Jae-min froze.
The humid, stale air of the fourteenth-floor hallway pressed against his skin like a wet towel, 34°C, Manila in April, the fluorescent tube above Unit 1419 buzzing at a frequency just below conscious perception and casting the corridor in flat sterile white that erased shadows and softened nothing.
Alessia stood in her doorway with one blue eye visible through the gap, a messy cascade of indigo hair falling across her face, the cold stethoscope around her neck catching the fluorescent light as the plastic lanyard hanging from it swayed gently.
Dr. Alessia R. Santos — St. Luke's Medical Center.
Those eyes, in the frozen hallway six weeks from now, glassy and dead and torn from her skull by neighbors who stopped being human, he had held her hand until her fingers snapped like icicles, and now those eyes were wide awake and confused and bright, and the disconnect short-circuited something in his chest like a gasp that never reached his lungs trapped behind his sternum like a stone.
"Jae-min?" Alessia murmured, a sleepy confusion threading through her voice.
Her voice was soft and alive and cut through the ringing in his ears like a bell struck in an empty cathedral, and Jae-min's throat sealed shut as his hand gripped the doorframe of Unit 1418 with the wood biting into his palm and his knuckles going bloodless, unable to speak or move, just standing there a dead man staring at a ghost who didn't know she was one.
Alessia pulled the door open fully, a loose white shirt slipping off one shoulder to expose her collarbone, cotton shorts, dark circles bruising the pale skin beneath her eyes.
The bitter scent of hospital coffee and antiseptic clung to her from a night shift, probably, but underneath it the lavender soap was clean and sharp the way it always was, cutting through the clinical stink.
"Are you okay?" Alessia pressed, genuine concern bleeding into her tone as she tilted her head and frowned.
The crease between her brows hit him like a fist to the sternum.
"You look like you've seen a ghost." Alessia said, a tired attempt at humor falling flat.
'You have no idea.' Jae-min reeled, a shuddering wave of trauma gripping his chest.
"I'm fine." Jae-min said, his voice robotic and hollow and entirely wrong.
Alessia's frown deepened as she stepped closer into the hallway, the faint lavender cutting through the antiseptic while her clinical precision sharpened. "You're pale, and you're sweating; it's hot but not that hot."
She reached up and cool fingers brushed against his feverish forehead, and the touch ignited something, a flash of frozen hands blue and brittle reaching for him from the dark, and Jae-min flinched hard with his whole body jerking back like he'd been branded.
Alessia pulled her hand back quickly with hurt flashing across her blue eyes, just for a second.
"Sorry." Alessia whispered, a flash of hurt crossing her eyes.
"No, I'm sorry." Jae-min stammered, the words escaping too fast and too desperate. "I just... bad dream."
'A bad dream where we were eaten alive.' Jae-min recalled, a bitter lingering horror echoing through his skull.
Alessia studied him with the searching gaze of a woman who spent her nights diagnosing people who couldn't diagnose themselves, then offered a small, tired smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.
"You should drink water and maybe fix your sleep schedule." Alessia teased, a tired warmth in her voice. "We can't both be zombies."
'Zombies.' Jae-min realized, a sickening ironic twist stabbing his gut.
He almost laughed and almost threw up right there on the linoleum.
"I will." Jae-min nodded, a forced calm barely holding. "Get some rest, Alessia."
Alessia paused at her doorway and turned back with something shifting in her expression, a softening barely perceptible. "You called me Alessia."
"You are Alessia." Jae-min said, matter-of-fact.
"I mean, you didn't call me Doc or Dr. Santos." Alessia whispered, tucking a stray strand of indigo hair behind her ear, nervous. "It's nice."
Jae-min reached out, and his fingers found the second indigo strand still loose near her temple, tucking it behind her ear slow and deliberate, his thumb lingering against her cheekbone for half a second longer than a neighbor's touch should.
Alessia went still with her blue eyes widening and a faint flush creeping up her neck, then she turned, disappeared inside, and the door clicked shut.
Jae-min stood in the hallway for two full minutes with the fluorescent hum filling the silence and his fingertips still warm and the pulse in his wrist hammering against nothing.
'She's alive.' Jae-min exhaled, an overwhelming, desperate relief flooding his veins. 'Alessia is alive.'
— • • • —
But the relief cracked open something darker beneath it.
The hallway shrank, and the hum of the fluorescents became the static of a television left on in an empty room while the memories came flooding through the cracks.
Flight KE627, Incheon to Manila, lost contact over the Alishan Mountains, no survivors.
He had sat on the edge of his bed in Unit 1418 staring at his phone while Ji-yoo's last message sat open on the screen, a photo of her and Mom and Dad at some restaurant in Gangnam, all three of them squished together laughing, Mom making a peace sign, Dad looking embarrassed, Ji-yoo mid-bite into a tteokbokki.
The timestamp read 4:47 PM, April 14, the day before the world ended.
They never made it home, the plane going down in the mountains on the exact same day the freeze hit Manila, three voices erased in a single news headline, forty-three days in hell with no family.
'Ji-yoo is alive. Mom is alive. Dad is alive.' Jae-min realized, a fierce trembling hope igniting his soul. 'They're still in Korea, and the flight hasn't happened yet.'
He went back inside Unit 1418, closed the door, threw the deadbolt, and leaned his back against the wall, slid down until he was sitting on the cold tile, 34°C outside, but the tile was cool against his palms and grounding.
'Twenty-nine days.' Jae-min calculated, a rigid, unyielding resolve hardening his mind. 'Call them, bring them home, all of them.'
Food first, water and calories and medicine and shelter in that order, so he pulled out his phone and opened the BPI app. Savings account: ₱87,000, not enough for guns or steel reinforcement or a generator but enough to start stockpiling the basics that disappeared from shelves within the first twelve hours of the freeze.
He pushed himself to his feet and walked to the kitchen where his throat was painfully dry, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and turning on the faucet while the hiss of rushing water filled the silent unit, filling the glass to the brim and lifting it to his lips.
His hand slipped.
The glass hit the edge of the granite counter and tipped over the edge and fell toward the tile floor, Jae-min reaching for it but his fingers closing around empty air.
The glass hit the floor, but it didn't shatter; it vanished, a faint inky distortion rippling through the air right above the tile like heat waves shimmering off summer asphalt and then nothing.
Jae-min stared at the floor, then at his hand, then back at the floor.
"What the hell?" Jae-min asked, his voice trembling.
He crouched down and touched the tile, cold and solid, no shards of glass and no pooling water, then stood up and closed his eyes and reached out with his hand, not physically but something else, a deep instinctual pull in his chest he didn't know he had.
A black crack split open in the air in front of him, small and barely the size of a fist, a jagged tear in reality itself, and inside the darkness the glass floated perfectly intact with the water still inside and perfectly still.
Jae-min's heart stopped.
He reached into the crack, and his fingers disappeared into the freezing pitch-black void until he felt the cold glass and pulled; the glass reappeared in his hand with water sloshing against the sides, normal and real.
He dropped it again, this time on purpose, and the glass fell and vanished into thin air a foot above the floor as the black ripple appeared and swallowed it whole.
Jae-min stared at his trembling hands.
'Space? I was controlling space.' Jae-min realized, a manic disbelieving awe seizing his brain.
A broken laugh escaped his lips, quiet and hoarse and bordering on hysteria, because he had torn through time to get back here and he had brought a piece of the void with him.
He set the glass down on the counter and stared at it for a long moment, then looked at the black crack still hovering in the air, patient and silent like a dog waiting for its master to throw the ball again.
"Later." Jae-min said, his voice steady, already turning to more important things. "I'll deal with you later."
He had groceries to buy, real ones, the kind that kept people alive when the shelves went empty and stayed empty for months.
His phone buzzed against the granite counter with a message from an unsaved number.
[Unknown]: Jae-min. It's Kiara. We need to talk. I made a mistake. Please call me back.
Jae-min looked at the glowing screen, and the glass in his hand cracked under the pressure of his grip, shards biting into his palm as hot blood dripped onto the white tile and spread like red ink, and he didn't feel it.
'Three years wasted on a cheating bitch.' Jae-min fumed, a toxic seething rage boiling his blood. 'Time I should've spent calling Ji-yoo, calling Mom and Dad, getting them home earlier.'
Not this time.
Jae-min opened the contact and blocked the number and deleted the message, his thumb moving without hesitation like a surgeon amputating a gangrenous limb.
He went to his bedroom and walked into the closet, pushing past the suits he never wore and the hoodies he wore too often until he found a clean navy polo shirt and charcoal slacks, understated and practical, the kind of outfit that said he had a job and was good at it without trying too hard.
He changed and fixed his collar and checked himself in the mirror, the face staring back gaunt and shadowed, the face of a man who had seen forty-three days of hell and dragged himself back.
"Good enough." Jae-min said, barely glancing at the mirror.
He grabbed his wallet and phone and keys, then paused at the closet door and looked back at the neat row of government IDs, two passports, driver's license, PRC, TIN, PhilHealth, grabbing them all and shoving them into a folder.
Banks tomorrow, food today.
— • • • —
The elevator ride down to the basement parking was eleven seconds long, and in those eleven seconds Jae-min mentally mapped the city, not the banks yet but the supermarkets and wholesale stores and pharmacies, four years of logistics routes having burned every street and shortcut and choke point into his brain.
Every building and overpass and artery he could see from the GT-R's windshield would be entombed in ten meters of snow within weeks.
The basement was quiet with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and casting the concrete pillars in flat sterile white, his footsteps echoing off the cold floor as he walked toward her.
The pearl white Nissan GT-R Nismo sat in her spot like a crouched predator waiting to be unleashed, the curves of her body catching the fluorescent light and throwing it back in clean, sharp lines, not a speck of dust on her, spotless and alive and his.
Mom and Dad had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday along with the matching Z Nismo for Ji-yoo, a twin present for twin children, and the look on their father's face when Jae-min and Ji-yoo had both screamed in the driveway was the kind of joy that only exists once in one moment and never again.
Beside it the candy yellow Nissan Z Nismo sat gleaming, Ji-yoo's car left here before she flew to South Korea, and on the other side of the GT-R, a creamy white VW Golf GTI, Alessia's car.
Jae-min ran his palm along the GT-R's hood with the metal cool under his touch. "Hey, girl." Jae-min muttered, a genuine affection softening his voice. "We're going grocery shopping."
He unlocked her and slid into the driver's seat, and the cockpit wrapped around him like a fighter jet, low-slung and tight and purposeful, and he pressed the start button as the twin-turbo V6 roared to life with a deep guttural growl that vibrated through the steering wheel and up into his chest.
A security guard two rows over nearly dropped his coffee.
Jae-min pulled out of the basement and into the early morning Manila traffic with the sun barely up and the sky a pale bruised purple bleeding into orange along the skyline, the streets just waking up with jeepneys belching black smoke and motorcycles weaving through gaps that didn't exist and street vendors setting up their carts along the sidewalks.
He memorized every face, every storefront, every corner.
— • • • —
First stop, Puregold, EDSA.
The store was already alive with the morning rush, housewives in house dresses pushing rusted carts and construction workers loading up on rice and canned meat, a security guard whose uniform was two sizes too big leaning against the entrance with the thousand-yard stare of a man who had given up on life.
Jae-min grabbed a cart, then another, then a third and stacked them in a train, one behind the other, pushing the whole procession down the first aisle.
A little old lady in a house dress had to press herself flat against the shelf to let him pass, and he gave her a polite nod while she gave him the kind of look usually reserved for tax collectors and people who talk in theaters.
He stopped in front of the rice section and stared at the shelves like a general surveying a battlefield, twenty-five-kilo sacks of Dinorado and Jasmine and regular well-milled rice lined up in neat rows, and he loaded six sacks into the first cart, one hundred and fifty kilograms.
The canned goods aisle was where it got ugly.
He grabbed every can of Spam on the shelf, all twelve of them, and the housewife beside him gave him a look that could curdle milk.
"Excuse me, sir." the housewife snapped, her hand on her hip and her glare fixed on his cart. "Some of us need to eat too."
"Buy it tomorrow." Jae-min replied, not looking at her.
"Tomorrow?" the housewife snarled, her voice climbing. "You're buying out the whole damn section!"
"There'll be more on the truck." Jae-min countered, without looking up.
"And what am I supposed to feed my children today?" the housewife demanded, her voice climbing an octave.
Jae-min paused and looked at her, then at the twelve cans of Spam in his cart, then back at her.
"Mung beans." Jae-min answered, a cold efficiency that left no room for argument. "They're cheap, and they're filling; your kids will hate you for it, but they'll survive, aisle four."
He grabbed the last can from the shelf, the one she'd been reaching for, and dropped it into his cart with a smile that wasn't a smile.
"YOU—" the housewife shrieked behind him.
He was already gone, sweeping through the rest of the aisle with the methodical efficiency of a man who knew exactly what was coming, loading corned beef in every brand and variant, canned sardines in tomato sauce and in oil and in mustard, baked beans and canned peaches and canned tuna and canned chicken, everything that came in a can and had calories going into the cart.
The third cart filled with dried goods, boxes of instant noodles and pasta, sugar and salt and coffee, cooking oil and soy sauce and vinegar, the basics of Filipino survival.
He paused in front of the instant noodles and stared at the shelf, and the memory hit him like a fist.
'Paolo, Unit 1403, beaten to death over a pack of Lucky Me.' Jae-min remembered, a cold sickness settling in his stomach. 'The crack of his skull on the tile floor, his glasses shattering, nobody helping.'
Now the shelf was fully stocked, row after row of colorful packets, an entire wall of the stuff, and he took everything, forty-seven packs of noodles hitting the cart like colorful bricks as the shelf went bare.
A child walking past with his mother stopped and stared at the empty shelf. "Mommy, where did the noodles go?" the child asked, tugging his mother's dress.
"That man is a bad person, sweetie." the mother said, pulling him closer. "Don't look at him."
Jae-min pushed the three-cart train to the checkout counter where the cashier, a young guy with a name tag that read MARCO and a face that suggested he was not being paid enough for this, stared at the mountain of groceries with the expression of a man watching a natural disaster unfold in slow motion.
"Sir." Marco started, his voice defeated.
"I know." Jae-min replied, his patience steady rather than thin.
"Like, a lot a lot." Marco repeated, scanning the first bag of rice with the defeated energy of a man processing his own funeral.
"I know." Jae-min confirmed, his patience steady.
"Are you opening a restaurant?" Marco asked, squinting at the pile.
"Something like that." Jae-min said, a smile that wasn't a smile.
"A sari-sari store?" Marco guessed, quietly.
"Something bigger." Jae-min said, a faint warmth in his voice that hadn't quite reached the surface yet.
"A supermarket?" Marco asked, his voice pitching upward.
"Marco." Jae-min said, looking him dead in the eye.
"Sir?" Marco swallowed, quietly.
"Scan." Jae-min ordered, quiet but firm, leaving no room for negotiation.
Marco began scanning, with each can of Spam producing a small defeated beep as the total climbed on the screen: ₱5,000, ₱10,000, ₱20,000, and the housewife behind Jae-min now openly glaring while an older man in a basketball jersey shook his head and muttered something about hoarders.
A teenage girl took a photo of his cart and uploaded it with the caption: this guy at Puregold acting like the world is ending tomorrow lmaooo. She had no idea how right she was.
Marco scanned the last bag of rice, and the register displayed the final number. "Thirty-four thousand, seven hundred pesos, sir." Marco announced, quietly.
Jae-min handed over his BPI debit card, Marco swiped it, the machine hummed, and it was approved.
"Would you like a receipt, sir?" Marco asked, quietly.
"No." Jae-min said, already walking away.
"Would you need help loading your—" Marco offered, quietly.
"I've got it." Jae-min said, grabbing the first cart.
"Sir, that's three carts and you're alone, I really should—" Marco tried, nervously.
"Marco." Jae-min said, grabbing the first cart.
"Yes sir?" Marco asked, nervous, fidgeting with the receipt.
"You seem like a good kid." Jae-min murmured, something warm and heavy passing behind his eyes, genuine care gone in an instant. "Go home, hug your family, eat a good meal tonight."
"…Is this a scam?" Marco asked, staring at him.
"No." Jae-min said, already pushing the first cart toward the exit. "Just advice."
— • • • —
The GT-R's trunk swallowed two carts' worth of supplies with the seats folded down and the third cart's contents filled the passenger seat and part of the back seat.
Jae-min glanced around the parking lot, an old woman loading her sedan three spaces down, a security guard on his phone near the entrance, a delivery truck idling by the loading bay.
Good enough.
He picked up a twenty-five-kilo sack of rice from the third cart and pressed it against the trunk interior with one hand, making it look like he was cramming it in, while his other hand moved behind the bag and a faint ripple in the air swallowed the sack whole, one moment pressed against the back seat and the next nothing but empty space where twenty-five kilos of Dinorado had been.
No sound, no flash, just a cold whisper of displaced air.
He grabbed another sack with the same motion, palm flat against the surface and other hand hidden behind it, ripple, gone, then again and again, cans of Spam and corned beef and sardines disappearing one by one into the void behind his hand while he made it look like he was violently stuffing them into an already packed trunk.
Three carts of supplies with half in the car and half vanished into a pocket dimension that existed somewhere between his ribs and the fabric of reality, the GT-R sitting low on her suspension but nowhere near as low as she should have been for what he'd bought.
"Eleven more stops." Jae-min said, patting the steering wheel, dead serious. "Don't embarrass me."
The spatial storage was still small, barely the size of a walk-in closet, but it was growing, and he could feel it stretching every time he pushed something inside like a muscle he'd never known he had, and by the end of the day maybe it'd be big enough to hold a warehouse worth of supplies. Discretion was the only rule that mattered.
— • • • —
Second stop, S&R Membership Shopping, Congressional Avenue.
The wholesale warehouse was cavernous with concrete floors and industrial shelving stacked three stories high, forklifts beeping in the aisles and the smell of cardboard and frozen meat hanging thick in the air-conditioned cold. Jae-min grabbed a flatbed cart and went to work with the focused brutality of a man buying for a war.
More rice, fifty-kilo sacks this time, four of them loaded onto the flatbed until the cart groaned under two hundred kilograms. Twenty cases of bottled water, six hundred liters of Nature's Spring and Aquafina. Whole boxes of Spam, corned beef, Vienna sausage, and liver spread without reading labels, just loaded.
The frozen food section yielded whole chickens and pork belly and ground beef and hotdogs, more than his condo freezer could ever hold, but the void could take the rest. Dried beans and lentils and garbanzos, the things that lasted forever and provided protein when the fresh meat ran out. Powdered milk and infant formula, not for an infant but because it was calorie-dense with a two-year shelf life.
Gallons of cooking oil for cooking and preservation and trade, and twenty-kilo sacks of industrial iodized salt because in the apocalypse salt was currency, it preserved meat and flavored the tasteless garbage they'd be eating, and people killed for it.
The total hit ₱42,000 and the cashier, a middle-aged woman who had clearly seen every kind of bulk buyer in her career, didn't even blink, just scanned and bagged and asked for the card.
Jae-min loaded the flatbed into the GT-R's trunk or made it look like he did, because for every case of water and sack of rice he placed inside the car, two more vanished into spatial storage behind the cover of the open trunk door.
A stockboy walked past and glanced at him struggling with the bags and kept moving, then stopped and turned around and counted the bags on the flatbed and counted the bags in the trunk and counted them again. He opened his mouth and closed it and shook his head and walked away muttering something about not getting paid enough to understand math.
By the time the flatbed was empty, the GT-R's trunk was full, and the void inside Jae-min's chest was fuller, and he could sense its boundaries stretching dark and vast like a room being built in real time around the things he put inside, able to pull anything out with a thought and reach into the crack to find exactly what he needed in under a second.
— • • • —
Third stop, Mercury Drug, Quezon Avenue.
The pharmacy was small and bright and smelled like disinfectant and air freshener, a pharmacist in a white coat standing behind the counter arranging pill bottles with the quiet precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times.
"I need first aid kits, five of them." Jae-min said, his voice clipped and efficient.
The pharmacist, a woman in her fifties named Mila according to her name tag, looked up with her eyebrows climbing behind her glasses.
"Five, sir?" Mila asked, her eyebrows rising behind her glasses.
"Yes." Jae-min said, flat, no explanation offered.
She pulled them from the shelf and set them down and Jae-min began adding to the pile without pause, Ibuprofen and Paracetamol and Mefenamic Acid, antiseptic and gauze and surgical tape and elastic bandages, burn ointment and antidiarrheal medicine and oral rehydration salts, a thermometer and tweezers and scissors, stacking them on the counter one after another until Mila's hands stopped moving.
"Antibiotics." Jae-min continued, his voice dropping to a register that had nothing to do with volume. "Amoxicillin, Ciprofloxacin, Metronidazole."
Mila looked at him over the rims of her glasses with her fingers pausing over the bottles.
"Sir, those require a prescription." Mila said, her fingers pausing over the bottles.
Jae-min held her gaze and didn't blink and didn't explain, just stared at her with those calm, steady eyes that had seen forty-three days of hell and come back with nothing left to lose. Mila looked away first and reached under the counter for the antibiotics.
"I'll need you to fill out the backorder form." Mila said, quietly, sliding the paper across the counter.
Jae-min filled it out, and the name on the prescription line read Dr. Alessia R. Santos, St. Luke's Medical Center, Unit 1419, and he'd figure out how to make that real later. Total: ₱14,200.
— • • • —
Fourth stop, ACE Hardware, EDSA.
The hardware store was paradise with bright fluorescent lights and endless aisles of tools and materials and the smell of new plastic and sawdust filling the air as Jae-min loaded a cart with everything a fortress needed.
Duct tape and nylon rope and tarpaulin sheets, Maglite flashlights heavy enough to double as weapons, batteries and a portable gas stove and LPG tanks, basic tools and a handheld radio and cable ties and a fire extinguisher.
The cashier, a kid who couldn't have been older than twenty, looked at the cart and grinned.
"Building a doomsday shelter, sir?" the cashier grinned, quietly.
Jae-min didn't laugh.
"Yes." Jae-min said, not a hint of humor in his voice.
The kid's grin froze mid-face as he looked at the duct tape and the rope and the tarpaulin and the flashlights and the radio and the fire extinguisher.
"Sir, are you... okay?" the cashier asked, slowly and quietly. "Like, mentally? Do you need me to call someone?"
"Just the register." Jae-min said, cutting the kid off.
The kid swallowed and scanned the items in silence. Total: ₱18,700.
— • • • —
Fifth stop, a water refilling station in Pasay.
He pulled up to the cramped little stall wedged between a car wash and a sari-sari store, the sign reading ALWAYS PURE WATER REFILLING, ₱35 per gallon, and the old man behind the counter squinted at the GT-R and asked how many gallons.
"Fill twenty of these." Jae-min said, setting down the stack of empty five-gallon containers he'd bought at ACE Hardware.
The old man's eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.
"Twenty?" the old man exclaimed, his eyebrows climbing toward his hairline. "Son, that's—"
"₱3,500. Here." Jae-min said, placing the cash on the counter.
The old man picked up the bills and counted them and counted them again and looked at Jae-min and looked at the GT-R and looked at the twenty empty containers.
"Son, are you running a car wash?" the old man asked, squinting at the GT-R.
"Something like that." Jae-min said, setting the containers down with a dull thud.
"Because I've been running this station for fifteen years." the old man said, leaning on the counter, genuinely baffled. "Nobody has ever bought twenty gallons at once, not even the hospitals."
"First time for everything." Jae-min said, his expression unreadable.
The old man studied him for a long beat, then shrugged, pocketed the money, and got to work.
"You know, if you're stocking up for a typhoon." the old man called out, without looking up from the hose. "The news said there's no storm signal this week."
"I'm not stocking up for a typhoon." Jae-min said, leaning against the GT-R, arms crossed.
"Severe drought?" the old man asked, with a shrug.
"No." Jae-min said, his jaw tight.
"Volcanic eruption?" the old man asked, squinting at him now, half-amused.
"Just fill the water, sir." Jae-min said, final, shutting the conversation down.
While he waited, Jae-min leaned against the GT-R and did the math: ₱34,700 at Puregold, ₱42,000 at S&R, ₱14,200 at Mercury Drug, ₱18,700 at ACE Hardware, ₱3,500 for water, ₱113,100 total, and he only had ₱87,000 in savings.
He'd gone over by ₱26,100, and his credit card covered the difference, but it was a warning, because tomorrow he would hit every bank in Metro Manila, but today was about keeping people alive for the first month.
The old man finished filling the last container, and Jae-min loaded them into the GT-R one by one, making a show of it for the old man behind the counter and the couple waiting at the car wash next door while the spatial storage swallowed half of everything he touched.
A five-gallon container in each hand with one going into the trunk while the other dissolved into the void behind his hip, smooth and natural like he'd been doing it his whole life.
The old man watched him load for about thirty seconds before tilting his head.
"Son." the old man observed, quietly. "Your car doesn't look as full as it should be for twenty gallons."
"I'm very efficient at packing." Jae-min deadpanned, not breaking eye contact.
"…You're weird." the old man said, shaking his head slowly.
"Thank you, sir." Jae-min said, already pulling out of the station. "Have a good day."
The pearl white GT-R Nismo, a car designed to go 315 kilometers per hour, crawled through Manila traffic at thirty, weighed down by ₱113,100 worth of apocalypse supplies split between her trunk and a dimension nobody else could see.
— • • • —
Jae-min pulled into a McDonald's parking lot and killed the engine, the silence sudden and heavy after the GT-R's roar as he sat in the dark for a moment with the only light coming from his phone screen.
He opened his contacts and scrolled past Kiara's blocked number, past Alessia's because he wasn't ready for that conversation yet, past Uncle Rico's because that was tomorrow's problem, and stopped on Ji-yoo's name with his thumb hovering over the call button.
'Call her. Call Mom and Dad. Get them home.' Jae-min urged, a frantic, desperate urgency spurring him on. 'That's the whole point of this.'
He pressed call.
It rang once, twice, three times, then:
[Ji-yoo]: "Oppa?" Ji-yoo mumbled, her voice groggy and thick with sleep.
Korea was one hour ahead, past midnight there.
[Ji-yoo]: "Do you know what time it is?" Ji-yoo grumbled, a yawn cracking through the phone.
[Jae-min]: "I know what time it is." Jae-min replied, his voice tight and controlled.
[Ji-yoo]: "Then why are you calling me at one in the morning?" Ji-yoo pressed, still half-asleep.
[Jae-min]: "When do you and Mom and Dad fly back?" Jae-min demanded, cutting straight to it with no room for small talk.
Silence on the other end, just the rustle of blankets.
[Ji-yoo]: "Oppa, what are you talking about?" Ji-yoo asked, a yawn cracking through the phone, still half-asleep.
[Jae-min]: "The flight." Jae-min pressed, his voice hard. "When do you all come home?"
[Ji-yoo]: "April fifteenth." Ji-yoo answered, confused, the sleep burning away. "We booked a flight together, the three of us, KE627, Incheon to Manila, you know this, you helped Mom book it."
April fifteenth, Flight KE627, Incheon to Manila, the same flight.
'Alishan Mountains. No survivors.' Jae-min recalled, the words a death sentence carved into his skull.
[Jae-min]: "Change it." Jae-min commanded, his voice flat and hard, the kind of voice that didn't invite argument.
[Ji-yoo]: "Change... what?" Ji-yoo asked, blinking, pulling the phone closer to her face.
[Jae-min]: "The flight." Jae-min ordered, a command, not a request. "All three of you, book an earlier flight, any day before April tenth."
[Ji-yoo]: "Oppa, are you drunk?" Ji-yoo asked, half-laughing, still not taking him seriously.
[Jae-min]: "Ji-yoo." Jae-min said, her full name, sharp enough to cut glass.
The way he said her name, sharp and final and carrying the weight of a dead timeline, shut her up immediately, because in all their years of arguing Ji-yoo had learned to recognize that tone, the tone that meant her brother was not playing around, the tone that meant something was very, very wrong.
[Ji-yoo]: "Oppa... what's going on?" Ji-yoo whispered, her voice smaller now, the humor gone.
[Jae-min]: "I can't explain right now." Jae-min pleaded, raw, almost desperate. "I need you to trust me."
[Ji-yoo]: "You're scaring me." Ji-yoo trembled, her voice thin, cracking at the edges.
[Jae-min]: "Good." Jae-min said, his voice firm but not cold, the voice of a brother who had already lost them once. "Be scared, now book the flight, all three of you, and call me back when it's confirmed."
He hung up before she could argue.
— • • • —
Jae-min sat in the dark parking lot for a long time with the GT-R's engine ticking as it cooled and a stray cat wandering past the front bumper to sniff the tire and move on.
His phone buzzed.
[Ji-yoo]: You're insane. Mom is going to kill you for waking her up.
Three minutes later:
[Ji-yoo]: Fine. I'll book mine. But you OWE me an explanation.
Five minutes after that:
[Ji-yoo]: Mom says she's not speaking to you until you apologize for calling at 1 AM. Dad says he wants to talk to you tomorrow morning. Both of them want to know why.
Eight minutes after that:
[Ji-yoo]: Also, who was that girl I heard in the background last time I called? At the unit? You had someone over, didn't you? Don't lie to me, oppa. I always know.
Three minutes later:
[Ji-yoo]: You still owe me your black hoodie, by the way. The oversized one. I KNOW you have it. I saw it in your Instagram story from two weeks ago. I WANT IT BACK. That hoodie is mine. You STOLE it.
Five minutes after that:
[Ji-yoo]: Also, you're wrong about tteokbokki. The cylindrical kind is better than the sliced kind, and I will die on this hill. Fight me, oppa. FIGHT ME!
[Jae-min]: I'll explain everything soon. I promise. Just get on that earlier flight.
He set the phone down on the passenger seat or what was left of it, buried under a sack of rice and two cases of Spam, and leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes.
One day down, twenty-nine days left, groceries loaded and void tested and sister warned, tomorrow the banks and the real work.
He opened his eyes and started the engine, and the GT-R rumbled to life with her twin-turbo heartbeat steady and strong beneath him, and he drove home.
The black crack was still hovering in his kitchen when he walked in, waiting and hungry.
Just like him.