Vengeance

thirty one

When everyone had finally fallen asleep, Kyungsoon was left working on her own in the lab, focused intensely on the sample before her. Inspiration had struck her only moments ago and she felt certain if she just kept pushing through, she could get it to work.

Only one thing could hamper her progress.

"Soon-ah?"

She paused her work, turning at the familiar voice of her little brother. She looked around, seeing that Yeosang had fallen asleep. No one would know if she just went to console him.

After everything that had happened over the past few weeks, she couldn't help but worry about Saem. She knew she never should have brought him along to the venue. Her anger had blinded her to the dangers ahead of them. She thought of herself as invincible with the power to control all of the zombies. She hadn't ever expected to lose.

After she'd been shot, she started to regain her common sense. Waking up to her crying brother made clear the impact it was having on him. At first she'd assumed the bullet hadn't been fatal. That was why she never even suspected Saem had been shot too. He didn't look when it happened so he didn't remember it, but Seungmin and Jeongin had filled her in on what happened.

When she woke up, Saem was angry beyond measure and she couldn't get him to calm down. He refused to listen to her until she said she was sure they would come back. When he heard this, he started getting ideas. He wanted to make Changbin suffer for what he'd done to her, which was why he'd taken Felix away. To be safe, he'd also given him the injection, now that they knew it made them easy to control. She went along with it only after he promised he'd stay in the bathroom too, where it was safe. Not knowing the bullets wouldn't hurt him, she was afraid of what they would do if they knew what he had planned.

In order to keep him off of their radar, she'd taken Hongjoong with her for protection, as well as motivation for Ateez members to find her first. She had planned to make Hongjoong speak sooner, but Saem acted first. When that gunshot sounded through the hallway, she truly thought her brother was dead.

She hardly even remembered the rest.

Her fury took over. She hadn't intended to hurt anyone. But when she saw them taking him away, she couldn't just sit still and let them have it their way. In that moment, all she wanted was bloodshed. She knew she would die with him but she didn't care. She'd wreak as much carnage as she could before then.

By the time she came to, they were in the mansion, chained up. But the only thing she cared about was seeing her brother next to her, alive.

At first she had no intention of helping them after they'd hurt them twice. But days of sitting in the tiny room with her little brother had taught her the scary truth of her virus. Saem was still so filled with rage.

He tried to plot with her, tried to come up with plans to bring them down once and for all, to fill the world with the mindless so only those that mattered would be left. He wanted to kill all of them.

It wasn't like him. Nothing that had happened could've made him so spiteful except for her defective virus. Without the mindless, natural instinct to attack, the rabid spirit in them had nowhere to go. It had all been turned into irrational anger, a sort of blind fury.

At first she had thought this was something she needed to cure. But with the prospect of working with the special serum itself, she only had to remove the side effect along with the mind control. Once combined with the weak antibodies in the temporary cure, the regenerative properties of the special serum could enhance the cure's duration to be infinite.

It would turn everyone back to normal.

"Soon-ah, why are you still working? It's late."

She stepped away, creeping up beside the door and taking a seat before it.

"I think I've figured it out, Saem. How to fix us. How to save Soonbok."

He was quiet a moment.

"You found a cure?"

She nodded, placing her hand on the door.

"I'm gonna save you, and everyone else. It won't make up for what I've done, but it's the least I can do."

He was quiet a moment before continuing as if he hadn't paid attention to a word she'd said.

"Soon-ah, you can finish it in the morning. Go to sleep."

She laughed, standing and stretching her limbs. She'd been sitting at that desk for so long her shoulders were tight with tension and her lower back ached. A yawn took over her mouth as she shook her head, trying to blink her eyes awake.

"I know, but I'm so close. Just a little longer and I'll have it. I can't stop now."

But as the words left her mouth, she yawned again, feeling drowsier by the second.

"You sound tired. You need to take care of yourself, noona."

She rubbed her eyes, looking at the clock. It was nearly five in the morning.

"I guess I could take a short nap. I just want to have it done when Yeosang wakes up. He'll be so excited."

Saem didn't say anything else, evidently uninterested in her new friends. She figured he would be, since he'd never felt very warm about any of them. But she would help him see that they weren't so bad.

Once she got a little rest.

She started to walk back to lie down when her energy began to run out completely and she tipped over, collapsing to the floor in exhaustion.