a/n sorry for the long haitus, I'll be publishing chapters fairly quickly :) I decided to finish writing the fanfic and just publish chapters at a regular rate <3 Kookie boy has arrived
—"𝙒𝙝𝙤 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪?"
Kim Taehyung's earliest memories date back to when he was 4 years old. Vivid flashes of muted colours, like blots of colour dabbed on canvas; nostalgic wafts of scents like damp blankets and the sweet pervasive scent of overgrown lilies and lavender that waged war with ruddy brown exterior walls of the orphanage; loud discordant noises and cooing orphanage children. He remembers curling little stubs of fingers around an older hand, a large treasure map that was four times the size of his and riddled with callouses and palm-line valleys.
It was the first time he had felt loved, protected and warm.
The hand belonged to an older orphanage child, Jiwoon. He had been fourteen and he left the orphanage when Taehyung had reached the young age of eight. He never came back. And maybe Taehyung spent some Prussian blue smothered nights, the blurred blinding white eyes of the moon scarring his own obsidian inky black pupils, with his hands clasped in prayer bound by some fallacious credence that if he prayed enough Jiwoon would come back.
For amid his orphanage life lay the love Jiwoon had nestled in the crevices of his heart, covering every pore of his young frail body with indescribable warmth. Jiwoon had placed the galaxy in Taehyung's coffee brown eyes, made his smile stretch wide when he laughed and his chest fall open to project love and a mischievous spirit. In a parentless world where he grew up to the shrill of the matron's nasal voice and brotherhood of orphanage children like him, he had never known (almost parental) love before Jiwoon.
Maybe this is why he thinks of him now when thoughts of the older haven't plagued Taehyung's mind in almost 6 years.
He is going to die.
He fucking knows it.
Its been a week and a half since Kim Taehyung has left the orphanage. The effects are beginning to showcase on his face, ranging from his raccoon eyes to his frizzled fusilli hair. His skin is a wan, paper-thin sheet stretched over his bones, it barely holds against a ravenous monster that gnaws his stomach slowly into smithereens. A strange blurred-camera-esque filter has dropped over his eyes, softening the lines of even his own hand.
His survival equates to sleepless nights of sweaty paranoia, shivering in strangers' houses and incoherently muttering countless prayers to Gods he does not believe in. He has contemplated Jimin's betrayal. And the abrupt way he left the orphanage, his home for the past 16 years. He has muffled his tears and screams with the slender back of his hand.
He wants to laugh at himself, call himself a little naive boy when he thought that was the worse he could go through. But could he blame himself for wanting a little hope? For dreaming that the pain was over and that he would never see zombies again?
The sight before him has his stomach wanting to spill out onto the street (taking every single organ with it).
Beyond Taehyung's tattered nondescript checkered black and white shoes winds a tarmac road, freshly printed dark grey that snakes downwards from the hill Taehyung's standing on. On either side of the road, suburban residential houses with wide windows observe him between a coiling stench of warm sticky gone-off meat.
In the middle of the road, at the foot of the hill laying in front of Taehyung's feet, four walking corpses(zombies?) heedlessly stumble around.
One head-buts into a pole. One natters its teeth in a minacious fashion. One stares listlessly into the hypnotic periwinkle eyes of the sky. The last twitches its nose compulsively.
