Don't Pick Up the Male Lead in the Apocalypse - Chapter 10
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-Whoooosh.
The wind whipped my hair around.
It was freezing.
Hugging the padding I had been dumped with, I sat in the snow dazedly, shivering.
Eventually, I gathered myself and stood up, putting on the padding and zipping it up to my neck.
What now?
“…Haaah.”
Maybe I should go back to that man. I decided to stop resenting the guy who left.
Since my padding has returned to me, the man is probably in a terribly cold state. Cold or warm, he’s likely in a state where he can’t feel temperature anymore.
Even if he was already dead, I didn’t want to leave his body carelessly strewn on the street.
The dead can’t speak, so even if they don’t request it, they should be buried, right? We are both human, after all.
Crunching through the freshly fallen snow, I went back to where the man was lying, now just a cold corpse.
With a shovel I had grabbed from the yard of the house I’d entered earlier, I started to dig a spot next to him.
“Moving around makes it a bit less cold, mister. It would’ve been nice if you could move too.”
Talking to someone who can’t respond felt strange, but it wasn’t bad.
“But, you know, mister, maybe now’s not the time for me to be saying all this. Do you know? We’re inside a novel where the male and female leads embrace and freeze to death. What am I supposed to do in a story where even the protagonists die? Dammit.”
Dark thoughts swirled in my mind. My mom would be worried, and now, how will I manage alone…
“…..”
I quickly wiped away a tear that rolled down my cheek with my sleeve.
Crying made my eyes sting.
“It’s freaking cold.”
Just then, I heard the sound of a car roaring from afar.
I stopped digging and looked towards the distant sound. A car that seemed like a tiny dot grew larger as it approached.
Stunned, I couldn’t take my eyes off the car.
Eventually, the man got out of the car that had pulled up in front of me.
He came over and stood, his gaze shifting between the dead man, me, and my shovel, finally settling on my face.
“After all that tough talk earlier, are you crying again?”
“I’m freezing…”
I wanted to say I was crying because of the cold, but after shoveling outside in this freezing weather for so long, my damn mouth was too numb to form words properly.
The man looked at my face for a while in silence before turning his head, his gaze drifting off into the distance.
“I’ve picked up a real headache, haven’t I?”
“A headache? Then why did you come back?”
“Well. Is there a problem with coming back?”
No, I’m glad. You look even more handsome, damn. I must have damaged my eyes.
“Just, well…”
He stumbled over his words for a moment.
“It’s not like it’s my first time seeing someone die.”
His blue eyes rolled down slowly, landing on the face of the man lying on the ground.
“…..”
And then rolled back up to meet mine, staring at him.
“Guess I developed some kind of dog-like sense of responsibility.”
“d-dog-like… responsibility?”
Responsibility?
“Speak a bit more nicely, will you? There’s another person listening here, you know. Besides, we’ve just met, right? We don’t even know each other’s names.”
“If we don’t know each other’s names, do I need to go with you? I’ll go then.”
Ah, he’s really turning his back.
“Hey… Hey!”
“Why?”
“P-p-please, don’t leave me behind.”
Let’s go together, you jerk.
After blurting out these words that trampled on my pride, I could only stare at the ground, drowning in embarrassment. But then, a soft chuckle sounded from above my head.
That guy’s pretending not to care, but he’s actually bothered by me, isn’t he? Masking his concern with that ‘dog-like sense of responsibility’ talk, but in the end, he does feel responsible, doesn’t he?
And now I’m the one crying, alone and vulnerable, and I can’t help but feel like I shouldn’t care.
Inwardly, I hoped for him to reach out his hand to me, suggesting we head back to the car to escape this bitter cold.
But instead…
“You’re not coming? Planning to live out here?”
And he nonchalantly trudged through the snow and got into the car.
Such an insufferable man, right to the very end.
“Yes, I’m coming~”
