Art Of Survival
Title: Art of Survival
Pairing(s): QMi
Genre(s): Angst, violence, romance, concentration camp AU
Length: 3896 words
Rating: PG-16
Summary: After being thrown into a concentration camp, all Kyuhyun thought about was survival.
Inspiration(s): I have always wanted to experience writing about torture and sadness.
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Day 1
“Filth!” the guard sneered as he harshly shoved a skinny boy to the ground, kicking him several times in the stomach for good measure. “All of you are nothing but filth!” Grabbing the boy by the scruff of his neck, he painfully hoisted him up and all but threw him into the back of a rusty old furniture moving truck where other young men were huddling, helpless. “You filthy Mixeths have no place in the world!”
The abused men in the roaring vehicle could only avert their eyes as the guard spat on them and slammed the doors shut. The muffled sound of clinking keys was heard from the other side. “Go!” the guard ordered before the engine spluttered and inertia swept across the cramped space.
The air was tense in the dark confines of that truck. Nobody dared to breathe or move, as if some Pureth would suddenly appear from out of nowhere with a loaded gun. It was not the weapon that scared them anymore-death was seen as an easy way out of the situation-but in fact it was the location where they would end up if they were discovered that sent chills down their spine.
Concentration camps. There, Mixeths were no longer human beings who had fundamental rights. There, they were statistics, one in a million brainless machines with absolutely no freedoms, a waste of space, an object of no value. The only thing that one could think about if placed in a concentration camp was survival. Concentration camps were jungles, where one fended for oneself, drowning others in order to keep one’s nose above water. Do all that needs to be done, endure all that needs to be endured, sacrifice all that needs to be sacrificed-all for that one goal to make it out of the predicament alive.
At least, that was all that Kyuhyun thought of when he sat shoulder to shoulder in the claustrophobic space. With that objective in mind, he closed his ears to the whimpers of the skinny boy who had received the harsh beating just minutes ago.
```
Day 5
They arrived to the site of torture in the middle of the afternoon. The passengers squinted as the truck doors were flung open and light spewed onto them.
“Out, Mixeths!” a guard shouted, making them all scramble onto their feet. “Hurry it up!”
The poor boy on Kyuhyun’s left, still sore from the thrashing, had an awful time trying to stand up, and the guard narrowed his eyes.
“You there,” he called out menacingly. The Mixeths stopped in their tracks, neither of them daring to breathe.
The skinny boy looked up with frightened eyes and started trembling.
“Name?”
“R-R-Ryeowook, sir.”
“Stand straight, Ryeowook.”
Ryeowook winced as he forced himself upright. The guard circled him twice, nodded with a deceiving smile on his face, and then threw a surprise punch into the boy’s stomach. A cry of pain escaped Ryeowook’s vocal cords and he crashed to the ground, curling into a pitiful fetal position.
The guard smirked devilishly and then turned to the rest of the group. “What are you guys looking at? Get on with it! Go!” He pulled out his gun and shot the man nearest to him in the head. The dead body fell to the ground with a lifeless thump, blood spilling from the side of his head. “Hurry up!”
The Mixeths immediately started moving away, none sparing even one pitiful glance at the beaten man or the dead one. Kyuhyun sure as hell didn’t. Ignoring the nauseous feeling in his stomach, his eyes were forced forward to where four cabins stood side by side, bordered with an electric fence. Kyuhyun felt a chill run through him as he eyed the concentration camp. It looked like one of those misleadingly cozy cottages where monsters disguised as villagers lured in outsiders and trapped them like prey. Not surprisingly, Kyuhyun was not that far off the bat.
The cabin was eerily empty. The first thing that he saw when he walked into his assigned cabin was a dead man in his bunk. He looked no older than twenty, thirty at most, and he was whiter than the plastic sheets he lay in. Kyuhyun fell on his knees and the meal he never ate bubbled out from his mouth, burning his esophagus. A bony hand was placed on his back and the snarky young man jumped up in surprise, immediately ready to retaliate.
Instead of a gun that he was expecting, he saw a lanky man with bright incandescent eyes. It was noticeable that this man had been at this concentration camp for quite a while if his pronounced ribs and sunken cheeks were any hint. “Are you alright?” he asked in an accented Korean.
Kyuhyun hardened his gaze at him. “I’m fine, thank you.”
The man’s head turned towards the dead man. “He died only hours ago from consumption. Is it your bunk?”
A nod.
“I see. I’ll help you move him. The graveyard is at the back.”
Kyuhyun narrowed his eyes. “What do you want?”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t fool me. You are only going to hang this over my head and guilt me into doing a favor for you later on that may or may not get me killed!”
The taller man blinked in surprise. “Why would I do that?”
Kyuhyun frowned. “You tell me, stranger.”
There was an awkward moment of silence before the man looked Kyuhyun directly in his eyes. “My name is Zhou Mi. We are not strangers anymore. And for the record, I really was trying to help and the offer still stands if you are still willing to take it. The graveyard is quite shocking to newcomers, you see.”
The messy-haired boy looked from the corpse to the puddle of vomit and then back to Zhou Mi. “Show me the way. I’ll haul him.”
Then Zhou Mi did the most peculiar thing: he smiled. The ends of his mouth lifted and his lips parted, showing his yellow teeth, and despite the fact that all of them were either broken or missing, the smile was still beautiful. It was not those malicious smiles that wicked sorceresses had, either. This one was sincere and radiated rainbows and butterflies; it did not have any ill intentions or evil undertones, or at least none that Kyuhyun could perceive. “Alright. Follow me.”
Kyuhyun rolled his eyes and rolled the sheets off of the dead man’s body, stifling a fit of nausea when all he saw was practically skin and bones. He lifted the weight off of the bed and dragged him by the arms to where Zhou Mi was leading him. Past one door that was more of a rag than anything was something Kyuhyun wished he had never seen in his whole life.
Piles of corpses. Some dismembered, some intact, some missing only a limb or two. Flies circled the heaps of rotting material, and maggots literally dove into their meals with abandon. The smell was so acrimonious that it was painful breathing.
Zhou Mi only winced and coughed a few times before retaining his composure. Kyuhyun, on the other hand, had a violent coughing fit and another bout of vomiting on top of feeling as if he was suffering from the lack of air. Once again the taller man’s bony hand was on his back. “It takes a while to get used to.”
“You can actually get used to this!?” Kyuhyun screeched between coughs.
The Chinese man thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I guess you really won’t get used to seeing this, but eventually the sight is just so habitual that you cannot help but be forced to take it in. It’s horrifying just how much we Mixeths can endure these days. Here, you learn to look upon a dead man the same way you look upon a broken eraser.”
The younger lad clenched his teeth and threw the corpse into the pile. “Personally, I find that the dead have it easier than we do.”
“Perhaps, but life is precious. If it wasn’t, why don’t you take your own life right now?”
Kyuhyun looked up defiantly. “I was never one to take the easy way out. Besides, committing suicide is the most dishonorable way of dying in this world.” With that said, he spun around and reentered the cabin, desperate to escape the stench of rotting flesh. He made a beeline towards his bunk and peeled off the thin bloodstained sheets, noisily switching them with the ones on the bunk next to his instead.
“That’s not nice.”
“If I had slept in those plastic germ ridden sheets I would have died of consumption in less than a week.”
Zhou Mi sighed. “But you don’t need to infect other people with it.”
“Well, tough luck. Shit happens in life.”
“The Pureths are already brutal enough as it is; we don’t have enough capacity to endure brutality from both spectrums.”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “I’m sure that the man beside me would have done the exact same thing if he were in my situation, and then I would be the wronged one.”
Zhou Mi looked hurt. “They would never do that.”
“You’d be surprised.”
```
Day 6
There were fifteen men in that particular cabin, and they were divided into five groups of two or three, each doing a certain job. The rules were simple: do the job, do it well, or die. It just so happened that Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were the ones chosen to chop wood. It was tiring work under the blazing sun, but it was neither of fatigue nor of the heat that made marble sized sweat beads roll off their temples.
At the end of a work-based, torture-filled day with a Pureth’s gun forever pointed at his head, Kyuhyun was grateful to return to his bunk for his daily two hours of rest. Hopping onto the hard wood, he wrapped his hardly insulating sheets around him and closed his eyes. Shuffles were heard around the room, but the skinny young man ignored them.
“Hey.”
Kyuhyun groaned and allowed his eyelids to open just a bit. “Make it quick, Zhou Mi.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kyuhyun.”
“Kyuhyun,” he repeated, satisfied. “May I call you Kui Xian instead? It’s easier on my tongue, you see.”
“Do whatever you wish. Now may I go to sleep?”
“Yah, go ahead.”
```
Day 30
Ryeowook died when a Pureth guard thought it would be funny to throw him against the electric fence. Nobody talked about the empty bunk. Zhou Mi cried for hours.
Kyuhyun watched as Zhou Mi went to dispose of the body in the graveyard. A white puppy made its way toward the smiley man, and in addition to a scratch on the top of its furry head, it was given a large portion of Zhou Mi’s bread. Kyuhyun frowned at that and pulled the covers over his head.
The puppy was found dead later that day, unmoving beside the electric fence.
```
Day 50
It was not difficult to notice that Zhou Mi was different from the rest of the cabin inhabitants. For one, he possessed this optimism that one could never imagine possible: he constantly smiled, even on those days when he received a good whipping from the Pureths for no concrete reason at all. His belief was that something good comes from something bad, and he knew from the bottom of his heart that this experience would pay off somehow.
Zhou Mi was too nice. Much too nice. He cared for the wellbeing of the others, and if any of them received a whipping or looked excessively tired, he would without hesitation offer them his daily piece of bread. He took care of the others when they had a cough, and even put up with Heechul’s never-ending complaints when the Pureths all but broke his leg.
He hated him. Kyuhyun hated Zhou Mi with a passion. He was so nice that it was almost ridiculous. He was liked by everybody because of the happiness that he naturally spread, and once or twice Kyuhyun had to sneak a smile when nobody was looking. That was another thing: Kyuhyun hated how Zhou Mi could effortlessly make him feel so much happier with only one of his toothy grins or the cheerful way he said “Kui Xian!” every day. He hated how the Chinese man could make him feel as if life was beautiful when it really wasn’t at the moment. He hated that he cared about the others. Most of all, Kyuhyun hated how no matter how hard he convinced himself otherwise, he actually liked the guy and felt safe with him around.
It made him feel weak and helpless.
He received his first whipping on his twentieth day there after he dropped his hammer. Kyuhyun deemed himself lucky, really. If it was any other time, he would have been shot in the head without a moment’s hesitation. He remembered the feeling of that slick piece of wood slipping from his hands on making a loud thump on the ground. He remembered the way Zhou Mi looked up at him with the widest eyes he could manage. He remembered the way he just froze, fear overpowering his whole system as he heard a Pureth make his way up to him with a gun in his hand.
Kyuhyun went back to his bunk with a bloody backside, and he painfully lowered himself onto his bunk and pulled his sheets over his head. Zhou Mi shifted beside him and pulled out a piece of bread.
Kyuhyun glared at the man. “I don’t need your damn meal.”
“You need strength, Kui Xian,” he reasoned gently.
“I can manage by myself, thank you.”
“You lost a lot of blood.”
“I have plenty left.”
The elder sighed. “Kui Xian-”
“Zhou Mi, just stop it!” he hissed just loud enough to get his point across, making sure not to wake anybody. “You are in a concentration camp. Helping people is equivalent to suicide!”
“What do you mean?”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “What are you, a saint? You are giving out all the resources you can offer, and guess what you are getting in return: absolutely nothing. You are being used! Nobody in this room cares about anybody else. It’s a dog-eat-dog world here. You have to step on others in order to survive.”
Zhou Mi looked hurt, and his bright eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Even if I am being used, I would still have this peace of mind that I did some good in the world. Is that too much to ask?”
“Well, then, you are an idiot.”
Silence.
“Kui Xian, how come you are not using me then?”
Kyuhyun all but choked on his saliva. “What?”
“If all you want is to survive, then how come you don’t take what I offer?”
Kyuhyun turned his back on the man. ‘Because I want you to survive,’ he thought to himself before closing his eyes.
```
Day 74
“All Pureths want to do is kill us,” Kyuhyun sneered as he routinely slipped into bed.
“Don't say that,” Zhou Mi chided, doing the same.
“Well, it’s true. Take Ryeowook for example.”
“Not all Pureths want to do this.”
Kyuhyun scoffed.
“Killing is a difficult thing to do, Kui Xian. You are taking away somebody’s life, their most precious possession; only the most heartless people would be able to live through the guilt.”
“Pureths are heartless.”
“No, Pureths are human,” Zhou Mi corrected. “And so are we.”
Kyuhyun rolled his eyes.
Zhou Mi chuckled. “You know, I’m quite glad to be here.”
“How could you be?”
“It brings out the best and worst in people.”
The messy-haired boy could not help but crack a smile. “I am assuming that it brought out the worst in me, hasn't it?”
“Perhaps,” the Chinese man teased. “But seriously, something good always comes from something bad.”
“Like?”
“If I had never been discovered, I would have never been beaten and placed in this concentration camp, and then I would never have had to witness all this death and unjustness.” A smile crept onto the sides of his lips. “Yet, on the other hand, if I had never been discovered, I would have never been able to meet you and learn what love feels like. I love you, Kui Xian.”
Kyuhyun felt blood rush out of his system, and he stayed silent, unable to form any intelligible words. His mind blank, he only barely registered Zhou Mi’s heartfelt confession. “Don’t love me.”
Zhou Mi’s smile faded and he sighed. “I can’t help it.”
“Don’t love me,” he repeated, louder.
“Why in the world not?”
“You just can’t!” Kyuhyun shrieked breathlessly as he shivered in his bunk, twitching.
“Oh Kui Xian.” Worried, Zhou Mi attempted to put his arm around the trembling boy but it was smacked away.
“You must not touch me!”
“Kui Xian-”
“Don’t!”
Zhou Mi moved quickly. Flying onto the other boy’s bunk, he trapped the younger male in his embrace, his arms around his shoulders and his leg encircling the boy’s knees. Kyuhyun gave a squeak in protest, but it was impossible for him to escape the man’s embrace, both physically and emotionally. Twisting and turning, his sobs became more breathless and his cries more delirious, but the harder he resisted, the tighter Zhou Mi held him. “Let me go!” he breathed out.
Zhou Mi pretty much rolled on top of him and he was silenced with a hard and hungry kiss that he could not help but reciprocate.
```
Day 75
The first thing Kyuhyun saw the next day was Zhou Mi.
“Good morning,” he greeted cheerfully, smiles and all.
Kyuhyun bit back the grin that was on the tip of his lips and forced all his energy into appearing rationally heartless. “Don’t ever speak to me again,” he said coldly.
A mixture of surprise and sorrow made its way onto Zhou Mi’s face. “What?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Kui Xian, I don’t understand. I love you, and I know that you love me too.”
“For once in your life, stop being such a romantic and realize our circumstances! We are not living the dream, Zhou Mi.”
“But-”
“Just no!” he interrupted sharply before jumping out of his bunk and running out of the cabin for another sweat-filled wood-chucking day.
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Day 82
Zhou Mi did as Kyuhyun demanded well enough for three consecutive days. He never uttered a word to the stubborn boy, avoiding eye contact when working, but still continued to take care of him and watch over him. Love and concern were the only emotions that showed in his eyes, and Kyuhyun was becoming increasingly annoyed at the whole situation.
It was not as if he did not know that he was going to falling for Zhou Mi-heck, he knew quite well that he would eventually fall in love with him whether he liked it or not-it was just that love did not fit into the equation of survival. Survival was food, shelter, water, and hygiene; love was nothing but an inhibitor. Not only that, he did not expect Zhou Mi to confess so directly. It would have been exponentially easier to hide his true feelings if he was at least partially certain that Zhou Mi did not feel the same way.
The only thing preventing him from commencing any relationship with the man was the fact that they were being watched by ruthless brainwashed soldiers of the Pureth army. Word from outside reported that the war was coming to an end soon, and that the prisoners of war would either be set free, or gassed to death before they could. Kyuhyun did not like the sound of the latter.
It was on the seventh day of silent treatment and when Kyuhyun got another whipping, and as per usual, Zhou Mi was right beside him, worry brimming up to his eyelashes.
“Zhou Mi, just stop!” he yelled as the Chinese man was covering him with an extra blanket.
Wide eyes were his only response.
“Stop acting like you care about me at all! I am perfectly capable of looking after myself! I’m not seven years old, you know! I don’t need your goddamn help! I don’t need you!”
The taller man winced.
Kyuhyun had to summon up his best acting skills in order to spit out the next sentence that escaped his vocal cords: “You really don’t get it, do you? Zhou Mi, I hate you! Can’t you see that I am just tired of having you around? Just looking at you makes me sick!”
The gangly man’s eyes flashed surprise, anger, hurt, and finally blankness. Kyuhyun shivered as he saw the man’s fists curl from the corner of his vision. “Sorry,” he rasped. “I didn’t know that you really, uh, thought of me like that. I’ll leave you be.”
“And take back your goddamn blanket!” Kyuhyun roughly threw Zhou Mi’s blanket back at him. “Take mine as well; it absolutely reeks of you.”
That night, Zhou Mi slept in fetal position, both his and Kyuhyun’s blanket covering his head as he tried to muffle his heart-wrenching sobs. He was starting to run out of oxygen, but fell asleep before he noticed. Right beside him, Kyuhyun closed his eyes and shivered from the cold, and it was only after midnight when he shivered no more.
```
Day 83
Zhou Mi woke up with a gasp. Light was pouring in from the bottom of the cabin door and he guessed that it was the late afternoon. Why hadn’t the Pureths waken him up yet? He threw the blankets off his head and immediately regretted it: it smelled of rotting corpses. His eyes widened. In the bunk across from his lay a dead man, skin pale and gray. The bunk next to that one had a man, also dead, clutching his throat. The next ones did not look any more attractive, even from a distance.
However, the most horrific one he saw was the one beside him. Curled up and stiff, sickly white from lack of thermal warmth, was the man that he had given his whole heart to. “Oh no, Kui Xian!” he screeched as he grabbed his beloved by the shoulders. Kyuhyun’s eyes were closed, and his head lolled back like dead weight. Breathing hard, the elder desperately felt for a pulse and his heart pretty much stopped when there was none that he could find. He was dead from poison gas.
Kyuhyun was dead. Kyuhyun, the one who valued survival above everything else, was dead. Kyuhyun, the one who Zhou Mi cherished more than his own life, was dead.
And Zhou Mi let out a cry of anguish and brought Kyuhyun’s corpse into a desperate embrace. “Oh Kui Xian, why? Of all people, I would have thought you would have known this would come! Why aren’t you alive? You said that the only thing you can think about when in a camp was survival! Why didn’t you?”
Sobbing and shaking, Zhou Mi buried his face into his love’s cold neck and remained in that position until Mixeth rescuers found him several hours later.
You see, Kyuhyun had been thinking about survival, just not his own.
Pairing(s): QMi
Genre(s): Angst, violence, romance, concentration camp AU
Length: 3896 words
Rating: PG-16
Summary: After being thrown into a concentration camp, all Kyuhyun thought about was survival.
Inspiration(s): I have always wanted to experience writing about torture and sadness.
```
Day 1
“Filth!” the guard sneered as he harshly shoved a skinny boy to the ground, kicking him several times in the stomach for good measure. “All of you are nothing but filth!” Grabbing the boy by the scruff of his neck, he painfully hoisted him up and all but threw him into the back of a rusty old furniture moving truck where other young men were huddling, helpless. “You filthy Mixeths have no place in the world!”
The abused men in the roaring vehicle could only avert their eyes as the guard spat on them and slammed the doors shut. The muffled sound of clinking keys was heard from the other side. “Go!” the guard ordered before the engine spluttered and inertia swept across the cramped space.
The air was tense in the dark confines of that truck. Nobody dared to breathe or move, as if some Pureth would suddenly appear from out of nowhere with a loaded gun. It was not the weapon that scared them anymore-death was seen as an easy way out of the situation-but in fact it was the location where they would end up if they were discovered that sent chills down their spine.
Concentration camps. There, Mixeths were no longer human beings who had fundamental rights. There, they were statistics, one in a million brainless machines with absolutely no freedoms, a waste of space, an object of no value. The only thing that one could think about if placed in a concentration camp was survival. Concentration camps were jungles, where one fended for oneself, drowning others in order to keep one’s nose above water. Do all that needs to be done, endure all that needs to be endured, sacrifice all that needs to be sacrificed-all for that one goal to make it out of the predicament alive.
At least, that was all that Kyuhyun thought of when he sat shoulder to shoulder in the claustrophobic space. With that objective in mind, he closed his ears to the whimpers of the skinny boy who had received the harsh beating just minutes ago.
```
Day 5
They arrived to the site of torture in the middle of the afternoon. The passengers squinted as the truck doors were flung open and light spewed onto them.
“Out, Mixeths!” a guard shouted, making them all scramble onto their feet. “Hurry it up!”
The poor boy on Kyuhyun’s left, still sore from the thrashing, had an awful time trying to stand up, and the guard narrowed his eyes.
“You there,” he called out menacingly. The Mixeths stopped in their tracks, neither of them daring to breathe.
The skinny boy looked up with frightened eyes and started trembling.
“Name?”
“R-R-Ryeowook, sir.”
“Stand straight, Ryeowook.”
Ryeowook winced as he forced himself upright. The guard circled him twice, nodded with a deceiving smile on his face, and then threw a surprise punch into the boy’s stomach. A cry of pain escaped Ryeowook’s vocal cords and he crashed to the ground, curling into a pitiful fetal position.
The guard smirked devilishly and then turned to the rest of the group. “What are you guys looking at? Get on with it! Go!” He pulled out his gun and shot the man nearest to him in the head. The dead body fell to the ground with a lifeless thump, blood spilling from the side of his head. “Hurry up!”
The Mixeths immediately started moving away, none sparing even one pitiful glance at the beaten man or the dead one. Kyuhyun sure as hell didn’t. Ignoring the nauseous feeling in his stomach, his eyes were forced forward to where four cabins stood side by side, bordered with an electric fence. Kyuhyun felt a chill run through him as he eyed the concentration camp. It looked like one of those misleadingly cozy cottages where monsters disguised as villagers lured in outsiders and trapped them like prey. Not surprisingly, Kyuhyun was not that far off the bat.
The cabin was eerily empty. The first thing that he saw when he walked into his assigned cabin was a dead man in his bunk. He looked no older than twenty, thirty at most, and he was whiter than the plastic sheets he lay in. Kyuhyun fell on his knees and the meal he never ate bubbled out from his mouth, burning his esophagus. A bony hand was placed on his back and the snarky young man jumped up in surprise, immediately ready to retaliate.
Instead of a gun that he was expecting, he saw a lanky man with bright incandescent eyes. It was noticeable that this man had been at this concentration camp for quite a while if his pronounced ribs and sunken cheeks were any hint. “Are you alright?” he asked in an accented Korean.
Kyuhyun hardened his gaze at him. “I’m fine, thank you.”
The man’s head turned towards the dead man. “He died only hours ago from consumption. Is it your bunk?”
A nod.
“I see. I’ll help you move him. The graveyard is at the back.”
Kyuhyun narrowed his eyes. “What do you want?”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t fool me. You are only going to hang this over my head and guilt me into doing a favor for you later on that may or may not get me killed!”
The taller man blinked in surprise. “Why would I do that?”
Kyuhyun frowned. “You tell me, stranger.”
There was an awkward moment of silence before the man looked Kyuhyun directly in his eyes. “My name is Zhou Mi. We are not strangers anymore. And for the record, I really was trying to help and the offer still stands if you are still willing to take it. The graveyard is quite shocking to newcomers, you see.”
The messy-haired boy looked from the corpse to the puddle of vomit and then back to Zhou Mi. “Show me the way. I’ll haul him.”
Then Zhou Mi did the most peculiar thing: he smiled. The ends of his mouth lifted and his lips parted, showing his yellow teeth, and despite the fact that all of them were either broken or missing, the smile was still beautiful. It was not those malicious smiles that wicked sorceresses had, either. This one was sincere and radiated rainbows and butterflies; it did not have any ill intentions or evil undertones, or at least none that Kyuhyun could perceive. “Alright. Follow me.”
Kyuhyun rolled his eyes and rolled the sheets off of the dead man’s body, stifling a fit of nausea when all he saw was practically skin and bones. He lifted the weight off of the bed and dragged him by the arms to where Zhou Mi was leading him. Past one door that was more of a rag than anything was something Kyuhyun wished he had never seen in his whole life.
Piles of corpses. Some dismembered, some intact, some missing only a limb or two. Flies circled the heaps of rotting material, and maggots literally dove into their meals with abandon. The smell was so acrimonious that it was painful breathing.
Zhou Mi only winced and coughed a few times before retaining his composure. Kyuhyun, on the other hand, had a violent coughing fit and another bout of vomiting on top of feeling as if he was suffering from the lack of air. Once again the taller man’s bony hand was on his back. “It takes a while to get used to.”
“You can actually get used to this!?” Kyuhyun screeched between coughs.
The Chinese man thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I guess you really won’t get used to seeing this, but eventually the sight is just so habitual that you cannot help but be forced to take it in. It’s horrifying just how much we Mixeths can endure these days. Here, you learn to look upon a dead man the same way you look upon a broken eraser.”
The younger lad clenched his teeth and threw the corpse into the pile. “Personally, I find that the dead have it easier than we do.”
“Perhaps, but life is precious. If it wasn’t, why don’t you take your own life right now?”
Kyuhyun looked up defiantly. “I was never one to take the easy way out. Besides, committing suicide is the most dishonorable way of dying in this world.” With that said, he spun around and reentered the cabin, desperate to escape the stench of rotting flesh. He made a beeline towards his bunk and peeled off the thin bloodstained sheets, noisily switching them with the ones on the bunk next to his instead.
“That’s not nice.”
“If I had slept in those plastic germ ridden sheets I would have died of consumption in less than a week.”
Zhou Mi sighed. “But you don’t need to infect other people with it.”
“Well, tough luck. Shit happens in life.”
“The Pureths are already brutal enough as it is; we don’t have enough capacity to endure brutality from both spectrums.”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “I’m sure that the man beside me would have done the exact same thing if he were in my situation, and then I would be the wronged one.”
Zhou Mi looked hurt. “They would never do that.”
“You’d be surprised.”
```
Day 6
There were fifteen men in that particular cabin, and they were divided into five groups of two or three, each doing a certain job. The rules were simple: do the job, do it well, or die. It just so happened that Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were the ones chosen to chop wood. It was tiring work under the blazing sun, but it was neither of fatigue nor of the heat that made marble sized sweat beads roll off their temples.
At the end of a work-based, torture-filled day with a Pureth’s gun forever pointed at his head, Kyuhyun was grateful to return to his bunk for his daily two hours of rest. Hopping onto the hard wood, he wrapped his hardly insulating sheets around him and closed his eyes. Shuffles were heard around the room, but the skinny young man ignored them.
“Hey.”
Kyuhyun groaned and allowed his eyelids to open just a bit. “Make it quick, Zhou Mi.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kyuhyun.”
“Kyuhyun,” he repeated, satisfied. “May I call you Kui Xian instead? It’s easier on my tongue, you see.”
“Do whatever you wish. Now may I go to sleep?”
“Yah, go ahead.”
```
Day 30
Ryeowook died when a Pureth guard thought it would be funny to throw him against the electric fence. Nobody talked about the empty bunk. Zhou Mi cried for hours.
Kyuhyun watched as Zhou Mi went to dispose of the body in the graveyard. A white puppy made its way toward the smiley man, and in addition to a scratch on the top of its furry head, it was given a large portion of Zhou Mi’s bread. Kyuhyun frowned at that and pulled the covers over his head.
The puppy was found dead later that day, unmoving beside the electric fence.
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Day 50
It was not difficult to notice that Zhou Mi was different from the rest of the cabin inhabitants. For one, he possessed this optimism that one could never imagine possible: he constantly smiled, even on those days when he received a good whipping from the Pureths for no concrete reason at all. His belief was that something good comes from something bad, and he knew from the bottom of his heart that this experience would pay off somehow.
Zhou Mi was too nice. Much too nice. He cared for the wellbeing of the others, and if any of them received a whipping or looked excessively tired, he would without hesitation offer them his daily piece of bread. He took care of the others when they had a cough, and even put up with Heechul’s never-ending complaints when the Pureths all but broke his leg.
He hated him. Kyuhyun hated Zhou Mi with a passion. He was so nice that it was almost ridiculous. He was liked by everybody because of the happiness that he naturally spread, and once or twice Kyuhyun had to sneak a smile when nobody was looking. That was another thing: Kyuhyun hated how Zhou Mi could effortlessly make him feel so much happier with only one of his toothy grins or the cheerful way he said “Kui Xian!” every day. He hated how the Chinese man could make him feel as if life was beautiful when it really wasn’t at the moment. He hated that he cared about the others. Most of all, Kyuhyun hated how no matter how hard he convinced himself otherwise, he actually liked the guy and felt safe with him around.
It made him feel weak and helpless.
He received his first whipping on his twentieth day there after he dropped his hammer. Kyuhyun deemed himself lucky, really. If it was any other time, he would have been shot in the head without a moment’s hesitation. He remembered the feeling of that slick piece of wood slipping from his hands on making a loud thump on the ground. He remembered the way Zhou Mi looked up at him with the widest eyes he could manage. He remembered the way he just froze, fear overpowering his whole system as he heard a Pureth make his way up to him with a gun in his hand.
Kyuhyun went back to his bunk with a bloody backside, and he painfully lowered himself onto his bunk and pulled his sheets over his head. Zhou Mi shifted beside him and pulled out a piece of bread.
Kyuhyun glared at the man. “I don’t need your damn meal.”
“You need strength, Kui Xian,” he reasoned gently.
“I can manage by myself, thank you.”
“You lost a lot of blood.”
“I have plenty left.”
The elder sighed. “Kui Xian-”
“Zhou Mi, just stop it!” he hissed just loud enough to get his point across, making sure not to wake anybody. “You are in a concentration camp. Helping people is equivalent to suicide!”
“What do you mean?”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “What are you, a saint? You are giving out all the resources you can offer, and guess what you are getting in return: absolutely nothing. You are being used! Nobody in this room cares about anybody else. It’s a dog-eat-dog world here. You have to step on others in order to survive.”
Zhou Mi looked hurt, and his bright eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Even if I am being used, I would still have this peace of mind that I did some good in the world. Is that too much to ask?”
“Well, then, you are an idiot.”
Silence.
“Kui Xian, how come you are not using me then?”
Kyuhyun all but choked on his saliva. “What?”
“If all you want is to survive, then how come you don’t take what I offer?”
Kyuhyun turned his back on the man. ‘Because I want you to survive,’ he thought to himself before closing his eyes.
```
Day 74
“All Pureths want to do is kill us,” Kyuhyun sneered as he routinely slipped into bed.
“Don't say that,” Zhou Mi chided, doing the same.
“Well, it’s true. Take Ryeowook for example.”
“Not all Pureths want to do this.”
Kyuhyun scoffed.
“Killing is a difficult thing to do, Kui Xian. You are taking away somebody’s life, their most precious possession; only the most heartless people would be able to live through the guilt.”
“Pureths are heartless.”
“No, Pureths are human,” Zhou Mi corrected. “And so are we.”
Kyuhyun rolled his eyes.
Zhou Mi chuckled. “You know, I’m quite glad to be here.”
“How could you be?”
“It brings out the best and worst in people.”
The messy-haired boy could not help but crack a smile. “I am assuming that it brought out the worst in me, hasn't it?”
“Perhaps,” the Chinese man teased. “But seriously, something good always comes from something bad.”
“Like?”
“If I had never been discovered, I would have never been beaten and placed in this concentration camp, and then I would never have had to witness all this death and unjustness.” A smile crept onto the sides of his lips. “Yet, on the other hand, if I had never been discovered, I would have never been able to meet you and learn what love feels like. I love you, Kui Xian.”
Kyuhyun felt blood rush out of his system, and he stayed silent, unable to form any intelligible words. His mind blank, he only barely registered Zhou Mi’s heartfelt confession. “Don’t love me.”
Zhou Mi’s smile faded and he sighed. “I can’t help it.”
“Don’t love me,” he repeated, louder.
“Why in the world not?”
“You just can’t!” Kyuhyun shrieked breathlessly as he shivered in his bunk, twitching.
“Oh Kui Xian.” Worried, Zhou Mi attempted to put his arm around the trembling boy but it was smacked away.
“You must not touch me!”
“Kui Xian-”
“Don’t!”
Zhou Mi moved quickly. Flying onto the other boy’s bunk, he trapped the younger male in his embrace, his arms around his shoulders and his leg encircling the boy’s knees. Kyuhyun gave a squeak in protest, but it was impossible for him to escape the man’s embrace, both physically and emotionally. Twisting and turning, his sobs became more breathless and his cries more delirious, but the harder he resisted, the tighter Zhou Mi held him. “Let me go!” he breathed out.
Zhou Mi pretty much rolled on top of him and he was silenced with a hard and hungry kiss that he could not help but reciprocate.
```
Day 75
The first thing Kyuhyun saw the next day was Zhou Mi.
“Good morning,” he greeted cheerfully, smiles and all.
Kyuhyun bit back the grin that was on the tip of his lips and forced all his energy into appearing rationally heartless. “Don’t ever speak to me again,” he said coldly.
A mixture of surprise and sorrow made its way onto Zhou Mi’s face. “What?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Kui Xian, I don’t understand. I love you, and I know that you love me too.”
“For once in your life, stop being such a romantic and realize our circumstances! We are not living the dream, Zhou Mi.”
“But-”
“Just no!” he interrupted sharply before jumping out of his bunk and running out of the cabin for another sweat-filled wood-chucking day.
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Day 82
Zhou Mi did as Kyuhyun demanded well enough for three consecutive days. He never uttered a word to the stubborn boy, avoiding eye contact when working, but still continued to take care of him and watch over him. Love and concern were the only emotions that showed in his eyes, and Kyuhyun was becoming increasingly annoyed at the whole situation.
It was not as if he did not know that he was going to falling for Zhou Mi-heck, he knew quite well that he would eventually fall in love with him whether he liked it or not-it was just that love did not fit into the equation of survival. Survival was food, shelter, water, and hygiene; love was nothing but an inhibitor. Not only that, he did not expect Zhou Mi to confess so directly. It would have been exponentially easier to hide his true feelings if he was at least partially certain that Zhou Mi did not feel the same way.
The only thing preventing him from commencing any relationship with the man was the fact that they were being watched by ruthless brainwashed soldiers of the Pureth army. Word from outside reported that the war was coming to an end soon, and that the prisoners of war would either be set free, or gassed to death before they could. Kyuhyun did not like the sound of the latter.
It was on the seventh day of silent treatment and when Kyuhyun got another whipping, and as per usual, Zhou Mi was right beside him, worry brimming up to his eyelashes.
“Zhou Mi, just stop!” he yelled as the Chinese man was covering him with an extra blanket.
Wide eyes were his only response.
“Stop acting like you care about me at all! I am perfectly capable of looking after myself! I’m not seven years old, you know! I don’t need your goddamn help! I don’t need you!”
The taller man winced.
Kyuhyun had to summon up his best acting skills in order to spit out the next sentence that escaped his vocal cords: “You really don’t get it, do you? Zhou Mi, I hate you! Can’t you see that I am just tired of having you around? Just looking at you makes me sick!”
The gangly man’s eyes flashed surprise, anger, hurt, and finally blankness. Kyuhyun shivered as he saw the man’s fists curl from the corner of his vision. “Sorry,” he rasped. “I didn’t know that you really, uh, thought of me like that. I’ll leave you be.”
“And take back your goddamn blanket!” Kyuhyun roughly threw Zhou Mi’s blanket back at him. “Take mine as well; it absolutely reeks of you.”
That night, Zhou Mi slept in fetal position, both his and Kyuhyun’s blanket covering his head as he tried to muffle his heart-wrenching sobs. He was starting to run out of oxygen, but fell asleep before he noticed. Right beside him, Kyuhyun closed his eyes and shivered from the cold, and it was only after midnight when he shivered no more.
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Day 83
Zhou Mi woke up with a gasp. Light was pouring in from the bottom of the cabin door and he guessed that it was the late afternoon. Why hadn’t the Pureths waken him up yet? He threw the blankets off his head and immediately regretted it: it smelled of rotting corpses. His eyes widened. In the bunk across from his lay a dead man, skin pale and gray. The bunk next to that one had a man, also dead, clutching his throat. The next ones did not look any more attractive, even from a distance.
However, the most horrific one he saw was the one beside him. Curled up and stiff, sickly white from lack of thermal warmth, was the man that he had given his whole heart to. “Oh no, Kui Xian!” he screeched as he grabbed his beloved by the shoulders. Kyuhyun’s eyes were closed, and his head lolled back like dead weight. Breathing hard, the elder desperately felt for a pulse and his heart pretty much stopped when there was none that he could find. He was dead from poison gas.
Kyuhyun was dead. Kyuhyun, the one who valued survival above everything else, was dead. Kyuhyun, the one who Zhou Mi cherished more than his own life, was dead.
And Zhou Mi let out a cry of anguish and brought Kyuhyun’s corpse into a desperate embrace. “Oh Kui Xian, why? Of all people, I would have thought you would have known this would come! Why aren’t you alive? You said that the only thing you can think about when in a camp was survival! Why didn’t you?”
Sobbing and shaking, Zhou Mi buried his face into his love’s cold neck and remained in that position until Mixeth rescuers found him several hours later.
You see, Kyuhyun had been thinking about survival, just not his own.