Chapter Text
“Namsu—”
“It’s Namgyu.”
He has to bite down on his tongue and give a strained half-smile to stop himself from snapping further. His attention is instead hyper-focused on the faint outline of the cross necklace that’s pressing against the green jumpsuits they’ve been forced into. He needs that necklace, and the contents that he knows are lying inside. Whatever belittling Thanos is offering will eventually be worth it to survive this hellhole—even if he has to ignore the bitch sitting behind him staring through his skull like she’s so much superior. The pill. He needs one of those pills. Nothing else matters, not even the way he knows he’s embarrassing himself in front of his new ‘teammates.’
Namgyu’s been far past humiliation anyway, since he approached the same rapper he gave an endless supply of free drinks to and a free VIP room, only for the bastard not to even bother remembering his name.
“Right, Namgyu.” Thanos corrects himself, hazardously looking around before holding up his necklace, “Do you know what this is?” Does it matter? Namgyu rarely ever gives a shit about what goes into his system when it’ll eventually kill him either way. That might sound—fuck, depressive or suicidal, but it’s not. He’s not. Namgyu is perfectly sane. He’s not the type of person to just give up on himself.
In the hell that he’s been thrown into, however, there’s only one means to his survival. As he said, he’s a sane man: someone who easily panics at the sight of bodies dropping like cockroaches. In this place, finding a way to get rid of that logical, humane side of him that constantly imagines his own face covered in blood with a gunshot wound to his forehead is essential to his survival.
For now, the only punctures in his skin are the trackmarks from needles that were shot up in Pentagon’s grimy bathroom. If he pulled his sleeve up higher to show Subong, the faint bruising of a belt that hasn’t completely faded yet would be visible too. What can he say? Being on heroin isn’t pretty by any means. There’s a reason why models choose to do cocaine instead.
Namgyu never liked letting his trackmarks be on display. Again, it’s humiliating. It’s visible evidence of his instability—which is very different from insanity—that's become a part of his body now. A consequence that’s gladly accepted every night, before the spark of regret in the morning. But when all his pride has already been stomped into the ground by Thanos’s blatant disrespect, what else does he have to lose? Not much.
His disregard for the little self-respect he still has for his image comes with high reward, as he’s passed a pill with only the comment of, “You junkie.” A small price to pay, when he’s already biting down on the bitterness wedged between his teeth, it doesn’t seem to matter much.
Maybe it’s a placebo, but the relief comes almost instantaneously. All of his worries melt away as if they had never existed, as the chalk grates against the inside of his throat when being swallowed down.
Thanos’s eyes stay fixated solely on him, whilst the pill slowly dissolves in the pit of his stomach.
Their exchange is over. Namgyu got what he wanted, and Thanos doesn’t seem too upset about losing one of his pills. All of the gunshots had finally passed, and the next team should be starting soon.
However, instead of looking away once their interaction is over, Thanos’s dilated eyes don’t dare glance away from his face.
Something eerie washes over Namgyu as the dreading feeling that something is wrong begins to overwhelm his senses. Goosebumps suddenly erupt on the nape of his neck and across his arms where his tattoos are. What’s happening?
Not knowing what else to do, he stares back into Thanos’s eyes, trying to make sense of why he’s starting to act so weird. His own reflection is visible in the centre of the blue contacts circling the ring of his iris. Then, something even weirder happens.
Thanos’s eyes slowly glaze over in a coldness he’s never seen on anyone else; they look almost doll-like, or dead.
Trying not to panic, Namgyu’s eyes drop to see a strange colouring slowly forming on Thanos’s neck. Right where his Adam’s apple is, a red line blossoms rapidly, growing from a faint marking that was almost unnoticeable into an intense colour that’s surely not normal.
In seconds, that redness forms into liquid that starts to trickle down the column of Thanos’s neck. As the clumpy liquid turns dark, Namgyu realises he’s watching blood pour from four perfectly equal incisions.
His lungs compress in on themselves, making it almost impossible for him to heave in painful, desperate breaths of air.
He tries looking around—Gyeongsu, Minsu, Semi—to see if at least one of them is also witnessing this, only to find they’re not there. No one is, because they’re surrounded by this void of endless darkness that encircles them.
When he turns his head back, Thanos’s body is slumped before him in a pool of blood that covers the void floor they’re sitting on, rising more and more until he’s almost swimming in plasma. Thanos’s blood manages to reach Namgyu’s knees, staining the green fabric, and he scrambles back in fear. His head was too light for his thoughts to process how this could be possible.
However, floating untainted from the blood that’s still seeping out of Thanos’s body is the necklace.
That necklace isn’t an accessory in the slightest; it’s a lifeline—a totem for his survival. No time is wasted in throwing his body forward to grasp it to secure the chance of his living, momentarily forgetting that he’d be pressing his hands into the blood.
Except when he lunges for it, the necklace slips through his fingers as he falls through whatever floor they’re sitting on. He’s plummeting from a height he can’t even see, and he’s falling, he’s falling—
✃𓄧꒷꒦
When Namgyu finally wakes up, he blinks slowly in complete calmness instead of shooting up in a panic with his heart racing as he did originally.
This is the third time he’s had this exact dream, and somehow it doesn’t occur to him that he’s not sitting next to Thanos listening to rounds being fired into bodies as they fail whatever minigame they were stuck at, until the very last second.
It’s dark outside, judging by the lack of light being emitted from the thin curtains pulled over the glass. He has no idea what time he fell asleep or what time it could be now. In the games, they weren’t told what time it was ever. There was only the space that existed between when they weren’t fighting for their lives and sleeping. Maybe his body is still stuck in that routine.
Reluctantly, he drags his body from his worn mattress that’s been sunken from his weight lying for hours on end, and into the kitchen, where Namgyu finds that all of the cupboards, fridge, and shelves are barren. When he left for the games, there hadn’t been much food left because of his lack of funds. But even now, with 180 million won sitting in his bank account untouched, he still hasn’t found the energy to buy more food.
Anything he bought would’ve turned rotten away, it’s not like he has the appetite for anything—he’s been too distracted from puking up what little contents are left in his stomach.
A month had passed by now since he was tossed out of a black van with so little care that his knees were roughly scraped against the road’s concrete. If he wasn’t also thrown out with a card he wasn’t carrying before, he’d complain.
The first thing he did after pulling his clothes on was to pay off his debt. There’s no doubt that he looked insane, stumbling into his creditor’s office with his hair thick with grease and a face stained with blood.
His creditor spared him a judgmental look and commented, “I wonder what you had to do for this.” Whilst turning over his new card with a scoff. It’s obvious he thought the money had come from other methods, based on how dishevelled he looked, but somehow, he couldn’t even bring himself to care what he thought because all of his debt was cleared, and he was free.
Financially free.
He’s not free in any other sense; he won’t be for a long time.
A dull ache gnaws at his stomach. When was the last time he ate? Yesterday, maybe? Even then, he can’t remember what exactly it was. Whatever the case, he’s not starving yet, so instead, he reaches for his cheap pack of cigarettes that are sitting on the table.
With trembling hands, he brings his silver lighter to the cigarette posted between his lips. It takes him exactly 4 attempts to find the strength to flick the spark wheel successfully.
It doesn’t work.
He tries again with more stability this time.
There isn’t a single spark or flame. Useless fucking piece of junk is broken.
Frustration builds in him, along with a wrath of fucking hate for his lighter—expensive lighter—that didn’t even last two months. The asshole who sold it to him scammed him, exactly like how MGCoin had scammed him. Is Namgyu just the ideal victim for petty fucking scams? Because he has a habit of being so blindly trusting? What a joke. Maybe if he weren’t so gullible, he wouldn’t have expected Thanos to remember his name or give a single shit about him.
The fucking asshol—
A loud gunshot interrupts his train of thought, as he violently flinches, and whips his head around, expecting to see a masked, pink guard holding a rifle waiting to put him down for good.
No, not a gunshot. There’s no one here except himself. The loud noise he had thought came from a gun had turned out to be the sound of his lighter being thrown against the wall. Its shattered pieces remain scattered across his kitchen floor as proof of his outburst.
Namgyu uses his other hand in an attempt to still his dominant hand from shaking so violently.
Fuck it. Whatever. He won’t smoke, then, if that’s what the universe wants for him.
He checks his phone, which is close to being dead: 2nd December, 5:24 am.
Tomorrow, it’ll be a month since Thanos died in that bathroom, on the cold tiles.
Again, not that he cares. That man was nothing but an asshole to him. He’s only making an observation, a pitiful one. It doesn’t actually bother him. Obviously.
In a hypothetical, alternate universe, where, let’s say, Thanos showed him the slightest ounce of respect, then yeah, it would be sad to think about the fact that if he had waited to die for another day, he would’ve been able to turn 37.
But in this one, he doesn’t care. It doesn’t even matter, because since he’s been back, Pentagon hasn’t even called him once. No check-ups to see where he was, or what he was doing, nothing. Maybe they assumed he had a bad trip and ended up overdosing in some ditch, and now he’s not their problem. So, it’s not like he needs Thanos anymore to rise in Pentagon. All of those free drinks could’ve been poured down the drain, and in the long run, no difference would’ve been made. Thanos would’ve still treated him the same. Thanos would still be dead.
It’s pathetic. But, more importantly, Namgyu doesn’t fucking deserve that. He deserved to be referred to by his actual name. Not a number, or ‘Namsu. Namsu, Namsu, Namsu, Namsu’ Namgyu. Gyu. It’s a fucking single syllable, but Thanos couldn’t even register that through his thick fucking skull. Probably the same way he couldn’t remember his own lyrics in the underground—
An ugly noise scrapes against the inside of his throat as he chokes the sound out painfully.
He has to clasp a palm over his mouth to ensure that the same noise doesn’t manage to escape from him again. He doesn’t know why that happened, but it also forces him to clutch his stomach with his other hand as he desperately leans back against the wall for support. Everything hurts.
Namgyu’s been living like this since the night he was thrown back into reality. Every day starts to bleed into the next with no clear beginning or end, because he feels too incapable to step foot outside. His routine has been reduced to waking up to smoke, checking for food when he already knows there’s barely anything left, and on the rare day when he feels energised enough, he’ll scroll through YouTube videos on his TV—most of the time—end up not actually watching anything, before going back to sleep. Since his new deposit, he’s set all of his bills to autopay, so he can live peacefully until he eventually burns through his money, and then he’ll figure out what to do. He earned enough so that as long as he’s not buying anything exorbitant, it’ll see him through for hopefully the rest of his life at this rate.
Except today, not only is he almost out of cigarettes and food, but he’s also gone through every other necessity. Maybe today will be the day he finally orders something to his door, now that he has the money to do so.
Going out for anything himself seems like such a chore that he couldn’t be bothered to deal with. Even the mere thought brings on a headache.
Thankfully, he lives in an age where he doesn’t have to.
Still, what a bother to plug in his phone, open some delivery app, and manually select food.
As he collapses on his worn couch, he puts on a video with a title he didn’t bother to read, needing some form of background noise to fill the heavy silence.
When you live completely alone like Namgyu, there’s nothing except silence most of the time. It gives him a lot of time with his own thoughts, at least, when there’s nothing else to drown them out.
Recently, his thoughts have almost always drawn back to the bathroom. Back then, everything had unfolded so chaotically in a matter of minutes that he’s still trying to piece together how he and Thanos confronting that pussy Minsu managed to result in him bleeding out on the floor in front of his eyes. To Myunggi’s hands, no less. Was he even in the bathroom when they entered? Why would he defend Minsu? They had never even talked.
It wasn’t about the fact that they were trying to sway Minsu back to voting O. It wasn’t. MGCoin voting X was nothing but to show his pathetic, pregnant girlfriend that he’s not a complete dipshit. If she weren’t in the equation, he would’ve been voting the same as them. He should be thanking them, really, that they didn’t have bitches to pretend to care enough about to vote X. Instead, he decided to repay them with Thanos’s blood.
He looks up to see what he had selected randomly on the TV, it’s a local news station broadcasting the same Monday announcements that they do every week. Latest arrest, some celebrity scandal, the upcoming week’s weather, and so on. It’s not worth listening to.
Namgyu thinks about the exact moment Myunggi swung. The resentment in his face morphed into confusion when Thanos dodged by stepping back. He was so angry. A pure, unfiltered moment of actions taking hold of his usually reasonable thinking. Why? Because of whatever Thanos had whispered to him when he leaned in close?
Then there’s also another side that he prefers not to think too hard about. The uglier side.
Sometimes he lies awake through nights, staring at the ceiling with plaster slowly peeling off, replaying his recollection of what happened in the bathroom over and over again on repeat like an old VHS tape. It always pauses exactly at the second where he hits the ground next to Thanos’s corpse, before starting from the beginning, where he came out of the stall to see Myunggi challenging Thanos. Punch, blood, cross, fork, again.
He tries to pinpoint the moment that triggered it all. What could’ve been changed?
Every time, it always results in the same conclusion. The trigger that had first made Myunggi snap so violently was when he told Thanos about his girlfriend being pregnant.
That scene sticks out to him so individually, because he saw the change in Thanos’s demeanour as well when Myunggi had stepped forward. Something changed in the way that his smile had dropped instantly, and his gaze sharpened as it flickered from Namgyu back to MGCoin.
If he hadn’t said anything, had let the tension dissolve, then what? Would Thanos be alive?
No.
Right?
Namgyu’s not the one at fault. He’s not. And even if it was, then he wouldn’t be condemned for it, after all the shit that Thanos gave him. Fucking bastard. If there is a higher power awaiting to judge him, he would understand that Namgyu was justified in provoking Myunggi and letting the interaction lead up to Thanos’s death.
He is justified. Because it only would’ve been a matter of time before Thanos did the same to him, just like Gyeongsu. Gyeongsu, who did nothing wrong to Thanos. Who was the only genuine fan who had admired him above everything else, and yet Thanos didn’t even blink before plunging him into his death. If Namgyu hadn’t indirectly murdered him, who’s to say he wouldn’t have been next? Obviously, he hadn’t mattered any more than Gyeongsu.
His attention is turned to the News program that’s still ongoing in the background, as a familiar tune starts to play, announcing the segment of the most important ‘breaking news’ of today. Namgyu decides to take a break from buying groceries and distract his thoughts with whatever bigger issues are going on in the world.
The news anchor clears her throat before starting to rattle off the script she’s clearly reading behind the camera. Only, he’s not looking at the way she not-so-discreetly attempts to make a last-minute adjustment to her hair, because he’s already staring at the picture being displayed in the corner of the screen. It’s—
“Breaking News, recently defamed rapper Thanos—otherwise known as Choi Subong, reported dead at 37. After his label announced his sudden disappearance 3 weeks ago, we have now received official confirmation that the celebrity has passed away from suicide in the early hours of this morning.”
Thanos. Thanos’s picture is shown in a shot where he’s wearing a face mask, dark sunglasses, and a beanie, trying to disguise his face, even though his trademark purple hair is still peaking out from under the fabric.
Seeing him displayed only a few feet away from him, as if manifested by his thoughts alone, sends him spiraling before he’s able to grasp himself together. His right leg starts to bounce rapidly, but not faster than the short breaths that hitch out of his throat.
Thanos is a celebrity, obviously. Nobody knows that better than himself, from the number of times he served his every need and want at Pentagon: bringing him free drinks that never ended up being finished because he’d be too busy talking to some girl who looked in his direction for a split second. Maybe it was because he hadn’t really returned to the real world yet, but it hadn’t occurred to him that other people were bound to notice that Thanos was gone. Other people were mourning him, unlike Namgyu, who wasn’t doing that. Namgyu’s been reflecting on Thanos’s death and how that affected him. Not to be confused with anything else.
It’s also funny just how wrong the news is. Thanos wasn’t 37 when he died, because he died one day before his birthday, and he didn’t die by suicide, he died from a fucking fork of all things to the throat by MGCoin.
No one would ever know how he died. Not his parents, siblings, friends, company, or fans. Namgyu would lie in his grave with the knowledge of what had really happened, knowing he couldn’t share the truth. Who would believe him if he tried? That he and 455 other people, including Thanos, were kidnapped and forced to play kids' games for money?
He rereads the headline sceptically. Did his label give up on finding him and decide to go with the assumption that he must’ve overdosed in some alleyway? Thanos was already in debt, and from what he heard, somewhat cancelled for some other dumb scandal, so maybe they were cutting their losses safely and hoping he wouldn’t resurface. It’s weird for them to be so specific that he had died in the ‘early hours of this morning.’ What do they think will happen when his family asks for his body? Whatever. It’s not his problem, anyway.
It’s not even like he would be at the funeral. Why would he be? He wasn’t anyone to Thanos. If anything, he was his fucking servant. Before the games, Thanos had never given him a second of consideration.
Them being... allied in that place is perfectly explainable too. There are all kinds of stories about those who bond in dangerous places—it’s instinctive. Trauma-bonding is all they had. That’s the only reason why Thanos took pity on him and shared his pills. Not because of some star-crossed emotional reason that would’ve occurred in any other environment.
“Police are still investigating the situation, on suspicion of foul play involvement. However, here today, we have a special interview for everyone watching at home with a supposed eyewitness to Choi Subong’s death.”
What? No—this has to be someone, an actor, paid off by the company Thanos worked for to convince everyone of this whole elaborate story. Fuck. Did they really need to do all of this just to make people believe it? It wouldn’t be the first, second, or last time a public figure took their life because the pressure became too much. Nobody would’ve batted an eye at the rapper whose career had plummeted after a continuous series of one fuck-up after another, taking a toll.
... But. What—what if this was someone from the games? Someone who saw it all go down in the bathroom?
If it were, would they be able to point the finger at Namgyu as the one who triggered the entire fight? No, right?
He holds his breath, half-expecting to see a face he recognised associated with a number suddenly appear on the screen, or prepares for the worst if MGCoin himself jumpscares him.
“Uh, h-hello.” Oh. Okay. A small sigh of relief escapes from him as a girl who looks like she hasn’t even graduated high school is displayed instead of whoever he had expected. Definitely not anyone from the games, “I—uhm, I’m sorry, this is my first time on TV,” she says shakily.
“No worries,” the interviewer responds before placing the microphone back in her face. “Just tell us what you saw.”
She visually took a deep breath before continuing, “So, uhm, I was coming home f-from a friend’s house at maybe... 1 am, I think? And I was crossing the Han River Bridge when I saw this man, and he was really, really injured; it was really scary. I tried to get closer to help, and that’s when I realised it was that rapper—Thanos. I-I’m not really a fan, but my friend—she loves him, so I was standing, like, in shock. I wasn’t sure what to do, but he—he—”
Tears began streaming from her already bloodshot eyes.
“He—then he, oh, God, then he jumped.”
This has to be a joke, he thinks, as he continues staring at his TV screen without actually processing anything beyond the words spewing out of the girl’s mouth in a disorganised way. Not to defend Thanos (what would the point be when he’s already gone?) but, this is... sick. Going into this much effort to convince the world that he flung himself off a bridge?
Not a bridge, the Han River Bridge. 2 months ago, he wouldn’t have known anything more about the place past its location, but since then, his search history had been filled with photos of the place.
He’s not sure why. He knows what it looks like from driving past it so many times.
Still, he’s spent hours staring at pictures of the metal rails surrounding the edge, ones that aren’t high enough to stop someone from climbing over. It’s the stupidest thing he’s ever considered, because back in that bathroom—when Thanos had cornered Minsu, telling him about considering ending his life right there—he hadn’t actually been serious. He couldn’t have been. If he was, why would he tell Minsu of all people? Exactly, he wouldn’t. It was something he had to have made up on the spot, to gain his trust? Pity? To ensure that he would vote O.
Trying to picture Thanos standing on that bridge, holding tightly onto the rail as he internally debates how painful the impact would be if he were to throw himself over and into the waters—maybe asking himself whether the collision alone would be enough to do the job, or if the water that would flood his lungs would be the final blow—is impossible. In Namgyu’s memory, Thanos basked in too much praise to ever consider something so drastic.
But, on the slim chance that the story he had spewed to Minsu’s gullible face was true, then maybe Thanos had left behind a letter of some kind before being given that business card leading them to the games. Maybe his label actually thought his body was lifelessly floating through the murky waters further down the Han River. Why would they get a high-school girl to be the broadcaster of this information, though? He doesn’t understand.
“Terrible,” the woman interviewing her shakes her head, as if they were talking about some minor inconvenience. “Absolutely terrible. You said he was injured? How so?”
Namgyu perks up. Injured? “Y-yes. It was horrible,” she cries, “I couldn’t see very well, because I was kind of standing from afar, but there was all of this blood gushing from his n-neck.”
He can sense the colour from his own face draining quickly. Blood? From his neck? A fucking strange and uncomfortable coincidence that he didn’t like. At all.
“I wouldn’t have noticed it, b-but he was wearing this... Green? Blue, maybe? Tracksuit, and it made the colour really visible.” Her mouth continues to move, though the loud ringing in Namgyu’s ears does well to tune her voice out.
What.
The.
Fuck?
On reflex, he makes a grab for the remote that’s sitting next to him and instantly turns the TV off as if something would jump through the screen.
He’s hearing things. He has to be.
It’d make sense; there has to be some consequence of going isolated after watching who knows how many people being gunned down like animals in front of his eyes.
Crazy or not, Namgyu shortly concludes that his day had promptly ended. He doesn’t know how many hours he’s been conscious for, but it felt like way too many. All he craves now is to retreat under the thin sheets that cover his mattress. His wonderful mattress, with too many sharp springs breaking through the material, which he can’t be bothered to replace, even with ￦180,000,000 in his account.
So that’s where he drags himself back to, like every night for the past month. The thought of food has been completely abandoned as he seeks out a new goal: to be unburdened.
✃𓄧꒷꒦
Namgyu doesn’t sleep, similarly to all the other nights he’s spent in this exact position—the one where he’s left staring at the crack in the ceiling’s plaster that grows larger every day.
It's grown a considerable amount in only a week. By the next, a large part of that plaster will have probably fallen to the ground, exposing the ugly stone that’s hiding underneath.
At least tonight, it’s easy to explain why he’s unable to fall asleep, because he found himself going through every number he could recall from after the bathroom, and trying to envision the girl's face in a numbered green tracksuit. Thus far, he’s not been successful, as every number that comes to mind: 235, 394, 336, 009, 388, only creates the image of a shadowy figure with no real features.
Since he’s not going to end up falling asleep anyway, he lifts himself to his feet to start slowly pacing his small bedroom, managing to circle the entire floor in only 5 short strides. Think. Think harder. How does this girl magically know that Thanos was stabbed in the neck? How does she know about the uniform they were forced to wear? She wasn’t there, unless the organisers of the games, whoever they may be, hired her? Or someone from the games told her about everything that had happened?
All the possibilities race through his mind as he goes through them one by one, quickly dismissing them based on the likelihood of each theory.
Before you ask, yes, this does concern him. Not because he cares, again, he doesn’t—but it’s important to remember Namgyu’s role in this. Albeit indirectly, he murdered Thanos. Namgyu is a murderer. He fell next to the body he had provoked Myunggi to swing at in a heap of blood, took the fork that was still sitting in his flesh, and used it to stab into the side of a player’s thigh.
The thigh had to be stabbed first, because it was the only thing he could do when a leg was being kicked into his chest, whilst he made a grab for the necklace trapped under Thanos’s head. It successfully made the man crumble to the floor, where Namgyu gained the advantage by climbing onto him to pierce through his stomach next.
Then, there were the repetitive, precise lunges into exactly where his heart was. The ugly sound that came from the sac surrounding the heart popping is still fresh in his memory, as well as the blood-curdling noise that came from the player’s throat.
Even now, Namgyu doesn’t feel anything at the thought of that player’s body rotting somewhere.
That fucking bastard.
That fucking bastard.
He hopes the fearful look in that man’s eyes stays ingrained in his memory forever, after he continued raining down kicks onto Namgyu’s already fallen body and screaming the same 5 words he’s heard so many times, it’s begun to sound like a description rather than an insult:
“Fuck you, you fucking loser.” What famous last words.
Namgyu’s the loser here? When he’s the one who still has life pulsing through his veins, and not pathetically bleeding out onto bathroom tiles, with the shell-shocked, dazed look frozen on his face? He’s not the fucking loser in this equation, and he’s getting tired of men who don’t even have a beating heart anymore saying so.
But that’s besides the point he was trying to make. What he was going to say is that he’s guilty of being a murderer. This bitch could send people hunting after him, which would ruin the fragile haven he’s built around his apartment, where no salesmen can come after him with ddakji in hand.
Or, he could leave Korea entirely. ￦180,000,000 is more than enough to run away to an unheard-of place and start again. It’s not like what he’s doing now counts as living when his routine is an endless cycle of being awake, doing nothing, and then trying to fall asleep.
Yeah. That’s what he has to do. Get the fuck away from Seoul and go somewhere he’d never be found again. Maybe he’ll even change his name to make sure he’s completely untraceable—but he’s already so used to Namgyu that it’d probably have to be something similar. Like Namjun, Namsun, Namsu—
No. Not that, he doesn’t know why he thought of that name.
Either way, now he has a plan to follow through with. He’ll figure out where exactly he’s going to go later, but for now, he has to get all his shit together and ready to leave. He has to do that right now; if he waits for too long, they’ll track him down and throw him back into the games just for fun. There was already another guy in there—the one who was fucking crazy, who said he had won, but was still in there with him anyway. If they can bring him back, they can drag Namgyu back, too.
A worn, battered suitcase is hoisted down from the highest shelf of his closet. His ID, passport, wallet, and clothes are all thrown into the luggage in a rush of adrenaline-fuelled panic that races through him. It’s the most alive he’s felt since holding that fork in his blood-stained hands.
The suitcase is almost brimming over with clothes when the same sequence of words plays through his head.
‘Then he jumped’
Another image, one of Thanos’s mangled body, sunken to the bottom of the river’s floor.
Namgyu forces both out of his mind, rips a shirt off from a hanger and pushes it into the already full suitcase.
‘Then he jumped’
With more practice and serious learning, other than knowing the basics to talk to foreign regulars at Pentagon, he could learn to be fluent in English. He could take himself to the United States or even England.
‘Jumped. Then, he jumped.’
No, he didn’t. Thanos’s body isn’t anywhere close to the Han River Bridge.
Namgyu saw him die on the cold bathroom floor, away from the fame and spotlight that he had on the outside, because nobody apart from him and Gyeongsu recognised him as someone who used to claim the title of a ‘legend.’ Thanos didn’t leave the world known as that, though. He died as Player 230, with not a single person blinking at his murder when Namgyu announced it, thinking that there would be somebody who shared his shock. Only for them to ask how many players had snuffed out, for the vote.
Namgyu stares down in defeat at his suitcase, which is messily packed with most of his possessions strewn everywhere.
At the top of the pile is a metallic glint that immediately draws his attention. A ring?
Most of his rings are either sitting around his fingers now or in a small box he’s yet to empty. After retrieving it from the heap of clothes and bringing it into closer view, he doesn’t recognise it as his own at all.
So where the fuck did this come from? It did look somewhat vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place where from.
For the first time in a while, he tries to remember his life before the games and where he could’ve gotten hold of an expensive-looking ring that he doesn’t recall buying. Experimentally, he tries slipping it onto his ring finger to test the size.
It’s too big. Not by a lot, but noticeably not his size at all.
Logically, it had probably fallen into his pocket by accident from a client at Pentagon: the job he had just stopped showing up to with no explanation. With the style that the ring is, it does look similar to the clients he used to serve, like QM, Sleeq, Thanos—
Oh.
It’s Thanos’s ring.
Moments after the connection is made in his mind, he sees that the initial ‘T’ is engraved into the inner silver band.
Looking at it closer, he distantly remembers Thanos wearing it on what must’ve been their first time meeting, when he decided to try the nightclub that looked like a crack house from the outside. Namgyu might have commented on it whilst bringing the first of many rounds of drinks.
He turns over the ring again. Outside of the previous ownership, the item itself isn’t anything special that he would want to keep. Just a regular, overpriced piece of junk that he doesn’t have any use for.
As its slipped into his pocket, he makes the decision to throw it whenever he gets the chance.
Namgyu walks away from the bedroom and into the kitchen, where his pack of cigarettes are left sitting on the table. A sliver of hope fills him before remembering what had happened to his lighter.
He never bought food earlier, either. Not that it would matter if he’s leaving soon anyway.
Before that, though, he should be able to have a cigarette.
✃𓄧꒷꒦
The nearest convenience store is a 10-minute walk away. Relatively short, and with the complete darkness of the night, there’s no one to spare him their judgmental glances on the street. Making it arguably the best time for someone like him to go on an ‘errand’ run.
When he arrives at the store, he sees on the standard clock that hangs next to the entrance that it’s 2 am. Officially making it the 3rd of December.
After seeing the date, he sends a mental ‘Happy one-month death anniversary’ to Thanos. Whether or not his wishes would be heard from whatever ring of hell he’s sentenced to, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. It’s the thought that counts, or something like that. He should be grateful that Namgyu spared him that, considering it’s more than the other bastard who died from his hand in the bathroom gets.
Muttering out his wanted brand of cigarettes to the tired-looking cashier makes him realise that this had been the first time he’s used his voice in weeks. Or, the most obvious sign is how his hoarse voice starts to choke the second he opens his mouth.
Embarrassingly, he leaves the counter momentarily to add a small bottle of water to his total, ignoring the weird look the cashier is giving him.
Eventually, he manages to leave with a cigarette perched between his lips and a slightly less-dry mouth that doesn’t feel like knives are being dragged down his throat every time he speaks.
Originally, he planned to go back home without any detours after getting what he needed, but the stillness of the night began to convince him otherwise. The absence of anyone walking the street was also persuasive.
So, he began to walk with no real destination in mind. Being stuck in the four walls of his grimy apartment made him almost forget what the real world was like, such as how different the temperature is when not being pumped by his stale air conditioning.
The further he goes, the more the streets he passes by seem to blend together, as if he’s walking through an endless hallway that resets him to the start every time he reaches the end. Houses start to become almost indistinguishable from the next, and he swears he’s walked past the same tree at least 5 times by now. Despite the dull repetitiveness, it is somewhat therapeutic to be outside with the welcomed taste of tobacco filling his lungs.
He manages to break through the neighbourhood scenery and onto what looks like a main road. Given the time, hardly any cars are driving past him. It’s a complete ghost town. The only companion he has is the psithurism coming from the line of trees ahead.
A line of trees that leads to a bridge.
One that by now, he’s no stranger to from the hours of staring at the landmark through his dim screen.
Namgyu hopes that his consciousness knows that bringing him to the Han River Bridge isn’t funny in the slightest. Whatever kick it thought would rouse from him wouldn’t come.
Because it’s just a stupid fucking bridge that he’s crossed over a million times before without batting an eye. It shouldn’t be any different now.
Even though the reminder repeats in his head that he should leave and start on the path home, Namgyu unconsciously finds himself being drawn closer to the bridge until he’s faced with the rusting metal railing.
His cigarette had long since been crushed under the sole of his shoe; there’s no way for him to estimate how long he’d been walking for. It must have been for longer than he was aware of, judging from the way his body instantly gave in the second that his hand held onto the railing, like all of his bones had gone weak and supportless.
Namgyu aches. All of the signs of such are painfully present; impossible to ignore.
Looking down, there’s a terrifyingly long distance between the bridge he’s standing on and the water underneath. At the point where he’s standing, he can also see a concrete underpass that descends into the water.
If there was any ounce of truth behind what Thanos had fed Minsu, where would he have been standing? In the exact spot where Namgyu is now, where there’s a gamble between plummeting onto the concrete below or further along the bridge, where he’d be guaranteed to crash into the waters?
Guess it depends on what sort of death Thanos was aiming for. Nearly instant, but with the chance of feeling all of his bones shatter in that split-second before life leaves his body, or slow, trusting that the impact of hitting the water would leave him unconscious enough to not feel the water filling his lungs.
Whatever the case, he got what he wished for now. He might as well have jumped instead of joining the games if his fate was going to be the same either way. If he had, it would’ve saved Namgyu from being... distracted. If his only connection to the outside world wasn’t there, reminding him of the person he is, he could’ve done more. He’s sure of it. He could’ve won, if not for Thanos.
Then again, he also would’ve crumbled without those pills.
Fuck. Why did it have to be Thanos? Out of every fucked up, dragged-through-the-mud celebrity why was it him?
Namgyu leans forward as he lights another cigarette, staring into the dark fog ahead as he thinks about what lies ahead for him. Mentally, he figures America would be his best choice. It’s far enough away for no one ever to contact him again, and big enough to make it easy for him to disappear like the smoke stemming from his cigarette fading in front of his eyes.
When he’s in America, he’d never think of the colour purple ever again. Over time, he’d be able to walk past Churches with the cross symbol clinging to the structure and not even blink an eye. Forgetting Thanos would be easy when the last remnants of his body disperse from his bank account. That’s the reason why he’s been so caught up over the fact, because the worth of his corpse is sitting in his possession in the form of ￦100,000,000.
“It’s only fair,” he speaks out loud for the first time. “After all the shit I did for you? This is the least you could do for me in return.”
There’s no response.
“What? Do you want me to say that I’m sorry?”
To any onlookers, it would surely seem as if he’d lost his mind. But, thankfully, there aren’t any witnesses to offer their judgments.
“Because I’m not. Really, I’m not. I know you think from down there that I’m useless without someone to please—but you didn’t know anything about me. You didn’t even want to, so that’s your fault for being wrong. Don’t blame me for that.”
The sound of the river flowing is all he needs in place of an answer anyway.
“Stupid fucking shit. You didn’t even care that I voted O. Did it process through your thick fucking skull that I could have sent you home without your money, and I would’ve been fine? No, you would have fucking—” the word ‘killed’ gets stuck in his throat, “—you, you would have been pissed at me. Not like you were with Minsu, you insisted on going easy on him. I wouldn’t have gotten that.”
“And don’t blame me for leaving you there,” he tacks on after a beat, the pause creating a crack in his voice. “Because you know you would’ve done the same thing to me,” just like you did to Gyeongsu.
If this is the only closure he’ll ever get before leaving, then he’ll have to be okay with the fact. At least it’s something to get all the words that had been circulating in his mind off his chest whilst he’s still in somewhat proximity of where Thanos’s memory lies before leaving the country. This way, when he does start somewhere anew, he won’t be plagued by all of the things he didn’t say.
“I don’t know anymore. You were an asshole, and I hate that I—”
The feeling of something brushing over his hand resting against the railing interrupts the end of his sentence. For the smallest fraction of a second, he mistook it for the presence of something else.
But when he turns his head, a green praying mantis is staring back at him as it sits on the back of his hand.
Namgyu freezes, not moving to shake it off yet.
The thin insect crawls over his hand and continues on its way across the bridge’s railing whilst he watches in silence. By the time it’s almost out of sight, he thinks of the mantis tattoo he has under his collarbone, which he got shortly after he started working at Pentagon.
There wasn’t any reason why he got it except for thinking it was pretty when his tattoo artist was flicking through the pages of his sketch book. It seemed to call out to him, so he got it. Simple as that.
Without fully realising, his hand that had been holding his cigarettes had drifted to where his tattoo lies under his shirt. Causing the pack to escape from his hold and fall over the bridge.
“Shit,” Namgyu hissed, leaning over as he watched it drop down until it landed on what he thought to be the underpass—thankfully, not the water. “Shit.” But the wind that began to pick up could soon change that.
Although he could’ve gone back to the store and bought another pack, that would have disturbed his route going home. Plus, he didn’t feel like seeing that cashier’s face again.
So instead, he finds the staircase that dwindles into the underpass whilst muttering the word ‘shit’ under his breath like a mantra in hopes that the wind wouldn’t act before he got to the bottom.
Under the bridge is, as he comes to find out, far darker than the surface. The only source of illumination flickers from a single strobing lightbulb that’s attached to the stone wall behind him. If it weren’t for the light from his phone, finding his cigarettes would’ve been an impossible task in the shroud of darkness.
Eventually, he manages to spot the pack lying not too far away from where he’s standing. Thank fuck, at least he has something going for him.
Except when he moves to stash the cigarettes away in his pocket, something metal brushes against his hand instead.
Oh. Right, the ring.
He did say he’d dispose of it as soon as he got the chance to. What better place to throw it out than here?
It’s not like he’s ever going to need it. Before today, he hadn’t even realised it was in his possession. Keeping it would only unnecessarily drag on the thought of Thanos in his mind when he doesn’t even deserve that. Not when he already has fucking hundreds of fans thinking of him.
“Probably didn’t even realise it was missing anyway,” Namgyu says in a hushed voice as if there’s a risk of someone overhearing him. “Sounds like him.”
Before he can begin to talk himself out of it, he sharply reels his arm back in preparation to throw. The coldness emitting from the ring is a stark contrast to his clammy palm that holds the band tightly.
He throws his arm forward,
But doesn’t open his hand to release the ring. It’s still in his hold.
Again. He swings.
Nothing hits the water other than a falling leaf.
Why can’t he do it?
“Fuck.”
Obviously, if he were to let the ring sink to the bottom of the river, then that would be a waste. It’s a subconscious thing, because Namgyu takes a liking to expensive jewellery, it’d be like a betrayal of himself to destroy something like this. Maybe he should leave it for someone to find as a donation. Not that the smallest ounce of charity would make up for a fraction of what he’s already done.
When his arm falls limply to his side, Namgyu questions why he’s here. He should be at his apartment, gathering the last of his things and organising for a place to stay. Not under the Han River Bridge in the dead of the morning.
In the back of his mind, he knows he should leave. There’s obviously nothing waiting for him here, but it’s definitive seeing it for himself. Like, there really is nothing.
Fuck, he doesn't even know what he's saying. That bitch on TV has gotten his head confused. That’s all it is.
Still, there’s something eerie about being down here himself that makes his skin crawl with dread.
There’s no explanation for the way he stares fixedly at the murky water as if he expects something to rise in front of his eyes. Distantly in the back of his mind, he hears his own voice telling him that he can’t stay here and that he needs to go home. Home.
He has to go back. Namgyu has a new life waiting for him that he has to prepare for.
A life without Korea, without Pentagon, without any death games, without Thanos. One where his only focus will be himself, and leading a life where he won’t feel like shit every single day.
Namgyu steps backwards until he slowly feels the staircase behind him leading to the surface, and after one final look, he turns his back on the river to begin scaling.
Before he can reach the third step, a sound echoes from somewhere behind him, making him falter.
It wasn’t the sound of the bushes moving in the wind, or the water softly crashing against the wall. He knows what both of those sound like. The one he had just heard wasn’t anything close to that.
Namgyu couldn’t even describe to himself what it had sounded like without hearing it again; whatever it was, it was similar to a growl. Or a groan, maybe.
Fuck. What the fuck was that?
No, realistically, it’s an animal lurking near the waters. Being on the outskirts of the city, it wouldn’t be weird for him to be unfamiliar with species this far out.
If Namgyu were to react normally, his instinct would be to take that noise as a sign to climb out of the ditch faster. Tonight, however, he discovers that rather than doing what his mind is telling him to do: something is rooting him firmly in place, stripping away his ability to move.
Which wasn’t a figure of speech.
Something is actually rooting him to the ground. More specifically, something has latched onto his ankle in a tight hold.
Namgyu is barely able to hold back a scream as he turns to look at what he prepares to frantically kick off—
Off—
But his panic is quickly melted into confusion.
Because animals aren’t supposed to have bony, human-like hands with colourfully painted fingernails. Normally, they don’t have rings decorating the base of their anthropoid fingers either.
“I was crossing the Han River Bridge when I saw this injured man. I tried to get closer to help, and that’s when I realised it was that rapper—Thanos. That’s when he jumped from the bridge.”
Thanos died in the midst of the chaotic brawl that he had started away from the public’s eye, where no one had spared him a glance as he had taken his final breath. Namgyu slipped into a pool of his blood that was infectiously spreading across the bathroom’s floor and staining the crevices of the tile’s grout. When every other player had filtered out, Namgyu loomed over Thanos’s body to watch as his once-dilated pupils had now narrowed and gone glassy, devoid of the euphoria that was once all there was to see in Thanos. He had been staring into eyes that weren’t seeing him in return, which was now literal, not figurative.
Thanos was dead. Thanos never walked out of that bathroom door in front of him; that was the truth that had been ringing through Namgyu’s head every single day since.
So why was Namgyu met with the sight of Thanos’s unmistakable body collapsed on the stairs barely beneath him, with his hand around Namgyu’s ankle in a deathgrip?
The scream that was ripped out of Namgyu’s throat reverberated several more times in his own ears before it even registered to him that he was the one who created the blood-curdling sound.
This time, his body responded to the hysteria, which was making the blood rapidly drain from his head, and he began to desperately shake his leg off... off... until he was finally free.
What he hadn’t considered was how the action would make him lose balance and fall forward onto the stairs, something he refused to respond to as he forced himself to his feet and dragged his shaking limbs up the stairs that felt like they were ready to crumble.
Within seconds, he re-emerged onto the surface without having looked behind him. From there, he continued to limp as fast as he could back to his apartment.
✃𓄧꒷꒦
“Namgyu? Is that you?”
Some time had passed since he had stumbled through his door and sunk to the ground to press his weight against the wood as a makeshift barricade. In the weeks following the game, his weight had dropped to being lighter than he had ever been in his adult years, so he’s not sure if his efforts would even do anything.
Details of his surroundings and circumstances aren’t processing through to him, though. Not when his heart feels like it’s a few beats away from stopping completely. All he can see are the same shapes: square, circle, triangle. Square, circle, triangle. Triangle, circle, square. Blood, forks, and doors.
The thought of running away is distant, like a faint memory. How can he run away? How can he leave when something is waiting on the other side of the door for the second he lowers his guard enough to pull his weight away to burst through and drive a fork through his neck? He’s stuck in this exact position now for the rest of his life.
He’s been unmoving for hours at this point, daylight had been pouring through his draped curtains for ages, and still, there’s only one image at the front of his mind. No matter how many times he blinks, the same image is burned through his eyes. If he focuses hard enough, he could imagine it sitting opposite him. Except he doesn’t want to do that, at all. That’s the opposite of what he wants to do.
Thanos. He was there. Namgyu saw him.
No, that’s not right, though. The Thanos that exists in Namgyu’s memory is split into three separate people: the one before the games, who rarely glanced at him whilst he served one of his many drinks and brought him all the luxuries he wouldn’t be able to get from anyone else, the one during the games, who did (kind of) look at him, if only for a second.
And then, the one he watched being lowered into a black coffin with a pink bow wrapped on the top.
None of those people aligned with whoever had been clinging to his leg. This... doppleganger did look like Thanos, in the way that they had the same nails, jewellery, hair down to every minuscule detail.
But this ‘Thanos’ didn’t have the same warmth beneath his skin that had so famously drawn in a mass crowd wherever he went. His yellowed complexion was inhumane and sickly-looking, one that would only scare people away.
That’s not the Thanos he wanted to remember, he—
“Namgyu? You there?”
Right. This fucking asshole, “H—” to his annoyance, nothing comes out of his throat again when he attempts to respond. Water. He needs water.
“Dude,” the voice on the other end of the line says anyway at the sign of life. “We all thought you were, like, fucking dead. Where the fuck have you been?” A voice he didn’t miss in the slightest.
“I need…” What does he need? “Need…”
“You’re not coming back to Pentagon, are you? Shit, let me tell you, man. I’ve never seen Seojun with a bigger smile on his face since he got all your fancy clients. He almost bought me out of my entire fucking inventory last Saturday. I’m not trying to be a dick, but if you show your face again, he’s gonna be mad.”
Inventory. He had stuff in stock, “I need...to buy.”
His (ex) co-worker gives an uncertain scoff of laughter, “I’m not doing free hand-me-outs. You gotta have the cash to buy, and if I recall—you still owe my boy. You gonna cough that up?”
“I have,” he snaps irritably. “Will—pay. Come.”
He’s probably not making coherent sense. He has to hope it can be somewhat understandable, “Where? To you?”
Yes. Let him come, and if there’s anything outside waiting for Namgyu—let it ravage him first and allow him time to escape. “Yes. Bring water. Food.”
There’s hesitation, before, “Alright, man. You'd better have the money for it, though. Seriously.”
Namgyu doesn’t have time (not that he was going to) to respond before the line ends, and his phone screen fades to black. The phone is then thrown to his side as he draws his knees under his chin.
What a joke, the idea of him being able to leave by himself.
Leaving doesn’t sound as nice anymore; everything outside of the four walls surrounding him seems terrifying.
He doesn’t want to be trapped. He doesn’t want to be alone. He wants things to be normal again.
He wants to curse Thanos under his breath again as he demands another round of drinks to be brought to his party immediately. It was shitty, and he did hate every second of it—except for that split moment where Thanos had spared him a glance, and his resentment vanished until he couldn’t remember why he was so mad in the first place. Until it happened again.
Namgyu hates Thanos, though. Namgyu is glad that he was the one who died, instead of him.
Knock,
Knock.
Two short raps against the door he’s leaning on make Namgyu jolt in fear—this was it. Someone’s here for him; that thing he saw in the river found him.
Namgyu can’t die to whatever’s waiting on the other side; he—he does still have himself to live for. His life can’t just end now—
“Dude, are you in there?”
—Oh. How long had it been since the call?
With legs that still haven’t stopped shaking since returning to his apartment, he stands like a foal taking its first steps, and cracks the door open slightly. Not all the way, just in case.
Seeing a familiar face feels almost surreal. “Do you have it?”
“Your usual fix? Yeah, I have it,” he kisses the back of his teeth in agitation. The sound rings in Namgyu’s ears. “Before that, though, I’m gonna need the money you borrowed.”
Of course. “Okay,” he breathes before letting the door open wider to let him in.
Namgyu watches carefully as his ex-coworker—now dealer, apparently—takes one glance around his apartment before giving Namgyu a brief up-and-down look with a permanent grimace plastered on his face. He’s disgusted, undoubtedly, but nothing he hasn’t already seen a million times. Maybe it’s weird for him to see it on someone he knew before everything fell to shit.
Without exchanging a word, Namgyu bends down to pick up his phone from the ground with trembling hands and starts to open the bank account that had been given to him a month ago.
It takes exactly 3 minutes until a soft alert sound goes off from his pocket, signalling that the transfer went through successfully.
After he briefly checked to confirm how much Namgyu had sent, his ex-coworker walked out just as quickly as he had come, leaving Namgyu standing in his empty apartment with his newly acquired small, sealed bags and sparse food. Nothing more than snacks that looked disgusting based on the packaging alone—probably stuff that he didn’t want for himself.
It doesn’t take long after that until he’s finally sedated enough to push out the images of rotten corpses wearing blood-stained green tracksuits. Finally, his mind seems quiet enough to keep him from thinking about anything at all other than the warm flush blossoming beneath his skin.
Namgyu’s not sure how he managed being cooped up in his apartment without this for as long as he did. Compared to how he feels now, he realises just how shitty he was before going through withdrawals of every kind.
At least now he has this, and he’ll be supplied for a while. Hypothetically, this wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the rest of his life: being able to call his new dealer, knowing he has the funds and won’t have to borrow money, ask him to bring food, and go through what he bought until the cycle resets. It would be the best he could do with his situation, much better than moving to England. Or the United States. Or wherever he was planning on going, not much of it is remembered now in the state he’s in.
As he basks in the high whilst it's still at its peak, he starts to go through one of the bags of crisps. It tasted as horrible as he expected it to, but at least it was food.
The downside was that eating had forced him to remember what hunger actually felt like. Being half-full felt way worse than it did before he ate.
He could always sleep it off, though, by dragging himself from where he’s currently planted boneless on the couch to the bedroom. That sounded better than being awake, dealing with wanting more food.
Maybe it was because he was so tired, but after standing from his couch and taking exactly 2 steps across the room—
—he slipped, falling to the floor clumsily.
Namgyu burned with embarrassment; even if there was obviously no one to witness his fall, it was still humiliating for him to deal with.
It wasn’t even his fault—if the floor hadn’t been wet, he wouldn’t have fallen at all.
Wet?
Why was the floor wet? Did he spill something?
As he turns his hands that were supporting his weight over, he sees that they’re stained with a dark brown, almost black, colour. It’s cold to the touch, but it's definitely some form of fluid that he’s sitting in a puddle of.
His eyes follow the snail trail that was leading from where its pooled next to Namgyu, to his front door, where it disappears out of sight underneath the crack hoving over the floor.
Looking closer, he also manages to make out the shadow of what looks like two legs standing outside his door.
The realisation that someone is outside barely manages to hit him before there’s a short, but heavy, thump against his door.
Namgyu scrambles back with the same fear that ignited him when he was at the Han River Bridge, not even caring about how he was spreading the dark liquid further across his floor, until he hits the couch again.
It’s here for him. It has to be. There’s no way his ex-coworker would come back for any reason. Or maybe he would, and Namgyu’s thinking too much about someone being outside his door.
Carefully, he edges closer, trying to hear for any tell-tale signs of someone clicking their tongue out of agitation, or tapping their foot against the floor impatiently.
The only sound he manages to hear is someone growling lowly in an almost anguished way. It’s throaty and scarily distinctive to the same noise that came from the Han River, too.
And only seconds after he heard that noise back then, he had looked down to see—
“Nam—...su,”
No. No, stop it.
In all of this time he’s been alone, Namgyu hasn’t cried. Not since he was sitting by himself in that bunk bed, trying to process all of the events through his mind.
There’s no point in crying; it doesn’t change anything about what’s happened.
Even so, there’s no thought put behind the tears that instantly well in his eyes at the sound of a voice coming from the other side. A voice croaking out the only twisted nickname he’s ever heard come from anyone else’s lips, other than Thanos. Thanos, who’s dead. Who isn’t alive. Who isn’t on the other side of the door—because he can’t be.
But that is unmistakably Thanos’s voice. It’s been so long since he’s heard it that it makes his skin shiver.
One part of him wants to open the door. Why? He doesn’t know. Because he’s also scared of what’s waiting for him. He’s going to die at the hands of this thing that’s been chasing him.
“Namsu.”
That name is groaned out again in the same voice, but this time, he immediately turns to use his body to barricade the door. It rattles against his weight as another, louder, knock comes.
“Thanos?” Namgyu tries, even as his voice comes out choked. He tries not to think about what would happen if it were to respond, “Go away.”
The doorknob rattles again, and Namgyu quickly puts his hand over it on the other side, even though the muscles are too weak from shaking so violently.
“Go away,” he repeats louder. “Go away, please, Thanos. Go away, go away, go—”
At this point, he can feel the tears streaming down his face, and all of the snot is making his throat close up, taking away his ability to speak.
“—away, please, go away.” All of his begging won’t do much when the door is eventually broken down, crushing Namgyu along with it.
Shit. He’s going to be crushed under the door. The impact surely won’t be enough to kill him before the thing on the other side rips him apart.
His panting begins to pick up unevenly. “You’re not real. This isn’t happening.”
It’s hard to believe what he’s desperately trying to convince himself of when the door tries to forcefully open again. At this rate, the hinges are only a few pushes away from breaking entirely.
“N—Nam—su,”
Shut up. Shut up. Why can’t it shut up?
Namgyu’s hand wavers over the doorknob that’s still rattling persistently as he tries to level his breathing. Thanos’s voice, sounding so raw and in agony, is messing with his head. He’s not able to think straight, as the image of what he saw in the river is forced to the front of his mind again.
He’s not scared of Thanos. Alive, or dead.
That’s why he stares at the wood separating them for a long second, muttering, “You fucking asshole,” before promptly unlocking the door.
Instantly, he wishes he hadn’t.
As soon as there’s no resistance blocking the door, a limp body falls through the entrance of Namgyu’s apartment—dragging in mud, water, and the black fluid that had been seeping across his floorboards.
In actual lighting without the darkness from the riverbed, he’s able to stare at the ‘230’ plastered on a green jumpsuit that’s coated in dried blood coming from his wounded throat. Namgyu kneels to where the body—Thanos’s body—is twitching on the floor and pulls him up into a better sitting position.
The first thing Namgyu’s instincts do, before even looking at the face, is to press over the space where the heart would be lying underneath. He holds his breath as he waits for a beat to come.
…
…
…
No response. Namgyu’s hands quiver even more as he finally averts his gaze up to the face he can feel staring down at him through strands of soaked purple hair that stick to his forehead.
“Thanos?”
Even with the absence of warmth underneath his charred skin, his eyes, which have grown hollow into his skull, blearily blinked as some form of answer—sparking a flicker of hope that something is alive under the lifeless expression haunting his pale, sallow face.
It’s almost impossible for him to believe, though, when the left half of Thanos’s face had been gruesomely peeled off, leaving the layer of skin tissue fully exposed to the stale air. A chunk of his lip was also completely missing, revealing his repulsively rotting gums.
“What the fuck?”