(Last Dance) Under The Sun: Prologue One

Synopsis: “The end of the world is really, nearly here. You can taste it in the air, feel Earth’s sentencing through every heavy hour that passes in seconds, too quick, too short, too thin. It is written across the skies and stars, a timer or ticker, not visible but palpable in every panicked eye that looks above.

The end is coming.

It’s coming, and it’s terrifying.. or at least, it should be terrifying.

Except it isn’t. Not quite yet.”

After it’s discovered that a gigantic, 111-mile wide asteroid named Athos is on a collision course with Earth, strategies are set in motion to deflect or destroy it before it can hit. However, when all plans fail, the world has less than seven weeks left before impact. Scientists are calling it the real “end of the Earth”: there will be total, global extinction with no chances of life surviving.  

But the news doesn’t stop a group of five friends from making the very most of their remaining time. Together, they set out on a journey to complete their bucket lists in the forty-six days that the world has left.

Characters: OT7, reader, other characters to be added later.

Genre: science fiction / pre-apocalyptic (extinction-level event), extremely heavy angst, sickly sweet fluff, lots of low-class, middle-finger, highly offensive banter-between-best-pals style humour.

Warnings: multiple major character death, discussions of death and the afterlife (non-religious, mostly speculative), mentions of crime, riots, mercenaries, alcohol, dark humour, other sensitive topics which I will update here as the story progresses.

Chapters: Prologue (1) | Prologue (2) | Prologue (3) | Prologue 4 | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Epilogue

—–

It is a beautiful, beautiful day.

The air is thick with fear; heavy and overflowing, like a dam about to break apart at any moment. A north wind is gaining traction and carrying with it far off voices - some hurried words of love and regret - before taking them up and away, maybe to reside somewhere along the distant skyline. Devastation is clear in every slipping second, but it is still a beautiful day. And the birds are singing.

As if she knows, the sun sits a lot brighter today. Perhaps it is her parting gift. Her last adieu before she retreats for the South to take her final, solo bow at the curtain call, even though it is not she who is leaving Earth’s stage. We will not see her again; but that farewell is on us, and not on her.

For a few moments you stare, observing the grace that is the World above. Try as you might, but you cannot pull your eyes away. The reason is obvious, though you don’t allow yourself to think of it. Instead, you favour becoming completely enraptured by the sky and the sun in all their brazen beauty. So much so, that you almost miss the soft voice calling a short distance behind.

“Dance with me.”

Joon is standing there, watching you with a smile, his hand held in front of him. He says nothing more when you turn to face him. Just watches you. There’s something unusual about it. Something new in the way his eyes meet yours, but there isn’t enough time to think on it. It takes you five more seconds to close the gap and grip his hand.

“Lead the way”, you say, and he smiles more while he starts to sway you both. First, from side to side, and then he spins you around in an almost-circle, and a whole minute passes like this. Of you two stepping and shuffling, feet finding some sort off-beat rhythm, flawed and perfect all the same. He looks at you through every second, and you wonder if that’s why your steps aren’t so fluid. But it doesn’t matter, not now, and not in this moment. He is still smiling, but you can’t miss that it’s falling short of reaching his eyes. There is something different, something new. You can feel it in the way his fingers curl between your own, and the way he continues to lead you, as he has always done. Except it feels fragile now. Delicate. Frantic.

He begins to hum after a few more seconds. A gorgeous tune that you don’t recognise. And while he does, a distant realisation bares itself at the very forefront of your mind. This wonderful World - in all her stars, in all her skies and seas and lands. In every new breath of life, each young flower, in every kind of existence. In all the colours and complexions, in all the days and nights. Mornings and evenings, the different seasons. Light and darkness, good and bad. In all the hearts and minds that are crafted, like everything else, by the hands of chance. This World is magnificent. She is grand and mysterious and rare. A master in her artistry of beauty, of wonder. But somehow, she pales to Joon. He is stunning. He takes your breath away. His smile, his laugh, his velvet voice that continues humming. His eyes are warm and his touch is soft, and he is thoroughly, undoubtedly, devastatingly beautiful.

“This is the song I always imagined playing for our first dance,” he says. “I made it for you. It’s your song.”

“Our first dance?”

“I wanted to marry you. I still do,” he continues. “I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. But not like this.” He sets his jaw, tears welling in his eyes. He still hasn’t looked away from you. “Not like this. Not with such little time to love you. I wanted more.”

Since Spring began, you’ve done well to keep yourself together. You’ve held tight at your seams. Every broken moment was a wasted moment, that’s what you thought. But this moment is different. It hits you all at once; a pain you’ve never felt, inching around you, feral and cruel. It pauses you. Drags you away into a void of grief and mourning you didn’t know existed. Mourning for moments of life you’d never imagined for yourself, but others had. Grief apace with grief. For the life you know you’ve lost, and another life you didn’t know you’d also lost. It’s a cold and dry void and you’re in it. There is no escaping it. These short weeks were not the gift they should have been, they were a penalty, and Time was never the friend we praised her to be. She, too, is in this loss.

“If you had asked me, I would have said yes.”

He thinks for a moment, wiping at the tears you didn’t realise had fallen down your face.

“Do you remember that day five years ago, when we were down at the river near home? It was a bad day for me. I felt like I was falling through life. I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted. Who I wanted to be. So I ran to that river because I thought I needed to be alone,“ he says.

"I remember.”

“You followed me. I’d been there for a few hours, but you followed me there and you sat right next to me at the waters edge. You didn’t say anything, but you put your arm around me and that was all I needed. We sat in silence, watching the sunset. I always knew how I felt about you, even before that day. But that evening, I realised just how fiercely I loved you. And even if I didn’t know what else I wanted from my life, I was sure of one thing, and that’s you.”

You don’t try to stop your tears. His words, so simple, have stunned you. You want to speak, to remind him of just how much you love him, too. But all you can do is cry while he carries on speaking.

“I have never forgotten that day,” he whispers, lifting one hand to brush his thumb across your face. “That was the moment I understood that there would never be anyone else for me. It is you, it always has been, even since that very first day we met. Y/n, I have spent most of my life with you. Not in the way that it should have been. I wish we could have so much longer. I wish we could have forever. I wish we weren’t on the wrong side of fate. But I know that we could have endless lifetimes together, and still there would never be enough time for me to give you all that my heart and mind had hoped and dreamed for you.”

He lifts your hand up to place a soft kiss to your knuckles, and you cannot say anything, too choked on grief to make a sound except for heavy rasps while you try to breathe. His whole body is shaking. And your heart is burning.

“Know this, y/n. My life has been richer and more colourful than I could have ever imagined it to be. And that’s because of you. You opened my heart to a life I didn’t know existed. To a love that I didn’t know could be so beautiful. And now here we are together, with tonight approaching… and it doesn’t really feel like the end.“

He wipes your tears again, and places his hand to stroke your cheek. "I don’t know what happens after today. But whatever does happen, I promise I will find you again. This… this is my vow, y/n. Every word is my vow to you. I never got the chance to marry you, but I love you more than I can ever put into words.”

“I love you too, ‘Joon. I love you, I love you, I love you.”  

The sun will start to set soon. Right now, she’s still dancing along a blue tide, though the sky has already begun to recede, ready for the last close of the curtains. An array of golden hues are coursing through the heavens and setting the scene for Earth’s final act. But there will be no encore, nor round of applause. The lights will fall, and that shall be the end of the show.

Minutes have passed and you and Namjoon are still standing there, arms tight around each other. Neither of you have said much more, but you remain to enjoy the sight of the sun while she still glitters. Maybe the moon and the stars will arrive earlier tonight. Maybe they’ve their own goodbye to wish to the World, or maybe not.  

(Last Dance) Under The Sun

Author note: Catch me saying that I wouldn’t be posting another prologue after the third one! As always, I’m awful. Here be the fourth and (I promise) final prologue before I start pumping out chapters.

Synopsis: “The end of the world is really, nearly here. You can taste it in the air, feel Earth’s sentencing through every heavy hour that passes in seconds, too quick, too short, too thin. It is written across the skies and stars, a timer or ticker, not visible but palpable in every panicked eye that looks above.

The end is coming.

It’s coming, and it’s terrifying.. or at least, it should be terrifying.

Except it isn’t. Not quite yet.”

After it’s discovered that a gigantic, 111-mile wide asteroid named Athos is on a collision course with Earth, strategies are set in motion to deflect or destroy it before it can hit. However, when all plans fail, the world has less than seven weeks left before impact. Scientists are calling it the real “end of the Earth”: there will be total, global extinction with no chances of life surviving.

But the news doesn’t stop a group of five friends from making the very most of their remaining time. Together, they set out on a journey to complete their bucket lists in the forty-six days that the world has left.

Characters: OT7, reader, other characters to be added later.

Genre: science fiction / pre-apocalyptic (extinction-level event), extremely heavy angst, sickly sweet fluff, offensive low-class, middle-finger, highly offensive banter-between-best-pals style humour.

Warnings: multiple major character death, discussions of death and the afterlife (non-religious, mostly speculative), mentions of crime, riots, mercenaries, alcohol, dark humour, other sensitive topics which I will update here as the story progresses.

Chapters: Prologue (1) | Prologue (2) | Prologue (3) | Prologue (4) | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Epilogue

—

Isn’t it funny?

Several voices, none that you recognise, take it in turns to shout across from each other, all marking the minutes as they pass by. And many, many minutes have gone, until someone far away bellows “eighty-seven,” and a large, desperate breath can be heard.

It is absolutely funny, you think to yourself, how devastatingly heavy silence can feel.

There are fifty or so people standing nearby, some still shaking themselves off, others trying to regain their bearings, and every single one remains silent. Nobody speaks. All that sounds through the air are those same voices, echoing back to each other and slinging up the passing minutes for all to hear.

Exactly one-hundred-and-eighty more seconds go, and there is a final shout of “ninety!”, when a different voice yells, “enough!”

Still, nobody speaks, and the silence very suddenly feels heavier.

Everyone knows what that “enough!” means - everyone knows that, eventually, it was going to be said, and everyone knows that it should really have been said around eighty minutes ago. Everyone was hoping that someone else would draw the short straw, or find the courage to call the time.

A hand wraps around your shoulder and tries to pull you away. It’s Hoseok - that much you can tell just by the soft grip - but you can’t find the sense in yourself to move. He stands with his hand on your shoulder for a while, gliding his thumb across the top of your back, until at last, he speaks.

“Come on, y/n. We need to go.”

His voice is the first thing to truly penetrate the silence, and maybe it should have been liberating, in a way, except you can feel yourself begin to open up to reality. That silence - that devastatingly heavy silence - was all-encompassing, something like a barrier, or protection from the truth that lay within those ninety minutes. It was welcoming, almost. Utterly immobilising, but it stood between your mind and the reality that you do not wish to face. Now Hoseok’s words have disturbed it, and you hate how your heart so quickly shifts from disbelief to anger.

Hoseok, ever the comforter, tries again.

“Please come away y/n. Just a little bit. Towards me. Please.”

“No,” is your response. He grips you a little harder and tries to pull.

“No,” you repeat, “don’t. Please, just don’t.”

He sighs but doesn’t relent. “We need to move away, y/n. We need to get away from here.”

He strides forward, this time with both arms pulling you away and he gets a little firmer when you refuse, moving next to and using more of his strength, but still trying to be gentle. Like a strike of lightning, something within you cracks.

“No. Get off me. Get OFF ME, GET OFF ME!”

Your voice is less of a shout and much more of a scream, and Hoseok retreats, wide-eyed, palms up, completely caught off guard. He knows it was fruitless to attempt it, but the sad side of him couldn’t bear to watch you waiting for news that wouldn’t come. He knows that you’d stand there all night, just as he knows that you have to get away. You know that, too, but it is another part of the reality that you do not want to accept. Behind him, Jimin, Taehyung, Namjoon, Jungkook, Yoongi and Seokjin have gathered around with their belongings at their feet, looking at you and waiting. You see Namjoon take a step forward just as Jimin calls your name, and you cannot take it anymore.

“NO! No. None of you-, none of you understand this. None of you can understand this! So don’t tell me to come away, or that we need to leave. None of you- that…no. He’s my friend. He’s my friend. For years. My friend. And all of the others… but he is my friend.”

You turn from them, walk towards the bridge, and scream. Loud, loud enough that all fifty pairs of eyes dart towards you. You don’t care. You are not screaming at anyone, just the situation. This reality. Those ninety minutes, and the few seconds that proceeded those ninety minutes. You carry on screaming for the pain that burns your heart and the anger that scolds your mind, and you keep screaming even when Namjoon wraps his arms around you. He whispers into your hair I love you and I’m here, I’m here, I’m sorry but I am here, I promise. Your throat stings, but you don’t let up. You can’t. It’s like vomit - it keeps coming until you are empty, and that is when your throat dries and the fuelling anger has simmered down to cold, raw grief and tears. Namjoon doesn’t release you.

“I’m here. I promise.”

“He is my friend, ‘Joon. He is my friend.”

Namjoon says nothing more, but you feel him nod.

“Where are his belongings?” you ask to him, even though you know that he doesn’t know the answer. “I need to take them home.”

This prologue is the last thing that I uploaded for LDUTS. All of it was written, is written, right to the very last word, but life kind of really got in the way, and as you mention: this fic definitely, absolutely, also felt too massive for my writing skill level. I had never quite known how to summarise it in my own mind before, but you’ve done so perfectly there. Even though I had it all penned down - it still felt too big for me. 

When it comes to writing - it took a decently long time. I would agonise over every sentence, sometimes over every word. I knew how I felt in my own mind, and how I wanted the story to feel, but sometimes trying to get across the emotions became harder and harder the more effort I put into it. For you to say that you feel the intensity of the attachment, the emotional investment - I cannot tell you what it means to me. But know that it means so much, so so much to me. You’re right; it is very difficult to lure audiences with prologue content. I can’t tell you how many short stories and novel-length pieces I have written, and the prologue is always the hardest part. It’s the part I seem to fall short on constantly, which is why your words mean even more to me. I have never been confident with my writing, and the prologues I were truly dreading uploading. This story is one that I have been working on for several years with my own characters, and eventually adapted to fit the fanfic world. It is a story that I first began to write for a lost loved one of mine; a story they once asked me to write, and so it is a story rooted with deep attachment for this person I lost. I have already said it, but I will and want to say it again: the fact that you have commended what I have shared so far, is one of the greatest compliments I have ever received from my writing.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for these words, and for expressing such love for the prologues that I have uploaded. I am so glad that you could feel in certain moments, and more; that you loved those moments too. I have received a lot of advice regarding beta-readers, and taken on board what everyone has said: to have none. So that is exactly what I am doing - no beta-reader, just me. I am getting ready to proof read the story again, make adjustments where I see fit, and finally start to upload it.

I want to thank you again, many, many times over for your words. I first read this many months ago, during what I might say was one of the lowest points of my life. There wasn’t truly a lot good happening for me at the time - I was sad beyond all measure and desperate for anything that would make me smile. This made me smile, far more times than I can count, far more times than I can ever tell you. There is a great power in words, and you lit a very dark time for me. I can never begin to express to you how thankful I am for you, and for this. Ever.

There isn’t much interesting that I can write here, but I’ll go ahead anyway.

Once upon a time I was LDN based - now I reside in the great states. 

If you scroll through my Tumblr, you shall see not a lot more than several broken promises spread across a pretty strained and difficult year. Here’s the thing: I have, in not too far-past times, been quite unwell. I shall avoid any details here, but I have been taking time to recover, which included an extensive period tending to my mental and emotional health, as well as physical.

I am alike many other writers who use stories and words as an outlet. Often an idea will strike, and so will an urge to put pen to paper. Those times are usually accompanied by a newfound determination and power and will to write: I shall absolutely get this story done by this date! It’ll be written by the end of that month! 

But sometimes (as with most things), Life can get in the way. It can be a really tricky business. My days are currently spent career-building and earning a living. Many things that I do lately have to be paced carefully, for my own wellbeing. When it comes to writing - for as much as it is one of my favourite things to do - I find that it occasionally has to take a back seat. 

It’s my hope that this small blog-space of mine will become a more positive place. I will continue to write as frequently as I can and at some point (finally) get the stories that I have been working on uploaded for all to see.

If you read this; thank you!

I have kept my original “About Me” below.

Hi, hi, hi ☺

⋆ Ma’adim/Mads! LDN based and a very uncool person. 

⋆ side-studying cosmology, philosophy, metaphysics and languages.

⋆ I’ve no idea what I actually want to do now that I’ve been thrust out into this terrifying World. 

⋆ adulting is a very tricky business.

⋆ currently experiencing the trauma that is learning to play the piano and guitar.

⋆ no social life.

⋆ sometimes I manage to write. Sometimes.