a place imagination can't reach ─── 최수빈
Choi Soobin x fem!reader genre: dystopia, angst, fluff, romance synopsis: As the end draws closer, they discover that love may be the only thing worth carrying to the very end.
The city had forgotten how to breathe.
Its lungs were choked with ash, its veins threaded with abandoned train lines and shattered highways, every jagged skyline carved into the shape of surrender. High above the rubble, ancient advertisements still flickered from broken towers—holographic faces smiling through static, promising futures that had already been erased. Somewhere behind those flickering lights, buried beneath collapsing concrete and rusting steel, Cube was still searching.
Always searching.
Neither of them dared to look back.
The sound of their footsteps disappeared beneath the distant, low groan of heavy machinery and the endless wind dragging gray dust through empty streets. Soobin held her hand so tightly it almost hurt—not because he feared losing her, but because he already knew the weight of what losing felt like.
By some fragile miracle—or perhaps by some cruel delay in fate they had slipped through another patrol. Another impossible escape. Another borrowed day.
Only when the towering glass walls of an abandoned botanical garden swallowed them both whole did either of them finally stop.
Nature had reclaimed what humanity had abandoned. Glass ceilings lay fractured across tangled, wild vines. Ivy strangled rusted iron arches, and brilliant flowers bloomed through cracked marble as though they had never learned the world had ended. Somewhere, hidden beneath years of silence, water still trickled.
A pond. Its surface was hauntingly still.
She wandered toward it without speaking, her knees giving out as she crouched beside the dark water.
Her reflection stared back at her.
Dust stained her cheeks. Her hair hung in tangled, muted strands around her face. One sleeve of her coat had nearly torn away entirely, exposing bruises fading into a sickly yellow beneath her pale skin. There were streaks of dried earth beneath her nails, cuts across her knuckles—tiny, painful reminders of climbing walls that were never meant to be scaled.
She barely recognized the woman looking back at her. Not because she was filthy, but because she looked hollow. As if the world had chipped away little pieces of her until all that remained was a ghost pretending to remember who she once was.
"Is this really me?"
The question barely escaped her lips, dropping into the quiet space between her and the water.
Behind her, Soobin had been inspecting the broken greenhouse doors, making certain no search drones had followed their trail. His broad shoulders relaxed only when he was sure she was safe. Then, he noticed her.
He watched her reflection for a heartbeat before quietly walking over, his heavy boots crunching softly against scattered glass. Without a word, he crouched beside her in the damp moss.
The pond reflected both of them now. Two phantoms in a dead world.
He reached out. Not for her hand, but for her face.
His palms, rough and calloused from weeks of survival, gently cupped her cheeks. With infinite patience, he turned her face away from the water—away from the stranger staring back at her and toward him.
"Soobin..." she breathed.
He smiled.
It wasn't the smile he used to wear before the world collapsed. That old smile had been light, effortless. This one carried heavy exhaustion behind it. Hunger. Sleepless nights. Too many funerals without bodies to bury.
Yet somehow, against the backdrop of ruin, it was still breathtaking.
"You're pretty," he whispered.
She blinked, a faint, disbelieving crease forming between her brows. "What?"
"You're pretty."
"You don't need to lie."
A quiet, breathless laugh escaped him—real and soft against the cold air.
She couldn't return it. Instead, her gaze shifted as she really looked at him. Really looked. She saw the fading cuts along his sharp cheekbone, the faint scar crossing the bridge of his nose, and another jagged mark tucked beneath his jaw. Old wounds from days ago that had never been allowed the luxury of healing.
She reached out, tracing the mark on his nose carefully with her thumb. "Soob..."
His eyelashes fluttered shut beneath her touch, leaning faintly into her palm. "You got hurt," she whispered.
"I did."
"...You're bleeding again."
"It stopped."
"You always say that."
"Because it always does."
He leaned forward, pressing his forehead gently against hers. "So do you."
Silence folded around them like a shroud. The pond reflected their faces so close together they became impossible to separate. She wondered which one of them looked more broken. He wondered why she couldn't see herself the way he saw her.
His fingers brushed stray strands of hair away from her face, committing every soft line of her features to memory, as though memory was the only home either of them had left.
"If tomorrow disappears..." His voice was scarcely louder than the wind weaving through the dead vines above. "...these eyes will slowly film every moment."
She looked at him. Only him.
"So I can see your smile again," he murmured.
Her vision blurred with unshed tears. "You don't have to remember me like that."
"I do."
"You'll forget."
"I don't trust tomorrow," Soobin said quietly, his thumb brushing beneath her eye before a tear could fall. "I trust today. So let me look."
He looked at her the way people used to look at stars—knowing they were impossibly far away, knowing they would disappear by morning, but staring anyway.
The botanical garden eventually surrendered them both back to the ruined city.
The silence between the hollowed-out buildings felt different now. Lighter, somehow. Perhaps because her fingers were intertwined with his. Perhaps because neither of them dared to imagine letting go.
They walked without a destination, without maps, without promises. They passed collapsed apartment blocks, rusted playgrounds frozen mid-laughter, and a church missing its roof where wild ivy climbed toward a heaven that had long since closed its doors.
Then—a bell chimed softly. Not from prayer, but from the wind.
An old storefront door swayed on broken hinges. The faded sign above it had nearly disappeared beneath dark moss: RECORDS.
Inside, time had stopped trying.
Vinyl sleeves lay scattered across warped wooden floors like fallen leaves. Shelves leaned drunkenly beneath decades of dust, and broken speakers stared from the corners like forgotten monuments to a lost age.
She wandered slowly between the aisles, her coat dragging softly against the debris. "So many songs..." she whispered, more to the empty room than to him. "So many people who thought they'd always be here."
Soobin didn't answer. Something else had stolen his attention.
Near the back counter, beneath a collapsed ceiling beam, rested an old film camera. Black, scuffed, and worn, but intact. He picked it up carefully, brushing away years of grime with his sleeve.
"Does it still work?" she asked.
"I doubt it."
Yet, when he lifted the camera to his eye and focused the lens on her—everything changed.
Through the glass of the viewfinder, the cracked world vanished. The ash disappeared. The shattered windows mended themselves, and the dust left her clothes. Her hair fell neatly over her shoulders, catching the golden afternoon light pouring through glass that no longer existed. Her smile was bright, careless, and entirely untouched by fear.
She looked exactly as she had before the ruins. Before Cube. Before survival became just another word for grief.
Soobin’s breath caught in his throat. "...There you are," he breathed.
She tilted her head, puzzled. "What?"
He lowered the camera, and the world collapsed back into jagged ruins. He lifted it again—and there she was. Whole.
He laughed softly, a sound of pure disbelief. "Come here."
"What are you looking at?" She stepped closer to him, her brows knit. "Soobin?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he watched the girl in the lens smile at him with eyes that still believed in tomorrow.
"I found you," he whispered gently.
She frowned, reaching out. "What do you mean?"
He lowered the camera into her waiting hands. When she lifted it to her own eye and looked through the viewfinder, she saw her.
Not who she was now, but who she used to be.
She gasped, the air leaving her lungs in a sharp rush. "No..."
The girl inside the camera laughed soundlessly, looking impossibly, agonizingly alive.
She lowered the camera immediately, her hands trembling so hard the strap rattled against the metal body. Looking any longer felt like a physical wound. "It remembers," her voice cracked, thick with unshed tears. "Soobin..."
He smiled sadly, his dark eyes soft with an overwhelming tenderness. "Maybe cameras are kinder than people."
She looked through the lens once more—just for a fraction of a second before lowering it back down to her chest. "What kind of fate awaits us?" she asked, the heavy question hanging between the rows of forgotten music.
No answer came.
Her fingers reached out, searching until they found his. "What if..." her voice trembled softly, "What if you... and I lose our way eventually?"
His hand tightened around hers, grounded and unyielding. Then, with a softness that hurt far more than any scream, he brought her knuckles to his lips.
"We already did," he murmured against her skin. "And somehow... I still found you."