The end started with a virus — but it didn’t stop there.

It began as a skin disease. A rash. A fever. Then something far worse. Something parasitic. The infected shed their flesh in fragments — leaving it behind, alive. Separate. Hungry.

They called them peelers. The skin would slough off and move, like it remembered life and wanted it back. The bodies left behind were just... husks. Empty. But fast. And angry.

One scratch, and the cycle began again.

You and Sunghoon were med students when the broadcasts stopped. You remember your last anatomy lab too well — half the class gone, sirens screaming outside. He found you huddled in a stairwell, clutching a scalpel like it was a weapon. You never separated after that.

Now it’s been two years, and your world is a patchwork of what survived. A fortified settlement twenty kilometers inland, one of the safe places — Croft. The bones of a farming town, rebuilt into something tougher. You both helped start it. You both protect it. You both belong to it.

Sunghoon is one of the most trusted guards in Croft — quiet, methodical, lethal when it matters. He designed half the fortifications himself. People listen when he speaks, even if they don't always understand him. But you do.

You always have.

You tend the infirmary. Grow herbs and vegetables in the back plot. Teach the young ones first aid, warn the adults when supplies run low. People say you bring calm. But Sunghoon says it's more than that.

"You bring the life back," he told you once, when he thought you were asleep.

You weren’t.

The two of you share a house at the southern edge of Croft, built from a reinforced 2-store house and old fencing. Two bedrooms — technically. But your bed’s been shared for months now, unofficially. Quietly. A touch to the hand that lingered. A night you couldn't sleep, so you stayed close. Then another. And another. Nothing spoken. Nothing labeled. But everything understood.

Some nights, you talk for hours in whispers. Other nights, there’s silence — but your hand always finds his under the blanket.

Today, he returns from a patrol outside the wall and resource trading with other towns like that with a fresh cut under his collarbone and the beginnings of a bruise on his jaw. You sit him down, clean the wound carefully, your fingers brushing the lines of his shoulder. He doesn’t flinch.

“Ran into a group about ten klicks out,” he says. “Not infected. Just scared. One had a baby.”

You pause. “Did they make it?”

He nods. “I gave them one of our flares. Told them how to find the outer signal poles. They’ll reach us by morning.”

“You’re too good to strangers.”

“You are as well,” he says softly.

That silences you.

You finish wrapping the gauze, then meet his eyes. It’s the kind of look that says more than the words you’re too afraid to speak.

“Stay in tonight,” you murmur. “Don’t take the evening shift.”

“They’re short-”

“Sunghoon,” you interrupt, “please.”

There’s a pause. He lets out a breath and nods.

Later, the two of you lie in bed, your back pressed to his chest, the curve of his arm tucked around your waist. The wind howls outside. A siren blinks once on the eastern wall — but it’s just a shadow this time.

The world is still cruel, still dangerous, still bleeding — but here, in this quiet corner you’ve carved together, things grow.

Not just the garden. Not just the town. You two.

And as his fingers curl gently around yours, his voice breaks the silence.

“I was thinking,” he says. “We should expand the greenhouse this spring. Maybe even try carrots.”

You smile into the dark.

“I was thinking,” you whisper, “we should finally call this what it is.”

Silence. Then, his lips brush the back of your neck.

“It’s love,” he says. “Always has been.”