Road to Utopia - NCT

45 - Neutral Ending

"Jisung, shoot them."

He approached the kneeling members, circling them like a vulture. He settled to aim at Ten. "The new leader, I suppose. I should shoot you first." He said and aimed a pistol at his head, courtesy of JYP.

He unlatched the safety of the gun and placed his finger on the trigger, building more pressure on it as time passed. Just before the trigger point could be activated, he heard a voice in his head.

Do you really want to kill your closest friends, Jisung? After all they've done for you?

He glanced down at the pleading looks of his past members and froze. What was he doing? How could he murder the people who were the closest to being his friends?

"What are you waiting for? Shoot them or I will!" The Utopia Party leader tapped his foot impatiently after seeing his newest weapon's hesitation.

After receiving his order, the voice of doubt and remorse had vanished. Finally, his trigger finger had curled, and a bullet passed straight through the middle of Ten's skull.

"No!" The members cried out as they struggled against the people holding them. Jisung, with his expressionless face, had moved down the line and aimed at Jeno's head.

Jisung, remember all the fun you had with them.

His hesitation increased. Was he really going to shoot them?

"Is he defective or something? I thought you said he would follow orders willingly?" JYP turned to one of the researchers that looked after Jisung in the labs. That was all it took for Jisung to snap out of whatever he was going through and pulled the trigger again, Jeno's body now lying limp next to Ten's.

Now facing Sungchan, he raised the pistol again, but as he did, the voice of rationality had finally been successful.

Is this really what you want in life? To murder all your friends and live as a slave to the government?

It was the most successful that the voice had been, and it had snapped him out of the control in his mind. However, it came at a cost; Sungchan's arm being shot. Not a vital part of the body, but still painful, nonetheless. After regaining his control back, he shot the remaining guards and researcher. JYP had scrabbled to hide behind his podium, but Jisung was armed and currently stalking towards him. Once he had an unobstructed vision of his weak points, he shot them, causing the country's leader to fall to the ground.

A sharp, splitting pain crashed over Jisung's head as he turned to face the remaining NCT members. "Run." He whimpered as he fell to the ground in pain. "You need to run and get out of here."

"We can't leave you here." Winwin urged him to come with them, grabbing his arm.

"No, I won't make it. Take Sungchan and go! Hide somewhere and don't come back."

"What do you mean-"

Jisung grabbed his gun and lifted it. Yuta froze as he did, thinking that he was about to be shot at, but the youngest raised it to his head.

He smiled weakly. "The self-destruct part of the drugs in case I would deviate."

The deafening bang filled the air as they witnessed his death. Chenle and Yangyang shed a few tears as Renjun ushered them away from the scene before anyone else could be killed.

~~

A few years later, they remained in EXO's base. They had never come back from China (or if they had, they never returned back to where NCT found them). Yuta had been made the new leader of NCT, but since they were fugitives, there wasn't much they could do without being seen, caught and killed. So, they hid here, away from civilisation in an attempt to salvage their group and never to forget their deceased members. After all, they couldn't be remembered if they all died, could they?

Sooman still provided them with everything they needed, from groceries to advice, but the old man was dying and the contact between them dwindled in the last few weeks.

After JYP had been shot, a new, unknown leader had been announced. If they thought JYP was bad, he was even worse. He had ordered people to maintain their workload to impossible hours and little breaks to boost the economy so he could get rich. Capitalism had increasingly found its way back to Korea and it was maintained through the drugs that the government kept circulating in society.

Of course, there were still pockets of people who refused to take them, and the Utopia Party had made it their lifelong goal to track them down and either force-feed them or kill them, usually the latter. Occasionally, they had taken them to be drug testers or their handlers, capturing them and keeping them forever drugged to obey them and losing their sense of free will and personality.

FIN

I wasn't sure how to end this version properly. I called this the neutral ending because not everyone died but not everyone lived. The members who got shot were decided through a random wheel, don't accuse me of hate/favouritism.