Stay Alive [BTS fanfic]

Discarded Trash

It took three days for the water to go down. Han Mo-sae noticed the most out of anyone. He put on some work gear and maneuvered his body down into the sewer below the grate to check things out, discovering a rotting mass of old flyers and garbage blocking the pipe. He grimaced, and crawled back out to get the right tools. 

Bichna hung her arm down and held the flashlight for him, and he filled a bag with all of the trash, passing it up to her before climbing out. "It shouldn't flood again," he informed her. "I unblocked the connection to the rest of the sewer."

"Good, because now you need a bath," she retorted, looking him over. He just chuckled, knowing full well there was something gross in his hair, he could feel it. Ah, she won't touch me anyway, he thought with resignation.

Another thing he noticed was the creek along the field where they dumped the buckets was very high and flowing fast. The next time they did a dump run he gave it a wary look and cautioned the other three to be careful.

Bichna was in agreement, staring at the water for a moment before they went to work. It wasn't an all day event but it was pretty labor intensive, with the four of them digging the trench. Mo-sae always dumped the toilet buckets on his own so the others didn't have to get close and personal with the awful smell. They quickly shoveled the dirt back over.

"I bet this is some kind of biological hazard," the banker remarked. "It's probably illegal."

"Doesn't matter. It works for now, so it's somebody else's future problem," Mo-sae replied, like he didn't care. The four of them knew in their hearts that with the state their hometown was in, they would probably leave and not come back. 

Mo-sae's family had lost the farm years ago so there was nothing keeping him here. From what he'd heard from Lau, the vehicle repair shop he'd worked at had burned down. It would take years to rebuild this place.

The banker was on the sanitation team to try and repair his karma after years of denying loans to people and businesses, that might have been able to get back on their feet and pay it off if they'd been given the money. A lot of lost dreams had come from him following the rules, and he carried around that guilt.

Their last companion was a carpenter by trade, and a husband and father. At least it had been that way last time he checked. Every day he hoped and prayed that his wife and two kids had been evacuated from town, and not... There were too many horror stories passed around when the civilians sat around talking to each other. "I don't know what I will do if I never find them again," he'd said when he'd first opened up about it.

"Isn't there something we could do about the bio-hazard?" the banker argued.

"Maybe not the bacteria part, but for the harsh metals we could plant sunflowers," Bichna suggested as she kept shoveling dirt. "They pull that kind of thing out of the soil."

Mo-sae looked at her with astonishment. "Where did you hear that from?"

"Ritsu unnie had these herbalist textbooks that talk about the benefits of all sorts of plants. I must have read it in one of those," she admitted.

"Isn't the biggest exporter of sunflower seed the Ukraine?" the banker pointed out then, and the four of them paused for a second to think on that.

Yes, they are one of them. I wonder if the sunflowers pull radiation out of the ground too, Mo-sae contemplated, and then shook his head. "They're in the same predicament we could be in. So we won't be getting sunflowers from Ukraine at the very least."

"Nevermind," Bichna said, and went back to work. She always did more of the work, determined not to be looked at like a girl who couldn't do as much as the guys.