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"LET ME GO!"
The muffled sound of crashing objects and desperate scuffling bled through the heavy wooden door of the fourth-floor storage room, dying in the empty hallway beyond. Outside the cracked window, the afternoon was perfectly serene. Birds chirped in the temperate April air, oblivious to the violence unfolding four stories above the pavement. Down on the street, no one could hear a single decibel of the screaming.
"I TOLD YOU TO LET GO, GODDAMMIT!"
Julie wrenched his arm, his bright orange eyes flashing with a vitriolic mix of hatred and sheer disgust as he tried to break away from the insistent prick who never knew when to stop. Even with his light, ash-brown hair perfectly styled and his delicate, feminine features flushed with rage, Julie looked dangerous. But he was severely overpowered. The guy he was facing was amountain of a man, built like a brick wall, though his current state wasn't doing him any favors. His neck and face were painted with angry red scratches, fresh crescents left behind by Julie's frantic, clawing nails.
"LISTEN!" Mark pleaded, his voice a pathetic, grating whine. "I'm sorry, I'll never do it again! I promise you, my 'jewel', I'll treat you so much better... So just—"
Thwack. Julie didn't let him finish. He drove his fist hard into Mark's stomach. For a pretty boy who practically lacked a single visible muscle, Julie's bones were unnaturally dense, and he hit with the staggering, heavy force of a sledgehammer. The black acrylics on Julie's nails dug into the fabric of Mark's shirt as the larger man gasped, doubling over and hacking out a wet string of coughs.
"I ain't fucking interested in you anymore!" Julie spat, stepping back, his chest heaving. "What do you not understand, you dumbass cunt!?"
"Cough, cough... YOU LITTLE-..." Mark wheezed, clutching his gut as he stared up through watering eyes. "J-Julie... I know you're mad... But be reasonable. These three years can't just go to waste now, no?"
Julie sneered, turning his back on the pathetic display. He tried to storm away, his heavy stomps vibrating through the floorboards of the cramped room. But Mark, desperate and refusing to take a hint, lunged. His thick fingers clamped around Julie's ankle like a vice.
Julie's momentum betrayed him. He tripped, crying out as he face-planted hard onto the unforgiving floor. His palms skidded against the linoleum, and his pant leg hitched up, allowing his fragile, porcelain skin to scrape raw against the ground. When Julie pushed himself up, looking at his torn knee and scratched palms, his expression darkened from irritation into a murderous, trembling fury. If Mark was lucky, he'd escape this room with half his teeth intact.
But Lady Luck rarely ever smiled on losers.
With a sharp hiss, Julie kicked Mark's hand away and sat back to inspect his bleeding knee. Mark used the opportunity to stand,towering overwhelmingly tall, his toned muscles flexing beneath his clothes as he knelt back down beside Julie.
"Listen, babe," Mark murmured, his tone shifting into something sickeningly gentle. "I know your anger issues get the best of you, so I won't stop... 'Cause I love you!"
Mark smiled. Julie answered that smile with a blindingly fast slap.
Mark's reflexes flared; he managed to block Julie's right hand before the acrylics could shred his face again. But he entirely missed the left. Julie's palm cracked against Mark's left cheek with a sickening smack, the sheer density of the blow sending the larger man toppling over onto his right side, groaning as he cradled his jaw.
Instantly, Julie was on him. He scrambled over Mark's body, kicking him flat onto his back and planting his boot firmly on the center of Mark's chest. Pinning him to the floor, Julie glared down, only to feel his stomach churn. Mark was just lying there, looking up at him with a glazed, hazy expression. The idiot looked slightly excited.
Julie's lip curled in absolute disgust.
"I know I have anger issues, but I also have dignity," Julie hissed, leaning his weight onto the foot pressing into Mark's sternum. "Why do you think posting that video wouldn't get me mad? Are you genuinely brain-dead, or just retarded?"
Julie dug his boot in deeper, pressing down with a sharp, cruel twitch of his leg without lifting his foot. The air forced its way out of Mark's lungs in a strained hiss, triggering another fit of coughing. Yes, it was overly cruel. But Mark's insistent yammering, the constant pulling, the suffocating clinginess, it had been driving Julie insane for years. It was enough to make his already volatile temper boil over into pure destruction.
"Babe..." Mark gasped out, a twisted smirk touching his lips despite the boot on his chest. "We're alone right now... And you're already on top of me, so..."
Before Julie could react, Mark's hands moved. He grabbed the ankle of the foot resting on his chest, his large fingers slipping brazenly under the hem of Julie's pants. He trailed his fingertips up Julie's calf, caressing the impossibly soft skin. Julie gasped, trying to jerk his leg away, but Mark's grip was ironclad.
"S... stop...!" Julie stammered, his confident veneer cracking. "I don't wanna..."
Despite his furious protests, a traitorous flush of red crept up Julie's neck and dusted his cheeks.
Mark's hand slid higher, past the fabric of Julie's pants, his fingers finding the sensitive hollow right behind Julie's knee. With a calculated press of his index fingers against the large vein there, Mark's grip forced Julie's leg to buckle. With a yelp, Julie collapsed forward, falling heavily onto his stomach right on top of Mark.
Julie froze. He just lay there, breathless, his mind racing as he stared down at the fabric of Mark's shirt, still furious but suddenly acutely aware of the warmth beneath him. Mark just looked up at him, a smug, adoring look in his eyes as his hands began to wander lazily over the fabric of Julie's clothes.
Slowly, reluctantly, Julie's resistance melted. He let out a shaky breath, his anger giving way to that familiar, toxic gravity that always pulled him back. He leaned forward, closing the distance until his face was hovering mere inches from Mark's, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath, but not yet touching.
"You stupid fuck," Julie whispered, his voice trembling.
"I'm your stupid fu-"
And in an instant, they were both in the air.
The world didn't just shake; it forgot its own rules. An extreme, deafening wave of kinetic force ripped through the city with an agonizing roar. Outside the window, the concrete skyline seemed to snap. Buildings didn't sway- they hopped. They violently danced, thrust upward by a subterranean force so colossal it made a Magnitude 20 seem like a conservative estimate.
For one agonizing, suspended second, people, cars, and the very asphalt were airborne. Then, the horrific, impossible dance ended, and gravity reclaimed its territory with a vengeance.
The six-story building around them shrieked as its skeleton shattered. The floor gave out, walls imploded, and the ceiling rained down in a blinding storm of plaster, steel, and dust. The ground outside was no longer linear; massive, jagged craters ripped open the earth, turning the metropolitan streets into a jagged, impassable mountain range of shattered civilization. Car sirens wailed in a chaotic, dying chorus, drowning out the faint, brief screams of a million people being crushed alive.
Then, there was only the choking dark.
Julie dragged air into his lungs and immediately choked, coughing up a thick cloud of pulverized concrete and dust. His ears were ringing, a high-pitched whine that drowned out the groaning of the shifting rubble around him.
He blinked his eyes open, the bright orange of his irises cutting through the suffocating gray smoke. He was on his back. His ash-brown hair was matted with tiny rocks and grit. He was alive. Miraculously, impossiblyalive, despite having just ridden a fourth-floor collapse all the way down into the earth.
He tried to sit up, his mind struggling to bridge the gap between his last memory, hovering over his boyfriend's lips-...and this subterranean nightmare. He looked down athis chest.
His pristine, white button-up shirt was speckled with heavy, wet drops of crimson. But he didn't feel any pain there.
Julie slowly lifted his chin, his breath catching in his throat.
Above him, forming a desperate, human arch to hold back a slab of concrete, was Mark. But something was horribly wrong. Protruding from Mark's side, bursting through his back and pointing down toward Julie like a crude spear, was a jagged rod of rusted rebar. It had impaled him cleanly through the wall during the collapse.
Mark's eyes were still open. The vibrant blue of his pupils hadn't faded yet. His messy black hair drooped downward, dusted with ash, as he stared down at the boy beneath him. Blood dripped steadily from the terrible wound, pooling on the rubble and splashing onto Julie's clothes.
"...We haven't done it that rough in a while..." Mark breathed, his voice a wet, bubbling rasp. "Cough, cough..."
Julie's eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated terror.
"Whuh...-WHAT THE FUCK—QUIT YOUR DIRTY JOKES, YOU'VE LITERALLY BEEN IMPALED!!!" Julie screamed, his voice cracking hysterically.
The pocket of space they were trapped in was agonizingly small. The storage room had been crushed down to a quarter of its original size, a claustrophobic tomb of shattered drywall and rebar. Yet, there was just enough room to stand.
Mark was still holding up the debris resting on his shoulders, his arms trembling violently as his lifeblood spilled down the rusted metal rod.
"WHAT—WHAT do I... FUCK, FUCK, FUCK.."
Panic, raw and unfiltered, finally shattered Julie's haughty facade. He hadn't looked this scared in his entire life.
With shaking hands, Julie grabbed the hem of his ruined designer shirt and violently ripped off a chunk of his own sleeve. He scrambled upward, pressing the fabric desperately against the horrific entry wound around the metal rod, trying to stem the bleeding.
Mark didn't look at the wound. He just stared at Julie. With a sluggish, agonizingly slow movement, Mark lowered one trembling hand from the rubble above and cupped Julie's dirt-streaked cheek, fighting a losing battle against the encroaching drowsiness.
"C-CAN YOU MOVE?!" Julie sobbed, pressing harder against the bloody fabric. "I-I'LL MOVE TO THE SIDE AND YOU GET THAT ROD OUT OF YOU—"
"No..." Mark whispered, his thumb weakly brushing a tear from Julie's skin. "Can you just... stay...? You always look prettier when you're laying down..."
"STOP TALKING LIKE THAT!" Julie shrieked, his chest heaving with terrified sobs.
"You can shut me up by kissing me~" Mark smiled, though his teeth were stained red.
"SERIOUSLY, STOP-..."
"I'm... I'm serious... haha~..." Mark's voice barely a breathless hum now. His eyes were losing their focus. "It really hurts... Can you... kiss me..?"
Julie froze. He looked up into Mark's pathetic, fading display. Those annoyingly persistent eyes were dimming, staring deep into Julie's lips like they were a dying man's last salvation.
A ragged sob tore its way out of Julie's throat. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut against the nightmare, and leaned upward. Keeping his hand pressed firmly against the bloody wound, Julie pressed his lips softly against Mark's.
The moment held. Amidst the end of the world, in the dark and the dust, time seemed to stop. But as their lips lingered, Julie felt it. Mark's heavy hand, still resting on his cheek, became incredibly, terrifyingly cold. The soft pressure of Mark's tongue grew slack, and the last breath shuddered out of his lungs, brushing against Julie's face.
Slowly, Julie pulled back. He fell to his knees, staring blankly up at Mark's now lifeless body, still pinned between the floor and the ceiling like a tragic, grotesque statue.
"You... piece of shit..." Julie whispered into the silence.
He just sat there, staring at the corpse of the guy who had annoyed him every single day for the past three years since high school.
Sure, Julie made awful decisions. Sure, they broke up multiple times a month. But Julie had always, always run back to him when the world got too hard. Because out of everyone in Julie's life, Mark was the only one stupid enough to actually learn how to love his unruly, egotistical, rotten personality.
Mark's last expression was frozen in time, his eyes closed, his lips still slightly puckered in the ghost of their final kiss.
Julie's vision blurred. The hot tears spilled over, cutting clean tracks through the gray dust on his cheeks.
"Augh... Hngh...."
He broke. He wailed, sobbing violently into the dark for minutes that bled into hours. When there were no tears left to cry, his usually cold, calculating face was completely shattered. He scrambled up, digging his torn, bleeding hands into the concrete debris, desperately trying to pull the rocks off Mark's body. He pulled, pushed, and kicked, trying to free the corpse from the metal rod, but it was to no avail. The rubble wouldn't budge.
That way was blocking the door anyway. To his left, what used to be the fourth-floor window was now cracked open at ground level, offering a narrow crawlspace out into the destroyed world. He could leave. He should leave.
But everything seemed utterly, devastatingly hopeless.
Instead of climbing out, Julie sank down to the floor. He crawled back under the shadow of the debris, pulled his knees to his chest, and lay down in the dirt next to the corpse. Gently, he reached out, taking Mark's cold, lifeless hand... the same hand that had just been holding his face, and intertwined their fingers, waiting for the end of the world to finally take him aswell.
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...First, there was darkness. And then, there was only the waiting.
Julie lay in the suffocating black, surrounded by the crushing weight of shattered concrete and the metallic tang of Mark's blood. He didn't care. If the crushing isolation didn't kill him, time would. It would all be over in maybe two days. He was already on a strict caloric deficit, part of his endless, agonizing routine to maintain his flawless figure... so starvation would take him relatively quickly. Add in the sheer physical exertion of fighting Mark, screaming, and sobbing until his throat bled, and dehydration would probably claim him even faster.
Did he really want to die? The thought echoed in the hollow cavern of his mind. He closed his eyes, the darkness behind his eyelids no different from the tomb around him.
What would you even do if you lived? another voice whispered.
I'd live out of pure, unadulterated spite, Julie answered internally, the familiar, bitter venom rising in his chest. Just to prove I could.
"Spite's a hell of a motivator, babe."
Julie blinked. The suffocating blackness dissolved, replaced by the harsh, fluorescent hum of cheap overhead lights. He wasn't under the rubble anymore. He was sitting on a lumpy, unmade mattress in a painfully messy room. The floor was littered with discarded wrappers and crumpled sheets of sheet music.
Draped over the desk chair were two identical high school uniforms, smelling faintly of cheap cologne and teenage angst.
Beside him sat Mark. He looked younger, his face unmarred by scratches or the exhaustion of their toxic twenties. He was still holding Julie's hand, his thumb tracing nervous circles over Julie's knuckles.
Julie recognized this memory immediately. It was the night they had laid out a handful of stolen prescription pills on the nightstand, making a grandiose, melodramatic pact to end it all together. They hated their lives, hated their empty pockets, and hated the world. But the pact had failed.
Not because of a sudden revelation or an intervention, but because Mark was simply too cowardly to swallow a single pill. He had spent the rest of the night sobbing into Julie's shoulder, bawling about how he actually wanted to live, how he wanted to grow up, be on stage, and become a massive celebrity.
Young, stupid, and utterly pathetic.
Yet, the irony was thick enough to choke on. Mark did become a celebrity, in his own minor, fleeting way. When Mark started his indie band, he couldn't write a decent hook to save his life. So, Julie wrote them. He poured his own bitter, sharp-edged poetry into the lyrics, composed the melodies, and then handed them over to Mark, refusing to take a single ounce of the credit. Julie hated the spotlight if it meant sharing it with a bunch of sweaty bandmates.
When the band eventually imploded, Mark pivoted to Theater Arts in college. And Julie, despite his endless complaints, followed him.
I just wanted to help him, Julie thought, staring at the younger version of Mark in the dream. I was the one carrying him. But he always insisted he had to be the man. He had to be the one buying me things, providing for me, treating me like some fragile little prize...
Mark chuckled, a warm, resonant sound.
"I just wanted to give you the world you deserved, my jewel."
Julie frowned, his brow furrowing. He was responding to me? How could he hear what I was thinking? Julie tried to speak, to yell at him, but his lips wouldn't move. Was he rambling out loud in the dark?
No. Mark could hear him because this was a dream. The realization hit him with a cold, hollow thud. This wasn't a memory; it was a goodbye.
Mark leaned in, his youthful face fading, the edges of his silhouette beginning to blur into the background. He raised a hand and gently pressed his index finger against Julie's forehead.
"Wake up, my most precious Jewel."
Mark flicked him.
Instantly, the messy bedroom shattered like glass. Julie was thrown backward, plummeting into a vast, endless void of searing, bright orange light, a color that matched his own eyes perfectly. He fell for what felt like an eternity, the heat of the light burning away the cold residue of the dream.
With a sharp, agonizing gasp, Julie's eyes snapped open.
Dust fell into his eyelashes. He was staring up at a jagged slab of concrete, illuminated by a faint, unnatural grayish light filtering through a crack somewhere above. He was still in the ruins of the campus building. The smell of pulverized drywall and ash was unmistakable.
But something was wrong. This wasn't the cramped, bloody tomb where Mark had died. The air was slightly cooler here, the space a fraction wider. There was no metal rod. There was no Mark.
Who moved me? The thought formed, but Julie lacked the energy to panic. His body felt like it was made of lead. His muscles burned, his joints ached, and his mouth was drier than bone. He didn't want to move. He didn't even want to blink. He just sat up, slumping against a tilted pillar, his orange eyes half-open and vacant, staring blankly into the ruined space.
The silence of the apocalypse was deafening. To fill it, to stop his mind from spiraling back to the blood and the dream, Julie's throat produced a dry, raspy sound. He began to hum, the notes piecing themselves together into a gentle, childish tune he used to sing whenever Mark's anxiety kept them awake.
"No need... to stand guard..." Julie whispered, his voice cracking on the dust. "Mama Bear's cave is safe... even if it's raining hard..."
He closed his eyes, humming the lullaby to the dead world.
Poke.
Julie stopped. The humming died in his throat.
Something small and sharp had just prodded him squarely between his shoulder blades.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Julie turned his head, looking over his torn shoulder into the gray shadows. Sitting there amidst the gray rubble was something that absolutely did not belong in the ruins of a natural disaster. It was tiny. It looked vaguely like a cat, but its proportions were entirely wrong, as if drawn by a child with a shaky hand.
And it was a vibrant, nauseating shade of neon pink...
—_—_—_—_—···
. . . . Chapter END
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