooting the rifle.

“Junnie—”

Renjun shakes his head, holding out a hand to stop Donghyuck from moving closer. “He’s dead…

No birds sing in the air, no light peeks through the clouds.

They’d wrapped him in a sheet, hauled him up the hill on a scrap of wood and decided on the biggest tombstone on the Dracula’s Castle course to lay him beneath.

Renjun takes the shovel and digs at least 4 feet out of the dirt, just enough so that he can sleep there peacefully and no longer aware of the horrors that took him first of all of them. They cover him quickly and Renjun kneels over the dirt to scratch ‘Jaemin Na’ into the cheap plaster.

He can’t hear anything they say for Jaemin, he can’t see anything either, just the orange poppy in his hand from the garden on the other side of the golf course. They each lay one on top of the fresh damp dirt… he’ll have to bring a vase or a cup for the flowers the next time he finds himself up here.

“…jun? Renjun, it’s going to start raining soon, we have to go.”

He nods but keeps his feet planted, staring ahead.

Donghyuck places a soft hand on his shoulder from behind him, and something inside of him just breaks.

He turns and, for the first time in his life outside of sparring, Renjun hits Donghyuck for real.

“Jun… I can’t stop— It's not m-me…”

All he can do is stare as Donghyuck jolts and screeches and crawls up on his hands and knees with his nails catching on the fibers of the carpeting to keep his still trembling form as steady as possible.

He leans over the kitchen island and snatches a knife out of the block on top of it. He swipes the blade towards him, barely grazing his cheek. Donghyuck growls after a heaving breath and charges at him in all fours until he gets him on his back with a yell.

Renjun did not want to die. He did not want that thing retching and whimpering on the ground over him to try to rip his throat open, not again.

He was scared out of his mind.

But he was even more afraid of letting this monster take out what’s left of their crew, of letting him take another sweetness from Renjun’s grasp. So he pulls his legs in and plants his knees on the ground once Tsuki stops kicking him and thrusts up to give them both the momentum needed to switch their positions, straddles him with a tight hand around his throat.

The newborn sun reflects off of the blade of his knife when he holds up above Donghyuck’s— the Runner’s— body. It still tries to claw at him but he brings it down straight into his chest and he hits his own wrist to drive it deeper.

Again and again.

Until he’s sure that it will never come back.

Tsuki pulls him back into a hug and he doesn’t even realize that he’s sobbing until she rubs his back and a broken scream rips out of him and he falls forward, face first into his stomach. He stays there for too long, curled around his body, clothes covered in his diseased blood.

Eventually the sobbing turns to crying turns to sniffing turns to shallow and rough breaths.
His bones feel like gel when he pulls himself up and takes the glass of water left over from the night before on the coffee table. It tastes stale in his dry tongue.

When Tsuki comes back to check on him, he has scrubbed his hands clean of the blood dried onto them.

“We should probably find somewhere new… this means there will be more coming into this side of town if they aren’t here already.”

“Okay,” she rubs her hands down her cheeks. “When?”

“Tonight or tomorrow.”

He can’t look away from the body staining the carpet. Somehow, now that it’s dead, it looks more like Donghyuck again.

“Do you want to take him to the—”

“No. The body stays here… we can use the glass covering from the planter outside to put over him or something but— but he stays here.”

Tsuki stays quiet, a curt nod and then she’s up to her room to pack her belongings.

It’s nearly nightfall by the time they’ve loaded all of their bags into their Volvo, the red sun hovering just above purple clouds. They had put off taking care of Donghyuck’s body until the end, boarding up every window and door and the fireplace just in case anything tries to get in once they leave.

The glass isn’t too heavy, and the coffee table works fine enough to put it and the body on top off. Renjun takes some of the poppies from the little vase on the island and places them on Donghyuck’s stomach beneath his folded hands.

He flicks open his pocket knife and carves ‘Donghyuck Lee’ into the shiny wood.

She waits for him in the car, giving him the peace to say his goodbyes, but his tongue doesn’t move behind his lips at all. He kisses his fingers and places them on the glass.

There is only one key left on the hooks beside the door. Renjun takes it and closes the door, locking it and slipping the key into the pocket of his sweater.

Take care of each other… I love you… even when I hate you.