The Last Train
Title: The Last Train
Length: 2.3k w.
Pairing: Luhan / Xiumin
Rating: PG-13
Summary: On the eve of the Korean War two lovers say goodbye.
Warnings:[Warnings]
Character Death
Written for the 23 emotions challenge.
The sound of a train whistle brought Minseok back to reality. He pulled away, breaking their lip-lock, a sudden retreat as fitting as could be given the immediate and horrible reality of their forced separation. Minseok found his eyes drawn to Lu Han’s, an unreadable gaze meeting his own.
It was raining, sprinkling, the droplets falling amidst the fog. Minseok had given up trying to keep himself dry. His coat was soaked, the itchy wool army issue garment scratching against his arms, a dim annoyance among bigger worries.
“You should go.” Minseok had wanted to sound strong, to sound confident, and to pretend like it wasn’t going to be the last time they saw each other. He failed, the words choked, overtly emotional in their delivery despite the fact he had halfway convinced himself he couldn’t feel anymore.
Lu Han pulled his trench coat tightly around his body, rocking on the balls of his feet as he stared at the wet pavement. There were a few soldiers milling nearby, Minseok could hear their extremely formalized method of speech as they discussed things that didn’t matter at the moment, not to him. At least not now.
The train came to a stop, the screeching of the great iron horse cutting through the night. Minseok looked towards the train. North, it was going north.
“Look, I can’t promise anything but I will try to write.” Minseok swallowed the anguish. Stay strong, he had done worse, hadn’t he? Back in Shanghai, back in Manchuria, when each day was probably their last. But that had been so long ago, it seemed so distant now.
“No, don’t promise.” Lu Han spoke softly, sadly.
“I am not sure where to send anything- hell, I don’t know where I will be in a few months. I will send them to your parent’s house, or maybe Yixing can-“
Lu Han kissed him, cutting off his ramblings. Minseok could taste tears. He could taste the utter despair they faced. The thought, the brief and flickering dream that he could get on the train with Lu Han, was as distressing as it was comforting.
He would claim they weren’t made for this, weren’t cut out for it - but it was how they met after all. Artillery shells screaming overhead, blood and dirt and smoke and death. It was exactly what they were made for.
“Walk with me for a moment.” Lu Han pulled away, grabbing Minseok’s hand. ”They won’t leave without me.”
Lu Han’s hands were rough, calloused, a leftover of when he used to sling fifty pound burlap sacks over his shoulders and trek through the mountains with explosive charges, skirting the Japanese lines. Minseok’s hands weren’t much better; he had all of the rough patches to prove he had shot enough for it to leave a permanent mark on his person.
Minseok still remembered the first words Lu Han said when they met. “I don’t trust you.”
It was exactly what Minseok thought when he stared at the thin, baby faced Chinese man - he didn’t trust him. But then again there were not many people you could trust in 1934 when you called Shanghai home, fighting a battle that was built on an underhanded foundation, the tides turning against everything you were working towards on a consistent basis.
Yet somehow, in time, they did trust each other. A trust built from having each other’s backs as the city exploded around them, as their ideals were lost along with their friends. It worked. It worked like a lot of things between them.
Except for circumstance, that never worked. It never had, except in the beginning when they had a common enemy. Now they had love between them, but everything else was at odds. Their countries, their families, and the world...it seemed.
The years had changed them. Lu Han wasn’t slinging sacks of explosives anymore, he was playing with politics. Minseok, he was still shooting, still fighting the way he knew how.
Their footsteps echoed on the concrete train platform, the difference in their footwear evident based on the way a click sounded alongside a heavy thud. Lu Han’s dress shoes, the ones he had bought back in Seoul, Minseok’s military issue boots, cheap rubber soles, long laces he could never seem to keep properly tied echoing alongside each other.
“I think I can talk them out of this,” Lu Han was hopeful. He was always hopeful. “Now that I am going back, I think I can do it.”
Minseok didn’t respond. He knew it was wishful thinking, Lu Han trying to comfort him with delusions that things could be made right. Maybe, maybe they wouldn’t see each other on opposite ends of a fight neither of them wanted. But Lu Han couldn’t stop it, no more than he could stop what happened in Shanghai years ago when they met.
Lu Han didn’t have that kind of power, that kind of position. Even if they had thrown him a decent office in the newly formed communist government he was nowhere near the level to talk those who mattered out of such an action, out of lending their soldiers to the coming storm. Even if they wouldn’t send in their troops right away, Minseok knew they would eventually no matter what Lu Han had to say about it.
Minseok stared at the wet concrete while squeezing Lu Han’s hand in his own, the feeling of being connected in such a simple way giving him a mixture of comfort and intense regret.
Lu Han had longer strides, Minseok watching as their shoes hit the pavement, the small puddles of water disturbed with their steps. He hated thinking this way, but somehow Lu Han leaving was not only disparaging but it was final. It was so final.
The light strung above the train platform flickered before going dark, the soldiers standing near the platform grumbling about the intrusion on their conversation - as if darkness was an end-all to speaking to each other.
“I guess we have to walk further,” Lu Han muttered, another light ahead. Minseok stayed silent, squeezing Lu Han’s hand tightly as they walked. Their pace slowed, neither wanting it to be over, neither wanting to see it end. When the light behind them flickered back on they ignored it.
“I never told you this,” Lu Han whispered, “But when I saw you in Shanghai, I thought you were one of the street kids they had recruited.”
Minseok chuckled, it was exactly like Lu Han to try to make it light hearted, to look for something to laugh over. It seemed like a lifetime ago when they had first met. The Chinese dissident and the Korean freedom fighter, united by a common goal of overthrowing those who had overrun their homelands. It was the beginning of a relationship that spanned a war, a brutal and trying time filled with loss and gain, with the depths of despair and the small, unexpected feeling of love. A strange, raw and unforgiving time.
“Fifteen - no, sixteen years ago.” Minseok calculated the years out loud. They had been young then, not even out of their teens. Minseok was now sporting a few streaks of grey, Luhan’s baby face falling plague to wrinkles.
They were approaching the light too quickly. Minseok held Lu Han back with a gentle tug of his hand. “Do you remember when we went to the Astor House and -“ He had to steady his voice, steady his breathing, steady his state of mind, fall into what he wanted to convey- an easy going sense of reminiscence, not a cover for his heartbreak. “Remember when you nearly set the bar on fire when the waitress spilled Absinthe on your best suitcoat.”
It was frivolous, a memory that wasn’t brought up to instill good feelings as much as to offer a distant thing to hold onto. A harmless place, a silly and foolish action from a youth that rarely had silly and foolish moments. Much like their present it was fraught with danger. Yet now…now it seemed permanent. Maybe it was their age, maybe it was what they had both experienced. Maybe death was that much more possible now, the insane actions of their youth letting them recall a time in which they felt invincible, when even soldiers and guns and chaos couldn’t kill them if they believed hard enough. Now…now believing wasn’t enough.
“I hated it! Do you know how long I saved for that coat?!”
“Hm…” Minseok retrieved two cigarettes from his jacket, handing one off to Lu Han he continued, “A year?”
“Six months!” Lu Han pulled out his silver plated lighter, holding it out for Minseok before igniting his own smoke. He took a drag, exhaling slowly. “No mind that half of what I used to pay for it was the money we stole from those bastards pushing opium.”
Minseok took a long drag, blowing the smoke up into the humid night sky. He looked towards the light ahead, the orange glow illuminating the sprinkling rain, the mountains in the distance hidden by the darkness. The clanking of metal had both men looking back towards the train platform, watching as the soldiers playfully pushed each other - one having dropped a knife, glinting under the overhead light.
“The look on your face was priceless,” Minseok exhaled, recalling the way a teenaged Lu Han widened his eyes, stiffened, and launched into a slew of expletives as a frightened waitress looked on.
“I swore never to go back after that, remember?” Lu Han chuckled.
“I remember.” Minseok looked back towards the soldiers, watching them because he needed something to focus on, not because he was genuinely interested in what they were doing. Silence hung over them, both men smoking, the only noise their inhales and exhales and the gentle sound of rain.
Minseok thought back to the last decade, the years they spent hiding their relationship among the turmoil - the times their brothers in arms cast accusatory glances, neither man confirming or denying. It was one more secret among a life of secrets. Somehow the war had made it less of an issue, when you had someone’s back, earning their trust via blood and dedication, it didn’t matter if you were homosexual. Now, now everyone who was important to them knew. And yet - none of that mattered, not now, not when the world and all of its chaos was closing in on them once again.
“Nothing seems right, I mean, nothing seems right to say.” Lu Han ashed, Minseok remaining silent.
“I think I can talk them out of it, some of it," Lu Han repeated, he was holding onto the faint hope that it was within his power to control the situation, to end it, to perhaps make it all go away.
Minseok flicked his cigarette, watching as it danced across the railroad tracks, the burning ash spreading across the ground.
“Do your best.”
“I will,” Lu Han promised, flicking his own cigarette, both men watching as it lay near the other discarded smoke.
Lu Han grabbed Minseok’s hand, raising it to his mouth he kissed it gently. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Minseok whispered. They resumed their walk towards the light, the hastily strung glowing bulb suspended over the concrete platform. They stopped at the edge of the light, at the edge of the circular reach of the orange glow, as if they were afraid stepping within the illuminated area would signal the end. Hovering in the shadows they stood, hands intertwined.
“When we meet again, that will be it. I am done with this.” Lu Han was always the confident one, always the one who did what he said. Back in Shanghai, when they fought using crude and small time tactics it was the case, when they shot their way through Manchuria, when they collapsed into foxholes, it was always the truth. It was still true.
“We should buy a little house somewhere.” Minseok couldn’t help it, the tears were falling. He had held back as long as he could.
“We could live in Shanghai again, or maybe Beijing. Or your hometown, after it is all over.” Lu Han’s voice was heavy with emotion. He was crying, Minseok was sure of it.
Lu Han pulled Minseok to him, his arms wrapping around Minseok’s waist as he kissed him. It was so many things, so many things said without speaking, the tension and pain at the edge of the light, hanging in the shadows, the darkness hiding their despair, disguising their small sliver of hope, drowning out the sounds of a train, of soldiers bantering, of a cruel and bloody world that they had been a part of for too long.
Minseok recognized only a few words of Mandarin, the angry shout from down the platform ripping through the safe place they had tried to build for themselves. He knew the man had called Lu Han.
“I have to go,” Lu Han cradled Minseok’s face in his hand.
“I know.”
“I will come back.”
Minseok couldn’t confirm the statement, not willing, and not wanting to recall the words if he was wrong. Instead he said it again, he would say it a thousand times if it made a difference. “I love you.”
“I love you too, so, so much.”
Their last kiss was deep, their tears intermingling, the whistle of the train, the distant conversing of soldiers, and the pain of imminent separation creeping around them.
Minseok stood on the platform, just out of reach of the light, as the train moved north, Lu Han on board. He didn’t bother wiping his tears, hands in the pockets of his uniform, he watched until he could no longer hear the iron horse, until he knew for sure Lu Han was gone.
Kim Minseok was confirmed dead on November 27 th , 1951 at the battle of Yudam-ni as a result of shrapnel from an artillery shell.
Lu Han was reported missing on January 9 th , 1952 while travelling across the Yalu River, declared dead on March 16 th , 1952.
Length: 2.3k w.
Pairing: Luhan / Xiumin
Rating: PG-13
Summary: On the eve of the Korean War two lovers say goodbye.
Warnings:[Warnings]
Character Death
Written for the 23 emotions challenge.
The sound of a train whistle brought Minseok back to reality. He pulled away, breaking their lip-lock, a sudden retreat as fitting as could be given the immediate and horrible reality of their forced separation. Minseok found his eyes drawn to Lu Han’s, an unreadable gaze meeting his own.
It was raining, sprinkling, the droplets falling amidst the fog. Minseok had given up trying to keep himself dry. His coat was soaked, the itchy wool army issue garment scratching against his arms, a dim annoyance among bigger worries.
“You should go.” Minseok had wanted to sound strong, to sound confident, and to pretend like it wasn’t going to be the last time they saw each other. He failed, the words choked, overtly emotional in their delivery despite the fact he had halfway convinced himself he couldn’t feel anymore.
Lu Han pulled his trench coat tightly around his body, rocking on the balls of his feet as he stared at the wet pavement. There were a few soldiers milling nearby, Minseok could hear their extremely formalized method of speech as they discussed things that didn’t matter at the moment, not to him. At least not now.
The train came to a stop, the screeching of the great iron horse cutting through the night. Minseok looked towards the train. North, it was going north.
“Look, I can’t promise anything but I will try to write.” Minseok swallowed the anguish. Stay strong, he had done worse, hadn’t he? Back in Shanghai, back in Manchuria, when each day was probably their last. But that had been so long ago, it seemed so distant now.
“No, don’t promise.” Lu Han spoke softly, sadly.
“I am not sure where to send anything- hell, I don’t know where I will be in a few months. I will send them to your parent’s house, or maybe Yixing can-“
Lu Han kissed him, cutting off his ramblings. Minseok could taste tears. He could taste the utter despair they faced. The thought, the brief and flickering dream that he could get on the train with Lu Han, was as distressing as it was comforting.
He would claim they weren’t made for this, weren’t cut out for it - but it was how they met after all. Artillery shells screaming overhead, blood and dirt and smoke and death. It was exactly what they were made for.
“Walk with me for a moment.” Lu Han pulled away, grabbing Minseok’s hand. ”They won’t leave without me.”
Lu Han’s hands were rough, calloused, a leftover of when he used to sling fifty pound burlap sacks over his shoulders and trek through the mountains with explosive charges, skirting the Japanese lines. Minseok’s hands weren’t much better; he had all of the rough patches to prove he had shot enough for it to leave a permanent mark on his person.
Minseok still remembered the first words Lu Han said when they met. “I don’t trust you.”
It was exactly what Minseok thought when he stared at the thin, baby faced Chinese man - he didn’t trust him. But then again there were not many people you could trust in 1934 when you called Shanghai home, fighting a battle that was built on an underhanded foundation, the tides turning against everything you were working towards on a consistent basis.
Yet somehow, in time, they did trust each other. A trust built from having each other’s backs as the city exploded around them, as their ideals were lost along with their friends. It worked. It worked like a lot of things between them.
Except for circumstance, that never worked. It never had, except in the beginning when they had a common enemy. Now they had love between them, but everything else was at odds. Their countries, their families, and the world...it seemed.
The years had changed them. Lu Han wasn’t slinging sacks of explosives anymore, he was playing with politics. Minseok, he was still shooting, still fighting the way he knew how.
Their footsteps echoed on the concrete train platform, the difference in their footwear evident based on the way a click sounded alongside a heavy thud. Lu Han’s dress shoes, the ones he had bought back in Seoul, Minseok’s military issue boots, cheap rubber soles, long laces he could never seem to keep properly tied echoing alongside each other.
“I think I can talk them out of this,” Lu Han was hopeful. He was always hopeful. “Now that I am going back, I think I can do it.”
Minseok didn’t respond. He knew it was wishful thinking, Lu Han trying to comfort him with delusions that things could be made right. Maybe, maybe they wouldn’t see each other on opposite ends of a fight neither of them wanted. But Lu Han couldn’t stop it, no more than he could stop what happened in Shanghai years ago when they met.
Lu Han didn’t have that kind of power, that kind of position. Even if they had thrown him a decent office in the newly formed communist government he was nowhere near the level to talk those who mattered out of such an action, out of lending their soldiers to the coming storm. Even if they wouldn’t send in their troops right away, Minseok knew they would eventually no matter what Lu Han had to say about it.
Minseok stared at the wet concrete while squeezing Lu Han’s hand in his own, the feeling of being connected in such a simple way giving him a mixture of comfort and intense regret.
Lu Han had longer strides, Minseok watching as their shoes hit the pavement, the small puddles of water disturbed with their steps. He hated thinking this way, but somehow Lu Han leaving was not only disparaging but it was final. It was so final.
The light strung above the train platform flickered before going dark, the soldiers standing near the platform grumbling about the intrusion on their conversation - as if darkness was an end-all to speaking to each other.
“I guess we have to walk further,” Lu Han muttered, another light ahead. Minseok stayed silent, squeezing Lu Han’s hand tightly as they walked. Their pace slowed, neither wanting it to be over, neither wanting to see it end. When the light behind them flickered back on they ignored it.
“I never told you this,” Lu Han whispered, “But when I saw you in Shanghai, I thought you were one of the street kids they had recruited.”
Minseok chuckled, it was exactly like Lu Han to try to make it light hearted, to look for something to laugh over. It seemed like a lifetime ago when they had first met. The Chinese dissident and the Korean freedom fighter, united by a common goal of overthrowing those who had overrun their homelands. It was the beginning of a relationship that spanned a war, a brutal and trying time filled with loss and gain, with the depths of despair and the small, unexpected feeling of love. A strange, raw and unforgiving time.
“Fifteen - no, sixteen years ago.” Minseok calculated the years out loud. They had been young then, not even out of their teens. Minseok was now sporting a few streaks of grey, Luhan’s baby face falling plague to wrinkles.
They were approaching the light too quickly. Minseok held Lu Han back with a gentle tug of his hand. “Do you remember when we went to the Astor House and -“ He had to steady his voice, steady his breathing, steady his state of mind, fall into what he wanted to convey- an easy going sense of reminiscence, not a cover for his heartbreak. “Remember when you nearly set the bar on fire when the waitress spilled Absinthe on your best suitcoat.”
It was frivolous, a memory that wasn’t brought up to instill good feelings as much as to offer a distant thing to hold onto. A harmless place, a silly and foolish action from a youth that rarely had silly and foolish moments. Much like their present it was fraught with danger. Yet now…now it seemed permanent. Maybe it was their age, maybe it was what they had both experienced. Maybe death was that much more possible now, the insane actions of their youth letting them recall a time in which they felt invincible, when even soldiers and guns and chaos couldn’t kill them if they believed hard enough. Now…now believing wasn’t enough.
“I hated it! Do you know how long I saved for that coat?!”
“Hm…” Minseok retrieved two cigarettes from his jacket, handing one off to Lu Han he continued, “A year?”
“Six months!” Lu Han pulled out his silver plated lighter, holding it out for Minseok before igniting his own smoke. He took a drag, exhaling slowly. “No mind that half of what I used to pay for it was the money we stole from those bastards pushing opium.”
Minseok took a long drag, blowing the smoke up into the humid night sky. He looked towards the light ahead, the orange glow illuminating the sprinkling rain, the mountains in the distance hidden by the darkness. The clanking of metal had both men looking back towards the train platform, watching as the soldiers playfully pushed each other - one having dropped a knife, glinting under the overhead light.
“The look on your face was priceless,” Minseok exhaled, recalling the way a teenaged Lu Han widened his eyes, stiffened, and launched into a slew of expletives as a frightened waitress looked on.
“I swore never to go back after that, remember?” Lu Han chuckled.
“I remember.” Minseok looked back towards the soldiers, watching them because he needed something to focus on, not because he was genuinely interested in what they were doing. Silence hung over them, both men smoking, the only noise their inhales and exhales and the gentle sound of rain.
Minseok thought back to the last decade, the years they spent hiding their relationship among the turmoil - the times their brothers in arms cast accusatory glances, neither man confirming or denying. It was one more secret among a life of secrets. Somehow the war had made it less of an issue, when you had someone’s back, earning their trust via blood and dedication, it didn’t matter if you were homosexual. Now, now everyone who was important to them knew. And yet - none of that mattered, not now, not when the world and all of its chaos was closing in on them once again.
“Nothing seems right, I mean, nothing seems right to say.” Lu Han ashed, Minseok remaining silent.
“I think I can talk them out of it, some of it," Lu Han repeated, he was holding onto the faint hope that it was within his power to control the situation, to end it, to perhaps make it all go away.
Minseok flicked his cigarette, watching as it danced across the railroad tracks, the burning ash spreading across the ground.
“Do your best.”
“I will,” Lu Han promised, flicking his own cigarette, both men watching as it lay near the other discarded smoke.
Lu Han grabbed Minseok’s hand, raising it to his mouth he kissed it gently. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” Minseok whispered. They resumed their walk towards the light, the hastily strung glowing bulb suspended over the concrete platform. They stopped at the edge of the light, at the edge of the circular reach of the orange glow, as if they were afraid stepping within the illuminated area would signal the end. Hovering in the shadows they stood, hands intertwined.
“When we meet again, that will be it. I am done with this.” Lu Han was always the confident one, always the one who did what he said. Back in Shanghai, when they fought using crude and small time tactics it was the case, when they shot their way through Manchuria, when they collapsed into foxholes, it was always the truth. It was still true.
“We should buy a little house somewhere.” Minseok couldn’t help it, the tears were falling. He had held back as long as he could.
“We could live in Shanghai again, or maybe Beijing. Or your hometown, after it is all over.” Lu Han’s voice was heavy with emotion. He was crying, Minseok was sure of it.
Lu Han pulled Minseok to him, his arms wrapping around Minseok’s waist as he kissed him. It was so many things, so many things said without speaking, the tension and pain at the edge of the light, hanging in the shadows, the darkness hiding their despair, disguising their small sliver of hope, drowning out the sounds of a train, of soldiers bantering, of a cruel and bloody world that they had been a part of for too long.
Minseok recognized only a few words of Mandarin, the angry shout from down the platform ripping through the safe place they had tried to build for themselves. He knew the man had called Lu Han.
“I have to go,” Lu Han cradled Minseok’s face in his hand.
“I know.”
“I will come back.”
Minseok couldn’t confirm the statement, not willing, and not wanting to recall the words if he was wrong. Instead he said it again, he would say it a thousand times if it made a difference. “I love you.”
“I love you too, so, so much.”
Their last kiss was deep, their tears intermingling, the whistle of the train, the distant conversing of soldiers, and the pain of imminent separation creeping around them.
Minseok stood on the platform, just out of reach of the light, as the train moved north, Lu Han on board. He didn’t bother wiping his tears, hands in the pockets of his uniform, he watched until he could no longer hear the iron horse, until he knew for sure Lu Han was gone.
Kim Minseok was confirmed dead on November 27 th , 1951 at the battle of Yudam-ni as a result of shrapnel from an artillery shell.
Lu Han was reported missing on January 9 th , 1952 while travelling across the Yalu River, declared dead on March 16 th , 1952.