Selective, Like Your Service and Your Memory
Selective, Like Your Service and Your Memory.
homin; r
drama
2,756 words
My second entry for kpop_olymfics, a pinchhit for FT Island's "Raining." The fic was partially inspired by ROKN submarine sinking and though it's a (hopefully) far-fetched future, I tried to make it as believable as possible, so warnings for some graphic violence.
Korea is still a country at war, and not even pop stars are above the mandatory service. Unfortunately for Yunho, the real war is just beginning.
When it happens, Yunho’s shooting a CF in Busan.
It’s the type of moment you never forget, when big things happen and years later you remember all the little details of where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. Yunho remembers the video game he’d been playing when his father came to tell him he’d been laid off; the two lights that were out on the vanity he was sitting at when they first learned they’d gotten #1 on the Oricon; the color of the shirt the newswoman was wearing when she announced the ROKN submarine had sunk off the coast.
This moment he thinks he’ll remember forever, as he brushes his teeth with mint-flavored paste and rubs dead skin from the corners of his eyes and first hears the yells from the living room.
What the-
Shhh! Quiet-
Turn it up! Turn it up-!
...Ohmygod.
He’ll remember the sudden hush, the faint sound of the television, and the muffled gasps.
He walks in and sees the staff huddled around the screen, reading the Breaking News! marquee like their lives depend on it - and maybe they do.
"We’re receiving word now… as of 5:15 this morning, a missile containing a nuclear warhead was launched from Pyongyang, and is currently on-route to the United States, estimated to hit the central Los Angeles area in approximately twenty minutes. US first-strikes have currently failed. Evacuation efforts…"
And Yunho sinks onto the couch, toothbrush falling to the floor, but he doesn’t care.
"Pyongyang has just confirmed the attack, as well as its intentions to launch more ICBM’s to overseas targets over the next twenty-four hours. The President is currently in negotiations, but the position so far is that if the President does not comply with North reunification initiative, shorter-range missiles, notably those that were installed at the border following the negotiation breakdowns of 2011, will be used…"
Yunho listens and listens and knows that he will not remember any of this part. Instead he will remember the way the silence hangs heavy around him, and that all he can think of is the enlistment notice sitting on his coffee table back in Seoul. When he first got it, he barely gave it a second glance.
He has to say goodbye to Changmin over the phone. There’s no time to meet, not when they’re already sending men to the front lines (and here he thinks of the friends already enlisted, Donghae and Jongwoon and Dong-wook and Seunghyun and Jaejin and Hongki - will he ever hear them again, like he’s hearing Changmin? Will he ever see any of them again?) The thought makes his throat close up, and the goodbye he has to force up through muscle and grief.
“It’ll be over quick,” Changmin mutters. “You’ll be back before you know it. They probably won’t even send you to the front.”
“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Yeah. Stay safe, okay? Don’t go outside, not if there’s a chance-”
“Of course I will. Of course. You stay safe first. Don’t worry about anyone but yourself - I don’t care if that’s impossible.”
“’Wish I could say goodbye in person.”
“Me too. But it’d be harder to let you go then.”
Yunho nods instead of answering. Some things just don’t need words. They talk as long as they can, until the taxi comes to take him to the base. He snaps his phone shut and the sudden reflection of the sun flashes in his eyes.
“You’re doing a good thing,” the taxi driver says, “our country needs you. May God be with all you boys out there.”
They’re calling it World War III before the real fighting even begins. With one-million civilians already dead and who-knows-how-many-more injured, it’s not like anyone can argue.
Yunho spends the first month in training and boot camp, dealing with comments like hey flower boy, think your fans will protect you on the field? and cocksuckers die first, u-know. He lifts his head and pretends it doesn’t bother him, and instead dreams of that back-before-you-know-it day, when he can go back to a world where he made his own path with the same sweat and hard work. It’s a world where he’s still on top, even after the legal drama, three and two but still together, still strong; where, in the end, all roads still lead to Changmin.
But this isn't the entertainment business, no matter how cutthroat that can be. This is war, this is life-and-death and all on chance, and dreams don’t last long enough. The things he thought he’d remember forever, like the cologne that Changmin gave him and the soft thunk of a toothbrush on a wooded floor, are gone - as are the shame and the taunts and everything else, shaken from his memory by shells breaking over the ground, torn straight from his head as the bullets fly close enough to ripple his skin.
Survive a flash-bomb in the night and no one gives a damn what you did before you started fighting, only that you’re fighting now and you’re not dead yet. That’s about as much as Yunho has time or effort to care for.
Back-before-you-know-it seems even more unreal than a dream. War itself isn’t like what he imagined or what he saw in the movies. Trench combat is obsolete, there’s no point of a frontline. It’s unmanned missiles and guerilla tactics and chemical warfare. North Korea is a tiny, impoverished country, and a century ago that would have been an easy defeat.
It is not a century ago. It’s 2014, and this war will go on for five long years.
Yunho keeps his finger on the trigger of his QBZ assault as he walks through Shenyang. The city is nothing but blown-out buildings and skyscraper shells. Glass crunches and cracks under his feet but other that, and the sound of twenty other crick-cracking footsteps, there’s nothing but the wind.
The sun is out in full, bright after what feels like a month’s worth of rain. Yunho feels like he’s soaked to the bone, never going to get dry, never going to stop shaking - but he’s got to keep his finger steady. His teeth chatter and his eyes dart nervously, but he’s not going to let his finger slip.
He’s seen it happen to too many men. Some on accident, some not. But he’s not going to die in some dead city on the opposite side of the North. If they can just push through without running into any trouble, they can make it to Liaoyang, where a bed, food, a satellite connection, and a whole glorious two days rest is waiting for them.
A sudden noise has them all ducking to one knee, swinging around their rifles out and around, covering each angle. Daejoon lifts his scanner up, trying to catch a signal, and raises his hand, two fingers up. Someone's there; ready fire.
Sweat drips into Yunho’s eyes but he doesn’t dare take the second to wipe it away. A whistle sounds, and the crackle of a radio. Daejoon twists his wrist and every man quickly ducks off to different sides of the road, finding hiding spots, lying in wait.
It's the waiting that drives you mad. Two and a half years in constant combat and Yunho’s learned that much. The killing, the pulling the trigger - it doesn’t hurt so much, not after the first (or second, or third, or tenth) time. You don't see the man but for a faint shape that's there and then not-there, and it's easy to dismiss in the roar of bullets and rockets and planes and grenades. It's the silence. It’s the inevitable wait, the thump of your heartbeat in your ears as you try to keep silent but can’t. Your breath is too loud and you know that at any moment, some enemy soldier might be hearing you, seeing you, locking his sight right on you-
“Hold fire!” Daejoon calls. “It’s one of ours.”
Yunho breathes a sigh of relief, and the sun burns on the back of his neck.
The squad they've come across is in a sorry state. Yunho’s platoon isn’t much better, a meager twenty men when they started out with sixty, but this squad is a small ten-man crew and they look like they’ve been on the run for days.
They all but collapse when Daejoon calls the stand-down. Their staff sergeant explains in faltering words, in between pulls from a flask filled with water - or vodka, you can never really know with Daejoon’s flask.
Yunho helps distribute MREs, tossing them to men laid out on the ground, most breathing too hard to offer any thanks. Yunho doesn’t mind - not until he gets to the last man, anyway.
He feels like he’s been punched in the gut, because there’s no doubt it’s him. “Changmin?”
Changmin is still too skinny, but not in a good way; Yunho can see his ribs through the holes in his shirt. He’s got blood caked down the side of his face and black dirt buried in the line of his nails. He looks up at Yunho with too-bright eyes and coughs out a laugh.
“You weren’t quick enough.”
They sit side-by-side on a park bench that leaves charcoal stains along the creases of their pants. Yunho keeps his rifle across his lap and Changmin keeps his own, a modified Daewoo K2, butt-down in the dirt, his thumb flicking the on the old-fashioned iron sight.
He doesn’t know if he should hug Changmin. He knows the initial moment is over, the happy reunion that didn’t happen. He doesn’t know if he should hold his hand, sitting in this bombed-out, deserted city. He’s not even sure if he wants to.
“I got conscripted seven months ago,” Changmin says. “I couldn’t get a hold of you; the army wouldn’t say where you were stationed-”
“It’s okay,” Yunho says, repeating it over and over even though it’s not. “It’s fine. You wouldn’t have…” he gulps, finding it hard to continue. “…We were in Hokkaido then.” He tries not to think about it.
Changmin’s head snaps up. “I-I didn’t know you were there,” he breathes, something like desperation.
A jerky nod is all Yunho can answer. Changmin looks at him like he’s expecting more, but Yunho won’t give it to him. He can’t. Hokkaido is still too raw a wound.
It had been more a massacre than a battle. A joint Japanese-Korean operation to reclaim the island that’d been seized in the first year of the war, they’d thought it would be easy. Instead they’d cornered the enemy, made them desperate, forcing their hand into using experimental weapons: Ion-EMP destabilizers. Radiated bullets. The “A-guns” - all the effects of a nuclear bomb in a single shot.
Even Yunho didn’t learn until after the whole damn thing was over what they were; all he knew was that once they started firing, no one was safe. Not even the ones pulling the triggers. Yunho saw skin catch fire and flesh slip off the bone like it had never been attached in the first place. He saw entire bodies smear into shadows on the pavement.
Another moment he will never forget; he will never forget how he kept tripping through the mud and how he killed a man with the butt of someone else’s gun. He will never forget the smell.
Changmin’s hand claps down on his wrist, jumping Yunho back into the present.
“I’m sorry-” they say it at the same time, words overlapping. They stop and for a reason he doesn’t want to explain, Yunho’s throat feels too tight.
Changmin hesitates before continuing. “Whenever we talked, when I was at home and you were out here… I never really understood. Now, it’s still not the same, but…”
“You get it,” Yunho finishes for him. He looks up into the sky and winces at the sight of clouds, slowly catching up to them.
Changmin nods soberly.
Yunho remembers a time when Changmin wouldn’t be caught dead in a buzz-cut, and he thought wrestling with Jaejoong was serious business, and they’d all thought they knew what exhaustion meant. His mind sifts through a hundred memories; sincere interviews filled with trivial words and scripted phrases. One sticks out the most: “Even if anything were to happen, I want to be at the front protecting everyone.”
If he said those words today, they’d be as hollow as the barrel of his gun.
It’s strange, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Changmin, weapons at the ready, having each other’s backs so literally. Yunho has walked beside Changmin half his life, dreamed of doing it for most of the war, but this feeling makes him a little nauseous.
Changmin fills him in on all the things he’s missed since Hokkaido. About Jaejoong, who’s still in Japan - been stuck there since the beginning, when the Korean peninsula was quarantined - and now works entertaining troops and raising money for refugees. Junsu’s doing much the same in Korea, when he’s not taking care of Junho. His twin was injured in Taiwan by an IED bombing three months ago, and is just getting into prosthetic therapy.
“And Yoochun?”
“He’s stationed at Osan, with some domestic troop. I don’t think he’ll ever be deployed, though, with his asthma.”
The clouds are growing heavier still, and Yunho sighs. “Probably for the best. I don’t think he’d do good out here.”
Changmin shrugs. “You don’t know what people are capable of until they get onto the field.”
Too soon they’re exhausted of things to talk about, not having (or wanting) to say much more. They’re walking to the next safe-zone, where they can set up tents and stay the night. After that they’ll go their separate ways - Yunho to Liaoyang, Changmin with his squad to somewhere, he won’t say. It’s probably classified and Yunho doesn’t have the right to ask. Changmin’s a rank above him.
“When did that happen?” he asks softly.
Changmin’s eyes lose focus, in a way Yunho imagines his own do sometimes. “I did something I’m not proud of,” he finally says, “and they rewarded me for it. The usual.”
Yunho smiles bitterly. “Sounds about right.”
When they reach camp, he pulls some strings with Daejoon so that he and Changmin will share the same tent and won’t be bothered. Yunho doesn’t even know what he’s expecting. Intimacy seems almost inappropriate here, and he’s not even sure if he wants it. He just knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t take this chance.
It goes unspoken. They eat side-by-side, and at dusk they crawl into the tent one after the other. Together they get in their own sleeping bags and together, Yunho knows, they stare at the ceiling, wondering what now? what can we do? are we even really together, right now?
It isn’t long before Yunho’s eyes curl down against his will. His mind hasn’t answered his questions yet, and morning will bring no answer. It’s in this moment, though, his mind already half-fallen into dreams, that he thinks he feels Changmin’s hand touch his.
It’s just a touch of body heat, barely there. It may have been real, and Yunho may have laced their fingers together, or he may have nudged back. What he thought was his own hand may have just been another curl into a deeper sleep - a movement of dreams. It’s hazy and warm and Yunho drifts away, picturing the scene on the back of his eyelids, as if he were outside of his own body.
When Yunho wakes, his fingers clench around paper. Changmin is gone, and there is a note in his hand. He has no idea how he slept through it; he hasn’t slept through the night in months.
The note is small, crinkled, jagged on one edge where it was torn from a larger page. It nearly rips when he unfolds it, and again when he reads it and starts to shake.
Stay safe. Stay safe and alive and come home, and we’ll take it from there. You need to survive if we’re ever going to start living again.
Yunho can see the faint lines of an ‘I love you’, but they’ve been erased. It doesn’t really matter. He steps out of his tent and gets his gear together, while the men around him stir to life in prep for the day’s march. The skies are mottled grey and somewhere, thunderclouds burst. It starts raining again, but Yunho won’t forget that small moment, that quiet feeling of warmth.
started writing: 6/3/10
finished writing: 6/7/10
master list
homin; r
drama
2,756 words
My second entry for kpop_olymfics, a pinchhit for FT Island's "Raining." The fic was partially inspired by ROKN submarine sinking and though it's a (hopefully) far-fetched future, I tried to make it as believable as possible, so warnings for some graphic violence.
Korea is still a country at war, and not even pop stars are above the mandatory service. Unfortunately for Yunho, the real war is just beginning.
When it happens, Yunho’s shooting a CF in Busan.
It’s the type of moment you never forget, when big things happen and years later you remember all the little details of where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. Yunho remembers the video game he’d been playing when his father came to tell him he’d been laid off; the two lights that were out on the vanity he was sitting at when they first learned they’d gotten #1 on the Oricon; the color of the shirt the newswoman was wearing when she announced the ROKN submarine had sunk off the coast.
This moment he thinks he’ll remember forever, as he brushes his teeth with mint-flavored paste and rubs dead skin from the corners of his eyes and first hears the yells from the living room.
What the-
Shhh! Quiet-
Turn it up! Turn it up-!
...Ohmygod.
He’ll remember the sudden hush, the faint sound of the television, and the muffled gasps.
He walks in and sees the staff huddled around the screen, reading the Breaking News! marquee like their lives depend on it - and maybe they do.
"We’re receiving word now… as of 5:15 this morning, a missile containing a nuclear warhead was launched from Pyongyang, and is currently on-route to the United States, estimated to hit the central Los Angeles area in approximately twenty minutes. US first-strikes have currently failed. Evacuation efforts…"
And Yunho sinks onto the couch, toothbrush falling to the floor, but he doesn’t care.
"Pyongyang has just confirmed the attack, as well as its intentions to launch more ICBM’s to overseas targets over the next twenty-four hours. The President is currently in negotiations, but the position so far is that if the President does not comply with North reunification initiative, shorter-range missiles, notably those that were installed at the border following the negotiation breakdowns of 2011, will be used…"
Yunho listens and listens and knows that he will not remember any of this part. Instead he will remember the way the silence hangs heavy around him, and that all he can think of is the enlistment notice sitting on his coffee table back in Seoul. When he first got it, he barely gave it a second glance.
He has to say goodbye to Changmin over the phone. There’s no time to meet, not when they’re already sending men to the front lines (and here he thinks of the friends already enlisted, Donghae and Jongwoon and Dong-wook and Seunghyun and Jaejin and Hongki - will he ever hear them again, like he’s hearing Changmin? Will he ever see any of them again?) The thought makes his throat close up, and the goodbye he has to force up through muscle and grief.
“It’ll be over quick,” Changmin mutters. “You’ll be back before you know it. They probably won’t even send you to the front.”
“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Yeah. Stay safe, okay? Don’t go outside, not if there’s a chance-”
“Of course I will. Of course. You stay safe first. Don’t worry about anyone but yourself - I don’t care if that’s impossible.”
“’Wish I could say goodbye in person.”
“Me too. But it’d be harder to let you go then.”
Yunho nods instead of answering. Some things just don’t need words. They talk as long as they can, until the taxi comes to take him to the base. He snaps his phone shut and the sudden reflection of the sun flashes in his eyes.
“You’re doing a good thing,” the taxi driver says, “our country needs you. May God be with all you boys out there.”
They’re calling it World War III before the real fighting even begins. With one-million civilians already dead and who-knows-how-many-more injured, it’s not like anyone can argue.
Yunho spends the first month in training and boot camp, dealing with comments like hey flower boy, think your fans will protect you on the field? and cocksuckers die first, u-know. He lifts his head and pretends it doesn’t bother him, and instead dreams of that back-before-you-know-it day, when he can go back to a world where he made his own path with the same sweat and hard work. It’s a world where he’s still on top, even after the legal drama, three and two but still together, still strong; where, in the end, all roads still lead to Changmin.
But this isn't the entertainment business, no matter how cutthroat that can be. This is war, this is life-and-death and all on chance, and dreams don’t last long enough. The things he thought he’d remember forever, like the cologne that Changmin gave him and the soft thunk of a toothbrush on a wooded floor, are gone - as are the shame and the taunts and everything else, shaken from his memory by shells breaking over the ground, torn straight from his head as the bullets fly close enough to ripple his skin.
Survive a flash-bomb in the night and no one gives a damn what you did before you started fighting, only that you’re fighting now and you’re not dead yet. That’s about as much as Yunho has time or effort to care for.
Back-before-you-know-it seems even more unreal than a dream. War itself isn’t like what he imagined or what he saw in the movies. Trench combat is obsolete, there’s no point of a frontline. It’s unmanned missiles and guerilla tactics and chemical warfare. North Korea is a tiny, impoverished country, and a century ago that would have been an easy defeat.
It is not a century ago. It’s 2014, and this war will go on for five long years.
Yunho keeps his finger on the trigger of his QBZ assault as he walks through Shenyang. The city is nothing but blown-out buildings and skyscraper shells. Glass crunches and cracks under his feet but other that, and the sound of twenty other crick-cracking footsteps, there’s nothing but the wind.
The sun is out in full, bright after what feels like a month’s worth of rain. Yunho feels like he’s soaked to the bone, never going to get dry, never going to stop shaking - but he’s got to keep his finger steady. His teeth chatter and his eyes dart nervously, but he’s not going to let his finger slip.
He’s seen it happen to too many men. Some on accident, some not. But he’s not going to die in some dead city on the opposite side of the North. If they can just push through without running into any trouble, they can make it to Liaoyang, where a bed, food, a satellite connection, and a whole glorious two days rest is waiting for them.
A sudden noise has them all ducking to one knee, swinging around their rifles out and around, covering each angle. Daejoon lifts his scanner up, trying to catch a signal, and raises his hand, two fingers up. Someone's there; ready fire.
Sweat drips into Yunho’s eyes but he doesn’t dare take the second to wipe it away. A whistle sounds, and the crackle of a radio. Daejoon twists his wrist and every man quickly ducks off to different sides of the road, finding hiding spots, lying in wait.
It's the waiting that drives you mad. Two and a half years in constant combat and Yunho’s learned that much. The killing, the pulling the trigger - it doesn’t hurt so much, not after the first (or second, or third, or tenth) time. You don't see the man but for a faint shape that's there and then not-there, and it's easy to dismiss in the roar of bullets and rockets and planes and grenades. It's the silence. It’s the inevitable wait, the thump of your heartbeat in your ears as you try to keep silent but can’t. Your breath is too loud and you know that at any moment, some enemy soldier might be hearing you, seeing you, locking his sight right on you-
“Hold fire!” Daejoon calls. “It’s one of ours.”
Yunho breathes a sigh of relief, and the sun burns on the back of his neck.
The squad they've come across is in a sorry state. Yunho’s platoon isn’t much better, a meager twenty men when they started out with sixty, but this squad is a small ten-man crew and they look like they’ve been on the run for days.
They all but collapse when Daejoon calls the stand-down. Their staff sergeant explains in faltering words, in between pulls from a flask filled with water - or vodka, you can never really know with Daejoon’s flask.
Yunho helps distribute MREs, tossing them to men laid out on the ground, most breathing too hard to offer any thanks. Yunho doesn’t mind - not until he gets to the last man, anyway.
He feels like he’s been punched in the gut, because there’s no doubt it’s him. “Changmin?”
Changmin is still too skinny, but not in a good way; Yunho can see his ribs through the holes in his shirt. He’s got blood caked down the side of his face and black dirt buried in the line of his nails. He looks up at Yunho with too-bright eyes and coughs out a laugh.
“You weren’t quick enough.”
They sit side-by-side on a park bench that leaves charcoal stains along the creases of their pants. Yunho keeps his rifle across his lap and Changmin keeps his own, a modified Daewoo K2, butt-down in the dirt, his thumb flicking the on the old-fashioned iron sight.
He doesn’t know if he should hug Changmin. He knows the initial moment is over, the happy reunion that didn’t happen. He doesn’t know if he should hold his hand, sitting in this bombed-out, deserted city. He’s not even sure if he wants to.
“I got conscripted seven months ago,” Changmin says. “I couldn’t get a hold of you; the army wouldn’t say where you were stationed-”
“It’s okay,” Yunho says, repeating it over and over even though it’s not. “It’s fine. You wouldn’t have…” he gulps, finding it hard to continue. “…We were in Hokkaido then.” He tries not to think about it.
Changmin’s head snaps up. “I-I didn’t know you were there,” he breathes, something like desperation.
A jerky nod is all Yunho can answer. Changmin looks at him like he’s expecting more, but Yunho won’t give it to him. He can’t. Hokkaido is still too raw a wound.
It had been more a massacre than a battle. A joint Japanese-Korean operation to reclaim the island that’d been seized in the first year of the war, they’d thought it would be easy. Instead they’d cornered the enemy, made them desperate, forcing their hand into using experimental weapons: Ion-EMP destabilizers. Radiated bullets. The “A-guns” - all the effects of a nuclear bomb in a single shot.
Even Yunho didn’t learn until after the whole damn thing was over what they were; all he knew was that once they started firing, no one was safe. Not even the ones pulling the triggers. Yunho saw skin catch fire and flesh slip off the bone like it had never been attached in the first place. He saw entire bodies smear into shadows on the pavement.
Another moment he will never forget; he will never forget how he kept tripping through the mud and how he killed a man with the butt of someone else’s gun. He will never forget the smell.
Changmin’s hand claps down on his wrist, jumping Yunho back into the present.
“I’m sorry-” they say it at the same time, words overlapping. They stop and for a reason he doesn’t want to explain, Yunho’s throat feels too tight.
Changmin hesitates before continuing. “Whenever we talked, when I was at home and you were out here… I never really understood. Now, it’s still not the same, but…”
“You get it,” Yunho finishes for him. He looks up into the sky and winces at the sight of clouds, slowly catching up to them.
Changmin nods soberly.
Yunho remembers a time when Changmin wouldn’t be caught dead in a buzz-cut, and he thought wrestling with Jaejoong was serious business, and they’d all thought they knew what exhaustion meant. His mind sifts through a hundred memories; sincere interviews filled with trivial words and scripted phrases. One sticks out the most: “Even if anything were to happen, I want to be at the front protecting everyone.”
If he said those words today, they’d be as hollow as the barrel of his gun.
It’s strange, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with Changmin, weapons at the ready, having each other’s backs so literally. Yunho has walked beside Changmin half his life, dreamed of doing it for most of the war, but this feeling makes him a little nauseous.
Changmin fills him in on all the things he’s missed since Hokkaido. About Jaejoong, who’s still in Japan - been stuck there since the beginning, when the Korean peninsula was quarantined - and now works entertaining troops and raising money for refugees. Junsu’s doing much the same in Korea, when he’s not taking care of Junho. His twin was injured in Taiwan by an IED bombing three months ago, and is just getting into prosthetic therapy.
“And Yoochun?”
“He’s stationed at Osan, with some domestic troop. I don’t think he’ll ever be deployed, though, with his asthma.”
The clouds are growing heavier still, and Yunho sighs. “Probably for the best. I don’t think he’d do good out here.”
Changmin shrugs. “You don’t know what people are capable of until they get onto the field.”
Too soon they’re exhausted of things to talk about, not having (or wanting) to say much more. They’re walking to the next safe-zone, where they can set up tents and stay the night. After that they’ll go their separate ways - Yunho to Liaoyang, Changmin with his squad to somewhere, he won’t say. It’s probably classified and Yunho doesn’t have the right to ask. Changmin’s a rank above him.
“When did that happen?” he asks softly.
Changmin’s eyes lose focus, in a way Yunho imagines his own do sometimes. “I did something I’m not proud of,” he finally says, “and they rewarded me for it. The usual.”
Yunho smiles bitterly. “Sounds about right.”
When they reach camp, he pulls some strings with Daejoon so that he and Changmin will share the same tent and won’t be bothered. Yunho doesn’t even know what he’s expecting. Intimacy seems almost inappropriate here, and he’s not even sure if he wants it. He just knows he’ll regret it if he doesn’t take this chance.
It goes unspoken. They eat side-by-side, and at dusk they crawl into the tent one after the other. Together they get in their own sleeping bags and together, Yunho knows, they stare at the ceiling, wondering what now? what can we do? are we even really together, right now?
It isn’t long before Yunho’s eyes curl down against his will. His mind hasn’t answered his questions yet, and morning will bring no answer. It’s in this moment, though, his mind already half-fallen into dreams, that he thinks he feels Changmin’s hand touch his.
It’s just a touch of body heat, barely there. It may have been real, and Yunho may have laced their fingers together, or he may have nudged back. What he thought was his own hand may have just been another curl into a deeper sleep - a movement of dreams. It’s hazy and warm and Yunho drifts away, picturing the scene on the back of his eyelids, as if he were outside of his own body.
When Yunho wakes, his fingers clench around paper. Changmin is gone, and there is a note in his hand. He has no idea how he slept through it; he hasn’t slept through the night in months.
The note is small, crinkled, jagged on one edge where it was torn from a larger page. It nearly rips when he unfolds it, and again when he reads it and starts to shake.
Stay safe. Stay safe and alive and come home, and we’ll take it from there. You need to survive if we’re ever going to start living again.
Yunho can see the faint lines of an ‘I love you’, but they’ve been erased. It doesn’t really matter. He steps out of his tent and gets his gear together, while the men around him stir to life in prep for the day’s march. The skies are mottled grey and somewhere, thunderclouds burst. It starts raining again, but Yunho won’t forget that small moment, that quiet feeling of warmth.
started writing: 6/3/10
finished writing: 6/7/10
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