Chapter Text
Prologue
Maybe life on earth looked different than they were made to believe. Who knows if those bedtime stories from their early days have been watered down now that they’re several generations in from when humans first crashlanded on this godforsaken desert planet that’s allergic to human life and does everything to eradicate it again. Humans tend to hate the things they have until you take those from them – then they suddenly find them ‘charming’, ‘nostalgic’. The bitterness of memories turns sweet, though it’s faux. Artificial.
‘My Gran said Earth was dubbed the Blue Planet, or Green Planet, even. Seventy percent of it was apparently covered in water, and the rest in nature. Like, trees! Lots of ‘em. They called them forests if there are many of ‘em in one place. She said there were thousands at once in some places, but I think that must have been the dementia talking. Still. Must have been heaven. No thirst, no endless oceans of sand. Kinda makes me wish forests were real, Hyung.’
Yoongi had just hummed at Hoseok’s usual theorizing about a planet that no longer existed as humankind must have known it. What use would there be to remind his friend that there must have been a reason why mankind had abandoned it? How horrible must Earth have been that they had decided to settle down on No Man’s Land – a floating rock in space made of nothing but sand and hostility?
However, they were all already damned to a life in this hot, arenaceous hell. If little made-up stories tinged with falsifying sentimentality are what make it a little more bearable for Hoseok, then Yoongi will be the last person to take that from him by voicing his own concerns about the accuracy of those tales.
If Yoongi was completely honest with himself – something he rather tended to avoid for his own preservation – he knew that he was dependent on Hoseok never losing his wonder for the ‘What ifs’ and ‘Maybes’, as he himself failed to summon them and return the innocent feeling of awe and hope to his day to day life. Hoba wasn’t naive in his pondering, but he was optimistic. Even when he tried to imagine what life on Earth could have been like, he never succumbed to the harsh reality of the deathliness that surrounds them now. Whereas Yoongi couldn’t seem to see anything else anymore; Death upon death upon death, upon suffering and starvation and corruption and injustice and humanity’s rotten core.
In his defense, that is exactly what the duo and everyone else have to witness and go through every day, no matter where exactly on No Man’s land they are hunkered down and fighting for survival – Life looks this bleak all around. So it’s no wonder that pessimism has become his second nature. Which only serves to make Hoseok’s buoyancy more addictive.
Brutally shaped by their pernicious surroundings, Hoseok and Yoongi have somehow created a symbiosis that kept both of them alive – though the latter can’t really find appreciation for his own survival, as that only meant having to endure more cruelty to come. Yoongi’s rationalism, mistrust and caution would help them preserve time and time again when human-made disasters struck, and Hoseok’s ability to see the good in even the ugliest facets of life kept his friend and travel partner from completely drowning in the darkness that seemed to be everlasting.
And that’s how Yoongi immediately knows that shit is really hitting the fan, when he gets jerked awake by the heavy metal door crashing into the side of his makeshift bed in the criminally small and stuffy closet space they call their room on the sandsteamer that is to transport them across the Great Sand Ocean – eyes flying open at once and finding Hoseok’s. Before Yoongi even gets the chance to fully digest the foreign terror reflected in them, Hoseok is on him.
A rush of words fall from his friend’s lips – each as much of a panicked mess as the next with no real discernible substance to them – as Yoongi is already being hauled out of the bed by his arm and shirt.
‘Yah, Hoba!’, Yoongi tries to intervene verbally, yet lets himself get pulled to his feet. ‘Calm down, what’s goi-’
But the words die on his tongue when Hoseok’s eyes fly back up to his; Soft edges turned to razorsharp jagged ones, lined with a peculiar fright that has never before settled on his friend’s features quite like that before, despite all the horrors they have faced already.
‘Hyung.’, Hoseok says with a mixture of a whisper and a hiss. ‘He’s here. The Humanoid Typhoon. Vash the Stampede. He’s on this ship. And he’s not alone.’