Fic: Life During Wartime [Endless Path mix] (Infernal Affairs, PG-13)
title: Life During Wartime [Endless Path mix]
author: ilovetakahana
fandom: Infernal Affairs
characters: Chan, Hon, Keung, Wong, Yip
warnings and spoilers: Discussion of the events and themes of the first movie. Drug addiction and alcoholism. Guns, surveillance, and skulking around behind enemy lines.
This is my fic for mumblemutter, who requested fic for her fandoms during Round One of the auctions at help_japan. I volunteered to write her a Mou gaan dou [無間道] fic, with some platonic Chan/Wong thrown in - so here it is.
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
summary: Chan is falling into his part, perhaps a little too well.
1.
Rain pouring onto the Hong Kong streets, endless wash of diluted light. A car horn shrieking through the dusk.
"Oi," a gruff voice said, and Chan looked up from the battered section of newspaper that he'd liberated that morning from some anonymous teahouse. Red characters up and down the page, gleeful predictions from this and that feng shui master.
Luck? What a crock of shit. Chan had once heard a British cop say something like "born under a bad sign" in reference to some recently collared thug with all his tattoos, and he'd liked the phrase immediately. A quick few words to describe his life. All of it.
"Ho," he said, as Crazy Keung thrust a paper bag at him. Waft of steam and hot peppers. "What's this?"
"Lunch."
"It's fucking eight PM."
"Lunch," Keung said again, and walked upstairs into Hon's current office, whistling lugubriously to himself.
Chan watched carefully as the rest of Keung's entourage disappeared. When he was sure he was alone on the pavement again, he opened the bag of food - and at the same time he pulled a pen out of his pocket, tore off a piece of newsprint.
"Best of times, worst of times."
He underlined the word "best" three times, dropped the makeshift note into the paper bag, and pulled out a couple of meat buns, miraculously still edible.
Chan laughed and wolfed them down, flagged a passing juice vendor for something to drink.
He crumpled the paper bag into a fist-sized wad, threw it into the vendor's cart.
"Evening," the middle-aged woman said, and scuttled off.
Chan was still chuckling when Hon came down, his business done for the evening.
"What's wrong with you," the smaller man asked, head tilted back to look him in the eyes, "are you high? You're still driving."
"Maybe I am," Chan said, and got behind the wheel, to Hon's dark mutterings.
///
Three days later, Chan followed Hon and his cronies into a girlie bar. Left at the bar while the triad boss conferred with his friends at one of the large corner tables, he waved the bartender over for a beer.
The beer slid easily down his throat, an icy counterpoint to the muggy weather.
The bartender presented him with a new bottle as soon as he'd emptied the first - and when Chan shook his head, the man silently pointed at the grimy coaster on the bar.
"Forget Sydney Carton. I need you alive."
He drank the second beer with a fake grin plastered to his face, but he was stone cold sober now, his heart thudding erratically in his chest.
What the hell had he actually gotten himself into?
2.
"Leave a message."
Chan nearly hung up. Suddenly he was scared: scared by what he had just been doing, scared by waking up to another shitty day, another wasted night. The alcohol and the drugs were screaming inside his head.
He knew he shouldn't have snorted so much - but the bosses were watching, Keung and the others were watching, and he'd just barely managed to stop himself.
Now his heart was pounding a painful tattoo in his chest, and he might be hearing voices, and for a moment all he could do was breathe painfully into the phone.
And then the words came.
"Am I just a ghost? No one out in the world who knows who I really am, except you, and the principal is dead and who the fuck killed him? Why did he have to die? I need both of you, I need someone to know who I really am, I need someone to stop me from becoming this terrifying monster that I never wanted to be. Every day I wake up and I know it's going to be another year in hell. Let me out, let me out. I never should have signed up for this. Feel like I'm going to die."
And he was shaking at the end and he threw the phone across the room, heard it shatter in the corner.
Chan wept, loudly and hopelessly, lying on the floor next to the bed in his slum-area flat.
He was mourning, but he didn't know who he was mourning.
///
He saw the juice vendor again the next day. Hon had sent him a new phone and a message to come in tomorrow, and he had been slouching through the dusty streets when he saw a familiar cart on the corner nearest his building.
She gave him a toothless smile and a cup of something garishly purple.
When he passed her a note to pay for the drink, he said, "Keep the change."
She passed him some coins anyway - and a crumpled-up piece of paper.
He fled back into his flat, unfolded the note with shaking hands.
Familiar handwriting.
"I am sorry."
Chan hurriedly burned the note - and only after did he find himself able to smile again. It was little more than a baring of teeth, and it looked more feral than it did a laugh or something amused, but he could do that, small tribute though it was.
3.
His hands shook all the time, now, and on some days it was all he could do to keep a steady trigger finger, to drive in a straight line.
Hon was staying in his own house for a change, and the staff were scuttling around underfoot trying to make a late dinner for everyone he'd brought home with him: the lackeys, the hangers-on, the members of his organization.
Chan used his right hand to close his left around his cup of coffee. Bitter, brackish, lukewarm. The cup rattled as he put it back down on the table.
One of the maids looked at him, her eyes both hateful and pitying, and he covered his shame with a growl: "Food, woman, when am I going to get anything to eat?"
A muscle twitched in her cheek, dismay pulling down the corners of her mouth - but she did slam down a large bowl of something in front of him, the chopsticks and spoon clattering around in the dish.
Chan dry-heaved and then looked down at his portion.
It looked like instant noodles with sausage.
He had hated instant noodles as a child, but here, now, he had to eat.
Salty broth, so hot that the steam wreathed his face. Bits of sweet sausage here and there. The noodles were still springy. He found an egg yolk in the bowl, cooked through, but no whites.
When he was done he nodded apologetically at the woman before slipping out for a smoke.
The other phone in his pocket was identical to Hon's, but it only had one number programmed into it. His hands were shaking just a little less as he keyed in the brief message:
"Staying in tonight, don't wait up for me."
He lit up a cigarette and then - Buzz. Buzz.
"Take care."
Chan nodded to himself, once, and then threw the phone into the sea.
4.
"Oi, Hon wants you," Keung said.
Chan downed the rest of his bottle of water and slowly got to his feet. At Hon's desk, he snagged one of the other chairs in the office and sat down in it front to back. "Boss."
Hon's usual suspicious expression cleared, and he favored Chan with the grimace that he called his smile. "Thought you'd wimped out on me. Been doing too many drugs lately? I warn you I won't mind, so long as you get things done."
He swallowed his disgust and forced a smile onto his face. "You've got me, boss."
"Damn right I do." Hon chuckled, and then dug a battered-looking brown envelope out of his desk. "I want you to deliver that to Wong at OCTB by any means possible. It's not a bomb, though the gods all know I'd like to send him one. Put him out of his misery, once and for all."
Chan covered the sudden tremble of his hands by shrugging extravagantly and reading the spidery, messy handwriting on the outside of the envelope. "You got a deadline for this, boss?"
Hon shrugged. "Tomorrow, in a week, in a month. I don't care. Get that to him."
"Okay," Chan said.
///
He'd had to buy a new shirt, but this was Hong Kong, and he bought himself a new pair of shoes while he was poking around in the midnight markets as well.
It was strange to be out and about in the sun again; Hon liked to work in the afternoons and all the way into the night. The troops were no better; Hon would throw them all out around sunrise, and they would kill another few hours eating and drinking - so everyone tended to spend the daylight hours sleeping.
Chan lurched out of his flat with the envelope firmly tucked into his battered leather jacket; several cups of convenience store coffee later, he was on his way to Hong Kong Police HQ.
As soon as he could make sure that no one was tailing him, Chan doubled back to an apartment in Kowloon. He had been carrying the address around in his head since he'd been kicked out of the police college.
He could have picked the lock even OD'd.
There was no one in the flat, but there was a note on the table, addressed to him.
"If you're reading this, you've been sent here. I know what's in the envelope.
"There is a package for you in the refrigerator. Take it with you when you leave.
"I'm sorry, once again, for having to put you through all of this.
"Maybe in the end there will be a kind of forgiveness for you and for me, for all the hell we've been going through.
"You're doing a good job. Be safe. Don't lose yourself."
Chan closed his eyes for a long moment. Pain, sadness, the siren call of the drugs.
He shook himself out of that sucking hole, turned over the note, started to write on the other side.
"I hope you know what you're doing."
The refrigerator was stocked with water and milk and someone's six-pack of canned green tea. Chan left the water and the tea, and drank the milk.
The package was heavy, but it was compact enough to tuck away in his jacket.
Chan only opened the package when he'd got back to his flat.
The parts of a gun, his own preferred Glock 19. A small clicker; he could see where the yellow button had been painted over so that the whole thing was a discreet matte black.
He laughed, then, and he opened a bottle of water and held it up, for Yip and for Wong, and maybe even for himself.
fin
author: ilovetakahana
fandom: Infernal Affairs
characters: Chan, Hon, Keung, Wong, Yip
warnings and spoilers: Discussion of the events and themes of the first movie. Drug addiction and alcoholism. Guns, surveillance, and skulking around behind enemy lines.
This is my fic for mumblemutter, who requested fic for her fandoms during Round One of the auctions at help_japan. I volunteered to write her a Mou gaan dou [無間道] fic, with some platonic Chan/Wong thrown in - so here it is.
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
summary: Chan is falling into his part, perhaps a little too well.
1.
Rain pouring onto the Hong Kong streets, endless wash of diluted light. A car horn shrieking through the dusk.
"Oi," a gruff voice said, and Chan looked up from the battered section of newspaper that he'd liberated that morning from some anonymous teahouse. Red characters up and down the page, gleeful predictions from this and that feng shui master.
Luck? What a crock of shit. Chan had once heard a British cop say something like "born under a bad sign" in reference to some recently collared thug with all his tattoos, and he'd liked the phrase immediately. A quick few words to describe his life. All of it.
"Ho," he said, as Crazy Keung thrust a paper bag at him. Waft of steam and hot peppers. "What's this?"
"Lunch."
"It's fucking eight PM."
"Lunch," Keung said again, and walked upstairs into Hon's current office, whistling lugubriously to himself.
Chan watched carefully as the rest of Keung's entourage disappeared. When he was sure he was alone on the pavement again, he opened the bag of food - and at the same time he pulled a pen out of his pocket, tore off a piece of newsprint.
"Best of times, worst of times."
He underlined the word "best" three times, dropped the makeshift note into the paper bag, and pulled out a couple of meat buns, miraculously still edible.
Chan laughed and wolfed them down, flagged a passing juice vendor for something to drink.
He crumpled the paper bag into a fist-sized wad, threw it into the vendor's cart.
"Evening," the middle-aged woman said, and scuttled off.
Chan was still chuckling when Hon came down, his business done for the evening.
"What's wrong with you," the smaller man asked, head tilted back to look him in the eyes, "are you high? You're still driving."
"Maybe I am," Chan said, and got behind the wheel, to Hon's dark mutterings.
///
Three days later, Chan followed Hon and his cronies into a girlie bar. Left at the bar while the triad boss conferred with his friends at one of the large corner tables, he waved the bartender over for a beer.
The beer slid easily down his throat, an icy counterpoint to the muggy weather.
The bartender presented him with a new bottle as soon as he'd emptied the first - and when Chan shook his head, the man silently pointed at the grimy coaster on the bar.
"Forget Sydney Carton. I need you alive."
He drank the second beer with a fake grin plastered to his face, but he was stone cold sober now, his heart thudding erratically in his chest.
What the hell had he actually gotten himself into?
2.
"Leave a message."
Chan nearly hung up. Suddenly he was scared: scared by what he had just been doing, scared by waking up to another shitty day, another wasted night. The alcohol and the drugs were screaming inside his head.
He knew he shouldn't have snorted so much - but the bosses were watching, Keung and the others were watching, and he'd just barely managed to stop himself.
Now his heart was pounding a painful tattoo in his chest, and he might be hearing voices, and for a moment all he could do was breathe painfully into the phone.
And then the words came.
"Am I just a ghost? No one out in the world who knows who I really am, except you, and the principal is dead and who the fuck killed him? Why did he have to die? I need both of you, I need someone to know who I really am, I need someone to stop me from becoming this terrifying monster that I never wanted to be. Every day I wake up and I know it's going to be another year in hell. Let me out, let me out. I never should have signed up for this. Feel like I'm going to die."
And he was shaking at the end and he threw the phone across the room, heard it shatter in the corner.
Chan wept, loudly and hopelessly, lying on the floor next to the bed in his slum-area flat.
He was mourning, but he didn't know who he was mourning.
///
He saw the juice vendor again the next day. Hon had sent him a new phone and a message to come in tomorrow, and he had been slouching through the dusty streets when he saw a familiar cart on the corner nearest his building.
She gave him a toothless smile and a cup of something garishly purple.
When he passed her a note to pay for the drink, he said, "Keep the change."
She passed him some coins anyway - and a crumpled-up piece of paper.
He fled back into his flat, unfolded the note with shaking hands.
Familiar handwriting.
"I am sorry."
Chan hurriedly burned the note - and only after did he find himself able to smile again. It was little more than a baring of teeth, and it looked more feral than it did a laugh or something amused, but he could do that, small tribute though it was.
3.
His hands shook all the time, now, and on some days it was all he could do to keep a steady trigger finger, to drive in a straight line.
Hon was staying in his own house for a change, and the staff were scuttling around underfoot trying to make a late dinner for everyone he'd brought home with him: the lackeys, the hangers-on, the members of his organization.
Chan used his right hand to close his left around his cup of coffee. Bitter, brackish, lukewarm. The cup rattled as he put it back down on the table.
One of the maids looked at him, her eyes both hateful and pitying, and he covered his shame with a growl: "Food, woman, when am I going to get anything to eat?"
A muscle twitched in her cheek, dismay pulling down the corners of her mouth - but she did slam down a large bowl of something in front of him, the chopsticks and spoon clattering around in the dish.
Chan dry-heaved and then looked down at his portion.
It looked like instant noodles with sausage.
He had hated instant noodles as a child, but here, now, he had to eat.
Salty broth, so hot that the steam wreathed his face. Bits of sweet sausage here and there. The noodles were still springy. He found an egg yolk in the bowl, cooked through, but no whites.
When he was done he nodded apologetically at the woman before slipping out for a smoke.
The other phone in his pocket was identical to Hon's, but it only had one number programmed into it. His hands were shaking just a little less as he keyed in the brief message:
"Staying in tonight, don't wait up for me."
He lit up a cigarette and then - Buzz. Buzz.
"Take care."
Chan nodded to himself, once, and then threw the phone into the sea.
4.
"Oi, Hon wants you," Keung said.
Chan downed the rest of his bottle of water and slowly got to his feet. At Hon's desk, he snagged one of the other chairs in the office and sat down in it front to back. "Boss."
Hon's usual suspicious expression cleared, and he favored Chan with the grimace that he called his smile. "Thought you'd wimped out on me. Been doing too many drugs lately? I warn you I won't mind, so long as you get things done."
He swallowed his disgust and forced a smile onto his face. "You've got me, boss."
"Damn right I do." Hon chuckled, and then dug a battered-looking brown envelope out of his desk. "I want you to deliver that to Wong at OCTB by any means possible. It's not a bomb, though the gods all know I'd like to send him one. Put him out of his misery, once and for all."
Chan covered the sudden tremble of his hands by shrugging extravagantly and reading the spidery, messy handwriting on the outside of the envelope. "You got a deadline for this, boss?"
Hon shrugged. "Tomorrow, in a week, in a month. I don't care. Get that to him."
"Okay," Chan said.
///
He'd had to buy a new shirt, but this was Hong Kong, and he bought himself a new pair of shoes while he was poking around in the midnight markets as well.
It was strange to be out and about in the sun again; Hon liked to work in the afternoons and all the way into the night. The troops were no better; Hon would throw them all out around sunrise, and they would kill another few hours eating and drinking - so everyone tended to spend the daylight hours sleeping.
Chan lurched out of his flat with the envelope firmly tucked into his battered leather jacket; several cups of convenience store coffee later, he was on his way to Hong Kong Police HQ.
As soon as he could make sure that no one was tailing him, Chan doubled back to an apartment in Kowloon. He had been carrying the address around in his head since he'd been kicked out of the police college.
He could have picked the lock even OD'd.
There was no one in the flat, but there was a note on the table, addressed to him.
"If you're reading this, you've been sent here. I know what's in the envelope.
"There is a package for you in the refrigerator. Take it with you when you leave.
"I'm sorry, once again, for having to put you through all of this.
"Maybe in the end there will be a kind of forgiveness for you and for me, for all the hell we've been going through.
"You're doing a good job. Be safe. Don't lose yourself."
Chan closed his eyes for a long moment. Pain, sadness, the siren call of the drugs.
He shook himself out of that sucking hole, turned over the note, started to write on the other side.
"I hope you know what you're doing."
The refrigerator was stocked with water and milk and someone's six-pack of canned green tea. Chan left the water and the tea, and drank the milk.
The package was heavy, but it was compact enough to tuck away in his jacket.
Chan only opened the package when he'd got back to his flat.
The parts of a gun, his own preferred Glock 19. A small clicker; he could see where the yellow button had been painted over so that the whole thing was a discreet matte black.
He laughed, then, and he opened a bottle of water and held it up, for Yip and for Wong, and maybe even for himself.
fin