Taekook Oneshots

The Last of The Real Ones (2)

So this one happened ages ago...to catch you up/remind you of the concept...taekook as some of last humans on earth after androids take over and they get away from the city and start to try and find somewhere to live after being given a second chance by an android with a heart (kinda).

It's been two months since Taehyung and I managed to escape from the city. And we haven't seen anyone else since we set off on our journey into the unknown, into a dying world that wouldn't be able to support us for long. And yeah, maybe we were a little crazy, running into the countryside with no survival skills and barely any survival supplies.

But if we stayed in the city, we would've been dead on that very first day, when that android let us go. It promised to get others to avoid us, promised that it would try to let us have a life, but it warned that this wouldn't necessarily work. And that makes sense. Androids, like people, don't seem to listen to each other.

Sure, they may be supercomputers, but they've gained identity, personality, experiences. They are, for want of a better word, people, now. So they are unique, and have their own views about different things. Some androids will want nothing more than to kill us, others won't care, and maybe some might be happy that there are still some humans out there somewhere, on the edge of the horizon.

After we found our forest, Taehyung and I agreed to stay in that area for a while, to gather supplies and recover from the blistering heat of the plains between the city and the forest. It took us a full week to slowly make our way through the trees, making the most of the shade before we would follow the river through more dry, open fields of nothingness. By the end of that week, we'd created a tent-like structure out of ferns and leaves, connecting parts together with broken twigs.

It wasn't watertight, but it wasn't meant to be. Rain isn't as common as it used to be, not here. The main focus of that makeshift tarpaulin was allowing ourselves some shade, even in direct sunlight. A sunburn could get infected and kill us, out here, could end up destroying us both. And it's just not ideal to have your skin peeling the whole time. Or the long term consequences.

Our first trek was deadly enough. And I don't really want to put myself in too much danger, if I can avoid it. I don't want to suffer more than I need to.

In that first week, despite our squeamishness, we found ourselves some protein-related food through the insects that we found on the floor, in the trees. We managed to squash them slightly, and then hang them over the fire on a makeshift leaf plate, high enough to give them the impact of the heat without turning them to charred dust.

They kind of just tasted like weird nuts, which wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

But once we'd dried our own version of 'protein crisps', we placed them in a small pot we'd found in our bags. The box we'd made on the first day that we spent in the forest was used to store fruit. Specifically, berries, which we also tried to dry in the same way. The flavour became a little smoky, and unfamiliar, but we were hardly in the space to complain about it.

As we moved through the trees, we tried to make more boxes, and found a way to fashion them out of wood. A stone, sharpened properly, allows for carving, we realised after some experimentation (and mistakes), and once we'd grabbed a fallen branch from the floor, it wasn't too difficult to isolate the wood within and use it to craft a primitive bowl. And then a primitive box.

And soon, our bags had a few of these containers, all holding food of some description. Taehyung offered to hold food if I held water and our little tent-thing. And it worked for us. Our old water bottles functioned in terms of supporting our hydration needs - once we'd found a little stream, it didn't take much to boil some water every night to make sure we were at least a little hydrated.