Love in Decibel Zero
Title: Love in Decibel Zero
Pairing: Yixing/Baekhyun
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Angst, Tragedy
Warnings: Hover
Length: ~1.3k
Summary: It takes one word to save a life, and a whole life to mourn one.
(A/N: Written for the justgetlayd fic fest! Hope you all enjoy(ed) it ^^)
August 11, 2078
WAR WAS NEVER DEADLIER is what the reporter on the radio tells Yixing at oh-five-hundred, when the commander storms into the barracks lugging a gallon of ice-cold water to pour over him and his bunk partner. She says it like she knows. One word to save a life, she chants; Yixing easily sees that she fragments the sentence by two words - “it takes” -, everyone afraid to use it.
Her voice fades behind the running taps, rhythmic dissonance of palms slapping cloudy brown water over dusty, ashen faces. In his head, Yixing looks for a counter argument - not because he believes in the government’s silly sixty-seven words a day rule, but because people can’t possibly be so selfish. Machine gun on the offense? Cover. Bomb? Ditch. Mines? Well, nothing can be done about those. Jump, maybe, but there’s hardly a chance of survival if your legs get blown off. Maybe they are selfish. Someone shuts off the radio.
The sun is just rising over enemy lines when Yixing straps on his helmet and steps out the door. Last night’s shells still hover over the horizon, neon green shadows burnt permanently behind his eyelids. He’d saved only three words, and Baekhyun had saved all sixty-seven, just for him. Baekhyun had whispered, just loud enough to be heard as the bombs went off like fireworks over enemy lines - who was the enemy, really? -, “I’ve missed you. The days pass and I can’t bear to say a word in the face of anything because this is all I can give you. I can’t save you. I can’t bring you home. I can’t kill you. But I can say I love you, I love you, I love you, Yixing, I love you. You are the reason I make it through these days.” And just like that, his sixty-seven words were gone.
All Yixing could say was, “I love you.”
///
August 18, 2078
Boys like Yixing have never been meant for war. Their thoughts dip more into memories than into strategies, more into nostalgia than into determination. One of these days, it’s likely that he’ll look across enemy lines and see Baekhyun smiling at him like when they were moving into their dorm together junior year of college and blink to find a grenade rolling on the ground in front of him, the other troops hidden in their ditches, screaming ditch! ditch! in their heads while they watch him disappear forever behind blinding light and smoke.
That is, more or less, how it happens.
During patrol, Yixing remembers reading frown lines on Baekhyun’s face, the crows feet in the corners of his eyes. He had counted, out of some sadistic instinct, how many of Baekhyun’s men had died because he’d refused to say a single word of warning. Yixing had sat there just as he always did in these meetings with his meager three and held his hand and pressed a palm to Baekhyun’s cheek and looked as far into Baekhyun’s eyes as he could manage to, like he had been waiting to drown in them, and said, “I love you.”
Baekhyun had smiled like it was enough - he always tells Yixing he’s enough. But in the end it doesn’t matter much that he would give his life for Baekhyun if he can’t bear the guilt of sacrificing someone else’s.
This is what haunts him when he notices the slightest rustle of leaves out of the corner of his eye when marching on watch. Behind him, there are six more troops who might die if he doesn’t call the ambush.
Just as Yixing sucks in a breath to speak, the figure pokes his head out from behind the tree, pressing a finger to his lips. Suddenly it’s Baekhyun and they’re back in the dorm, and Baekhyun is poking his head out from behind the couch on moving day and waving at him with that crescent-eyed smile, right as the sun begins to slip through the window shades. Like his smile really lights up the whole room. Back then all he had to say to be enough was I love you, because even if he didn’t say it it would hang in the air between them like a constant wave of overwhelming, because even if he didn’t say it Baekhyun could tell by the way their fingers interlaced and by the way Yixing would just stop and stare at him all the time for no reason that there was this perpetual swelling of affection deep within him that they mutually felt.
But when there are no actions to go with the words, it’s hard to tell they’re sincere. And Yixing just can’t let lives slip through his fingers, through the space where Baekhyun’s used to be.
When he blinks again, he’s alone. The terrain of dusty, cracking mud spans endless all around him, and across from him, in the bush, he sees the tip of a rifle pointed at him. Everything is spinning. His chest hurts, right where his heart is. It must be because I miss him, Yixing thinks, slowly dropping to his knees as he brings a heavy hand up to his heart, it must be because I miss him.
Everything goes black, twenty-two I love yous and one Baekhyun sitting on the tip of his tongue.
///
January 26, 2129
Baekhyun sits on the grass cross-legged, aching knees creaking when he leans toward his picnic basket to take out Yixing’s sandwich.
“Here,” he rasps, grinning, “your favorite.”
On the ground in front of him, held down by a fairly-sized rock, is a pile of handwritten letters on binder paper, sixty-seven words each. Six days a week he comes by to send letters to Yixing since he hasn’t got much of a voice left to talk. He’s so far away now. Baekhyun stretches his fingers and feels the arthritis catching up to him; he won’t be able to send letters much longer, either.
“They say the closer it gets to dawn, the scarier nightmares get,” he begins, clearing his throat a few times although his voice still doesn’t quite work. “It’s true. But when my dawn comes, I’ll see you again. It’s scary that even with the sixty-seven words I save daily, I soon won’t be able to talk to you. At least I’ll have used them. I wonder how you felt then, those words left on your tongue.”
He eats in silence, watching the papers flutter in the wind. He would never be able to imagine what it felt like to have all those words for someone left unsaid, the only words you would be allowed to say hanging on the tip of your tongue when you could no longer let them out. He wondered what he would feel like if he had sixty-seven more words saved for Yixing that would never be able to go to him.
Then again, no one really knows how death works. Maybe all this time, they’d never gone to him anyway.
Shaking his head, Baekhyun chuckles and sniffs, swallowing the last of his sandwich and staring at Yixing’s untouched one, sitting in front of the headstone where the letters rustle with the breeze.
“I love you,” he says.
Come the next dawn, perhaps he’ll fly to where Yixing is, and move in with him again.
Pairing: Yixing/Baekhyun
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Angst, Tragedy
Warnings: Hover
Length: ~1.3k
Summary: It takes one word to save a life, and a whole life to mourn one.
(A/N: Written for the justgetlayd fic fest! Hope you all enjoy(ed) it ^^)
August 11, 2078
WAR WAS NEVER DEADLIER is what the reporter on the radio tells Yixing at oh-five-hundred, when the commander storms into the barracks lugging a gallon of ice-cold water to pour over him and his bunk partner. She says it like she knows. One word to save a life, she chants; Yixing easily sees that she fragments the sentence by two words - “it takes” -, everyone afraid to use it.
Her voice fades behind the running taps, rhythmic dissonance of palms slapping cloudy brown water over dusty, ashen faces. In his head, Yixing looks for a counter argument - not because he believes in the government’s silly sixty-seven words a day rule, but because people can’t possibly be so selfish. Machine gun on the offense? Cover. Bomb? Ditch. Mines? Well, nothing can be done about those. Jump, maybe, but there’s hardly a chance of survival if your legs get blown off. Maybe they are selfish. Someone shuts off the radio.
The sun is just rising over enemy lines when Yixing straps on his helmet and steps out the door. Last night’s shells still hover over the horizon, neon green shadows burnt permanently behind his eyelids. He’d saved only three words, and Baekhyun had saved all sixty-seven, just for him. Baekhyun had whispered, just loud enough to be heard as the bombs went off like fireworks over enemy lines - who was the enemy, really? -, “I’ve missed you. The days pass and I can’t bear to say a word in the face of anything because this is all I can give you. I can’t save you. I can’t bring you home. I can’t kill you. But I can say I love you, I love you, I love you, Yixing, I love you. You are the reason I make it through these days.” And just like that, his sixty-seven words were gone.
All Yixing could say was, “I love you.”
///
August 18, 2078
Boys like Yixing have never been meant for war. Their thoughts dip more into memories than into strategies, more into nostalgia than into determination. One of these days, it’s likely that he’ll look across enemy lines and see Baekhyun smiling at him like when they were moving into their dorm together junior year of college and blink to find a grenade rolling on the ground in front of him, the other troops hidden in their ditches, screaming ditch! ditch! in their heads while they watch him disappear forever behind blinding light and smoke.
That is, more or less, how it happens.
During patrol, Yixing remembers reading frown lines on Baekhyun’s face, the crows feet in the corners of his eyes. He had counted, out of some sadistic instinct, how many of Baekhyun’s men had died because he’d refused to say a single word of warning. Yixing had sat there just as he always did in these meetings with his meager three and held his hand and pressed a palm to Baekhyun’s cheek and looked as far into Baekhyun’s eyes as he could manage to, like he had been waiting to drown in them, and said, “I love you.”
Baekhyun had smiled like it was enough - he always tells Yixing he’s enough. But in the end it doesn’t matter much that he would give his life for Baekhyun if he can’t bear the guilt of sacrificing someone else’s.
This is what haunts him when he notices the slightest rustle of leaves out of the corner of his eye when marching on watch. Behind him, there are six more troops who might die if he doesn’t call the ambush.
Just as Yixing sucks in a breath to speak, the figure pokes his head out from behind the tree, pressing a finger to his lips. Suddenly it’s Baekhyun and they’re back in the dorm, and Baekhyun is poking his head out from behind the couch on moving day and waving at him with that crescent-eyed smile, right as the sun begins to slip through the window shades. Like his smile really lights up the whole room. Back then all he had to say to be enough was I love you, because even if he didn’t say it it would hang in the air between them like a constant wave of overwhelming, because even if he didn’t say it Baekhyun could tell by the way their fingers interlaced and by the way Yixing would just stop and stare at him all the time for no reason that there was this perpetual swelling of affection deep within him that they mutually felt.
But when there are no actions to go with the words, it’s hard to tell they’re sincere. And Yixing just can’t let lives slip through his fingers, through the space where Baekhyun’s used to be.
When he blinks again, he’s alone. The terrain of dusty, cracking mud spans endless all around him, and across from him, in the bush, he sees the tip of a rifle pointed at him. Everything is spinning. His chest hurts, right where his heart is. It must be because I miss him, Yixing thinks, slowly dropping to his knees as he brings a heavy hand up to his heart, it must be because I miss him.
Everything goes black, twenty-two I love yous and one Baekhyun sitting on the tip of his tongue.
///
January 26, 2129
Baekhyun sits on the grass cross-legged, aching knees creaking when he leans toward his picnic basket to take out Yixing’s sandwich.
“Here,” he rasps, grinning, “your favorite.”
On the ground in front of him, held down by a fairly-sized rock, is a pile of handwritten letters on binder paper, sixty-seven words each. Six days a week he comes by to send letters to Yixing since he hasn’t got much of a voice left to talk. He’s so far away now. Baekhyun stretches his fingers and feels the arthritis catching up to him; he won’t be able to send letters much longer, either.
“They say the closer it gets to dawn, the scarier nightmares get,” he begins, clearing his throat a few times although his voice still doesn’t quite work. “It’s true. But when my dawn comes, I’ll see you again. It’s scary that even with the sixty-seven words I save daily, I soon won’t be able to talk to you. At least I’ll have used them. I wonder how you felt then, those words left on your tongue.”
He eats in silence, watching the papers flutter in the wind. He would never be able to imagine what it felt like to have all those words for someone left unsaid, the only words you would be allowed to say hanging on the tip of your tongue when you could no longer let them out. He wondered what he would feel like if he had sixty-seven more words saved for Yixing that would never be able to go to him.
Then again, no one really knows how death works. Maybe all this time, they’d never gone to him anyway.
Shaking his head, Baekhyun chuckles and sniffs, swallowing the last of his sandwich and staring at Yixing’s untouched one, sitting in front of the headstone where the letters rustle with the breeze.
“I love you,” he says.
Come the next dawn, perhaps he’ll fly to where Yixing is, and move in with him again.