Ship/Member: Soonyoung/Chan
Major Tags: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse
Additional Tags: use your close reading goggles for more fun and games, don't look too closely though because I wrote this in a few hours and didn't really edit it
Permission to remix: Yes

***

The storms were closing in fast. Chan knew it; Soonyoung knew it.

Everybody knew it. It had been all over the news, before the news crumbled just like the mountains, and after that the debris of it lingered on everyone’s tongues—little particles of information, my brother is still in Shanghai, did you hear, they say that, I applied for a permit to—until it dissolved.

There wasn’t much to discuss after that. Every day the same news, every day the same poems in the same books on the shelf, until there was no paper anymore and Soonyoung carefully ripped the blank page at the front of a book long-borrowed and wrote down a careful message to Wonwoo. He folded it up into an envelope. Hope stuck the stamp down onto the pulpy sheet: the last prayer. It’s blank, Soonyoung justified. Chan watched him the whole time. The book is different now, he said, but it’s okay.

Soonyoung pretended, the next morning, that he hadn’t heard Chan crying next to him. Chan pretended he hadn’t noticed the damp spot on Soonyoung’s pillow.

They rationed stamps after that, then they started neighborhood drives to turn old books into new paper. An opportunity to see how paper is made, Chan told his kids. Ask your parents if they have any spare books lying around.

He tore the apartment up the day before the field trip, gathered every bit of paper he could find: an old grocery list in the couch cushions, the textbooks from college, the poetry books, paper towels, a few cardboard boxes, an old calendar, some newspapers with articles about dead politicians.

Wonwoo’s reply. Letters, too, from Seungcheol, from Minghao, the ripped one from Junhui, the last time anyone had heard from him in months.

Soonyoung found him staring at the little pile of paper, thinking about how flammable it was, how easily it could turn to mush in the rains, when he came home.

I’m the teacher, Chan explained; I can’t go empty-handed. I can’t tell them they can’t do something that I’m allowed to do. But I don’t want to get rid of any of these things.

Soonyoung smoothed his hand over Chan’s forehead, pushed his bangs back, stroked him over and over. What are you allowed to do? in his most soothing voice, so familiar between them.

Have a container for my thoughts, Chan told him, something to hold the words for me.

Soonyoung helped him pick out his goods. They didn’t talk about the news, or the fires, or the vacancy signs, or the fact that Soonyoung was home earlier than usual. They didn’t talk at all.

Soonyoung came with him that day. The children walked between them, each carrying a sacrifice: a book, a note, a love letter, a permission slip. Chan introduced him to the children. Soonyoung knew which was his favorite, which he’d had difficulties with, whose parents frustrated him. The last little girl clutched a thick book with two hands. The title said The Vampire Lord, and Other Stories. She told Soonyoung she couldn’t read it yet.

The woman running the affair was short, old. She stood with her batteries and her blender and her sieve in front of the half-bare convenience store. On the table before her was a small stack of photographs.

We are going to make paper, she told the crowd—her neighbors, their neighbors, the children, all the children. We are going to make paper, and each household will receive a monthly ration, until we run out. Thank you for your generous donations for the good of the community.

Soonyoung clutched his paper tightly. I cannot let my stories fester in my head, someone next to him whispered. I have begun to write on the walls.

They—Chan and Soonyoung, Soonyoung and Chan—let that image turn in their minds. It would not be so bad, they thought, to turn the little thoughts they used to slip to each other into monuments. When the second waves hit, people started to divide things into categories of ephemera: their houses were only as secure as anything inside them. The parts of their lives were greater, then, than their sum.

Please place your paper in this box, the woman said. We are going to do this efficiently. Here will be the objects, here the station where the paper is separated from the rest. Here the garbage, here the blender. Here the line of neighbors.

And shy, shy Soonyoung. And the line of unknown vampires, waiting to be read. And the two-handed grip, and the stories on the walls, and the last stamp in the drawer, waiting and waiting and waiting for Junhui.

“Excuse me,” Soonyoung said. He gave Chan a reassuring smile, clutched at his hand briefly when he reached out. He made his way to the front. Bowed to the woman, bowed to the crowd. “May I say something?”

Chan was quiet as he watched him. The neighbors were quiet.

“I am proud to give part of my life for my community,” Soonyoung continued. “What I have in my hand is not precious to me. Nevertheless, every piece of paper contains something greater than itself: a memory, or a potential. There is a girl here with a book who cannot read it yet. Her sacrifice is her future, all the future joy she will ever extract from its words. We have photographs and grocery lists written in long-gone hands. Is it not right to thank them?” He felt on trial there, spinning his words out of his heart to be judged before the people, but he forged on despite his embarrassment. It felt strange to perform with only his honest words. He used to dance. He used to dance with Chan—a lifetime ago, almost.

“You all are busy,” he said, “and there is much work to do. We are all hungry, and there is not enough food. But let us only take one day of our lives, and see each person here. Reveal the things we have chosen to forget. Then our paper will not be a rationed thing; it will be another thing given, another thing shared between us yet.”

He raised his hand high so those who were able could read it: We’re sorry; your services are no longer needed. We wish you the best of luck in the future.

“Termination notice,” he said, “thank you for allowing me to contribute to the paper drive. I never want to see you or your kin again.”

Someone laughed.

More people laughed. The children laughed. Someone cheered, and soon enough Soonyoung had a real, proper reaction—and, in the middle, a cackle, full-breath and sustained for the moral support of the group. Soonyoung made eye contact with him across the little gap between them. Chan’s eyes, his face, the lips and teeth and cheeks and tongue and ears, everything Soonyoung had thought so often about—We can make new words, Soonyoung thought.

He put his notice in the box, then stood behind it, assuming the role of helper without thinking about it.

The photographs went next: the woman’s son, her grandchildren, her grandparents. Thanked and blessed, wept over, kissed. The whole group memorized their faces, shared the fear with their arms around each other’s shoulders. After the photographs came a grocery list, then a stack of comic books, then quite a lot of old newspapers. Minute by minute, the line ate away at the anchoring papers of people’s lives, leaving only the memories behind like a discarded ice cream wrapper. Would it be enough that such things had once existed? It would have to be.

I’m going to Jeju tomorrow, someone said, and if this letter from my girlfriend all those years ago only matters to me, what use is it now versus when I am dead?

No one said history. The little girl with the vampire book went next. She cried as she thanked Chan for helping her read. Chan cried too.

They took the cover off the book, carefully scraped off the glue, and cut the paper down to size. Soonyoung caught a few words as he flipped the pages—kiss, betrayal, blood, destruction, time, sex, forever. He asked the girl if she wanted the cover, now that the pages were gone, to remember this day by.

She took it from him, and then helped him add the water to the paper in the blender.

The children had brought snacks. At some point, the owners of the convenience store must have set up a table for food, and the neighbors began going home and returning with items: granola bars, jars of kimchi, rice, a portable burner. Soonyoung pressed blend, and when he took his finger off the button and the noise left his ears, he heard music behind him.

It was coming from the convenience store. He could almost recognize it, he thought.

“Hyung,” said someone next to him.

Chan.

Soonyoung took in his tired eyes, his sweaty bangs and the stressed set of his shoulders under the shirt that was beginning to cling to his skin.

“Chan,” he said. Chan Chan Chan Chan.

Chan’s smile began at the corner of his mouth and spread out, out, out, until it reached his eyes, until it reached Soonyoung too. He tilted his head. “It’s Apink,” he said quietly.

The last group whose music Chan had taught choreo for, before the studio closed. Soonyoung remembered then: the song had played on repeat while Chan figured out the moves he wanted to change in order to teach it to his ten-year-olds.

Chan curled his fingers around Soonyoung’s idle ones where they rested on the table, opening his hand. Soonyoung looked down as Chan placed a stack of paper into his hand: an entire book, unbroken except for the blank page at the front.

“Neither of us has opened this book in a long time,” Chan said. He was looking at Soonyoung, only Soonyoung. “You were running the blender, so you didn’t hear, but I talked about Jeonghan hyung. Remember when he gave me this?”

Before, Soonyoung thought, but it wasn’t quite true—it had been before the mountains, but after the waves, even after the first storms. They had still visited each other. They had still eaten lunch together. Still hugged each other and told jokes and argued.

“He managed to call me at work this morning,” Chan said. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you until now, but—he’s coming here. Next week, if he can make it.” The rattle of his breath echoed in Soonyoung’s own chest as he took a deep breath. “I think the walls thing is a good idea,” he said, eyes trained on Soonyoung, so wide and desperate. Soonyoung wondered when he had gotten so desperate. If he was like that all the time now, and Soonyoung just wasn’t watching closely enough. If he, too, seemed that starving when he looked at Chan.

“The walls?” he echoed, though he knew what Chan was referencing: the man who had made that comment had given three stacks of newspapers from fifteen years prior, one paper for every day he delivered a baby at the hospital, a little ritual of success. He had looked at the children with a mournful gaze and wondered which of them, if any, he had held in their first moments. Nobody had asked what happened to the others. There was almost no way of knowing.

He reached for Soonyoung’s other hand. Chan was tapping his foot to the beat of the song, Soonyoung realized, and so was he. Chan intertwined his fingers with his and started to sway gently. “Whoever wrote those poems didn’t know us,” he said. “The things we’ll say about each other can’t be contained in something like that.”

Soonyoung set down the pages and picked up the discarded cover waiting for one of Chan’s kids to sweep it into the community recycling bin. Its glue and veins were exposed, as if it really were a dead thing. He turned it over gently.

Love Poems.

“You’re not something that can be closed and discarded to me,” Chan said to him. “Even if we’re making something better out of a loss. You’re everywhere to me, my anchor, you know. The world will have to wreck my foundations before I stop loving you like this.”

Brave Chan. Chan whose hand was so warm in his. Chan who brought him good news, Chan who led the children’s march to sacrifice their futures, to destroy the very things he taught them was one of the most precious gifts of humanity. Chan who gripped one end of the book while Soonyoung held the other as they took the book apart, Chan who helped a child he didn’t know measure the water for the paper blend, Chan who stood on his tiptoes and whispered in Soonyoung’s ear, Dance with me? and Soonyoung who squeezed his hand, who stroked the hair back from Chan’s sweaty forehead, who watched the sun come out from behind the clouds to illuminate Chan’s brown, brown eyes, and sniffled wetly as the tears finally, finally spilled down his cheeks.

“Jeonghan hyung’s doing okay?” he asked.

Chan closed his eyes and swung his hips as he moved out of the way of the next group of helpers to the beat of "Love." He nodded. “He’s alive. He said he talked to Seungkwan, too. He’s in America.”

Soonyoung hadn’t realized how heavy the sky was until the burden was relieved from him. “Chan,” he said again. Chan Chan Chan Chan.

Chan’s energy was like a star, bursting and burning and steady, steady, steady. “Hyung,” he said, voice full of hope.

The paper took several days to dry. Chan went home that evening with the limp cover of The Vampire Lord, and Other Stories in his hand as the red sky flooded what was left of the street, and Soonyoung went home with the promise of forever on his tongue.