Before the Day Ends // Stray Kids

Chapter 1

Class was over. The bell hadn't rung, but the kids had gone rogue, and the teacher didn't have the energy to get them focused again.

Loud voices surrounded Jisung, trapping him. He decided to just ignore it. Even if some of the words strewn out of the kid's mouths were vile attacks against him. He didn't mind. He was used to it.

Jisung twirled his pencil between his fingers, readjusting his grip before he continued the drawing he had been working on. His tongue was stuck to the side of his mouth, protruding his cheek out as he concentrated. His eraser had broken. He refused to mess up.

The bell sang above him, alerting the kids that they could finally escape that hellhole of an English class. Jisung pursed his lips, shutting his sketchbook close with one hand, afterward shoving his one and only pencil into its curled spine. He had lost all the others.

Once his sketchbook was safely tucked into his backpack, he swung the right strap over his shoulder, not bothering to push in his chair before exiting the classroom. He also didn't bother apologizing to the people he hit with his backpack on the way out. He actually took some pride in that.

The hallway was a disaster. Teenagers were pushed against the lockers as their lips were attached to someone's face, acting like they were sucking the life out of each other. Jisung stumbled right and left as people were shoved into him. Some on accident, some on purpose. The ones done on purpose were always painfully obvious. But like always, he didn't give a shit. Not anymore.

The familiarity of a certain someone's shoulder-length black hair caught Jisung's eye, and he allowed a smirk to rest on his face.

Once the two approached each other, Jisung removed something from his jacket, reading it one last time before discreetly tucking it into Hyunjin's back pocket.

The smirk never left Jisung's face, even as he stepped away from the boy, and a smirk of his own snaked up onto Hyunjin's lips.

~~~

Looking left and then right, Hyunjin ducked under the metal chain that blocked off the back hallway from the rest of the school.

No one knew why it had been blocked off. There were hundreds of speculations.  A science experiment that went haywire, a ghost that the school couldn't pray away, a murder that the school wanted to hide.

Hyunjin didn't care. He didn't care if zombies had invaded that back hallway. It was abandoned, and that's all he needed.

He sunk down the wall, stopping right before his butt it the ground. He had already removed the note Jisung had given to him from his pocket.

A smile dawned on his face once he read it.

Crumpling the note up, he tossed it into the first trashcan he could find. He didn't care if other people saw it. It's not like they'd be able to decipher it anyway.

~~~

"It's his?" Jisung asked, crouching down next to a backpack Hyunjin had flung to the floor.

"Positive."

Jisung nodded before pulling a small box out of his pocket. Hyunjin followed the boy's lead and removed something of his own from his bag. A water bottle. 

He drenched the liquid inside onto the backpack, tossing the bottle behind him once it was nearly empty. The remaining contents bled onto the grey concrete as the bottle was left abandoned.

Jisung pushed the box open, pinching a small match between his fingers. Once in his grasp, Han shut the box, swiftly slid the match across it, and allowed the fire created to burn.

He sat there for a second, watching as the fire slowly crept down further and further to his fingers, ready to burn them to a crisp as soon as they made contact. About two centimeters before it reached his hand, Jisung flicked the match towards the backpack, and watched as it devoured the liquid soaking it in flames.