chaennie one shots

I don't have a reason to be, if I can't be with you

Sometimes, Jennie thinks to herself, she's just too damn compassionate.

Like right now, when she drives her trusty axe directly into the brain of one of the infected.

or

The world crumbles to pieces and Jennie's just trying to keep it all together.

-----

It's blindingly bright outside.

But that might be because it's the first time Jennie's left her shelter in days. It's just dangerous now, is all, even though the streets have been mostly empty for months.

If she cranes her neck hard enough, she can just see the tip of the church on the next street over where people flocked to the first few days after the virus struck. It's also, coincidentally, where Jennie made her first kill.

It was frightening – horrifying – and even though Jennie's killed plenty of others since, that's the one she has nightmares about. Chaeyoung had been scared, too –

Jennie shakes the thought from her brain. Thinking about Chaeyoung makes her too sad, too withdrawn, and that'll kill her sooner than anything else.

The little drugstore Jennie is in has been mostly wiped clean, but there are still a few beat up cans of ravioli that she stuffs in her bag. She only makes it a few steps out of the store when she hears it.

A loud, rattling breath and shuffling, dragging feet.

She turns very slowly – they don't react well to sudden movements, she's learned – and there it is.

She knows him. Or she used to anyway. He was her history professor in the class she was taking when the whole world ended. Dr. Kwon was kind, funny, a good lecturer – Jennie really doesn't want to kill him.

(He's already dead, technically, but that doesn't stop the weird niggling feeling in her gut when she has to bash in the brains of someone she used to know.)

He's just standing now, staring emptily at a car. He's decomposed enough for Jennie to relax a little; whatever bit him isn't still lingering around. He's got the typical look of those infected by the virus: hunched shoulders, fingers gnarled into claws, sunken cheeks and eyes. He's got dried guts on the front of his shirt, which means he probably hasn't eaten in a while. He's hungry, and that's bad news for Jennie.

She carefully slides her hands down the emergency axe she stole from a hotel nearly two years ago (the night of her first kill) and grips comfortably at the worn handle.

Maybe she can get away without a fight. There may be only one infected that she can see, but avoiding the fight was always the best way to survive – it's how she's survived nearly two years (and the last few months on her own).

She takes a slow, hesitant step backwards.

Crunch.

Kwon's head snaps towards her in an instant. Jennie takes off, the glass under her feet scattering as she does.

Unlike every horror movie that Jennie was so fond of pre-apocalypse, these zombies aren't supernaturally fast or strong. They run only as fast as the person they used to be could run. They also tended to be a little more uncoordinated – clumsy, even.

Jennie hates to use that word, though – zombie. She used to wonder (complain) to Chaeyoung about zombie movies.

"We all know they're zombies," Jennie would say. "Why do they just make up some other term when we have a word specifically for this use?"