The Last Of Us | tk ✓

twenty-five | fight and flight

Their tramp persisted in the sombre sewer for two hours, until they approach a rather meddling pathway, soles slapping softly in the icky swamp of the drainage water.

Before Namjoon, Jeongguk, Hara and Taehyung stood a chain metal gate to a side, within its confines were dusty shelves equipped with loot that made Jeongguk drool. To the left were a set of stairs, a raised platform, an opening quiet visible. The walls here were less grimy. An unsettling air of usage lingered.

In an undertone, Namjoon utters, "Perhaps we should turn away, there's another way leading on—" Jeongguk advanced to the steel fence that locked the supplies inside, the small room dingy, ill-lit.

Twelve years of this goddamn apocalypse, indeed people would fine the underground much safer.

Perhaps it were the Fireflies. Perhaps not. Whatever it was, whoever they were, Jeongguk was dying to get his hands on the glinting metal under his flashlight's beam, his eyebrows stitched, gnawing at his cheek whilst pondering hard, gazing relentlessly at the stock. The shadows falling on his face giving him a ghoulish, sinister sheen.

Taehyung crept up to him, waiting for the older's cue. What's he going to do? He perceives the thick, combing wire, the locked gate secure mechanically, lights and buttons and shit. The walls reached up to the algea-covered ceiling. There was no apparent means to infiltrate except for a four digit code, real mystery-genred movie-like.

Hara and Namjoon remain motionless, their loyalties lied with Jeongguk, who dislodged his knapsack, flicking it open to fish something out.

It was one of Yoongi's IED bombs.

"Cover your ears," Jeongguk murmured lowly, eyes affixed on the prize as he moored the device upon the junction of the steel gate. "Back up," he says ludicrously, making Taehyung leap away.

Hara, her nose rosy, eyes huge, proposed exquisitely, tone chiffony; "Won't the explosion attract the nearby infected, oppa-yah?" Taehyung marvelled how with such veneration Hara acknowledged Jeongguk, just like him in the beginning of their companionship. He should try that again, some other time.

Meanwhile, Namjoon still looked the part where he'd rather take that 'another way,' his face contorted in dubiety. Jeongguk cocked a brow at him, wary of the older's reluctance through the slight twitch of hard muscles under the hunter jacket.

Jeongguk puts forth composedly, proceeding to scrutinize Namjoon, "See. I'm running low on ammo. We are gonna face the attackers, whatever they are, one way or other. Better be ready for it, yeah?" He is regarded with puffed cheeks.

Giving in, Namjoon sighs in defeat. "Yeah," he concurrs lowly, "That's right, I guess." He tugged Hara to a considerable distance off. Taehyung slides beside Jeongguk as the latter twists his frame to pluck out a minuscule remote from his back pocket, surveying his accomplices to reassure they have their palms digging at the sides of their heads and hitting the button.

The explosion, despite the briefing beforehand, made their knees buck, debris spewing everywhere, the dust and powder making their visions hazy, quite hard to fathom beyond twelve centimetres across the destroyed entrance.

Jeongguk coughed cutely, for he was closest to the blow up. Instantaneously, he kicked open the metal gate with a harsh crash, Taehyung and Namjoon heedful of any lurking presence at both openings of the run-down space.

Hara crept up to Jeongguk, their silhouette vanishing in the settling smoke. The frenzy clink of metal and Jeongguk's sexy, "Voilá!" emitting from where he stood.

"Wait." Came Namjoon's faltering vowels, Taehyung spinning around to observe the tall profile farther than he supposed he was. He stepped closer to him, his watch on the staircase, for Namjoon to mumble discreetly, "I think I felt an earthquake?"

Hara's honey voice resonated through the concrete walls; "Is something the matter, Joonie oppa?" She began to amble back to the other pair, yet, a tremendous tremor broke lose in the sorry structure of the sewer, Jeongguk materialising behind Hara, who has her head clutched tight in her forearms, Namjoon and Taehyung barely on their feet, stumbling.

Their visions garbled, teeth chattering comically, bleary surroundings, only faintly aware of the danger they were in, waiting, waiting for this torture to conclude, fearful of their eyeballs to pop out.

The violent rumbling cut off abruptly. And then— Jeongguk grabbed a fistful of Hara's shirt, both gasping, his eyes on the ceiling, from which, not a millisecond later, a thousand tonne metallic wall drops with an ear-splitting crash.

Namjoon yells, "Hara!" He sounded close to choking. "Baby, are you okay?" Nobody spoke. "HARA!?" He bellowed with his whole chest at the blank, blue-ish partition in front of him, compact and fitting the width of the area, no way through. Taehyung treads over to the ginormous barricade, pressing his ear on the cold surface after rapping at it.

He cajoles under Namjoon's vacant gaze, "I don't think they can hear us, hyung." Not a beat later after the words left his mouth, with a snap, a slot in the centre slid open, Hara's damp, reddening, soft irises peeping from, Jeongguk rustling for his stuff behind her, utterly stoic as always.

Namjoon gulped thickly, whispering to himself something indistinguishable. He met his sister's eyes, brimmed with despair, although his phrase direct towards Jeongguk, "You find a way around, Gguk. I'll meet you with Tae there." He kisses his fingers and halts them where Hara's forehead may be. "Keep her save. Please." Jeongguk nodded faintly, features impassive.

Then the clicking, beastly yapping of the undead arises; toe-curling, tormenting. Not just one, dozens. Jeongguk and Hara jerk their heads at the raised platform, darkness within. For the first few seconds, Taehyung and Namjoon stay rooted to their spot, frozen, appalled.

When Jeongguk and Hara raise their weapons to mass shoot, the other duo take their cue, sprinting to the second option, hoping, wishing, praying, that the former two make out alive and intact, however the heck they do it, before Taehyung and Namjoon get there— if they do.

_

[unedited af]

ya'll its flu
season pls wash
your hands and
wear a mask. also
you hoomans
are v supportive
i'd have hug ya'll
if i wasnt afraid
to spread my roachy
sickness but ok also i cannot
that is sed.