4.6 | Dark Ages ✓

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IT'S IN THE dead of night when they finally talk about her.

The man's name is Yoongi, he learns. A colonel tasked with rescuing and recruiting specific talents into the force. They have plenty of survivors but far too few capable ones at the base in Antarctica. Too many disabled, traumatized or insane ones. Too few doctors, nurses, scientists, combatants and engineers. Yoongi had been given a list of people to contact, but he'd headed straight here.

To the house of his ex-girlfriend.

"She's always been brilliant, even back in college," Yoongi says, as they sit at the dining table with hands clasped around steaming mugs of instant coffee. Without the gun, vest and bag strapped around him, the man looks like a worn shell of himself. "When the rest of the kids were out getting drunk or high, she was always studying. Something about Quantum Mechanics—I was never interested in what she did. But I was interested in her though, from when she first sat next to me in class and let me copy off her test. I've never been very smart myself."

Taehyung stares at the man, unable to find anything to say. He's always seen her in his dreams, and in the photograph on the mantlepiece. But now, he's seeing her through another man's eyes. One part of him is fascinated. The other part wants to assert possessiveness, claim her in her entirety, screaming—she belongs to me, not to you, never to you, always to me—at the top of his lungs, but he shoves that ridiculous notion aside.

How can he feel so possessive over a girl he's never even met, except for in his dreams?

"Anyway, we went out for awhile," the other man continues, oblivious to Taehyung's dilemma. "She was one of the best people I knew. Still is. Kind, smart, funny. A bit clumsy, a bit stubborn, a bit emotional. She kept to herself mostly, but when she let you in, you never wanted to leave. I didn't, until I realized that we were growing apart. She with her books, me with my work..."

Yoongi lets out a weary sigh. Picking up his coffee, he takes a long sip and when he sets it down, his eyes seem colder.

"I joined the military, long before the world went to hell," he says, a hard edge to his voice. "I believe in keeping peace with force, where necessary. And when Gen F came, it did become necessary."

"Gen F?"

"Generation F. In the early days, we called them Frankensteins, playing on the irony that they were, indeed, created from Strand F—which was an experiment gone wrong. Are you sure you haven't been wiped?" Yoongi asks, peering closely at him.

When Taehyung responds with a shrug, he narrows his eyes, before leaning back in his chair.

"Anyway, she never liked violence, even when it did become a necessary evil. She preferred to solve things with her intellect, although it was intellect that wrecked this armageddon to begin with. So our paths diverged and we decided to call it quits before things could ever turn ugly between us. Not that it ever could," he adds, with a trace of fond nostalgia. "She doesn't have the capacity for cruelty or spite, in any way."

Of course she doesn't.

He doesn't know why he's so sure of that, except that in his dreams, she'd never appeared malicious or antagonistic in any way. When the world revealed itself to be a wasteland of human corpses and unkillable monsters, she was the sole constant that he clung to, even if at times he wondered if he might go mad clinging to her so desperately.

He takes a slow sip of his coffee and sets the mug down, his heart thudding in his chest. "But you don't know where she is now?"

A shadow crosses Yoongi's face. "No."

The word falls into the pained silence between them. Taehyung lifts his cup to drink and Yoongi does the same with his—two strangers connected by memories and dreams of a girl who'd proven to be elusive once again.