My Life In The Ruins 소설 & 이야기

Arms came around me as a loud sob rippled through me. It was not okay. I was not okay. Everything was falling apart and I was just hanging by a thread, a weak fucking thread, just fucking hoping and wishing that I was able to salvage whatever was left of my life. I was in Italy because I lost. I was in this underground house, with the people whom I dreaded being in their presence because I lost. Julia was dead because I lost. Losses. Losses. Fucking losses. That was the story of my life—I was always a loser.

But because I was too broken to care anymore. Let him have his lie. Let him have Morgan. Let him have Marcus Bennett's perfect life. I was done fighting. Done hoping. Done caring. I was just done. And tomorrow Tomorrow, I'd figure out how to survive becoming the kind of person who lets monsters win. Because I was too broken to be a hero anymore.

Pregnant and alone, his mother had carried him through war sirens and famine winters. He didn’t need to know whether it was a bomb or a god that broke the world. He already had someone to blame. Every day in the Ruins was a grind. You woke up hungry, dodged gangs, filtered dirty water through charcoal, and prayed that your cough wasn’t something worse. There were whispers of diseases, airborne, mutating, deadly. People just... faded. The lucky ones died in their sleep. But not Tunde. He had his music — an old solar-powered recorder, a secondhand guitar missing two strings, and his voice. His voice was everything.

“I understand more than you think. I’m not some naive girl who doesn’t know the weight of her words. I know exactly what I’m saying.” I run a hand through my hair, frustration bubbling inside me. “But you deserve better. Someone who can give you a normal life.” “A normal life?” she fires back, her voice rising. “What is normal, Ruin? Since when has my life ever been normal? I’m blind, being hunted by a man who I would have been married to, my family probably dead. Normal is a ship that sailed a long time ago. And you... you’ve been the only constant in this chaos.”

Teeth changing. I'm human again. Lying naked on my destroyed living room floor, covered in cuts and bruises and my own blood. Every part of my body hurts. I'm too exhausted to move. Too broken to care that I'm lying in broken glass and scattered books and the ruins of my life. I did this. I destroyed my own flat. Everything I worked for, everything I owned, ruined in one night. The sun's rising. Light streams through my broken window. I need to assess the damage. Need to figure out if this is salvageable.

And for the first time that night, I understood something terrible. My life was no longer falling apart. It had already fallen. Now I had to decide what kind of ruin I was willing to survive.

I hear her suck in a surprised breath and I force myself to look around at the wreckage. Everything is broken. My second-hand couch, my cheap coffee table, all my thrift store plates and mugs and glasses, all of it smashed. My television, cracked and playing static. My new clothes are strewn around the hallway, and even my toiletries are smashed to paste in the bathtub. My life lays in ruins around me and I can't feel anything but a cold and persistent terror. I've never had my own space before. This apartment isn't much—a small kitchen, tiny living room, miniscule bedroom, and a bathroom fit for ants—but it's mine, and that meant everything.

“You left me behind to rot in the place you call ruin. And now you wear your scars like proof you’ve earned something. Like you’ve changed. But I was the one who paid.” I staggered back. My knees hit the wet grass again. The pendant at my neck pulsed like a second heartbeat, but it couldn’t drown out the truth trying to claw free from my chest. Kye turned toward me, gently lowering himself until our faces were level. “Don’t listen. This is part of it. Whatever this thing is, it feeds off what it breaks.” But it wasn’t that simple. Because I remembered. The night the world had first shattered — the real beginning of my ruin — I had made a choice. And it wasn’t to fight. It was to run.

I hold on to her for dear life. *I’m sorry, Dre.* Ruth’s in a similar state to mine, tears welling in her eyes. She pulls back, reaching for my face, fingers trembling against them. “My life is ruined,” I whisper. She shakes her head aggressively to disagree. “No, Luke. It’s not.” “Yes, it is,” I argue. “My life is ruined. “My mum's dead. My father abandoned me. I’ve lost you...and Dre doesn’t want me. I’ve been expelled, and in a few months I’m going to Juvie for a crime I didn’t commit.”

“His father. Yours. Mine. We just get handed the wreckage and told to make sense of it.” “We’re not just handed wreckage,” I said. “We’re handed each other too. That’s the part I keep coming back to lately. Whatever this costs us before it’s finished, I don’t think I would have survived getting this close to the truth without you standing in it with me.”