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The nuclear winter is all that Yuta knows, now.
He isn’t sure if he actually remembers his childhood as it truly was, or whether the smiles and laughter, the warmth and serenity that he thinks he remembers are just false memories born out of the misery of his present: a sort of rose-tinted view of everything that happened before his sixteenth birthday, that has replaced whatever mundane life he really lived before. He longs for the way things were, when Summers were really Summers, and he had a family and a future. He remembers what it felt like to feel the warmth of the sun on his face. How freeing it felt to be to be able to walk the streets in thin layers of clothing - to let the heat soak gently into his skin without worrying about getting burnt by the sun he can barely even see. The irony of it all is not lost on him: it’s cold, it’s dry, it’s barren and grey, and yet he burns his cheeks on a regular basis because there’s no sunscreen anymore, and no Ozone layer to protect him from the harsh rays.
Making breakfast, lunch and dinner out of a third of a tin can of pickled cabbage is a skill that he never knew he’d need. Nor did he ever expect to gain the ability to start fires with his bare hands, the way he watched cavemen do it in movies when he was a kid, or the art of darning his own mittens with perfect stitches. But they’re the skills he has. He never wanted this, no one did.
And he doesn’t even have anyone to complain about it all to, not anymore. Not since Reo died. Reo: the last of his friends alive, his final companion. Reo who he met when he was eighteen and there were still a few hundred people in the city. Reo who joked that he was invincible, until he started to cough blood one day, eyes wide and fearful. Reo, who realised that he, too, was just like everyone else.
Yuta isn’t stupid, he knows that he isn’t invincible either. He’s just lucky, he guesses, because he hasn’t died yet. Or maybe, he wonders, that makes him unlucky. Maybe he is, in fact, the unluckiest soul that has ever been and ever will be. Alone, cold and hungry, tired and weak, and -worst of all- alive.
“Fuck you,” he shouts, voice hoarse, from the roof of the building that was the city’s Marriott hotel. Once, it boasted a magnificent view - across the entire, sprawling, city. The tallest building on the skyline, standing proud. Now it boasts a magnificent view of nothing. Of derelict buildings, of wasteland and dust storms and shadows cast across concrete.
Yuta climbs the stairs of the fire escape all the way to the top every Saturday, counting the stairs beneath his feet. When he reaches the top, pushing open the exit door and stepping out into the cold air, he takes the deepest breath that he can manage and then he curses the world from as high as he can get. It’s his weekly routine - has been for the last two years since he found himself alone. It’s good to have a routine, his grandmother always told him. It balances you, stabilises you, brings order to your life. Yuta always respected his grandmother and her life-lessons, and so he counts the days so that he still has the regularity of time on his side, and he makes his way to the roof every Saturday and screams his lungs raw, his voice echoing across the empty city below him. It feels fucking amazing.
In fact, it’s pretty much the only thing that feels like anything at all these days. The apocalypse has turned Yuta almost completely numb.
(Almost.)
When he was fourteen, Sicheng assumed, wrongly, that he would graduate school and go to university where he would invent something akin to Facebook, and, naturally, become a billionaire. Then he would buy a lamborghini and probably fall in love with a supermodel. At thirteen, this seemed to be both reasonable and also the pinnacle of life.
When he was fifteen, Sicheng assumed, wrongly, that he would be dead within months, radiation poisoning killing thousands of people every single day, the world ravaged by the nuclear apocalypse of his thirteenth summer.
By the time Sicheng was seventeen, he had long accepted that his pipe-dreams were doomed. He would never graduate school, because school no longer existed. And he’d never invent a new Facebook because the electromagnetic pulse had fucked up all electricity, so he couldn’t even get online to look at his Weibo, nevermind invent an entirely new social platform. He’d never be a billionaire because money was worthless and the gas crisis the summer before meant that only certain military groups had access to petrol, so he wouldn’t be driving a sports car anytime soon.
He didn’t want to meet a supermodel anymore and he (wrongly) assumed he would never fall in love. All Sicheng wanted by then was to keep his brother alive. And he did, for a while, even after their parents succumbed to the sickness that ravaged most of the population within the first two years. Sicheng's heart broke piece by piece, until there was only Renjun left in it, and he refused to let Renjun go. He'd do anything he had to to keep his brother alive.
But even the little food that Sicheng could salvage for Renjun stopped being enough, and when he was almost nineteen, Sicheng found himself desperate enough to put his trust into complete strangers.
When the group found them living alone, Sicheng assumed, wrongly, that everything would change for the better. They called themselves the World Military and they promised the brothers shelter and food and safety aboard their vessel. They were sailing to the somewhere on the coast of Japan, where they knew for certain that there was a healthy population, just waiting to make a new community with people from all over the world. They had running water and gas-lamps, and Sicheng had pulled Renjun close to to him under the wiry blanket in the back of the truck and had shared with his younger brother a hopeful smile. On the boat, they were given bread and small, salted fish, and they ate them greedily, famished and grateful.
Then the doctor took them into the hospital wing of the ship and checked them over carefully. “Just a few tests,” they promised him, in a caring tone that sounded like his mother’s used to, before - way before - all of this began. “So we can care for you if you’re sick.”
Sicheng assumed, wrongly, that he could trust these people, but then the ship made land and the doctor stopped smiling at them and started to run tests they didn’t understand.
There was no community waiting to take them in. They anchored down to be met by armoured tanks and stumbled onto dry land tired, thirsty and confused. The tanks took them to an old military compound armed by men with machine guns and blank faces, who welcomed the doctors and eyed Sicheng and Renjun interestingly.
“Exciting times,” one of the doctors had said to them both with a grin. “You two are very special.” Test Subject 1 she called him, and she watched through the thick glass window that separated him from safety and turned on the nuclear reactor.
Sicheng had blacked out soon after.
Yuta sits on the roof of the hotel for as long as he can stand it, until his fingers start to feel numb from the cold, and he can barely stand to lift his chin from where he rests it on his folded arms.
His teeth chatter as he looks out across the cityscape and counts the abandoned cars in the streets below. One, two, three, he counts - the red mitsubishi with the windows busted out, the black Toyota Corolla sport set on bricks where the wheels once were, the Nissan that Yuta can never tell the exact colour of; it looks either black or navy depending on where the sun is, and that never fails to intrigue him.
When he gets to twenty eight, he gives up counting cars: they’re all still down there, nothing has changed, there are no people miraculously driving them away. There haven’t been in years. But, still, he’ll come back and he’ll count them again, next week. Just in case.
It's rituals like this that keep him sane. Or, saner than he might have become otherwise. After Reo died and Yuta had buried his body on the outskirts of the city, under a cherry blossom tree, he had left the city for a while– headed East in the hope that he might find a miracle. He'd dreamt about it: a group of survivors - a new family - who needed his strength and tenacity and determination, who would welcome him with open arms and allow him to feel a part of something again. A part of the world.
He found no new family.
What he did find were dying wild dogs who didn't much trust humanity any longer, who snarled and snapped and turned away from him. He'd found abandoned homes, cars, the parts of humanity that were no longer needed. He'd found the bones of the people who died years before, and the bodies of those who had died more recently. He'd found an abandoned supermarket with a locked storeroom that hadn't quite been depleted yet. It had taken him four days to get inside, desperately trying out lock-picking techniques he'd seen in movies, and inside had been tin cans of pickled vegetables and jars of baby food that suddenly looked like gourmet fare. He'd packed as many as he could into the old, tattered backpack he used to take to school, and once he was sure he couldn't carry anymore, he'd left the remaining tins with a note to whoever found them next. Then he'd walked back through the empty streets, and onto the deserted highway, and he'd made his way back downtown.
If he was going to spend the rest of his life - however long or short that might be - by himself, he'd spend it in a place he knew like a friend.
He'd entered the lobby of the Mariott in the hazy light of the early morning sun and thought, fuck it, if I'm alone, I'll sleep like a damn king, and he'd walked up the emergency exit stairs, stopping every ten floors to catch his breath, and forced his way into the penthouse, with it's gold threaded curtains and the unmistakable smell of damp in the air. Then he'd crawled into the middle of the Queensized bed, kicked off his shoes and slept for thirty three hours.
Two years later and he wakes up in the same room, with the same gold-threaded curtains hanging half off the rail, every Saturday, and then he heads up to the roof and into the sky and he screams.
Domestic bliss it is not, but it's something like a life, and he'll take that over a slow, agonising, death for now.
Sicheng realised that he and Renjun were being used as scientific guinea pigs quite quickly, but quickly was already too late to stop it and leave. They hadn’t been saved, they’d been imprisoned, the compound in a foreign land not a new home, but a little slice of fresh hell.
Injected with electrical bio-matter and subjected to prolonged exposure to concentrated radiation, all part of a program to test biological weapons put in place by what remained of the army.
Orphans have always made great experimental bodies, one of the doctors from the ship had told him once. They always had. But especially now, with so much of the population wiped out. “There’s nothing left for you,” the doctor had said, matter of fact and solemn, as they’d prepared Sicheng’s next round of radiation. “At least by doing this, you’re being useful to us.”
The guilt ate him up at night as Renjun slept next to him, murmuring in his sleep as he curled his impossibly small body into Sicheng’s side. This was his fault– he couldn’t take good enough care of his brother so he’d accepted false promises so quickly, so desperately. He’d put Renjun into this position, a science experiment for a rogue government group, and he didn’t even have the energy to try to find a way for them to get out of it.
The exposure to the radiation continued. The tests with the magnets and the radiation waves went on. Sicheng lost all sense of time, held Renjun’s hand and pretended this was a bad dream.
Nothing much happened until the night of the electrical storm.
Yuta weight-trains in the hotel gym every evening around eight and every morning at seven. His mechanical watch - a gift from his grandfather on his tenth birthday - doesn’t fasten around his wrist any longer, but he has kept it all this time. He’s always been that way: frugal, thrifty, cautious. It had been his cautious nature that stopped him from signing up to one of the World Military schemes back when the world was first going to ruin. After his parents died, Yuta had considered it, if only momentarily.
If you were alone, the propaganda said, it was the obvious choice. Don’t die alone, live together! the posters said in bold print. His cousin went, boarded one of the military tanks that came into the city to pick up willing volunteers, and promised to find a way to get a message back to him, let Yuta know that she was safe. She promised she would do it, and Yuta believed her, but the message never came. The rumours did, though. Reo told him that he’d heard from someone that the scheme was just a way to lure in the naive and desperate to become bodies for scientific experiments using radiation and electro-science.
So, he hadn’t gone, and neither had Reo, but others had and none of them had never returned to the city. Slowly, one by one, the few remaining city dwellers had died of the radiation sickness, leaving a handful of people, which in turn became one. Yuta.
The Military haven’t passed through in years now and Yuta isn’t sure whether this is because they’re satisfied that there is no one left, or if they have all died themselves.
Some days he hopes it is the former- that there are other people out there, breathing the air he is. Some days he would prefer it’s the latter- that he is the only one left, safe from the horrors of the human psyche. Other days he doesn’t think about it at all. Just gets out of bed when the sun rises, eats some cold pudding, and heads to the gym for seven.
It might not be exactly seven this morning. It might be eight or five or something in between; his watch has stopped so many times before that his guess is all he has now, but that doesn’t matter. Time is a concept, Yuta knows this. But it’s a concept he admires, and that’s why he is glad for routine. So, he climbs to the roof on a Saturday morning, but not until he’s done his reps with the weights that are still stacked in front of the long, wall-to-wall mirror, of the hotel gym.
Sometimes he closes his eyes and imagines his father is there with him. He imagines his grandfather sitting on the bench across the gym, spurring them on. Three generations of Nakamoto men, together, alive. Sometimes, when he opens his eyes again, he can almost believe that it’s real. But it isn’t. There haven’t been three generations of any family alive round here for years and especially not his. Still, it’s nice to dream about having a family again, even if it’s never going to be a reality.
Sicheng celebrates his twenty first birthday by himself.
It’s the first birthday he has ever spent completely alone, and the emptiness aches inside of his chest. It’s almost two weeks since he last saw Renjun and eleven days since he saw any person at all, although, when he closes his eyes to think about it, he can’t be sure that what he saw on that day wasn’t just a shadow of the sun or an animal running free.
He wonders, sometimes, if he is truly alone now. He wonders if there is no one behind any of the windows he passes through the desolate streets, or whether, maybe, someone is out there, waiting for him. Or hiding from him. Not that he cares: he only cares about finding his way back to his brother, that is his focus.
He repeats the words like a mantra every morning:
Stay alive, find Renjun, make things okay.
He needs to find his way back to Renjun, whose hand was held tightly in Sicheng's own one second, and was gone the next, hail as large as golf balls raining down on them as the lightning struck overhead.
"This way!" Sicheng had shouted, desperate, grasping for Renjun in the darkness as water ran into his eyes. When the doors to the compound had unlocked, Sicheng’s first thought was to grab his brother and get out of there. And he’d done just that- looked Renjun in the eyes and said, “Trust me,” and dragged him through the corridors as fast as their legs could carry them. When they’d made it outside, the ground was muddy and the storm was raging, and there were voices behind them, catching up with them.
Sicheng had lost his grip on Renjun’s thin wrist, then. Desperately reaching behind him, trying to find him again as lightning lit up the sky and blinded them both. “Renjun! Renjun!” he had called, and Renjun had called his name back, Sicheng stumbling as the lightning flashed white spots in front of his eyes.
Renjun had called his name again, voice ragged, and Sicheng had tried so hard to follow the sound, had moved towards it, or what he thought was towards it, had shouted "We have to get away!” as the hail rained down around them.
He'd seen Renjun, then, just for a millisecond as the sky had lit up around them with a bright flash - Renjun back near the compound gate, Renjun on his knees in the mud shouting ”Go, now! ” as the soldiers gained on them.
So Sicheng had turned and ran, his legs feeling like dead weights in water, until he couldn’t run any further, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. And then his world had tilted and everything had gone silent, and dark, and almost peaceful, and when Sicheng had next opened his eyes, the storm was over and he was alone in a field of tall grass.
Yuta sits, cross legged, on the ledge of the roof-top underneath the safety railing. He isn't scared, he's way past a fear of heights. Height gives him power over nature: he can see far over the city from here, can watch the storm raging outside of it, the one that has been heading towards him for the last few days. He’s actually intrigued for it to come. The plants up here on the roof need watering, and it saves him having to drag water up the stairs in a bucket.
He counts the cars below him: the same amount as last week. He counts the street lamps: all unlit. He shades his eyes as he looks up towards the sun, and fleetingly hopes for it to crash to earth in a flaming ball of fire and swallow him up.
But the sun remains above him in the sky and so Yuta looks down at the city instead and watches dust clouds swirl debris across the isolated landscape. He opens his mouth to scream, but before a sound can leave him, he sees it - the shape, moving across the street far below him. The shape of a man.
Mesmerised by the scene, Yuta stands, hopeful, terrified and dumbfounded on a cold morning on what he has calculated from his calendar should be October twenty-third.
Yuta holds his breath. He closes his eyes. When he opens them, the figure is still there. “Who are you?” he whispers. “Are you real?”
And then he turns and he runs, taking the stairwell down to the ground floor two steps at a time.
When he reaches the street, he realises he doesn't have anything to protect himself - no knife, no rope, not the revolver he'd come across in the glove-compartment of a silver Lexus he'd got into and ransacked for supplies eighteen months before. All he has is his goggles, clear plastic things that make him look a bit like a mad scientist, but protect his eyes from the dust storms that whip up around him unannounced on some nights. The weather is anything but predictable now.
He pulls them down over his face, wrapping his scarf over his mouth, and he sets out in the direction that he'd seen-- whatever it is. A person, he thinks it's a person. He wants it to be a person so badly, he really does.
Maybe, he thinks, he won’t be dying alone after all.
Sicheng knows he's wandering through the very the centre of the city now, because tall, glass-fronted buildings line the street to his left. He’s in the business district, he guesses, or, what was once the business district, anyway. Clearly, the only business anyone around here engages in now is the business of staying alive, not that there is any sign of life: burnt out buildings line the other side of the street, and the wind howls through them like the intro to a bad song.
He's so tired that everything hurts. And he's still wet from the rainstorm he'd been caught in during the night; his clothes stick to his skin, his hair damp and his hands cold. The last time he had felt dry had been the day before the storm, sleeping in the dark room he and Renjun called their own, although it was little more than a cell. Still, it was under cover and it was warm with Renjun at his side. He hadn't been comfortable, and he'd been a little muddled from the lack of food and the shouting outside, but with his brother next to him at least his hands had been warm for a while.
Stay alive, get back to Renjun, make things okay, he repeats, over and over in his head. He stumbles over the rubble of a building that burnt down years ago, the blackened brick a stark contrast to the monster-like tower blocks still standing on the opposite side of the street, and goes down, his knee giving way beneath him.
"Fuck," he curses, as he puts his palms out by instinct to break his fall. Tears threaten to well up at the corner of his eyes. He's angry at himself - a raw wound to tend to is the last thing that he needs, and the scuff on his right palm is starting to bleed as he stares at it.
He's so focused on his stupidity that Sicheng doesn't hear the movement behind him until a voice calls out, "Are you okay?"
Sicheng turns around so quickly that he almost trips over his own feet again. He holds his injured hand palm up with his other hand and stares, wide eyed and alert, at the sight in front of him.
A man in heavy boots, with a tattered olive coloured hooded jacket and a scarf covered mouth stands in the middle of the street. All that Sicheng can really see of him is a nose that shines pink from the cold and eyes covered by the scratched up plastic of a pair of goggles.
The man pulls the scarf down away from his mouth and asks, "Hey, are you hurt?" He steps closer to Sicheng, and Sicheng doesn't know what to do.
So, he does what comes easiest in these sorts of moments and puts up his defences, narrows his eyes and shouts, “If– If you come closer, I will hurt you," as aggressively as he can muster. In his head, he's domineering, threatening even. “I could kill you.”
“Sounds appealing,” the man replies, voice playful, though his stance suggests he's a little wary. Not scared, though. Maybe, Sicheng thinks, bleeding hands and wet hair don't much help his ability to look dangerous. Which is ironic, really.
Sicheng changes tactic, stepping back just one pace to make his point. “Just– stay there. What’s your name?”
“Nakamoto Yuta.” The stranger gives it up so easily that Sicheng suspects it might be an alias, but the way the words roll off his tongue makes Sicheng want to believe him. “Yours?”
He can't be bothered lying, doesn't see the point. “Dong Sicheng,” he says.
The man considers this carefully. “Are you alone, Dong Sicheng?” His voice is softer now, but Sicheng guesses he's probably making his own calculations on how he'll get away if Sicheng does anything unpredictable.
He nods, because there's no point in lying, he knows it'll do him no good. “Not out of choice,” he admits. "What about you?"
The man - Yuta - tilts his head to the side, tongue between his teeth. He smiles. “Is there anyone left who is alone by choice anymore?”
Sicheng thinks that Yuta might be onto something there - choice doesn't really determine anything that he does anymore, that's for sure. Necessity, desperation, sheer panic all determine his actions now. Choice is just a distant memory.
The mention of loneliness leads him back to the reason he is here, stumbling through downtown by himself. He’s been hoping since the night he left Renjun behind, that Renjun had managed to get free too. He always had a great right hook for someone so petite; he’d shown it off on the playground when he was a kid, much to his parent’s embarrassment. Sicheng can picture it when he closes his eyes: Renjun struggling free of the mud, decking an unsuspecting soldier and sprinting out of those gates.
“Hey, have you seen my brother?” He calls, a little desperate, a little loud. “He's shorter than me, about this tall. He has black hair, cropped quite short. He's skinny and–”
“You’re the first person I’ve seen in two years.” Yuta shakes his head. “Sorry. In fact, I’m not sure you’re even real. To be honest, Sicheng, I think I might be hallucinating.”
Sicheng isn't surprised that Renjun hasn't been sighted, but he is sad. For himself, because he is no closer to reuniting with Renjun, and for Yuta, because years and years of solitude sounds unbearable, even for an introvert like Sicheng. “I think,” Yuta adds, “This might even be one of those fever dreams. Maybe I'm finally getting sick after all.”
Sicheng asks, “Why do you think that?”
Yuta walks a little closer to him; one, two, three steps, and then he stops. Sicheng wills him to turn away and leave. He doesn't have time for strangers who can't lead him back to his brother. Still, he's cold and tired and his ankle is throbbing, and beside his better judgement, he’s intrigued.
“Because your eyes are unnaturally green and you feel like static electricity.” He holds out his hand, arm stretched out in front of him, about a metre from Sicheng, and stares at it. He's feeling something sicheng can never forgot he emits. When he looks back at Sicheng it's with an unnerving intensity that makes his heart skip a beat. “And because, despite the very mean look you're giving me, you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met.”
Sicheng says, “If this is a dream, I want to wake up.”
Yuta says, “Come on, come with me and we can sort out that cut,” and Sicheng follows him.
Yuta fakes a confident stride, but his mind is all over the place– adrenaline and fear and anticipation turning his every thought into a jumble of questions and concerns.
He has no idea what he’s going to do if Dong Sicheng stays true to his word and tries to hurt him. He has no idea who this guy is. He can’t even tell his age - but it’s no wonder that he can’t gage ages anymore, it’s been too long since it’s mattered: the radiation poisoning has never discriminated by age, and, anyway, it’s been years since he saw another face. Yuta knows what he’s doing is risky - Dong Sicheng has warned Yuta that he’ll hurt him - and yet here Yuta is, his back to a stranger with unnaturally bright eyes and a suspiciously beautiful face, leading him through the city to the only place he feels safe.
It’s just– and he feels kind of stupid admitting this, even just to himself, but he needs this now. He needs this company more than he ever realised. He needs to know everything about Dong Sicheng, even if what he finds out isn’t welcome.
Yuta stops for a minute and waits for Sicheng to catch up with him. He pulls down his scarf and calls, “Sorry. I move fast. Wild animals are usually the only other thing following me.”
Sicheng doesn’t reply. His gaze rests on his bloodied palm as he hurries across the empty street.
Yuta asks, “Does it sting?” and gestures towards his hand.
Sicheng says, “No,” but Yuta can immediately tell that he’s lying by the way he grimaces.
“If it hurts but you’re pretending it doesn’t to look cool, smile now.”
When Sicheng’s mouth betrays him and curls up at the corners, it only serves to make Yuta want more. And it’s kind of funny, he thinks, as he begins walking again, that he isn’t even the tiniest amount upset his Saturday routine has been interrupted, not one bit.
“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting a visitor today or I’d have rolled out the red carpet especially,” Yuta tells him with a grin.
They’re in the lobby of the Marriott, Yuta’s goggles pushed back away from his eyes and Sicheng can see his face properly, now, out of the smog. It’s a handsome face, if a little grubby. There’s a bruise on his cheek that makes it look like he’s been in a fist fight, and Sicheng might believe this the case if he didn’t already know that they are the only two people around for hundreds of miles. Maybe he’s clumsy, too, Sicheng thinks. He looks up at the chandelier hanging from the centre of the tall ceiling. “You live in a hotel,” he says.
It’s a statement, not a question, but Yuta replies, “Live? Not so much. Survive, maybe.”
Yuta’s hair is long, pulled into a messy knot on the top of his head and the goggles sit awkwardly on top of the pile. He has brown eyes, like Sicheng used to before they turned a luminous, neon green. They look kind, and inviting. Sicheng tries not to stare.
Yuta tells him, “My preferred suite is the penthouse, which is right at the top, obviously. Floors three to five were quarantined years ago, when people started to get sick, so I usually keep off those floors.”
“Out of fear?” Sicheng wonders.
“Out of respect for the dead,” Yuta clarifies. “But, yeah, that too, I guess. Although I'm not really scared of much anymore." He leads Sicheng towards the back of the lobby, feet moving quickly. Sicheng follows him, holding his hand, palm up, out in front of him as they go. The bleeding has stopped now, leaving ribbons of dried blood running down of his wrist in a dark crimson colour that fascinates and disgusts Sicheng in equal measure.
“What were you scared of, before?" He asks as they walk. He’s struggling to keep up with Yuta’s pace again and he isn’t sure if Yuta even hears his question, until Yuta slows down, pausing as they reach a set of double doors that look like they lead into a set of offices. Their shoes leave wet patches on the marble floor.
Yuta glances back at Sicheng over his shoulder, face open and honest. “Dying alone,” he says, and then he pushes the door open.
Yuta has dressed his own wounds countless times over the years, but dressing someone else’s sets him totally off balance. That’s what he tells Sicheng with an apologetic smile and fumbling fingers. In truth, he’s done this before, although, granted, it was years ago. Back when there were other people to look after, rather than just himself and himself alone.
The truth is that he’s just plain nervous, the way he used to be around his cousin’s cute friends when he was fourteen and they were eighteen and seemed impossibly pretty and cool. This is different, though, because Sicheng isn’t just attractive, he’s also different. The air around them crackles with static electricity, and Yuta knows it’s coming from Sicheng’s skin, but he says nothing about it. He doesn’t think Sicheng would tell him what it’s all about, even if he asked him. His expression had been blank, back in the street when Yuta had mentioned the static electricity, and it wasn’t until Yuta had called him beautiful that Sicheng’s face had flickered with any emotion at all.
So, Yuta doesn’t say anything about Sicheng’s eyes or the fact that his skin is hot to the touch. Instead he hums to himself as he rinses cool water over Sicheng’s wound and then says, “Looks like it’s going to rain soon.”
It comes out sounding dumb, and it is - it’s an awkward attempt at small-talk. They’re in the back office, folders neatly lined up on the shelves above their heads: untouched, unneeded since the last guests checked out years ago. The tiny basin in the corner of the room still has cold running water, although it dribbles out of the tap at an excruciatingly slow rate. He rummages in the cupboard underneath for some antibacterial soap, but there isn’t any. Damn.
“Hmmm.” Sicheng is watching him. “There’s no antiseptic?” He asks.
Yuta shakes his head. “Give me a second, I’ll find some vodka or something, we can use that to clean it,” he says. “I’ll be five minutes, if you can wait here?”
Sicheng nods, but there’s something about the look on his face that makes Yuta wonder if he’ll still be standing there when he gets back.
He has to go down to the basement storeroom for the alcohol; he’d moved the alcohol stores up out of the basement when he first rooted himself here, but alcohol gives an addicting kind of numbness, so he’d locked it away downstairs one day, head pounding, eyes red. He’d told himself that it was for the best, that he should be saving it for a special occasion and by and large he drinks nothing but a single cup of water at breakfast and dinner.
His eyes adjust to the darkness of the basement and he makes his way to the racking where he’s stacked the glass bottles of spirits. It’s almost pitch black down here, but he knows his way around by instinct anyway. He pockets two miniature mini-bar bottles of vodka, the glass bottles clinking against each other in his jacket pocket as he climbs the stairs back to the ground floor.
He checks his watch as he reaches the light of the ground level. It’s almost midday. At this time on a regular Saturday he would probably still be on the roof, face going numb from the bitterness of the cold winds. He’d be staring out over the city, looking at nothing in particular– the static view already etched into his brain: an intricately designed map of the buildings that have remained here longer than any people have managed to. Then he would take the stairs back down, all the way to the bottom, and prepare something small to eat: a handful of nuts, a small portion of porridge, nothing appetising. Sometimes he would imagine he was fixing himself a sandwich: stale crackers with pickled carrots from a jar placed neatly in between. Eating is never exactly a gourmet affair, not anymore. Eating is fuel. But it’s fun to pretend, sometimes. Plus, eating is another ritual, and he likes his rituals.
But he also likes that his rituals have been broken, finally, by the unexpected arrival of the green eyed, surly faced guy waiting for him in the back office. Maybe he’ll have left already. Maybe, Yuta’s routine won’t be broken, just halted a little, he thinks.
Maybe he’s already alone again.
When Yuta rounds the corner and pushes open the door to the office, though, Sicheng is still standing at the basin, his jacket discarded now over the back of a chair. Yuta can’t help but smile, more relieved than he realised he’d be. “You’re still here,” he says, producing the bottles of vodka from his coat and placing them on the counter.
Sicheng raises his eyebrows and says, “I’m still here.” He sounds almost as surprised about this as Yuta feels, and it makes Yuta wonder if maybe Sicheng has his own rituals that have been interrupted by his sudden appearance, too.
Sicheng isn’t sure exactly what he is doing here, allowing a stranger in a deserted hotel to amateurly dress his wound, but whatever it is he’s doing, it’s clearly not conducive to finding Renjun and for that he’s pissed at himself.
He thinks about walking out when Yuta leaves him to go to the basement for alcohol. He thinks about taking the bandage and dressing the wound himself. He’s capable. Everyone is capable, now– that’s what survival is about. He thinks about taking the bandage and getting the hell out of the Marriott, and out of the city, because Renjun isn’t here and this– this hanging about pointlessly, following Yuta around like he can’t help himself– is just wasting time. But he doesn’t do it, doesn’t leave. He stands in the silence and waits for Yuta to return, and when he does he thinks, oh no, it’s too late for me to go now, as if he was ever going to actually do it. It’s only a white lie, after all.
Yuta says, “Sorry if this stings,” before he washes the wound with alcohol and Sicheng tries not to wince when, inevitably, it stings like hell. “So, how long have you been looking for your brother?”
“Since the storm.” Sicheng closes his eyes. “A few weeks I think. I lose track of the date these days.”
“I have a calendar,” Yuta says. “I made it myself but it’s definitely correct because I make sure I mark off every day.”
“Hmmm.” When Sicheng opens his eyes again, Yuta is looking at him intently, a flicker of a smile playing on his mouth. It’s a nice mouth, Sicheng notes. “What day is it, then?”
“It’s October twenty-third.” Yuta looks back down at Sicheng’s palm. He picks up the bandage and frowns as he sizes it up. “It’s a Saturday.”
October twenty-third, Sicheng thinks. It hasn’t been his birthday yet, after all. “Oh. I thought— uh, nevermind.” It seems silly to feel so disappointed that he isn’t even able to keep up with the days properly, but he does. He’s lost everything– his family, his concentration, even his concept of time is screwed.
“You thought what?”
“It’s stupid, it’s just… I thought it was my birthday already. I celebrated it a few days ago. Turns out I’m almost a week early.” He sighs, disappointed in himself for even caring. “Not that it’s important. Just— I guess birthdays are one of those things that don’t matter anymore.”
Yuta’s eyes widen. “Of course they matter! The rituals are still important, you being alive to celebrate it is important,” he says, and the sincerity in his eyes makes Sicheng want to believe him. “Your birthday, which date is it?”
“The twenty eighth.” Sicheng recites, “Dong Sicheng, born Twenty eighth of October, ‘ninety seven.”
Yuta hums. “You’re a little younger than me. Two years and two days, to be precise. Mine’s the twenty sixth and I was born in ‘ninety five.”
Sicheng does the calculations. “So you’ll be turning twenty three in three days?” He turns his palm over to allow Yuta to tuck the bandage inside itself so that it’s tightly wrapped around his cut.
Yuta steps back and smiles; he is clearly proud of his handiwork and it’s kind of cute to see. “I’m looking forward to my birthday now,” he says. "I wasn’t before, but I am now.”
They leave the offices and head back to the lobby, crossing the marble floor towards a neon sign that is no longer lit, which signals the stairwell. Sicheng follows him again, as though he has nowhere else to be. “Why are you looking forward to your birthday now? What’s changed?”
“You’ll be here.” Yuta turns back to smile at him and Sicheng can’t help but smile back at him, even though he won’t be here in three days time. He can’t be. He shouldn’t be here now . “Come on, I’ll show you the view from the top floor!”
The view is rather spectacular— or it would have been, ten years ago. Sicheng stands next to Yuta on the flat roof and leans over the railing, peering down at the streets below them. “Pretty cool,” he says. “What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen from up here?”
Yuta’s mouth twists into a pout of concentration. “A herd of deer,” he says. “About forty of them.”
“Doing what?” Sicheng asks.
“Just passing through. It was beautiful for a while. Then something spooked them and they started galloping away, so fast the dust rose up and didn’t settle for hours. I dreamt about it for months.” Yuta looks away, over the city and Sicheng can tell he’s reliving the image in his mind.
“Maybe you dreamt it to begin with,” Sicheng says. He doesn’t mean it to sound cynical or mean, he’s just making a point. Yuta did say he thought he might be asleep earlier when they met. Although, Sicheng realises, that might have been an outrageously unsubtle attempt at flirting.
Yuta shakes his head. “No, no, it was real.”
Sicheng’s face is getting cold as he leans over the rail, but he can’t seem to pull himself away. He doesn’t look at Yuta as he asks, “So no other—er, no sightings of people?”
“I haven’t seen your brother.” Yuta sighs. “I really haven’t, I wouldn’t lie about that, about someone’s family. That’s who you mean, isn’t it?”
Sicheng nods, though Yuta is only half right.
Sicheng wishes his brother were the only other person he knows is out there somewhere, but the World Military are out there, too. And he never wants to see them again, if he can help it.
Yuta chats away as they walk back down the stairs. “You can choose any room to sleep in tonight.” Yuta talks as if it’s a given fact that Sicheng will be here by nightfall. “The electromagnetic card system doesn’t work anymore, but most of the top floors are accessible. Still, it might be best to stay close to me, you know, just in case.” In case of what he doesn’t say.
Sicheng nods. “Okay then.”
“And then tomorrow we can find you some clean clothes, if you want.” He takes the stairs two steps at a time, turning back to smile up at Sicheng every ten or so. “We’re a similar size. I mean, you’re taller, but whatever.”
Sicheng follows. “Thanks,” he says. “But you don’t have to.” He doesn’t want to think about being here tomorrow, he should be on the road again before nightfall. Or, if he stays one night, first thing tomorrow morning.
Yuta stops at the bottom of the stairs and Sicheng almost barrels into him. “Do you want to wash up or anything?” he asks, head tilted, eyes boring into Sicheng’s. It’s unnerving, but, weirdly, Sicheng doesn’t feel like looking away.
“What?”
“Do you want to have a shower?” Yuta repeats. “I’ll prepare something to eat if you want to wash up? The water comes out like a dribble, the tanks on the roof are running low now, but it’s better than nothing.”
Sicheng considers this with a smile. “Are you saying I smell?” He probably does, if he’s being honest. At least at the compound he was allowed to shower - anything to make sure the white uniforms they put him in when they studied the electrowaves in his brain stayed crisp and clean. In the last two weeks, he’s been disoriented and confused and he can count on one hand the amount of times he has found somewhere to wash: a stream on day three, a backyard tap in an abandoned house on day five, a bottle of water he’d kept in his backpack on day seven…
Yuta tsks, his tongue between his teeth, and rolls his eyes. “I’m not saying anything of the sort, I’m just asking if you want to have a shower and get comfortable, since I’m the host around here.”
Sicheng doesn’t want to get comfortable, he wants to leave. But, he doesn’t say that. Instead, he nods. “Sure, a shower would be nice,” he finds himself saying. Part of Sicheng knows he’s putting off the inevitable. He can’t stay here, playing guest with a friendly stranger. It’s selfish and dangerous - for himself, for Renjun, for Yuta. Still, he accepts a royal blue towel from Yuta and turns the handle on the valve in the penthouse suite bathroom. It’s a decadent, over the top, marble room with mirrored walls. It feels alien compared to the sterile, stainless steel bathroom of the military compound, where he was allowed to shower once every two days, with supervision from an armed guard. As he undresses, Sicheng pretends that he’s on vacation from his real life, but the ice-cold water makes it difficult to pretend this isn’t reality. As he massages hotel-regulation soap into his hair, Sicheng wonders what the fuck he’s doing here.
“Don’t waste all of the nice hot water,” Yuta calls through the gap in the door, and it makes Sicheng smile.
Yuta’s Sundays usually go like this: gym, eat, check supplies, check the perimeter of the hotel, feed the birds that land on the balcony, gym again, eat, check the perimeter of the hotel, sleep. He tells this to Sicheng: counts each activity off on his fingers.
“Actually, that’s how most of the days of the week go,” he says as he hands Sicheng a jar of something that looks like baby food. It might actually be baby food, Sicheng thinks, but it looks edible so he’s grateful. “Though sometimes I swim too. Ah, it’s so boring, right?”
“Sounds alright to me,” Sicheng says. It sounds a hell of a lot better than what he’s been used to for the last two years, anyway. “I like swimming,” he says. “Or, I did, when I was a kid.”
“We’ll swim tomorrow then!” Yuta motions for Sicheng to tuck into his dinner. He obliges, and although it’s cold and basically tasteless, it is the best thing he’s eaten in a long time.
“Enjoy your shower?” Yuta asks him, waving his spoon to get Sicheng’s attention.
“It was alright.” Sicheng smiles. “Though the temperature of the water was a little disappointing.”
Yuta laughs. “Too hot?”
“Something like that,” Sicheng replies with a grin he can’t stop from forming.
This back and forth is something he hasn’t experienced in a long, long time. Maybe never, really. He’s never had the time, energy or desire to flirt before now; not really, in a way that could mean anything. Even when he’d started dating when he was a teenager, it was something fun to do to pass the time. But nothing is fun, and time passes weirdly now, so what he’s doing when he says, “And you didn’t even offer to dry your guests hair,” with his tongue at his cheek, Sicheng isn’t sure.
Still, the way Yuta chokes on his spoonful of baby food in response makes it worth it.
Sicheng has short hair, which in Yuta’s opinion is a glaringly obvious sign that he hasn’t been living on the streets for long. Or, if he has, his priorities are definitely different to Yuta’s. Keeping his hair neat isn’t top on Yuta’s list of things to do, although he could if he wanted: living in a hotel gives access to all sorts of arbitrary tools that seemed so necessary to people back before life and death were so closely intertwined. Anyway, Yuta quite likes having long hair. He thinks of it as his lion’s mane.
“Why do you keep your hair short?” he asks.
Sicheng raises fingers to the short hairs at the nape of his neck. “They cut it every so often. It’s easier that way.”
Yuta doesn’t know who ‘they’ are, but he doesn’t push his luck trying to find out. Instead he hums and tilts his head - imagines Sicheng with hair longer than his own.
“You’d look good with it long. It’s so shiny.” Yuta reaches out a hand and touches Sicheng’s wet hair. Sicheng doesn’t flinch away, but he goes still, so Yuta takes his hand back and looks down. He’s never been an overly tactile person, but now it seems that all he wants to do now is touch. “Not that you don’t look good now. You look good.”
Sicheng opens his mouth to speak, but he closes it again before any words come out. Maybe it’s for the best, Yuta thinks. He hasn’t been rejected in a while, if only because there is no one to reject him. He isn’t sure he wants to hear it right now, he isn’t ready. Sicheng just smiles at him instead, almost unreadable in his expression.
They go back to eating in silence. Except, it’s not silence exactly. Yuta’s noticed it since Sicheng followed him into the hotel lobby: the static, buzzing in the air. It’s louder now, he thinks. Or maybe it isn’t, maybe he’s just listening out for it.
“Is it always like this? The static noise.” Yuta scrapes the bottom of the jar with his spoon and the clanking sound cuts into the crackling between them for a moment. “Or- or does it depend on something?”
“I don’t know what noise you’re talking about,” Sicheng replies. Yuta is pretty certain he’s lying.
“The hair on my arms is standing on end, it’s like... It’s like the air is alive with electricity.” He pushes his sleeve up and shows it to Sicheng. “Can you control it?”
He knows he’s probably pushing the questions, but surely Sicheng can’t blame him for being intrigued by him. Yuta’s heard rumours about the effects the radiation had on some people. A rare few for whom exposure didn’t mean sickness, it mean change, strength, new abilities. Mutations. Yuta’s not exactly a cynical guy, but he’s had his doubts about how much truth there ever was in such whispers.
Now he thinks maybe there was truth in them, after all.
“I’m tired, do you mind if I choose somewhere to sleep?” Sicheng asks, as though Yuta hasn’t spoken at all, and Yuta doesn’t want to piss him off so he relents with the questions.
“Be my guest,” he says, and watches as Sicheng heads to the lobby to take the stairs back up to the suites.
Sicheng choses a room the floor below Yuta’s penthouse. It’s a large suite– “An Executive Suite,” Yuta tells him. “Which means… It’s big.” It houses a King sized bed and floor to ceiling windows which are streaked with dirt and dust, and stains from acid-laced rainwater. Still, he can see the city in a murky haze. It’s nice.
“I bet it used to be expensive to stay in.” Sicheng runs a finger along the top of the dresser against the back wall. His finger comes away grey with dust. He walks towards the en-suite bathroom and Yuta follows him.
“If only there was hot water, right?” Yuta looks pained as they stand in the bathroom. “Imagine having a jacuzzi bath right now. Imagine. ”
“That would be amazing,” Sicheng agrees.
“That would be even better than sex. Probably,” Yuta says. “It’s been a long time.”
“Since you’ve had a jacuzzi bath?” Sicheng acts like he doesn’t know what Yuta was referring to: coy, inquisitive.
Yuta laughs, softly. “Since anything.”
Sicheng watches them both in the bathroom mirror. His own reflection is lit in a green glow. He knows that his eyes glow in the dark now - neon green against pitch blackness isn’t something that can easily be missed and the first night they had shone Renjun had freaked out at him completely. That was about a year ago now. Now, having eyes like an electric neon sign feels almost normal to Sicheng most days. It feels abnormal now, though, Yuta watching him with the same bewitched expression he’d used when they met in the street.
“What?” He asks.
“Nothing.” Yuta turns around and walks back into the main bedroom. “If you’re not warm enough in the night just take more bedding from another room. If you need me I’m a floor up.”
Sicheng nods. “Okay.” It’s weird how much he does feel like a welcome guest here and not just a traveller passing by. It’s weird how comfortable he feels in the presence of this near stranger. “Thank you, Yuta.”
Before he leaves him alone in the suite, Yuta hovers at the door and asks, "What's with the eyes, Dong Sicheng?"
Sicheng doesn’t want to have this conversation, not when he is tired and his head is just catching up with what’s going on. "What's with the questioning?"
Yuta considers this response. Finally he says, “Questions are normal when you’re getting to know someone.”
Sicheng sighs. “What’s the point, though?”
“In questions?”
“In getting to know me. Everything is temporary.” Sicheng watches Yuta’s face in the shadows of the light from the moon. “This is temporary. In the morning… I have to go in the morning.”
Yuta says, “Cool,” and smiles but the smile isn’t real, and there’s a look on his face that Sicheng can’t quite place.
Later, as he lies awake and wonders what the hell he is doing here, wasting time even for one night, Sicheng realises that the look on Yuta’s face was probably one of disappointment and for a moment he feels like crying.
Yuta asks Sicheng if he slept well the next morning and Sicheng just pulls a face. “Not really,” he says. “Never do.”
They’re sitting in the old dining hall, at a table next to the door. Yuta pours out two glasses of water from a glass crystal decanter and the juxtaposition of everything makes Sicheng laugh. “I’m pretty sure no one ever served tap water from a jug like that before the apocalypse.”
“That’s the beauty of everything going to shit,” Yuta says. “We can repurpose everything to be useful.” He passes Sicheng a glass. Their fingers touch and Sicheng is surprised by how cold Yuta’s hands are.
“I’ve been outside,” Yuta explains, like he’s just read Sicheng’s mind. “There’s an icy wind and dark clouds on their way.”
Sicheng frowns. “I should get on my way before the dark clouds arrive overhead.”
“Yeah,” Yuta says. “Hey, do you want to go swimming?”
And Sicheng doesn’t know why, because he doesn’t have time to be frivolous, but he says yes.
The basement leisure centre is an echoing chamber of white tile and it's probably a little creepy, the way that all abandoned spaces can feel to some, but Yuta hasn’t felt creeped out by silence, or anything much, for a long time. “Be careful on the tiles,” he says to Sicheng. “Or you’ll slip and hurt yourself.”
“Speaking of slipping…” Sicheng raises his hand and it must be throbbing with pain because he grimaces. “I can’t really swim with this dressing.”
Yuta takes Sicheng's arm and turns it over, checking the white, carefully knotted bandage for signs the wound is still bleeding. It looks as though Sicheng has undone Yuta's work from the morning before and re-tied it in a better way. “How did you keep it dry when you showered?” he asks.
“With difficulty.” Sicheng smiles. “I’ll just— I’ll stay in the shallow end and keep my hand out of the water."
"You don't have to come in." Yuta looks at the water. The pool has remained pretty much unchanged over the last six years. It's probably full of unseen dirt and germs, but, it hasn't harmed Yuta yet. He hasn't had much more than the odd cold or upset stomach in the last year, the same as it's always been throughout his life.
“What happens in water with your– uh, the electricity thing.” He can't help asking, even though he doesn't think Sicheng is going to answer him. Sicheng has evaded every curious question related to his condition, or whatever it is that means he crackles with the live power of an electric pylon, since he arrived here. Still, it doesn't mean Yuta is going to leave the subject alone, even if he doesn't want to drive his new friend away. "Is it, uh, safe for someone else?"
Sicheng looks at the pool and then back at Yuta and says, "I guess you'll find out." There is the hint of a smile at his lips.
Yuta shrugs and pulls his sweater over his head. If Sicheng expects this to scare him, he is going to get a surprise, because instead it sends a thrill through him that he hasn't felt in years. "Are you not gonna take off your clothes?” He grins at the face Sicheng makes, mouth pursed into a surprised line as Yuta unzips his jeans and pauses with his thumbs in the belt loops, ready to pull them down.
“You're not even changing into swimwear, are you?" Sicheng remarks. "You're just getting naked like it’s nothing.”
“Sicheng, I’ve been the only person around for years. If it wasn’t freezing cold I would be naked all the time.” Yuta laughs. “Also I’ve spent the last year working on my abs and would thoroughly enjoy showing them off, even to someone who recently threatened to do me some harm.” He sticks out his tongue.
Sicheng averts his eyes as Yuta continues to undress. Hovers, a little awkward, and then says, "Look, actually, maybe I should get going now," as Yuta gets into the water.
There is no conviction in his voice, but even if there was, Yuta would want to try to make him stay. It's selfish, maybe, but Yuta thinks that maybe this is meant to be: Sicheng was meant to wander into view on a Saturday morning as Yuta counted cars, and Yuta was meant to invite him back here to his odd-ball domestic existence. Or maybe it was all a coincidence, Yuta doesn't know. He just knows that Sicheng is having some sort of internal panic about this entire situation, and if he leaves now he'll only walk into the incoming storm and be no further forward in his search for the little brother he's talked about.
"Swim first," Yuta says. He brings his wet hands up to his face and splashes handfuls of cold water over his head. "And then we can get you back on the road. What do you say?"
Sicheng says nothing, but he does unzip the old hoodie Yuta had left outside his room with his uninjured hand. Once he's down to his underwear, he gives Yuta a pointed look. "They're staying on," he says.
"You tell me like I would care either way," Yuta replies with a smile he can't help. He's loving having someone to exchange stupid comments like this with, he's missed the unpredictability of another person, and it helps that it's coming oh-so-easy to flirt with Sicheng because he is so attractive it's almost unbelievable. "Wait, that doesn't glow neon green too, does it?"
"No, it fucking does not!" Sicheng splashes water across the pool at him. "You're so... Ugh."
Yuta laughs as he dodges the spray. He almost splashes back, but resists the urge. It wouldn't be a fair fight, what with his two available hands to Sicheng's one. Nothing has changed in the water since Sicheng got in, so Yuta guesses he’s safe from possible death for now, which is somewhat of a relief.
"I'm what?" he asks.
Sicheng just rolls his eyes as he leans against the wall at the shallow end of the pool and mutters something under his breath that Yuta guesses is definitely an insult. The water laps at his waist and it distracts Yuta in a way that coils in the pit of his stomach. "I thought you were going to swim. Leave me to hang out in the shallow end in peace," he says, eyebrows raised.
Yuta walks backwards, further onto the slope entering the deeper part of the pool, until the water reaches level with his chest. "Why? Are you going to get out and leave when my back is turned?"
"I'm tempted to," Sicheng says. But, to Yuta's delight, he doesn't move an inch, and he still doesn’t leave after they get out of the pool. Or after they’ve eaten dry crackers off of fine china plates. He doesn’t leave after Yuta re-dresses his wound with awkward fingers and he doesn’t leave when Yuta leaves him alone to check the exits (one of his least favourite rituals). He stays, and Yuta kind of loves him for it.
The sky outside of the window is tinged in a burnt orange glow as the sun begins to set. Sicheng stares out of the window and imagines that he’s out there, making his way through downtown and out of the city centre, back into the suburbs as he continues his search for Renjun. Renjun, who is out there alone, waiting for him. Renjun, who Sicheng isn’t worthy of, because he isn’t out there looking for him at all.
“What’s up?”
“I didn’t leave.” He turns back to find Yuta behind him. Sicheng doesn’t know how he’s been standing there, but it doesn’t unnerve him like it used to when the guards watched him from the doorway of the testing facilities. “I was meant to leave today. I need to get out there and back on the road.” And yet, he’s purposely let the day slip by distracting himself with dumb things like swimming and looking through abandoned suitcases for clothes he doesn’t need that might fit him. Dumb things like flirting with a near-stranger.
Yuta gestures to his bandaged hand. “You’re— you’re having a rest. Everyone needs a rest. You’re injured.” Sicheng finds him almost convincing, or maybe he just wants to be convinced.
“I’m wasting time here,” he says, voice flat. “This is a waste of my time.”
Yuta visibly flinches at the harsh words. “Thanks,” he mutters.
“I didn’t mean… Sorry. I just can’t believe you’ve not seen anyone for years…” Sicheng runs his fingers through his hair. It’s so unfair. “Can there really be no one else left?”
“I don’t know about other parts of the world. Maybe there are.” Yuta shrugs and sits down on the unmade bed. “Can’t exactly just pop on the internet and check in, can we?”
“Have you ever tried to– you know, go out there?” Sicheng asks. “Don’t you wonder what’s out there beyond the city?”
“And leave my penthouse bachelor lifestyle?” Yuta smiles. "Yes, actually, I did. It was depressing. I walked the streets alone just like you, for a while. Except I didn’t have any family left to look for, so I just came back to the city and ended up here. Boring, right?”
“No, I get it.” Sicheng sits down next to him. “Anyway, you might get bored here, but at least you’re free,” he says. And it’s cryptic, he knows, but for once Yuta doesn’t question him. Instead he just places his cold hand in Sicheng’s and squeezes it.
“Let’s eat,” he says. “Eat and sleep and then you’ll leave, yeah?”
Sicheng nods, but he’s lying to himself and they both know it.
Sicheng lies awake in the bizarrely big bed he's chosen to sleep in and thinks about the last forty eight hours and all that it has brought. Two nights ago, he had spent the night wrapped in a dusty tarpaulin sheet in the outhouse of a house with an overgrown garden. The garden was filled with weeds and bushes, the hardy type that had continued to grow despite the radiation, when the majority of crops and flowers had died. Sicheng marvelled at them: after two years locked inside a guarded medical facility with an army who saw him and Renjun as weeds to be cultivated, the wild bushes had looked almost beautiful, if only because they were surviving here, on their own.
They reminded him of his brother: steadfast, and strong, and independent, and gave Sicheng hope that Renjun would be doing just fine without him.
He thinks about Renjun now, as he lies on silk sheets. He is only wearing a t-shirt and thin pants and, miraculously, he still feels warm. Sicheng can understand why Yuta has stayed here for so long, despite his clear loneliness. He can understand the draw of somewhere to call one's own and thinks maybe he would be the same if he didn't have someone to call his own instead. Sicheng's chest aches when he thinks about it. It's only been two weeks without Renjun and he's already a mess. How Yuta must feel, completely alone for all these years... Well, Sicheng can hardly bear to think about it.
Maybe that's why he's struggling to leave. Or maybe he's just putting off the inevitable - the cold, the dark and the fear that he might never make things right. He should never have ran into the storm that night, leaving Renjun behind, and deep down Sicheng is worried he might have lost him for good.
Sicheng lies awake, tosses and turns over and over again, and then, after what seems like hours but probably isn't, he gets out of bed and makes his way to the stairwell.
Yuta wakes up to a gentle knock on the door of his suite. At first he’s startled– confused and disoriented. He doesn’t get knocks on his bedroom door; there’s no one there to knock. But then he remembers piercing eyes and static electricity, and the fact that he isn’t alone at all. Sicheng knocks again (at least, Yuta hopes it’s Sicheng. He is not prepared for any other sort of surprise, not in his underwear in the middle of the night) and Yuta clears his throat. Calls, “Come in?” because the door isn’t locked, the magnetised locking system doesn’t work anymore, and Sicheng clearly knows this.
He’s knocking out of courtesy, Yuta realises and he finds it awfully cute. He gets out of bed, heading towards the door. His hand is on the door-handle when Sicheng pushes the door open and looks inside.
“Oh, sorry,” he says as he realises their close proximity. “I wasn’t sure if it was okay for me to, uh, just come in?”
“It’s fine.” Yuta steps back and Sicheng follows him into the suite. “Is everything okay?” He asks. He fumbles for the lighter he knows has fluid in it, and flicks it on. Sicheng’s face lights up a golden yellow. His hair is sticking up beside his ear.
“I can’t sleep,” he says, wrapping his arms around his body. He rubs at his bare arms.
“Are you cold?” Yuta asks. “Do you need more blankets?”
Sicheng shakes his head. “I’m not cold,” he replies. He takes a breath. “Can I sleep in here?”
Yuta isn’t sure what he was expecting Sicheng to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. It makes his heart jump a little in his chest, which he knows is dumb, but he can’t help it. There’s something about Sicheng that makes Yuta want Sicheng to trust him. There’s a lot about him that is intriguing, and everything about him is downright beautiful. And maybe Yuta is a lot more touch-starved than he ever thought he could be, but he craves the attention of his guest so much it’s almost embarrassing.
“Do you want me to take the floor, or..?”
Sicheng shakes his head again. There is a crease of worry, or anxiety, something, in his forehead and Yuta wants to place a finger on it. “The beds are really big,” Sicheng says. “It’s weird, I can’t– I can’t settle, can’t sleep, really. And I just thought that…” He trails off. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“We can share, if that’s what you want.” Yuta takes his thumb off the lighter and waits until the flame has been distinguished before he allows himself to smile. “Come on, get in before it gets too cold.”
Sicheng takes the left side of the bed, which is kind of perfect, Yuta thinks, because he has always slept on the right side. “Thank you,” he says, once they’re under the duvet, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling. “For taking me in when I was hurt.”
“Thank you for not hurting me when I crept up on you in the street,” Yuta quips.
Sicheng takes a moment to reply. “I wasn’t going to hurt you, not really,” he says.
“But you could have,” Yuta points out. It’s not a question, now. He can tell that there is power in Sicheng. He can see that Sicheng has secrets he is scared to share, but he gets it. “Thank you for not leaving me yet.”
Sicheng says, “Not yet,” and Yuta’s heart sinks a little. It might only have been two days since he met Sicheng, but, damn it, he doesn’t want to go back to how it was before now, when screaming into the empty city sky was his constant. He wants this to be his constant, too.
“When?” Yuta asks, but Sicheng doesn’t reply.
It’s Sicheng who finds Yuta’s hand in the dark half an hour later, fingertips gliding over his wrist to find the right spot, and as they lie there, in the centre of a stupidly big bed, Yuta thinks about two nights ago when he slept alone, completely and utterly alone, and wonders if he’ll ever truly be able to get over this when Sicheng inevitably has to move on.
He thinks about whispering goodnight, but he’s too warm and too content, so instead he allows sleep to take him.
Sicheng is dreaming - he must be dreaming, because he’s warm and comfortable, and he’s woken up past sunrise.
He doesn’t even remember the last night he slept through the entire night. When the nuclear bombs first started dropping, the world was a sleepless frenzy of terror. Sicheng and his family sat together in front of the television watching twenty four hour footage of devastation. Footage of journalists standing against a backdrop of demolished cities and reporting hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Renjun had asked their father, “We’re still safe though, right?” And their father hadn’t replied because he hadn’t wanted to lie.
Sicheng respected that about him.
When people in their neighbourhood started to fall sick, the worldwide impact of the nuclear fallout becoming clearer to all, Sicheng would lie awake and wonder what would become of all of the people he loved, the people he liked and the people he barely knew, too. The television continued to play twenty four hours a day. Sicheng’s bed felt like a prison, somewhere he’d grow sicker and sicker like his parents did, so he stopped sleeping, stayed up and watched television until there was no longer constant broadcasts, and then there were no longer broadcasts at all, and then, after a while, there was no electricity to watch the static of cancelled programming on the television, anyway.
By the time that Sicheng and Renjun were with the so-called World Military, Sicheng had perfected sleeping awake, listening to his brother’s breathing in the dark, and he’d forgotten what rest ever really was. Rest was a luxury that no longer existed, or so he thought. Now, he thinks it might still exist in small embraces and silk sheets.
Yuta is already awake, lounging in the chair next to the bed, legs curled up underneath him. He looks small like this, less like the King of his hotel-castle and more like the almost-twenty three year old lost boy he clearly tries his best to hide. “Good morning,” he says. His hair is wild, wavy around his face. He tucks it behind his ears. “Did you sleep well in my bed, oh gorgeous one?”
Sicheng knows he blushes, but he can’t help it. He isn’t used to compliments, but he thinks he could get used to them, if he allowed himself to. He shouldn’t allow himself to get used to anything about Yuta.
(He wants to though, and it scares him.)
“I slept well, thank you for asking.” He stretches his limbs out into a starfish shape. “My body feels like liquid gold.”
“Hmm.” Yuta smiles at him, and it’s a genuine smile that appears in his eyes as well as on his mouth. “I only got an electric shock from you a couple of times.”
“Ah.” Sicheng pulls an apologetic face. “Sorry.”
Yuta shrugs. “It was my fault, kind of kept accidentally taking up your side.”
Sicheng laughs at this admission. “I didn’t notice,” he says. “I suppose you’re used to having the whole bed to yourself though.”
“I suppose I am,” Yuta says. “It wasn’t a bad thing, though– sharing with you. It was nice.” Now it’s his turn to blush and Sicheng fights the urge to let it affect him too. He turns away, focuses on getting up. The carpet is so soft against his bare feet that it comes as a surprise.
“Why did you choose this place?” He asks, heading towards the window. “It’s not the very fanciest hotel in the city, is it?”
Yuta stays sitting in the armchair, but he shifts his body and rests his chin on the top of the back-rest. “No, but it’s the tallest. I have a vantage point here,” he explains.
Sicheng considers this. “To spot danger?”
Yuta grins up at him from the chair. “I spotted you didn’t I?”
Sicheng looks back out of the window and smiles. Yuta is a stupid flirt, but he’s good at it, especially considering he’s been alone for so long. Or maybe that’s just given him ample time to practise. “I guess you did.”
What follows is silence - or, not silence as such, not with the electricity crackling in his ears - but something akin to it. Sicheng looks out at the dark clouds rolling in, looks down at the billboard signs on the street below, advertising movies that never ended up showing in theatres six years before.
It’s Yuta who speaks again first. “What’s with the eyes, Dong Sicheng?”
Sicheng stills. He doesn’t want to talk about this, not now, not yet. He shakes his head. “Later. Ask me another one,” he says. He doesn’t look back round.
“Okay.” Yuta hums in thought. “Got one! Do you remember Summers from when you were a kid?” He asks, and the question throws Sicheng off guard. He loved Summer back when he was young. What he would give now to lie out on the beach and listen to the lapping of a calm lake on the shore again.
“Oh, yes!” He turns back to Yuta. His heart aches but it feels good to think about happier times, as bittersweet as the memories are tinged. “I loved them.”
Yuta smiles at him - a genuine, kind smile, that makes Sicheng want to hold his hand. “Good,” he says. “Tell me everything.”
So Sicheng does.
They sit at the edge of the swimming pool, Sicheng with the cuffs of his jeans rolled up to just under his knees and Yuta in surf shorts left behind years ago by a guest, and look down at their feet in the water.
They haven't stopped talking all morning, through their meagre breakfast of stale crackers off china plates at the best table in the hotel restaurant (something that makes Sicheng laugh when Yuta leads him to the table and pulls out his chair like the finest of Maitre D's), through checking Sicheng's wound, which is healing over nicely into a fresh pale pink scar of flesh in the middle of his palm, and they talk now, at what Yuta's grandfather's watch tells him is a little before midday, as they watch their their feet dance through the water, their reflections in the water just shadows.
Yuta has never felt so alive.
They talk about everything. From silly conversations about what they remember of old comics, the taste of their favourite childhood snacks, to more pressing matters like when the giant water tanks on the roof of the hotel are going to finally run out of water for their one long-term guest. Yuta says, "Or two guests," and tries to find a hint of what Sicheng is thinking from the look on his face, but he can't figure it out.
"What did you imagine your life would be like by now, before everything changed?" Yuta asks. "When you were a teenager, what did you imagine you'd be doing just before your twenty-first birthday?"
Sicheng twists his mouth. "I can't remember," he says.
"Yes you can!" Yuta nudges Sicheng's shoulder with his own. "You're pretending!"
"Fine, but it sounds stupid now, so immature." Sicheng hides his face, forehead resting against Yuta's shoulder. "I just wanted to be rich when I was older. Luxury cars, nice suits, date models... Stop laughing!" He scolds.
Yuta can't help the shake of his shoulders as he laughs. "I'm not laughing at you," He promises. "I'm laughing because I was the same. I wanted to be a professional soccer player. I was going to captain the national team and probably spend all my time with hot models too."
Sicheng groans. "Right now couldn't be more different, could it?"
"I don't know," Yuta says. "I spend all my time right now with you, and you're- you know– model hot."
Sicheng shakes his head. "No, I'm a wreck." He holds up his hand. “Please don’t think otherwise.”
"Here's a secret. We're all just wrecks, now. Me especially." Yuta places a finger over his lips. "Don't tell anyone."
Sicheng smiles. “Our secret,” he says, and then he adds, “For the record, you’re very good looking too, you know, just– you keep giving me these compliments, so I thought you should know.”
Yuta kicks gently at his foot in the water. “Model hot?”
“I don’t know… Are you tall enough to be a model?” Sicheng replies, kicking back. He’s all innocent voice and fluttering eyelashes, but the glint in his eyes gives away that he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Harsh!” Yuta feigns shock. “You know, Dong Sicheng, you’re kind of mean, but I like it. I like you.”
“I like you too,” Sicheng says, almost too quiet for Yuta to hear over the static, and then they watch their feet swirling the cloudy water until their toes turn to wrinkled prunes.
Sicheng spends the rest of the afternoon thinking about the conversation they’d had at the side of the pool, and then over-thinking it, again and again. He finds a tiny travel sewing kit in the closet of the hotel suite and uses it to darn the hole that had appeared in the shoulder of his jacket after he’d left the compound. He concentrates on the stitches, watches as the hole disappears and becomes complete again, and then he thinks about the hole he’s ripped between him and Renjun by letting them be separated. He thinks about completion: about what he truly needs to feel like a whole person and not a broken, fucked up, science experiment.
He thinks about Yuta, curled up in the armchair in his room, watching Sicheng with round, excited, eyes as they talked about childhood games and the way that flowers used to grow taller than themselves in their grandparent’s gardens. He thinks about Yuta’s bad attempts at bandaging him up, and the silly way he tries to disguise out of date scraps of food as gourmet meals even though the taste can’t be changed. He thinks about the fact that Yuta brought him into his home and let him sleep in his bed, and the fact he gets naked to swim.
Sicheng can feel his heartbeat against his chest and can hear the static in his ears and his thoughts linger for longer than they should on Yuta’s toned back and his slim waist.
He can’t stay here and fall in love. He has to go .
Yuta is talking about lighting a birthday candle he found in the kitchens as they eat a portion of something like porridge out of shiny, white china bowls. He mentions something about wanting to do it last year but it feeling like a waste of resources. Says, “It seems less of a waste this year. Since there’s two of us.”
Sicheng takes a breath, looks down at the food and says, “I won’t be here for your birthday.”
“Our birthdays.” Yuta looks at him. “Yours too.”
“I can’t stay. Sorry.” Sicheng continues to stare into the bowl of porridge. It’s thick, like treacle stuck at the back of his mouth. But he has to keep going, to explain why he can’t be here any longer. Even if part of him wants to be. “I need to find my brother, I have to keep looking. I think maybe I need to find my way back to where we were. Staying here isn’t– it’s not right.”
When he looks up, Yuta is watching him with a frown. “Yeah, okay.” Yuta purses his lips. He’s clearly been expecting this. Sicheng doesn’t blame him. Yuta drops his spoon into the bowl with a clatter and shakes his head. “Actually, no, it’s not. It’s not okay.”
Sicheng stiffens. “I don’t need your permission to leave.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Yuta rubs at his face. “I know you don’t...I just. I’m– I’m–”
“You’re lonely,” Sicheng finishes for him.
“Well, wouldn’t you be? Aren’t you?”
"I need to get back out there to find Renjun. And, anyway, I’m not good company. You don’t want to spend your birthday with me, I promise you.” He puts down his spoon, pushes his bowl away. “You don’t want anything to do with me.”
Sicheng has made his decision. He can’t let himself be distracted; he doesn’t want to be distracted. Except what scares him is that he does. He wants to be distracted from reality: from the pain, and the guilt, and the responsibility he feels. He wants to be distracted by the hands that held his hand and badly bandaged his wound, by the eyes that search his own, dark brown and hypnotising.
Yuta just sighs. His voice trembles just a little when he replies, “You have no idea what I want.”
Yuta sits by himself for a long time, until it feels normal to be alone again. It’s weird to think that after two years completely alone, a few days of company has had so much impact on him. It’s weird that he cares so much about Sicheng, about him being near. Or, maybe it isn’t weird at all. Maybe that’s just human.
Part of him wishes that his Saturday morning routine was different: that he had never been on the roof the week before when Sicheng had passed by. He’d been doing okay by himself, or as well as one can do in a ravaged wasteland of a world. Sure, it was lonely - he can’t deny that, but it was an existence of sorts, he thinks. He was fine before Sicheng.
A voice at the back of Yuta’s mind tells him he’s lying to himself. You’ve been waiting for him, it tells him. You’ve stayed alive all this time in the hope that you’re not alone.
Yuta can feel tears welling up at his eyes. There’s an angry sort of frustration that courses through him as he lets the tears fall. He wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand and kicks at the chair next to his petulantly, because he can, because he’s never seen any point in suppressing his emotions. He cries because he’s tired and he’s sad, and because after all of this, he’s going to be alone after all.
He won’t stand in Sicheng’s way - Sicheng has family out there to find, and he has determination and reason. He has a goal, and Yuta respects that. So he’ll help Sicheng get ready to leave, even if it’s going to hurt to watch him go.
Yuta takes the bowls to the kitchens and wipes them down with an old towel; there’s no point wasting water after every meal. He sets them back on the counter and heads back out to the lobby to make the walk back up to the suites on the top floors. It’s already getting dark outside, he notes, and he wonders if the sun has started setting even earlier in some new fucked up weather change, or whether there are just black clouds overhead.
Neither seem like particularly appealing weather.
“What are you upto in here?” Yuta stands in the doorway of the Penthouse suite, and Sicheng startles, as though he’s been caught somewhere he shouldn’t be. He kind of has - he’d come up to Yuta’s room to see if he was here, to tell him he was definitely leaving, and when the suite had been empty, he just hadn’t left. “Aren’t you getting ready to go?”
Sicheng watches him, standing there. “Hmm? Oh, yes. I just got distracted…” He gestures towards the window, where he’s been watching the sky change. He should have left already, but there’s something stopping him from taking that step. “The rain is getting heavier.”
Yuta joins him sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the world outside of the hotel. “That doesn’t look good,” he says. “So much lightning… I heard the thunder from the stairwell, but I thought maybe I was mistaken.” He flinches, then, and Sicheng guesses he’s giving out tiny electric shocks. He doesn’t move away, though, which Sicheng thinks is incredibly considerate of him.
“It’s an electrical storm,” he says. “It’s just getting started.”
“Like the one a few weeks ago.” Yuta nods. He is watching the side of Sicheng’s face and Sicheng wishes he would close his eyes. He feels vulnerable, like this. Between the storm and the proximity of Yuta’s warm skin to his, everything he feels is amped up to a million. “That was the night when you lost your brother, wasn’t it?”
“Oh. Yeah, I forgot I’d told you about that,” Sicheng admits. His skin is burning, static under the surface. The lightning is getting closer to the hotel, the thunder almost directly overhead now. “About there being a storm that night.”
Yuta is still watching him with something like awe or fondness, something that makes Sicheng’s throat feel tight. The lightning strikes are close together, every four or five seconds. It's scary, but it's beautiful too: the sky lit up like a festival, bright and hot and alive. He can feel it inside of him too, and Yuta’s eyes on him only makes it feel stronger: like he could burst into flames at any second. He can’t though, at least, he doesn’t think he can.
(Once he realised back with the army that the experiments had done something, caused something in him to change, he’d been so scared. He’d shied away from Renjun for days, worried to hurt him. Refused to sleep close to him, wishing the static ringing in his ears to dissipate. It never did.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Renjun had whispered in the night. “I’m your brother, stupid.”
“There’s something wrong with me,” Sicheng had whispered back.
Renjun had shaken his head vehemently. “Not wrong, just-- just different. Not wrong.”)
It had felt wrong, though. It still does, sometimes. There is more power in him, now, and it excites him and panics him in equal measure. He isn’t sure what he can do, but he has an idea. He’d wanted the alarm system inside the compound to turn off. He’d wanted the electronic gates to open. He’d wanted to escape. And the storm had come, and he’d thought about it harder than he’d ever thought about it before, and then: the sliding open of their cell door, confused shouts from along the hall, an open gate and giant hailstones and he and Renjun outside of the compound walls.
He’d caused it.
He’d caused it, and now Renjun is lost and Sicheng is scared, and he’s holding Yuta’s hand now and he can’t even remember reaching out and taking it.
Yuta says, “I’ve heard about people, changed by the levels of radiation and the electro-storms that we’ve been having. Mutated. I didn’t realise it could be this intense. Just from exposure.”
“Not normal exposure. Not like the type you’ve had.” Sicheng closes his eyes. “We went with the World Military, they promised us a new life… But they lied. They experimented on us, subjected us to prolonged, concentrated rays and kept us inside a cell. We were just experimental bodies for some weapons program.”
“Fuck.” Yuta’s other hand is balled into a fist by his side. “Fucking monsters, those people.”
Sicheng just takes a deep breath. Sometimes he feels like the monster.
“The storm… “ Yuta continues. “You can feel it inside of you, can’t you?”
Sicheng nods. Every time he blinks he sees flashes of light behind his eyelids. He says, “The storm is attracted to me, like a conductor. I– I make them worse. I made it worse, that night. When I lost him. I know that now.”
“It isn’t your fault.” Yuta reaches up and cups Sicheng’s face in his palm. His hand buzzes with static. But he doesn’t even flinch away this time, just presses a kiss to his cheek. When he pulls away, he says, “What’s with the eyes, Dong Sicheng?”
Sicheng smiles. “Honesty?” He says. “I haven’t got a clue. And that’s the honest truth. They just changed one day, just a consequence of all of the experiments, I guess. Sorry for a disappointing answer.”
“I didn’t really care about the answer, but thank you for telling me.” Yuta smiles back at him. “So, what now?”
“It’d be stupid to leave in this weather. I’ll have to wait for it to pass in the morning,” Sicheng reluctantly admits. He closes his eyes. “I know it no longer keeps things cold, but is there anything in the mini-bar in here?”
“Huh?”
“You said you save things like alcohol for a special occasion. It’s your birthday in a few hours, that’s special. We should celebrate,” Sicheng tells him. It isn’t strictly the only reason he has for wanting a drink - he needs to loosen up, to try to calm the buzzing in his ears, in his blood. He needs to feel something else.
Yuta shakes his head. “It’s empty, all the liquor is down in the basement.” He stands up and gestures towards the hallway. “Do you want me to go down and get something?”
“No, don’t go anywhere.” Sicheng stands up too. He takes hold of Yuta’s wrist and makes sure he’s looking at him, looking directly into his shining eyes, when he says, “I really am leaving tomorrow. I have to, you get that, right?”
“I get it.” Yuta looks sad, but he gives a half-smile, his eyes never leaving Sicheng's own, and nods. “Hey– If I kiss you, will I get an electric shock?”
“Probably,” Sicheng replies. He's still holding Yuta by the wrist and he can feel the energy between them. He can tell Yuta can too by the way that he licks at his bottom lip and gulps. “Yeah.”
“Damn it,” Yuta says, his voice barely a whisper, but he goes ahead and kisses him anyway, and Sicheng is oh so glad for it.
Kissing Sicheng is like a storm in itself: uncontrollable and exciting, and like nothing Yuta has felt before. Not that his past experiences can really compare. The teenage dates he went on when he was younger were nothing like this, nor were the desperate end-of-the-world fumbles he’d experienced when the world was first changed and it’s remaining population were scrambling to feel something other than fear. This isn’t just desperation or trepidation, it’s more than that. It feels like everything at once, like the storm outside is background music playing just for them, and even though the world is completely fucked, right now Yuta doesn’t care one bit.
His fingertips tingle as they trace Sicheng's spine, moving down along his lower back and along his hip-bones, until they come to rest at his waist. They part for air and Yuta struggles to catch his breath, mouth at the crook of Sicheng's neck. His skin smells like birthday candles, which is jarring and unexpected, but not wrong. Nothing about Sicheng is wrong, despite what he seems to think about himself. Sicheng works Yuta's sweater up over his head and his hair comes out all static crackles. "This is your fault." Yuta grins, smoothing down his hair.
"I'm not sorry," Sicheng replies. He takes off his own t-shirt in one swift motion; graceful, beautiful, and Yuta is determined to commit this to memory, for when he's gone.
When they kiss again, the storm behind them plays out in a crescendo, the wind howling, the thunder raging and, for the first time in as long as Yuta can remember, this feels like living and not just surviving. And living feels downright amazing.
Yuta wakes up the next morning aged twenty three and wrapped up in the limbs of a boy with green eyes whose skin sizzles with pure energy, and it’s by far his favourite ever start to a birthday.
Sicheng rolls over in his sleep, and Yuta slips from the bed, finds his sweater and pulls it on. The sky outside of the window is a pale turquoise, bright and welcoming. Yuta wonders when the storm passed over. They hadn’t paid it much attention last night, after all. Not once hands had began to wander, hot breath against cool skin and all of the tiny jolts of electricity that Yuta has learned come with pulling Sicheng’s body up against his.
Yuta stretches his arms above his head. He knows what he needs to do and it requires a large backpack, so he heads out of the suite and down to the left-luggage in the lobby to find something perfect for the task.
When he returns to his suite, Sicheng is still asleep; his mussed up hair fanned out behind his head on the pillow. He looks like an angel.
Yuta folds up pants and woolen sweaters and piles them up next to the bag. He rummages in one of the dressing table drawers and finds some empty pill containers that could come in useful, so he sets them down too. He needs room for at least one large canister of water, he decides, as he packs one of the miniature sewing kits the hotel has hundreds of into the front pocket of the bag. He can’t risk forgetting anything important.
He senses Sicheng stirring and when he looks up, Sicheng is sitting up, the duvet pulled up around his chest. He looks confused, and sleepy, and adorable as he says, “What are you doing?”
Yuta says, "Good morning. I'm packing."
"Packing what?" Sicheng scratches at the back of his head. He glances out of the window, eyes scrunched up against the sun that’s rising, and shining onto the glass as it does.
"Food, water, medicine. Bandages for when you slice your hands open on a rock or slip over, or whatever." Yuta grins. "We'll need two bags, probably. I wonder if we can carry more than one blanket?"
"We?" Sicheng pauses. “Are you saying..?”
"Just because I'm not scared of dying alone, doesn't mean I want to.” Yuta bites at his lip. “I’m coming with you, back to the compound or wherever we need to head out to, to find your brother. Is– Is that alright with you?”
“Oh.” Sicheng looks very much awake now. “Are you-- are you sure about this?”
Yuta nods. “I’m sure.”
“Then I think we’ll definitely need two bags,” Sicheng replies, and his smile could light a thousand candles. “I’ll help you pack.”
Sicheng celebrates his twenty first birthday for a second time, this time walking through tangled forest on the edge of the coast with Yuta in tow. It rains most of the day, a fresh spray of water that drenches his hair and soaks through his jacket. Yuta says, “Come here,” and puts an arm around his shoulder and another over his chest, capturing him in a hug as they walk, awkwardly, along the muddy pathway.
“We can’t walk like this for very long,” Sicheng says. “Or we’ll fall over.” But they walk like that for as long as they possibly can, giggling every time they almost lose their balance.
Yuta produces two jars of beans and a handful of some sort of dried vegetable - seaweed, maybe, and calls it, “A birthday feast, just for you.” It tastes terrible, but neither of them care. They use the compass on Yuta’s grandfather’s old watch to make sure they’re heading in what Sicheng is certain is the right direction back towards the compound. It doesn’t appear on any maps, being a government facility, so the tattered map of the local area that Yuta carries doesn’t help them much, but they keep it with them anyway.
“We’ll find him,” Yuta tells him, even though he can’t know that as truth or lie at all, and Sicheng appreciates it, regardless of how worried he is that this is going to be a fruitless search, even with two of them on it now.
They kiss that night under a scratchy blanket that barely covers their legs, hands cold and mouths hot, and Sicheng says, “Let’s close our eyes and pretend we’re in the Penthouse suite again,” but he is all-too familiar with sleeping rough, and no matter how close into Yuta’s shoulder he cuddles, he doesn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time, and neither does Yuta.
Sicheng feels guilty by their fourth night on the search, for taking Yuta from his comfortable bed back at the hotel. He says, “Maybe you shouldn’t have come with me,” and won’t look Yuta in the eye. “Maybe I’d be faster on my own.”
Yuta ignores his attempt at coldness and Sicheng guesses that he can see through the lies Sicheng has dressed up as insults, and Sicheng wonders what else about him Yuta has got all figured out. It makes him feel safe, like he can be completely himself, no matter what comes of it, and as Yuta’s thumb idly traces the fresh scar on Sicheng’s palm, Sicheng is thankful for the rock that tripped him over and lead to their introduction.
“Does it hurt?” Yuta asks him.
“No. I think it’s going to be fine,” Sicheng replies. And for once, he really, truly does.
He’s right, this time, because it’s less than three days later that they round a corner into a clearing and Sicheng says, “I recognise this.” He looks around, a memory licking at the corner of his consciousness. “I’m certain that this isn’t far from where I woke up after the storm. We’re definitely retracing my steps.”
It’s only six and a quarter hours after this that a figure appears from in between a group of tightly packed together trees and whistles to them quietly.
Sicheng’s heart stops for a second. He’d know that whistle anywhere– the special tune their father would use to retrieve their dog at the end of the day– and there is only one other person left in this world who would know that whistle too.
“Renjun!” he calls, and this time he doesn’t let go.
[Epilogue]
Nuclear winter isn't all that Yuta knows, now, because now he knows love, and he knows desire, and he knows what it feels like to be part of a family again.
Renjun has fierce eyes and a fierce wit and is a lot like his brother in that respect. He rolls his eyes as Yuta coos over Sicheng’s hair, which is growing out longer now, almost to his chin. Renjun has rolled his eyes a lot since he moved into the hotel with them all those months ago, not that Yuta minds one bit.
Renjun says, “He doesn’t look pretty, so don’t you dare say it.”
“He does so.” Yuta grins. He stops fussing over Sicheng to take his place at the railing on the edge of the rooftop of the Marriott hotel and asks, “Are you two ready?” to the brothers at his side.
Sicheng nods and Renjun laughs and then they scream into the sky, as loud as they can. They scream obscenities at the clouds and at the sun, up above them, burning itself out. They scream until their throats hurt, and their limbs feel looser, and then they sit down and catch their breath. Yuta counts the cars below.
It’s Sicheng who spots it first, across the park at the South of the city, and calls out to Yuta to look. He makes out a group of people, at least five or six, and although they’re tiny dots - pin-sized stickmen on the horizon - Yuta can tell that they’re moving towards downtown. They watch the procession in stunned silence, a flag above the crowd’s heads, flapping in the wind of the city streets.
“What does it say? On their flag?” Sicheng asks, as the group move in closer.
“I can’t tell,” Yuta replies. He strains his eyes, squinting to get a better view, but the neon letters can’t quite be made out yet. Yuta feels a strange sense of dejavu to the morning he met Sicheng, except now he has something to be frightened of – now he has family to protect.
Sicheng finally breaks the silence. “I think I can make out the letters, now,” he says. “N… C...”
“T.” Renjun finishes. “It says NCT. They’re– it’s not enemies!” He claps his hands. “This is crazy.”
“Why? Who are they?” Sicheng is playing the worried older brother now. His hair whips around his head in the wind, and Yuta makes a note to find some rubber bands from reception for him to tie it back now it’s getting longer. “What does that stand for?”
Renjun leans over the railing, eyes never leaving the party below. “I never found out. I met them briefly after I left the compound, they helped me stay hidden until the soldiers gave up.”
“You met–” Sicheng sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.“Why didn’t you ever tell us this?”
Renjun shrugs. “I wasn’t sure if it was a dream,” he says, and Yuta chuckles. He knows that feeling. “But they’re good people, orphans just like us, I promise.”
They all look at each other, asking a silent question that lingers in the air. Yuta nods first. “Come on, then. Let’s go and introduce ourselves,” he says. And it could be a terrible idea - it could be dangerous, but then, they have danger on their side, too. Yuta is reminded of it every time he kisses his boyfriend and comes away with tingling lips or rolls over in the night and gets an electric shock.
The three of them make their way down the steps, two at a time, and when they step out of the lobby and into the street outside, the sky above them is clear and all around them is hope.