The Labyrinth-Ateez x reader

Trash

 Y/N woke up in nowhere. She opened her eyes and above her saw a somber sky, but the bare ground beside her was harshly lit, like pictures she had seen on the moon. Perhaps she was on the moon, for all she knew. She had been at a ball, that much she could remember. Where it was, and how she had gotten there, and why — nothing came back to her; just the ball. She closed her eyes at the memory of Hongjoong, hot with shame at how she had succumbed to his charm. She felt soiled by what had ensued in the ballroom. Somehow, it had been her fault. Those men who pawed her, Hongjoong trying so rudely to force a kiss upon her — had she been truly innocent, they would not have behaved like that toward her, would they? "What was I doing?" she asked aloud. She sat up and looked about her. What she saw was an utterly desolate landscape, a desert whose only features were heaps and scraps of junk. Y/N's face was blank with despair. There was nothing to do here, nothing. No one in sight. It was a place where you would soon forget your own name. With an effort, she stood up. The first step she took landed on a small pile of rags. The rags moved, suddenly, beneath her foot. She jumped back. "'Ere!" said an old woman's voice. "Git off my back!" "Sorry," Y/N apologized instinctively without knowing whom or what she was addressing. A section of the rags stood up. Y/N saw that it was actually a pile of junk, stacked up on the bent back of a little old woman. At the same time it dawned on her that other mounds of garbage were in reality loads on the backs of other people, who were moving very slowly across the moonscape. She spotted the painted chair from the ballroom not far away, surmounting a pile that someone had collected. The junk woman's puckered face was staring closely at her from beneath a load of bent and battered metal objects, discarded clothes, chipped crockery, and broken furniture that she bore. "Why don't you look where you're going, young woman?" "I was looking," Y/N answered, slightly aggrieved. "Then where are you going?" "Oh ... er ... well, I can't remember." The junk woman sniffed. "You can't look where you're going if you don't know where you're going." Y/N thought that they could have argued the point, but she decided politeness would serve her better. She looked around and said, "I mean, I was searching for something." The junk woman chuckled, mollified. "Well, of course you was, dearie. We'se all searching for something, ain't we? But yer got to have sharp eyes if yer going to find anything. Now me, I found lots of things." And she glanced upward, indicating the burden of junk piled up on her back. Y/N looked harder at the woman's rubbish trove and found it curiously interesting to her. "Why," she exclaimed, "so you have!" The junk woman grunted with satisfaction. "There's a cookie tin," Y/N observed, "and a colander, and some pieces of candle ..." "Oh, yes." The junk woman was nodding. "It's hard to find classy stuff like this nowadays." "I suppose so." Y/N was looking past the old woman. Occasionally a pile of junk would arise on the back of someone who wandered across to try the pickings in another mound. All of them were heading, desultorily, in the same direction, as though making for home at the end of the day. "But don't you worry, dearie." The junk woman had become like a grandmother to her now. "I'll give you a few things, to get you started. How's that?" "Oh," Y/N said uncertainly, "thank you." The junk woman had started to trudge along in the same direction as the others. Y/N walked along beside her. As she went, the old woman rummaged with one hand among the pile of junk on her back, feeling for something. Y/N watched her anxiously, fearing that the whole load could come crashing down around her if she pulled out one item. Eventually the junk woman said, "Ha," and extracted what she wanted. She handed it to Y/N. It was Launcelot. Y/N swallowed, and smiled with childish joy. "Launcelot!" she cried, hugging him. "Thank you," she told the junk woman, "Thank you." It was as though she were again the little girl being given the teddy bear by her father. "That's what you was looking for, ain't it?" the old woman asked, kindly. Y/N nodded eagerly, clasping Launcelot. "Yes. I'd forgotten." She sighed, and gave the teddy bear a kiss. "Now," the junk woman said, "why don't you go in there and see if there's anything else you'd like?" She was pointing to a sort of tent they had come to, as colorless as the rest of nowhere. The woman bent down and pulled back a flap of the tent. Y/N took a step forward, saw what was inside the tent, and opened her eyes and mouth wide. It was her own room.