#took a brief hiatus while I struggled with some health stuff

[maybethistimemegz]

Criminal Minds - One Quote per Episode ↳ s04e11 - Normal

[colourfullsims]

An Overdue Update

Hey there! Long time no see.

It’s been quite a while since my last update (and several times that I’ve said I would update that fell through lol), but I think it’s finally the perfect time to tell you all what’s been going on behind the scenes. I’ve kept most of you all in the dark with no explanation for my hiatus for months now, but with the end of the year upon us, I want things out in the open before moving into 2021. I will warn you now, that this will be a long post, because there’s a lot of backstory I have to lay out to explain everything. There will also be some brief mentions of emotional manipulation and emotional abuse in the beginning of this post, which I will be content tagging for safety, so please skip over the first question if you would like to avoid this subject.

Now without further ado, I will be answering some frequently asked questions, starting with:

Q: Where did you go?

The short answer to this is that I took a very long, unwanted break from the community, but that answer doesn’t really suffice in explaining why. Typically, I like to keep things lighthearted and chill on this blog, because much of the reason why I play the Sims and do storytelling is for escapism. Things that happened this year took that away from me.

This spring, I broke up with my long term boyfriend of five years. With that separation came a lot of heartache, guilt, and stress for a variety of reasons. We’d been together since my days in undergrad and had shared so many intimate experiences together: graduations, moving out of state into our first “grown up” apartment, birthday trips to our favorite cities. We had inside jokes that I still find myself wanting to make with him, because after so much of our lives intertwined together, he’d essentially become my best friend. But things ended between us for good reason.

Despite the good that came out of that relationship, there was a fair amount of emotional manipulation/abuse that went on, early as the first few months of us being official. Sometimes it was subtle things: when we first started dating, I was in my final year of undergrad and doing all I could to bring up my gpa and buff up my resume, so that I could increase my chances of getting into my grad school of choice. Frequently, he would comment on my academic successes as if they would be the thing that would break us up. I remember presenting a paper on a panel, facing my fear of public speaking head on, and I was so proud of the work I’d put into it all, and then hours later coming back to my student apartment to tell him how it went, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Someday you’re gonna get too smart and leave me behind.” And that wouldn’t be the last time he said some iteration of that phrase to me, and every time it would feel like he was praying I would slow down so he wouldn’t feel I was outgrowing him. Even when I finally did get accepted to my dream school, my first thought after my excitement was that when I told him the news, he wouldn’t be happy for me. My decisions for my future became personal slights to him: I had to move from the midwest out to NYC to attend grad school, and even though I discouraged him from following me if he didn’t want to live in the city (which he 100% did not), he followed me anyway and hung that decision over my head like a giant reminder of some debt that I owed him. I regret not following my gut then and my failure to recognize the red flags, because I would go on to spend 3 more years after our move losing myself as he clutched onto me, in what I can only assume with the hope that if he held on tight enough, that I wouldn’t leave him behind. 

When I look at the more overt signs of my ex’s possessiveness, I realize I should have shared what was going on more with the people close to me: in the early stages on our relationship, he’d already done destructive things like slashing the tires of a guy I had been seeing earlier that same year, and punching a hole into the wall of my student apartment. He’d gone through all my messages on social media, my texts, my emails, all to find out about old crushes that he suspected I might still be in contact with. He even went as far as reading through my private journal, which I previously wrote in daily, but now I struggle to write in more than a few times a year, for fear of my privacy being invaded again. In the wake of realizing our relationship was failing, instead of ending things, I put my energy into hoping that he would do better, and I hid what was happening from my family and friends, to the point that I avoided their messages and phone calls. I isolated myself in increasing measures as time went on until I was too timid to do most things outside of my apartment without my ex-boyfriend by my side. The reason I stayed so long is because of these combined things: the sense of owing him my time after uprooting his life, the fact that I was both physically and mentally separated from my support systems, the feeling of familiarity that had grown from shared experiences and time, and largely, this overwhelming self imposed desire to not appear as though I had failed my relationship.

Largely, 2020 has been an absolute trash fire, but I can thank this year for one thing; putting me into a situation of such unrest that I could no longer ignore that I was not living the life I wanted or deserved.

After our breakup, I moved back to my parents’ place and stayed there while the remainder of my lease in New York ran out. When I originally left, I only brought back a small suitcase and backpack filled with essentials and valuable items that I couldn’t leave behind in my apartment, so I had to return again to retrieve my things, which, as you can imagine, was not fun. Not only was traveling during covid a nightmare, my ex was threatening to throw all my stuff out of our apartment, so I had to scramble to get a flight, a hotel, moving equipment, and a moving service arranged on the fly so I could retrieve everything (and when I got there, he had smashed one of my laptops). In summation, from our break up to finally moving out completely, this all happened over the span of mid-spring to the 1st of August.

Since then, I’ve been keeping myself sparse on the internet, partially because I needed the time to recover from the entire experience, and partially because frankly, I’ve been afraid of my ex monitoring any of my accounts to keep tabs on me. He was fully aware of this blog, and since in recent years it's been the only account I’ve kept up with, I was afraid of him trying to find out where I am and what I’ve been doing through here. I’ve only felt comfortable reblogging others content for the past few months.

So that’s where I’ve been. Which brings us to the next question:

Q: What happened to Love Island?

Over the past few months, I’ve received several asks and messages about whether or not I still planned on doing the Love Island challenge, as well as words of concern about my well being. I want to start by acknowledging all those messages by first apologizing to anyone I didn’t get back to: the majority of you got the sense that I was overwhelmed or burnt out, as most of us have been this year, and I really thank you for still having any interest in seeing me do any type of content after I essentially ghosted you all lol. I really appreciate all the well wishes too.

But I also received this:

Which, 1) I don’t know if this was either impeccable timing or horrible timing on your part, considering I planned on writing this update before this landed in my inbox.

And 2),

I don’t know if you were a reader or one of the participants selected for the challenge, but I’m sorry you’re disappointed about me not following through with the challenge. I was really excited to do it when I made the casting call, was ecstatic about the number of creators who submitted complex and diverse sims, and I had even completed the villa and started working on shooting the premiere. But as you can see from everything above, life happened. I wish this year had been more stable so that I could have done the challenge with no problem. 

But I’m not going to apologize for making the choices I needed to to preserve my mental health and safety.

That being said, it’s been so many months since I originally pitched the challenge; many of the creators who were selected are now inactive or have deactivated. And honestly, I didn’t know whether you all would even want the challenge at the point, I mean…? It’s winter time now, and Love Island was definitely more of a summer themed challenge lol.

As it stands, I don’t know if I will be picking up where I left off with the Love Island challenge. I certainly still have some interest in doing it; I built a whole set and had an entire schedule of challenges and dates planned for the project. But I don’t know if I can move forward with the original cast, or if I would have to do a new casting call to fill the spaces of inactive creators. So...I guess I would need feedback from you all. Would you want Love Island still?

Q: What are you planning to do now?

Right now, I’m doing whatever makes me happy. I’m in a much better place than I was about 6 months ago, and I don’t feel the same anxiety about posting as I did. For now, I might just post some casual gameplay until I know whether or not I’m moving forward with Love Island. I’m just happy to come back to do what I love.

So there you have it. 2020 kicked my ass in some really heart wrenching ways, and I needed some time to not worry about keeping up with content creation and just worry about taking care of me. Now that I’m a little more stable, I want to come back, even if it’s just simple stuff for now. To those of you who have stuck around waiting to see if I’d ever pick my projects back up, thank you so much, and I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting this long lol. For the time being, all I have to offer is a very long overdue Follower’s Gift: I will be hosting a giveaway for my followers this week, where I will be giving away $40 worth of sims content each to 3 followers. I’ll have more details about the giveaway tomorrow when the official post goes live.

If you made it this far thank you for reading this long mess, and I’ll see you all soon!

~Cam

[gwoongi]

𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗅𝖺𝗌𝗍 𝗈𝖿 𝗎𝗌 ✰ taehyung (9)

𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗅𝖺𝗌𝗍 𝗈𝖿 𝗎𝗌 kim taehyung / reader genre: zombie apocalypse au words: 4761

On one hand, it could just be the neighbours cat who did, sometimes, come into the house when your grandparents left the back door open. On the other hand, this could be the exact same as The Walking Dead and you could open the door and find a legless zombie chasing after you- 5 dumb seconds of adrenaline.

a/n: this fic is still on hiatus, due to the rest of it being rewritten and revised!!! please be patient and thank u for all the love :D

warnings: flashbacks, drug use, alcohol, gore, death, twd references, brief suicide mention, struggling mental health

01. denver ↝ 02. holiday with me ↝ 03. sad forever ↝ 04. surely ↝ 05. scorpion ↝ 06. shakespeare ↝ 07. thrones ↝ 08. moon motel ↝ 09. zombies

When Kyungmin heard the distinct sound of boots along the metal fire-escape she looked up from the gun in her hands, spotting Namjoon emerging up the small spiralled staircase to sit on the roof of the motel. She looked back, watching the stars appear sporadically in the dark sky with her feet dangling off the side of the roof, comfortable when her brother sat down next to her.

Namjoon reached into his coat pocket, opening a packet of Marlboro. He toyed with his between his lips, passing the packet to her openly with the raise of his brows, “want a light?”

She shook her head, cringing. “Can’t get over the taste. I’ll pass, thanks, Joonie.”

Namjoon shrugged, pocketing the cigarettes. With one hand, he lit the butt, and the other wrapped around Kyungmin’s hand, tightly, as if afraid to let go. He inhaled the smoke, letting it fill his lungs and choked it out, watching the smoke rush out towards the forest.

“Think they’re getting comfy back there,” he started, and Kyungmin looked over with raised brows, a smile twitching at her lips for a brief moment until it fell. “What? Jealous?”

Kyungmin shrugged.

“Maybe if you ask her, she’ll share him with you,” Namjoon teased, but then he paused, noticing how the skin on Kyungmin’s nose wrinkled, as if disgusted by the idea of being with Taehyung. Funnily enough, that’s exactly how it was. “What? You jealous of him?”

She shrugged again, huffing hair from her face. “It’s whatever, Joon. It’s one of those crushes where you’ve got nobody else to crush on.” Kyungmin waved her hand, “it’ll pass, don’t worry.”

“I guess. She’s pretty, though.”

“Yeah, she is.”

He thought for a long moment. “Is that why you came up here?”

More shrugging. “I had a hunch they’d get to it soon. In any case, it’s not like I wanna be with her. It’s just...a weird attraction. I don’t know. We get along. It’s nice to get along with someone other than you.”

Namjoon scoffed. If this had been any other normal day, without dead people roaming the streets, Namjoon knew everything would be different. 

Back home, back in Korea, he and Kyungmin were never close. With a couple years age difference, Namjoon never wanted to be with his little sister. He had his own friends and his own hobbies, he didn’t need the annoying sister he had to come by to his room and cry when she wasn’t allowed in to play Yugioh with his friends. She got him back for it; when Kyungmin got her first girlfriend aged fourteen, she didn’t want her big brother driving her around, knocking on the door to ask if they wanted something to eat when she knew the only reason he came in was to see if everything was okay. Kyungmin and Namjoon were never close, at least not until he went into translating for a big idol company in Seoul and Kyungmin transferred to LA for University.

He often thought it was funny, how they only got close when they were dragged further apart.

“I’m not that bad,” he muttered, offended.

Kyungmin dipped her head, fiddling with the gun. Bored, she began to reload it, spinning the chamber, the bullets rolling on the concrete next to her, ready to be slotted in. Namjoon barely paid any attention to it, glancing over at the spinning sound and dropping some ash off the edge of the roof.

“You shouldn’t play around with that.”

“Not playing, I’m loading it.”

“No difference,” Namjoon muttered, taking a drag. “If you accidentally shoot yourself, it’s gonna be on me or one of them to get it out of you. And I’m not trained in medicine.”

No, Namjoon had studied literature at a community college back in Korea since he couldn’t afford to go a proper University. That’s the difference between him and Kyungmin- one got all the good stuff afterwards because his parents got better jobs. Not that Namjoon minded much. He was happy studying something he liked at his own pace, whilst working for some company he couldn’t remember the name of for a couple months, building up his muscles and stamina, nicknaming himself Backbreaker with a couple of colleagues who worked in the statistics department.

Namjoon had never considered the slight chance that a zombie apocalypse could happen. Nah, it wasn’t possible to think about back when he was eight, thinking about what he wanted to do for a living. If he had known, he would have gone into medicine, or at least the army. Things would be different if the apocalypse was planned.

Namjoon gave up trying to lecture Kyungmin, knowing her well enough to understand that by now she was old enough to do her own thing and make her own choices. If she wanted to fuck around with a gun and twirl her butterfly knife like some Mob movie gangster, he couldn’t stop her. Taking a long drag from the cigarette, Namjoon glanced at her and held it out between his fingers one last time. “Final offer.”

Kyungmin glared at the cigarette, and Namjoon was shocked to see that the cigarette didn’t set up in flames at the intensity of it. She bit her lip roughly, and snatched it from his fingers. Namjoon smoked a lot lately; she knew that no matter how hard he tried to hide it, she could tell from the yellow staining on his fingers, the black nicotine pushed underneath his nails. Bringing the cigarette to her lips, she took an equally long drag, inhaling the smoke, coughing it out and stubbing the butt. The cigarette then fell, like suicide, from the roof onto the grass down below. Namjoon watched it fall, no longer an advocate for keeping the environment clean like he would have been before the Nukes. The world was ending anyway.

“God, it tastes like shit,” she spluttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Namjoon chuckled from next to her, nudging his shoulder against hers. They didn’t say anything after that, not much besides idle chat about the weather and how food supply was running low. Namjoon was a practical person, he liked things being neat and ordered and under control. As a silence fell over the siblings, Namjoon suddenly realised how easy it was to be around Kyungmin. Realistically, it had nothing to do with the fact that that they were blood related. Even if they hadn’t been related, Namjoon reckons it would have been easy being with her, being around her. Kyungmin had that vibe that mother’s have with babies, that somewhat maternal instinct that makes them nice to be around for a while. Kyungmin liked pretending she was Namjoon’s Mom. Maybe he liked that, maybe he liked having a sister and a mother at the same time, even when she was a couple years younger.

“Joon, I wanna stay with Y/N and Taehyung.”

He said nothing at first, swallowing the nicotine flavoured saliva and looking at her with a blank expression, devoid of emotion. Kyungmin frowned deeper, shuffling to face him, “hear me out.”

“I hear you, Kyungmin, I hear you.”

“It’s not right,” she breathed out, at last, shaking her head. “After everything they’ve done for us, and us them...it would be wrong to just leave them behind. We can’t leave them, Namjoon. I don’t want to.”

Namjoon pondered on that. “You’re my baby sister. The only thing I have left- I know, it’s hard, but I have to think beyond a couple of days. I need to think of the future- our future, Kyungmin, and-”

“We’re alive because of them,” Kyungmin continued, her voice raising slightly. But Namjoon didn’t flinch or cringe or even bat an eyelid. “This world is dark, and cruel, and evil. Like hell, are we leaving them behind in that. Look, Joonie, I know it’s not what you want to hear, but we need to consider the possibility of us not making it back home.”

Namjoon groaned, moving, “Kyungmin, no-”

“Please, Joon,” she rasped, holding onto his sweater paws. “Y/N has a group in Georgia with a boat-”

“-We don’t know that-”

“-and our best bet is on that boat,” Kyungmin explained, heating up her cheeks as she spoke. “And even if there is no boat, then fuck, at least we’re not alone on this ugly planet in this ugly country. Namjoon, I wanna go home more than anything else, but, it’s just not realistic right now. I want to stay safe and I think our best bet is to stay with Taehyung and Y/N. Or, fuck, I don’t know, invite them to come with us. Please, Namjoon. I don’t want to leave them behind.”

To be honest, Namjoon didn’t want to either. But it felt like he was the only person thinking realistically about the situation; there was absolutely zero guarantee that there would be anything in Georgia. Namjoon’s watched about a thousand apocalyptic movies, and the ending is never that simple. Without really realising he reaches for a second cigarette, the small box almost half empty.

Namjoon let out a puff of dark smoke, hissing between his teeth. God, no matter how many fags he smoked, he could never get used to that fucking taste. “I’ll bring it up with Taehyung tomorrow. Kyungmin, I just don’t know what to say anymore. We have to think of us. What do we wanna do?”

They left that question hanging for a bit, quietly watching the sky, trying to pretend that the world around them wasn’t falling apart by the second.

After the second night of staying over at the Moon Motel, Taehyung began to feel as though they had overstayed their welcome.

He proposed it over a tinned dinner, the little fire of salvaged wood from outside and pine cones, a leftover newspaper dating back to 2001 reporting the news of the Twin Towers. Just a quick run, to the small village he knew was nearby, nicknamed Shell-Shock, as he recalled from what he had seen on a left behind map back in the suite.

“It will take less than a day,” Taehyung had said. Namjoon didn’t look convinced. “We’re running low on gas, we’ve got about a day’s worth of food left…”

“It would be really helpful if you went, actually,” Kyungmin said around a mouthful of sweetcorn. “The world still spins, and menstrual cycles still exist.”

The plan was simple, the simplest of plans they’ve ever had all together. Taehyung and Namjoon would take the van for a short ten minute drive to the nearby town, scavenge the area and salvage some parts, and then come back. In that time, Kyungmin and yourself would completely pull apart the motel, looking for anything and everything to help the journey to wherever the fuck they needed to be.

“You know how to shoot this, yeah?”

“Of course I do, Taehyung,” you said, approaching him as he hesitated by the door to the van. Namjoon blinked, not caring about the slight delay, using the time to lecture Kyungmin on things she already knew off by heart. “You’ll be gone for a couple hours tops. We’ll be okay- I’ll be okay.”

He nodded his head frivolously, pulling you by your cheeks to plant a small, dry kiss to your temple. “Just making sure,” and then he was off and inside the van, pulling the doors closed.

Taehyung had never really paid much attention to the interior of the van until given the chance to look around. As Namjoon fiddled with the keys and anxiously checked the meter at least four times before driving off, Taehyung fingered the worn, holey leather and scrunched up his nose at the old and stale smell. It reminded him, now he thinks about it, of his first car after high-school. It was old, a 1983 Dodge Colt in red that had been sitting in a junkyard for around three months until he decided to save up at a job in his local cinema and buy the baby. Like the van, his Dodger had worn leather seats that he was too poor to replace, a deep maroon colour, the insides sticking out like tufts of fur.

For a first car, it wasn’t bad. Actually, it was kind of amazing, the kind of car you saw in those 80’s movies about vampires at your high-school. After he bought his first car, Taehyung bought a leather jacket, regretfully real instead of faux, and smoked his first cigarette. In his defense, it had been down to the peer pressure of his best friend, Seunghee, who picked up smoking from her friend Arin, who picked it up from her Dad during a weekend helping out at the garage he worked in. But, it’s a good memory.

He thought about the memory as the van rolled off beyond the small woods, onto the clear road and down towards Shell-Shock.

“C’mon, Y/N,” Kyungmin said after a while, tugging at the end of Taehyung’s leather jacket- the leather jacket- dressing your arms. “We should start near the kitchen, make our way up.”

3 YEARS PRIOR.

One, two, three. 

Seunghyun’s feet kicked annoyingly into the wooden frame of your bed, pushed up by the off-white wall, his head lulled back onto the dry paint as Jiyong stood hunched over your desk, one finger on his nose, the other tapping the table.

“Fuck, you got any more of this shit?”

Spinning in your chair, you pulled it across the matted carpet towards the bookcase covering a wall with a couple drill holes in. Honestly, when you moved in with your grandparents the Autumn after your mother passed away, you felt as if there had been little need to decorate the attic that was already looking reasonably liveable. With its slanted ceiling and cream walls, a running cream skirting board and old carpet that had been cut and lazily slapped down on the floor, it was enough to call a home.

The bookshelf ran a metre wide, a dripping deep brown shade with all sorts scattered on the shelves. Books from years ago that your grandmother had just put up for storage, a cactus from IKEA, a few photographs in worn out frames presenting Jiyong and Jennie and Seunghyun and whoever else had scurried into your life after the accident, and a sea-shell ornament placed at an angle, reflecting the light in a coral shade. A conch shell, from a trip to Portugal that your Dad went on after he divorced your Mum and spent the next three months pretending as if he gave a damn. The shell, pretty in its design, came in handy in several ways, as you fingered the hole to retrieve a little packet of glittery white powder, an obnoxious J written on it in red ink.

“There’s the beauty,” Seunghyun narrated, his attention alerted. He sat up straight, holding his hand out expectantly. “Gimme.”

Jiyong let out a sigh of relief, his gums aching as he collapsed onto the floor, shuddering like the shivers after a sunburn. “On second thought, that’s enough for me.”

“If you say so,” you said quietly, kicking the chair back towards the door where it hit the wood with a silent pad, enough to remind your grandparents that you were still up here, although occupied, and very much alive. They rarely saw you, actually. Not that they minded that much. 

Even before the accident, they were never very talkative, opting to living life as if their granddaughter wasn’t in the roof snorting lines and popping pills, doing everything and anything to forget and numb the pain, haze the memory of the cancer.

Seunghyun took the bag from you, promptly switching positions as he put the bag on the desk next to a sugary pile of cocaine Jiyong had yet to snort, bringing his attention back to the bed where you lay, staring up at him. You lay still, like a slice of ham. 

He grunted with satisfaction, always ready to dominate, and bunched up your shirt to roll it up over your head. Seunghyun sucked in a breath at the sight of a silk bralette, and a surprised gasp elicited your lips as Seunghyun brought back the packet.

“Please don’t fuck while I’m still in the room.”

“Whatever, we’ve done it before,” Seunghyun said, taking the vial from the desk and using it to draw a line of white on your stomach, a beginners position. Without a word, Seunghyun held his thumb to his nostril and sniffed hard, and with experience cleared up the line of white with a groan following. He tilted his head back afterwards, his eyes folding back, strands of bleached white hair falling back into his eyes when he looked back down at you.

His fingers were still white as he hooked his hands around your bralette, “can this come off?”

“Sure,” you breathed. Jiyong let out a groan, or something, you couldn’t quite remember, rolling back over to the desk to finish off the other line. The loud sound of Jiyong sniffing up the powder overpowered the inhale of breath from Seunghyun as he, with one hand, pulled away your bra, tossing it to the side to palm your tits with both hands, his fingers cold and powdery, the taste on his gums.

“Fuck,” he murmured, using the vial once more to draw a more shaky line down your sternum, gently holding back your breasts to clear the space. With what he had leftover, Seunghyun rubbed his fingers over his gums, groaning, and whilst numbing slowly, brought his face back down to snort his second line. That’s all your bedroom was now, a cave filled with white powder and the quiet sound of “Breaking News” that had disturbed the playlist session showcasing the newest album from Yeseo.

Yeah, you fucking druggies, North Korea might be sending cryptic messages about how those infected by their bomb are gonna rip everyone’s faces off, but it’s okay, yeah? As long as you’ve got your white lines, you’re cool.

“You want some?” Seunghyun asked after a long pause of silence. Pushing yourself up on your elbows, you shook your head, sitting up to push his chest back. He stumbled.

“Nah. I’d rather not become a coke addict,” you replied. “Besides, we had a fair trade. Coke for the weed. As per usual…”

Seunghyun smiled razorblades. “Ah, you never let me down. You’re a good girl.”

“D’you think the Denver Quarantine is gonna burst?”

Seunghyun pocketed the remains of the coke in the packet, glancing at Jiyong hunched on the floor. In a whiff, Seunghyun noticed the smell in the room, something like weed and off-cheese, the twang of alcohol and the same old lavender candle on the dresser by the mirror on the wall. He grimaced, reaching towards the window to push it open, airing out the room.

“What’s that got to do with...anything?”

“Just asking,” Jiyong shrugged. “Cause the radio just said that. Said the one in Washington got blown up this afternoon.”

Neither you or Seunghyun said anything. The elder shifted uncomfortably on two feet, already starting his cigarette for the way out. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, at least it’s them and not us,” Seunghyun replied as if it was the easiest answer in the world. “Denver ain’t coming down. You seen the size of those walls?”

“That’s what they thought about the Washington ones, too,” Jiyong shrugged, tightening his belt. “Ah well, fuck it. If the tossers come out, they come out, eh?”

Seunghyun shook his head, sniffing once. “You’re too deep on crack, man.”

Jiyong snorted but said nothing more. Jiyong was practically family at this point, having been a friend since before the start of high-school, during the divorce, after the cancer; he shrugged on his brown Oak and Fort coat, kicking around a packet of pills off the floor and using his foot to shoot it up into his hands, already opening the door leading downstairs. No doubt your grandparents would smell Jiyong before he bounded down the stairs, since he never came round smelling like anything other than booze, fags or faint sweat. Naturally the smell didn’t even matter to you anymore.

Listening to the sound of Jiyong’s socked feet disappearing down the stairs, Seunghyun adjusted the waist of his jeans and shrugged into his own jacket, then moving to pull your face in for a brief, nonetheless deep, kiss, all in one movement. “Thanks, Y/N.”

The boys vanished together, as they came, back outside the small home and into Jiyong’s jeep. It didn’t take watching from the window to hear it groan to a start, the engine revving obnoxiously as if Jiyong was trying to make a statement. Too high to drive, he reversed into one of the ditches across the road, struggling to get up, and then he cruised down the road at a desirable speed, the sound of Babymetal on the speakers.

Downstairs, you could hear your grandparents shuffling around, switching off lights and moving into the back bedroom where they’d probably stay all afternoon. To avoid the smell, maybe. Moving on the chair to kick the door closed, you relaxed when it clicked shut and you rolled back to your desk, switching on the lamp, sliding into a shirt and opening Google Docs on your laptop. You rubbed your finger across the leftover powder on your desk, considering sprinkling it to the ground but at the last second spreading it across your own gums. Because nothing beat writing Seunghyun’s essay on Henry VIII’s foreign policy than being off your face whilst doing it.

The scheduled hour of essay writing slowly turned into six hours of sleeping at the desk, your face shoved into the crook of your elbows with the sound of Childish Gambino in your ears on full blast. By the time you stirred awake uncomfortably, the sky was a blood orange, and you barely registered the faint line of charcoal in the sky until the Childish Gambino record looped for probably the 100th time, the beat making your head bop as you moved to the open window to stare at it.

With the earphones still in your ears, you remembered feeling incredibly uncomfortable listening to Donald Glover sing in a high tone, watching the smoke rise from the Denver cityscape beyond the dense woods, and the sight of oil and blood and about three starfish bodies on the road outside your window. At first, it didn’t seem real, as if you were dreaming vividly. It reminded you of the movies, the first episode of The Walking Dead where Rick has no fucking idea what’s happening. Oh, what a day to feel like Rick Grimes.

Slowly you pulled your earphones out, Donald shutting up, straining to hear absolutely nothing outside besides the obnoxious car alarm, something like gunshots in the city and the very faint sound of scratching behind your door. 

At first you almost missed it, the sound so quiet that you could have ignored it all together. You probably would have done, if it hadn’t been for the fact that there were three starfishes out on the main road, and nothing but the very unusual sound of literal warfare in the city.

Setting your phone and earphones to the side, your feet moved towards the door, slowly enough that the noises didn’t cease as they would if something approached the door. Instead, the scratching continued, almost sounding like a kitty pining for attention. 

You didn’t own a cat.

Refraining from the stereotype of horror movies, you didn’t bother calling out to whoever- or whatever- was outside the door. As if out of instinct, you paused before turning the handle, suddenly as still as stone. On one hand, it could just be the neighbours cat who did, sometimes, come into the house when your grandparents left the back door open. On the other hand, this could be the exact same as The Walking Dead and you could open the door and find a legless zombie chasing after you-

5 dumb seconds of adrenaline; you yanked open the door and hurried back a few steps, a strangled noise clawing at your throat as the door hit off the wall and revealed an empty staircase. Well, partly empty, if you ignored the fact that your grandmother was literally on all fours on the floor with half of her face missing.

Fuck you, Rick Grimes.

Unlike most pop-culture-induced teenagers, you had never given a zombie apocalypse much thought. Understandably, you had no idea what to do except stumble backwards in panic when she- or it- crawled forwards on all fours, scurrying like a feral animal. With half her jaw hanging by a slick piece of flesh, she picked one bone thin knee up off the second to last step, and in a frenzy, you moved to kick it, sending her tumbling down the stairs in a small nursery rhyme sounding set of thuds.

A groan from down the stairs began to get louder, and you pushed yourself back towards the bookshelf, in a position where you wouldn’t make it to the door before she got up to you. With one million different thoughts racing through your head, and the sight of a white nightgown out the corner of your eye, you turned to the bookshelf and scanned for something- anything to use as a weapon.

You threw a stuffed animal. 

You don’t know why, knowing it would do zilch as it bounced off the top of her head, bobbing up the stairs like a buoy on water. And then you saw it, the same coral colour of the conch shell, the spikes protruding like tiny swords. It was this or nothing. Sorry, Dad.

Grabbing the conch with one hand, you turned on your sock to face the groaning and grunting body of what should have been your grandmother, her legs hanging down on the floor like they were useless, and they probably were. The nightgown she always wore to bed was shredded at the hem, one breast hanging out with blood smeared over her neck and jaw, her face torn open like a lion to a gazelle.

It groaned upwards, a hand pointing out, asking for something to grab, and you kicked it away. You cringed at the feeling of bone underneath your foot, your heel digging into her voice box as you moved to stand over her and her biting mouth, and all at once, you brought the conch shell to her face and smashed. 

The demon that had always been inside of you somewhere snapped, the smell of blood driving her insane as she wrapped her body around yours, lacing her fingers between your own, moving your hand down, down, down, down, down, to smash, smash, smash, smash, until the face between your knees was bloody and red, with piles of flesh and blood clots and a glass eyeball that rolled on the floor underneath the bed. Even with half her face missing, the grandmother-imitator writhed, her hands clawing at your jeans, although her blunt fingernails made no damage to the material.

“You gotta aim for tha head,” Rick Grimes said in your head, pointing to your temple, and you swore you could feel the coolness of a gun against your skull. “Come on, Y/N, it’s dead. Ain’t gonna get ya. Aim for tha head, darlin’-”

Smash. One dent in her forehead. Smash. The skin caved in, like a sinkhole, muddy red rising up as the white smashed against the blade of the conch. And she wouldn’t stop controlling your hand, guiding it down like a virgin in sex, whispering the ways of murder in your ears, “that’s it, sweetheart,”, cutting off Rick Grimes as he pulled the trigger of his gun against your head, the air escaping through your lips and as you jolted in surprise, you noticed that the conch shell was coated in glistening red, her skull smashed in to the point where the brain had been punctured, blood pooling out like a water feature, the body of the grandmother-imitator still and comatose on the floor.

Oh, what an inappropriate time for Zombies to play in your earphones on the bed.