Before it All - A Love Wins All Fanfic

Chapter 9 - The Aftermath

Pushing open the door to the small classroom in the engineering school, she was weighed down by a plastic bag in each hand, laden with food, medical equipment, and other various items. She would have to begin exploring another area in a couple days. She had picked clean the couple of stores she had been scrounging from, slowly nibbling away like a rat at their supplies until they were gone.

"I'm back," she said to the seemingly empty room, words echoing hollowly back to her.

"Ye Joon?" She rounded the desks and saw him sitting against the back wall, legs curled up, head bent low as he scribbled away at the notebook in his lap. It was one of the first things she had picked up on her supply run. She had hoped it would help calm him down in the first couple of days of him getting injured. He had blown through the first notebook within the first week, filling it with drawing after drawing of the happiest scenes he could imagine, but each with a twisted undertone that made the drawing look corrupt and wrong.

As time wore on, and his wounds began to heal, his drawings slowly became what she was so used to. Eventually she had to get him another notebook, and from the looks of it, she would have to get him another soon.

At the sound of her approaching footsteps, Ye Joon looked up. Her stomach jolted as it did every time she saw the bandage wrapped around his head. He blinked up at her with his left eye, the one not covered by that cursed bandage, like he was trying to clear his mind from a fog. He smiled up at her, but it wasn't a true smile. It was just a mask for her.

"How are you feeling," she asked as she knelt in front of him and slowly began unwrapping the bandage.

It was a routine they had fallen into. Every few days she would unwrap the bandage and apply ointment to the cuts from the explosion and test the vision in his right eye.

"Same as every day," he said, sighing. But he held his hand up to cover his good eye, as he did every time they went through this, leaving his damaged eye staring out.

She allowed herself a moment to stare at him, assess him. To feel the guilt and regret shifting from the always present dull ache in her chest to the mind-numbing stab of pain through her heart like someone rammed a knife in and twisted.

It should have been me, she thought as she stared at him.

He had always had a pale complexion, but now it was dull and sickly. The cheeks that had given him a cute boyish charm were sunken. His cheekbones stood out prominently with a defined jawline that could almost be called handsome if there wasn't an air of death about it. A faded red chemical burn surrounded his bad eye spreading up to the side of his forehead and down onto his cheek. One could almost mistake it for a bruise that was in the final stages of healing, but Ji Hye knew better. Two small cuts marred his skin, one on the bridge of his nose while the other cut through his eyebrow stopping just above the eye. They were still angry and red despite her administration. She had done the best she could with the little she had, but the cuts had just been too deep, and the chemicals had gotten too far down to heal properly.

Then there was his eye. The rich dark brown of his iris had faded and morphed, the chemicals turning it a pale glassy blue like a turquoise lake freezing over in the winter. His pupil had also been taken over by winter and now shimmered a milky white.

She so badly wished she could turn back time and not let him join her suicidal mission. Scratch that. She wished she could turn back time and never have thought of the stupid idea in the first place, then they might only have had to worry about the one cube roaming the city rather than the dozens.

She pushed away the thoughts that threatened to consume her. The pain. The regret. The guilt.

She shook her head, clearing her mind. She couldn't think about that now.