Petranella Gordon sprinted up the building's stairs, stumbling through the threshold of the rooftop. Against the far brick parapet wall, Gwonhan's corpse lay sideways, lifeless eyes staring up at the starless sky. Next to him, with his broad, heaving back facing her, a boy crouched on his knees.
"Jungkook!" she called, desperation propelling her towards him only for her feet to stop at the sight of Jaewha lying in a pool of his own blood. A hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.
"Jungkook," she said quietly, braving forward till she was a mere step behind him. She reached a trembling hand to place on his shoulder. He turned to her and growled.
Petra shrieked and withdrew her hand like she had been burnt, staggering several steps behind. The boy glaring at her was not Jungkook, but a morphed version of him with pale green skin and veiny red streaks running across his forehead, sweaty tendrils of dishevelled hair framing his face. His onyx eyes had turned into a soulless grey, piercing predatorily into her.
A few feet away from him, next to Gwonhan's open palm, lay a half-empty vial of liquid Aenigmium.
She had done this before. She had worked with these creatures, she reassured herself, inhaling deeply as she levelled him with a calm expression.
"Jungkook, it's me."
He snarled wickedly, rising to his feet to swing a fist in her direction. Petra ducked, whirling around him and kicking the back of his knees to send him falling face first to the floor. She was atop him in a second, straddling his torso between her knees and holding his face against the ground with a hand.
"Jungkook, stop it!" she screamed, holding him down. Her voice seemed to work this time, his floundering arms going still on the ground, heavy pants leaving his lips instead of snarls.
"It's me, Petra," she whispered, loosening her hold on his hair just the slightest bit, fingers scraping lightly against his scalp just like she used to do to lull him to sleep. Just a little while longer this way, and Ava would get the job done. "It's just me, remember? We're okay."
Petra felt him relax under her hold and lift his head the slightest bit, turning it sideways as much as he could under the constricting position. When he looked back at her, lips moving soundlessly, she thought his eyes were a shade darker.
"What is it?" she asked, cautiously bending over his torso to align her ear with his lips. His voice was the barest whisper, the calm before the storm.
"Kill me."
The first shot of pain was at the juncture of between her neck and spinal cord, a sensation akin to cracking bones that she fully felt only after she was yanked to the ground in front of him. The pulse in her forehead pounded incessantly, so overwhelming that her skull felt like it was being hammered. Jungkook's arms were caging her throbbing body the next moment, a hand coming down to grip her jaw in place. She cried out from the pain, fighting to keep her eyes open to ward off the tempting clutches of unconsciousness.
Petra blinked up at the boy, raising a hand to claw away at his hold. Flecks of colour flitted in the pools of his eyes - sour grey, deep obsidian and coffee brown - incoherent jumbles falling from his lips as he looked down at her through a curtain of sweaty black bangs, his grip loosening sporadically only to tighten back again. It was almost as if he were fighting an inner beast, his conscience being pulled one way or another.
"Wh-where's you gun?" he rasped, groaning as her fingernails clawed at the skin of his waist, palms pushing him upwards and away. "Where is it?!"
"I-I'm not killing you," she managed, chasing the last molecules of oxygen before they could leave her completely. "H-hold on to it, j-just for a - for a little while."
"I'm trying-ARGHHHHH -"
His hands moved to her throat and squeezed, draining the recesses of life out of her. Petra's eyes rolled to look up at the sky just as the blurred silhouette of a helicopter whizzed overhead. The underside of the sky turned black with flecks. The bombs fell diagonally; the civilians rose and scrambled. Fourteen stories down, the Special Operations Unit fired a second anti-air battery and Petra listened to the shell scream into the sky. She saw a forest of dying sunflowers. She saw a flock of blackbirds explode out of a tree.
A demonic horde. Upended sacks of beams. A hundred broken rosaries. There were a thousand metaphors and all of them were inadequate: forty bombs per aircraft, four hundred and eighty altogether, seventy-two thousand pounds of explosives. But instead of leaving trails of fire and destruction in their wake, the bombs exploded into long wisps of gas that whisked through the air like tendrils of neon green smoke. It seeped through their nostrils and into their brains, transforming the liquid substance into gas and leaving their bodies with every exhalation. Fallen Aenigmi, those without bullet wounds, rose from the streets. Vestiges of memories returned with the tide - names, addresses, deadlines, ration lists. Somewhere, a convict writhing on the floor of a decimated subway station remembered the way back to his daughter waiting at home. Somewhere, a journalist held captive by a Special Ops officer who wouldn't shoot at him regained his voice, said I'm back, Taehyung. Somewhere, a man remembered the name of his six-year-old, almond-eyed son, Woobin.
Somewhere, on the rooftop of the Natural Sciences Building, Petranella Gordon could see a hole blacker than the blackness around her, at the bottom of which teemed a dark country full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all of their faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smouldering parks, and she heard thunder.
Lightning.
Artillery.
Memory returning to the city.
The ground quaking, the organs inside her body trembling. The fires subsiding. Then the slow trickle of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of the boy beside her.
☯
[A/N] Sweetest reader,
The next chapter will be the last.
Love,
Arya
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Dark Matter | JJK
Fanfiction"If you had to choose between wrong and very wrong, what would you choose?" When two young scientists decide to decode the secret behind a very millennial-looking zombie roaming the streets of their city on a moonless twilight, they are faced with...
