After
Title: After
Author: dracoslovebunny
Pairing: JunSeob, JunRa (or JunHara or just whatever they're being called)
Status: Oneshot
Genre: Romance, AU, Angst, Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Rating: R
Warnings: Slash (not graphic), death, violence, language
Word count: 3,126
Summary: In which Yoseob is torn by war.
A/N: Written as part of my ongoing ALL-PAIRINGS 15-fic self-challenge. Each fic is a standalone (not part of the same storyline as the others). Fics are prompted by A Little Left of Logical. Title is the prompt.
Previous Installments:
Accident/KiWoon // Imitation of Life/JunWoon // Passing Flame/JunSeung // The Moment/KiSeob // Crave/DooKwang // Massage/DooWoon // Burn/KiSeung // Snack/DongSeob // Letters from Nowhere/2Jun // Lie to Me/JunKwang // A Little Curious/HyunWoon
After the End of the World came a long period known as the Anarchy. After the Anarchy came the Peace. This short-lived period was quickly replaced by the Battle. Yang Yoseob had been born during the Peace. He had been nine when the Battle had begun. He feared he may never see the end of it.
The End of the World had played out fifty-seven years before. Students learned it from their teachers at school - those who were rich enough to attend - and from their grandparents and great-grandparents, many of whom could give first-hand acounts of the devastation. The leader of North Korea had passed away, and shortly after a disease began springing up in hospitals across South Korea and then into other parts of Southeast Asia. The history they were taught in class said that the new successor to the North Korean presidency had unleashed biological warfare against South Korea. Most of the grandparents, though, seemed to be of a different school of thought, insisting that there was no way to know if it had been an attack or something naturally occurring.
Regardless of the origin, it killed 20,000 in its first week. Those who were admitted to hospitals were seen going through various stages in only a matter of a few days, first cold- and flu-like symptoms, including congestion, vomiting, and fever. Then the victims' eyes would turn bloodshot and their vision would fade, they wouldn't be able to eat or drink anything, they would vomit blood, and some said the collective screams of agony from the hospitals could be heard for blocks. By the time they were begging for release from such pain, most unable to move or even open their eyes from the intensity of the pain of it, it was only a matter of hours until their bodies shut down. Yoseob's great-grandmother would tell him, before the Battle had begun, in a hushed voice when nobody else was around to hear, of the way the fleets of soldiers who had begun arriving during week three when the death toll had reached nearly 100,000 and fatalities had reached as far as North America and Europe, would come into a hospital, set up a quarantine system to the best of their abilities, and then silence the screams of dozens or hundreds of sufferers with loud gunblasts. Euthanasia, they'd called it. Yoseob would always shudder, and become thankful that he had been born during peacetimes rather than then.
It had taken a span of about two years for the final cases of the Disease, which had never been given a name besides the Disease, to be seen and suffered through and passed. The death toll had reached over 4 billion. Yoseob couldn't even comprehend a number that high, not really, not in terms of human casualty. It was unclear if the remaining roughly 2.5 billion people were immune to the Disease or had simply avoided catching it. The only good thing that had ever been said about the Disease was that at least it wasn't airborne. So, one way or another, about a third of humans made it out on the other side of the End of the World alive. In the years the Disease had taken to cause its devastation, government structures had fallen in most places. Lands were now for the most part self-governed, and not very well. It didn't take long for the Anarchy to begin.
For thirty-six years, any semblance of structure was railed agaisnt by the (significantly diminished) masses. People flooded from their small towns to the big cities to gather together and try to make some sort of sense of their ravaged world. But it was a case of monkey-see, monkey-do. Where these newcomers saw looting and rioting and stealing, they adopted it as their way of life; in such times, it was the only way to survive. There was no way to punish the wicked, no way to enforce laws that seemed trivial and without meaning in this new world, so they rose from the herd, sometimes as individuals out to cause as much damage and destruction around them as possible, sometimes as pseudo-leaders creating groups of ten or twenty or a hundred people who would have their own "community" with set rules and guidelines but overall seemed to consist of little more than "take what you want, no matter the means." It was an unfortunate truth that these people and their groups were faring far better than most.
Repopulation became one of the only things almost everyone could agree on, and common decency became a thing of the past as people attempted to procreate anytime, anywhere, often uncaring as to the willingness of their chosen partner. Families would often give their daughters to the powerful men in charge of the anarchist groups in hopes that with these men, she may be used for nothing but a breeding horse and a sexual toy but at least she would be cared for, fed, and kept (relatively) safe. Still, the idea of repopulating the land didn't stop these groups from killing millions of people worldwide each year in an attempt to attain whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. By the tail end of the Anarchy, the death toll was thought to have been in the general range of 100 million from these groups alone, and another hundred million or so due to poverty, starvation, sickness, and a number of other things a world such as that would wreak on its inhabitants.
The Anarchy was followed by ten years of calmness known as the Peace. In later years, when the Battle had begun, it would also be known as the eye of the storm, as the calm between the two destructive forces. Two governments had been established, one to rule over most of Australia, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, the other in charge of the Americas and most of Europe. They worked together in relative harmony, doing their best to help their people and conform to the ideals of one another. These ravaging, pillaging groups of yesteryear were brought down one after the other under the new system. As well as giving help to many of those still in need, giving the impression at first of a kind-hearted government, they also ruled with an iron fist and a one-strike policy allowing many small crimes as well as large ones to be considered capital offenses, for which the punishment was execution. Rumors trickled through the people that the crime rate in every part of the world was lower than it had ever been.
Most of the positive accomplishments of the new governmental system were enough to outweigh their trigger-happy sense of crime punishment. For a few years, there seemed to be hope that this world had a positive future laid out before it. And then disagreements began between the two governments. The West Government was lessening its extreme stance on execution. The East Government insisted they needed to retain the policies as they stood, as by their logic it was the fear instilled by these rules that kept the people in a peaceable state. The West began to shut out the East from its internal goings-on. The West decided that perhaps one single global government structure would be better than their bilateral system. Years of arguing took place behind closed doors and, for the most part, without the knowledge of the civilians. But news of that magnitude had its way of leaking out one way or another, and as the end of the Peace drew nearer, murmurs spread through crowds, facts convoluted and twisted the further they traveled down the grapevine until the people of the West concluded the East was poised and ready to take down their government to create their singular global ruling figure, and the people of the East had become convinced that the West were trying to allow criminals to walk free due to their ties to officials and government corruption, something they sought to spread to the East. Nobody was surprised when the Peace ended.
Yoseob had felt the tension in everyone around him during the final months before the first shots of the Battle had been fired. The day the news came in of the beginning of the Battle, Yoseob had been nine years old, laying in his living room with his head in the lap of his ten-year-old friend, Yong Junhyung. His mother had come into the room, crying, reaching out for Yoseob, telling him, Your father's going to war, he won't be back for many months, come tell him you love him before he has to leave, but Yoseob didn't want to hear any of it, and he turned from his mother, clinging to Junhyung like a lifeline. Junhyung would remain his lifeline for a very long time.
At the age of ten, Yoseob held his first gun. Junhyung had laughed at first, telling him, I held my first one at eight, I've been shooting at pro level since I was your age! and Yoseob had blushed and held up the handgun and shot wildly toward the plank of wood with a crude outline of a man sketched across its surface that they had set up 20 feet away. He missed the board completely. Junhyung lost himself in peals of laughter, childish sounds filling the quiet that the gunblast had left in the air with such an air of finality it made Yoseob want to cry.
Like this, Junhyung quietly instructed after getting himself under control, his arms wrapping around Yoseob, positioning his arms, holding his hands. Yoseob did as he was told, moved wherever Junhyung placed him, felt his hands practically crushed by the firm grip Junhyung's hands held on them, stared down the sight of the gun at the board, and let Junhyung tug his finger against the trigger. Yoseob was shaking as the gun blasted again, but when he and Junhyung checked his shot, he'd hit the poor board-man dead in the center of his chest. Yoseob wiped at his eyes with the backs of his hands when Junhyung wasn't looking. Then he had to chuckle when Junhyung muttered, I was aiming for the bastard's head.
Junhyung had been there, a young man of fifteen sprouting quickly into adulthood, when Yoseob had received the news that his father had been fatally wounded in battle. The fourteen-year-old, still somehow not completely hardened by the harsh and war-torn world around him, had felt tears spring to his eyes as he turned to Junhyung. Wuss, Junhyung had accused him, only total pussies cry, but still he held the shaking young man against his chest, letting him empty his emotions onto Junhyung's old T-shirt. Yoseob told himself even as his mind felt consumed by grief that that would be the last time he ever cried.
It was soon after that Yoseob began to explore himself in the way that young men find themselves doing at a certain age. He went to the one person who had always been there for him, his cold and sarcastic yet somehow completely lovable Junhyung, with all of his questions. Junhyung put on airs, Yoseob knew enough by that point to realize his friend didn't really have all the answers in the world, and when the cracks in Junhyung's facade of knowing everything about everything when it came to sex began to show, Yoseob weaseled his way between them and soon found himself requesting physical demonstrations and practical applications of the theories they were discussing. Junhyung was hesitant but eventually willing. They explored each other thoroughly from that time on, and at the age of seventeen, clutching tightly to bedsheets and Junhyung's shoulders, Yoseob found out that the young man really did know a thing or two about sex. Yoseob wondered if Junhyung knew even half that much about matters of the heart. Because despite himself, Yoseob could feel his heart falling into Junhyung's hands whether either of them wanted it to or not.
Her name is Goo Hara, Junhyung had told him one afternoon in late summer when Yoseob was nineteen. Yoseob had pretended not to hear him, because hearing him meant acknowledging things he didn't want to acknowledge. She doesn't know about us. Maybe we should stop.
Yoseob placed the dishes he'd been washing down in the sink and took off his gloves before turning to Junhyung and pressing a fierce kiss to his lips. His arms wound around his friend's waist to pull him close. When he pulled away, he practically growled, I was here first.
But from then on, Yoseob would hear that name tossed around as commonly as any other topic that made its way out of Junhyung's lips. And with each passing month, the young woman became more and more prevalent in Junhyung's everyday conversations. Yoseob refused to meet her. He would not encourage the breaking of his own heart.
Yoseob was only really half-aware of the heat and anger building up in his gut against the poor unknowing girl, until one evening, as Junhyung pulled on his boxers and Yoseob tugged the blanket over his nude body, Yoseob heard himself hissing out, Are you gonna marry her? You guys gonna reproduce and make sarcastic, foul-mouthed little brats that you can chase around until one or both of you gets killed in this fucked up war?
Shit, Yoseob, yeah, I'm gonna marry her. Junhyung was silent for a long time before muttering out another, Shit.
I fucking hate you, Yoseob spat, climbing out of the bed and dressing himself.
I fucking hate you too, you little bitch, Junhyung uttered.
Only pussies get fucking married, Yong Junhyung. You're such a fucking pussy.
Yoseob had known all along that this was how it would end up, that Junhyung was never really his, but still his heart felt like it had shattered all over the room as he left, slamming the door as he went. He was twenty years old, finally legally able to buy liquor, finally legally an adult, finally able to sign his life away to the military if he so chose. As he went home and packed his things, that was exactly what he chose to do.
The first time he held his gun in basic training, Yoseob felt lost without the hands of that eleven-year-old boy around his own to show him what he was doing. But he was recognized for his shooting skills immediately. He followed directions well. He was quick and efficient. He was compliant and submissive. He didn't cry when they tried to break him down psychologically. Yoseob was the model soldier.
Afte basic training, Yoseob's unit was deployed immediately to the West to help another unit that had been very badly devastated in a recent attack. The sight of the soldiers in the infirmary turned Yoseob's stomach, but he did his best to ignore it all, focusing instead on the things he'd been learning, and doing his best not to spare a thought on Junhyung and what he was likely doing in his life, with his brand new wife.
Rumors traveled around the camp from the seasoned soldiers to the newbies of talk on the topic of peace that had been taking place for a few weeks. According to the tales, they would all be out of there within a month if a conclusion could be reached at the top level, and in the eleven years this war had been going on, this was by far and away the closest to an agreement the two sides had ever reached. Yoseob felt empty as he heard about it, as though a lifetime of this war had taught him that without war, there was nothing. And that much was basically true; if Yoseob was sent back home, who would be there to greet him? Yoseob held his gun close to himself. No matter where he went, he was all he had anyway.
Yoseob got his first taste of battle a few days after they arrived, rushing alongside the other soldiers toward their enemies and firing his weapon when he was within a close enough range. The air was quickly filled with dust and gunblasts and the cries of uniformed men as they filled each other with tiny lethal pieces of metal, hot death held in all their hands. Yoseob was terrified, far more than he'd expected to be, as he aimed at the enemy soldiers. His drive to feel nothing had abandoned him as soon as he'd stepped foot on the battefield. He set the sight of his gun on men's arms and legs. He shot to wound, never to kill. Somehow, madly, he found himself thinking of games of Soldier they'd played when he was a child, and as the battle lasted hour after hour, Yoseob felt like standing up and asking everyone to just pause for a second because he really had to check the time since his mom would be expecting him home for dinner by five thirty.
The moment Yoseob got shot, he didn't even really know what had happened. He felt himself falling to the ground almost as though it wasn't him doing so but someone else entirley. The his face felt covered by mud, which was weird since he'd seen the dust from the dry ground swirling in the air around their heads for this entire fight, and as he touched a hand to the wet dirt on his face and looked at his slick fingers, he saw the rusty color of dirt mixed with blood. His own blood. Pain shot through his body starting from his chest as his nerves finally recovered from their initial shock. A scream tore itself from his lips, his body on fire.
It must have taken less than a minute for the medic to arrive, but for all Yoseob knew it may as well have been a lifetime. There were footfalls all around him, soldiers running past to get closer to and further from the action. The medic pressed at his chest, and Yoseob cried out again. He heard as though from a very far distance that the medic was saying something to him, probably something about him pulling through or some other ridiculous nonsense. Yoseob knew that when you got shot in the chest on the battlefield that you didn't just recover. He knew he was dying, and he was completly petrified.
Yoseob closed his eyes as a weird sensation came over him, the pain in his chest beginning to fade, his breaths short and shallow. For the first time in years, Yoseob felt tears filling his eyes. His breathing had almost completely stopped by then. As the tears spilled over and ran past his temples, he vaguely recalled the voice of his best friend telling him so long ago, Wuss, only total pussies cry.
~끝~
Author: dracoslovebunny
Pairing: JunSeob, JunRa (or JunHara or just whatever they're being called)
Status: Oneshot
Genre: Romance, AU, Angst, Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Rating: R
Warnings: Slash (not graphic), death, violence, language
Word count: 3,126
Summary: In which Yoseob is torn by war.
A/N: Written as part of my ongoing ALL-PAIRINGS 15-fic self-challenge. Each fic is a standalone (not part of the same storyline as the others). Fics are prompted by A Little Left of Logical. Title is the prompt.
Previous Installments:
Accident/KiWoon // Imitation of Life/JunWoon // Passing Flame/JunSeung // The Moment/KiSeob // Crave/DooKwang // Massage/DooWoon // Burn/KiSeung // Snack/DongSeob // Letters from Nowhere/2Jun // Lie to Me/JunKwang // A Little Curious/HyunWoon
After the End of the World came a long period known as the Anarchy. After the Anarchy came the Peace. This short-lived period was quickly replaced by the Battle. Yang Yoseob had been born during the Peace. He had been nine when the Battle had begun. He feared he may never see the end of it.
The End of the World had played out fifty-seven years before. Students learned it from their teachers at school - those who were rich enough to attend - and from their grandparents and great-grandparents, many of whom could give first-hand acounts of the devastation. The leader of North Korea had passed away, and shortly after a disease began springing up in hospitals across South Korea and then into other parts of Southeast Asia. The history they were taught in class said that the new successor to the North Korean presidency had unleashed biological warfare against South Korea. Most of the grandparents, though, seemed to be of a different school of thought, insisting that there was no way to know if it had been an attack or something naturally occurring.
Regardless of the origin, it killed 20,000 in its first week. Those who were admitted to hospitals were seen going through various stages in only a matter of a few days, first cold- and flu-like symptoms, including congestion, vomiting, and fever. Then the victims' eyes would turn bloodshot and their vision would fade, they wouldn't be able to eat or drink anything, they would vomit blood, and some said the collective screams of agony from the hospitals could be heard for blocks. By the time they were begging for release from such pain, most unable to move or even open their eyes from the intensity of the pain of it, it was only a matter of hours until their bodies shut down. Yoseob's great-grandmother would tell him, before the Battle had begun, in a hushed voice when nobody else was around to hear, of the way the fleets of soldiers who had begun arriving during week three when the death toll had reached nearly 100,000 and fatalities had reached as far as North America and Europe, would come into a hospital, set up a quarantine system to the best of their abilities, and then silence the screams of dozens or hundreds of sufferers with loud gunblasts. Euthanasia, they'd called it. Yoseob would always shudder, and become thankful that he had been born during peacetimes rather than then.
It had taken a span of about two years for the final cases of the Disease, which had never been given a name besides the Disease, to be seen and suffered through and passed. The death toll had reached over 4 billion. Yoseob couldn't even comprehend a number that high, not really, not in terms of human casualty. It was unclear if the remaining roughly 2.5 billion people were immune to the Disease or had simply avoided catching it. The only good thing that had ever been said about the Disease was that at least it wasn't airborne. So, one way or another, about a third of humans made it out on the other side of the End of the World alive. In the years the Disease had taken to cause its devastation, government structures had fallen in most places. Lands were now for the most part self-governed, and not very well. It didn't take long for the Anarchy to begin.
For thirty-six years, any semblance of structure was railed agaisnt by the (significantly diminished) masses. People flooded from their small towns to the big cities to gather together and try to make some sort of sense of their ravaged world. But it was a case of monkey-see, monkey-do. Where these newcomers saw looting and rioting and stealing, they adopted it as their way of life; in such times, it was the only way to survive. There was no way to punish the wicked, no way to enforce laws that seemed trivial and without meaning in this new world, so they rose from the herd, sometimes as individuals out to cause as much damage and destruction around them as possible, sometimes as pseudo-leaders creating groups of ten or twenty or a hundred people who would have their own "community" with set rules and guidelines but overall seemed to consist of little more than "take what you want, no matter the means." It was an unfortunate truth that these people and their groups were faring far better than most.
Repopulation became one of the only things almost everyone could agree on, and common decency became a thing of the past as people attempted to procreate anytime, anywhere, often uncaring as to the willingness of their chosen partner. Families would often give their daughters to the powerful men in charge of the anarchist groups in hopes that with these men, she may be used for nothing but a breeding horse and a sexual toy but at least she would be cared for, fed, and kept (relatively) safe. Still, the idea of repopulating the land didn't stop these groups from killing millions of people worldwide each year in an attempt to attain whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. By the tail end of the Anarchy, the death toll was thought to have been in the general range of 100 million from these groups alone, and another hundred million or so due to poverty, starvation, sickness, and a number of other things a world such as that would wreak on its inhabitants.
The Anarchy was followed by ten years of calmness known as the Peace. In later years, when the Battle had begun, it would also be known as the eye of the storm, as the calm between the two destructive forces. Two governments had been established, one to rule over most of Australia, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, the other in charge of the Americas and most of Europe. They worked together in relative harmony, doing their best to help their people and conform to the ideals of one another. These ravaging, pillaging groups of yesteryear were brought down one after the other under the new system. As well as giving help to many of those still in need, giving the impression at first of a kind-hearted government, they also ruled with an iron fist and a one-strike policy allowing many small crimes as well as large ones to be considered capital offenses, for which the punishment was execution. Rumors trickled through the people that the crime rate in every part of the world was lower than it had ever been.
Most of the positive accomplishments of the new governmental system were enough to outweigh their trigger-happy sense of crime punishment. For a few years, there seemed to be hope that this world had a positive future laid out before it. And then disagreements began between the two governments. The West Government was lessening its extreme stance on execution. The East Government insisted they needed to retain the policies as they stood, as by their logic it was the fear instilled by these rules that kept the people in a peaceable state. The West began to shut out the East from its internal goings-on. The West decided that perhaps one single global government structure would be better than their bilateral system. Years of arguing took place behind closed doors and, for the most part, without the knowledge of the civilians. But news of that magnitude had its way of leaking out one way or another, and as the end of the Peace drew nearer, murmurs spread through crowds, facts convoluted and twisted the further they traveled down the grapevine until the people of the West concluded the East was poised and ready to take down their government to create their singular global ruling figure, and the people of the East had become convinced that the West were trying to allow criminals to walk free due to their ties to officials and government corruption, something they sought to spread to the East. Nobody was surprised when the Peace ended.
Yoseob had felt the tension in everyone around him during the final months before the first shots of the Battle had been fired. The day the news came in of the beginning of the Battle, Yoseob had been nine years old, laying in his living room with his head in the lap of his ten-year-old friend, Yong Junhyung. His mother had come into the room, crying, reaching out for Yoseob, telling him, Your father's going to war, he won't be back for many months, come tell him you love him before he has to leave, but Yoseob didn't want to hear any of it, and he turned from his mother, clinging to Junhyung like a lifeline. Junhyung would remain his lifeline for a very long time.
At the age of ten, Yoseob held his first gun. Junhyung had laughed at first, telling him, I held my first one at eight, I've been shooting at pro level since I was your age! and Yoseob had blushed and held up the handgun and shot wildly toward the plank of wood with a crude outline of a man sketched across its surface that they had set up 20 feet away. He missed the board completely. Junhyung lost himself in peals of laughter, childish sounds filling the quiet that the gunblast had left in the air with such an air of finality it made Yoseob want to cry.
Like this, Junhyung quietly instructed after getting himself under control, his arms wrapping around Yoseob, positioning his arms, holding his hands. Yoseob did as he was told, moved wherever Junhyung placed him, felt his hands practically crushed by the firm grip Junhyung's hands held on them, stared down the sight of the gun at the board, and let Junhyung tug his finger against the trigger. Yoseob was shaking as the gun blasted again, but when he and Junhyung checked his shot, he'd hit the poor board-man dead in the center of his chest. Yoseob wiped at his eyes with the backs of his hands when Junhyung wasn't looking. Then he had to chuckle when Junhyung muttered, I was aiming for the bastard's head.
Junhyung had been there, a young man of fifteen sprouting quickly into adulthood, when Yoseob had received the news that his father had been fatally wounded in battle. The fourteen-year-old, still somehow not completely hardened by the harsh and war-torn world around him, had felt tears spring to his eyes as he turned to Junhyung. Wuss, Junhyung had accused him, only total pussies cry, but still he held the shaking young man against his chest, letting him empty his emotions onto Junhyung's old T-shirt. Yoseob told himself even as his mind felt consumed by grief that that would be the last time he ever cried.
It was soon after that Yoseob began to explore himself in the way that young men find themselves doing at a certain age. He went to the one person who had always been there for him, his cold and sarcastic yet somehow completely lovable Junhyung, with all of his questions. Junhyung put on airs, Yoseob knew enough by that point to realize his friend didn't really have all the answers in the world, and when the cracks in Junhyung's facade of knowing everything about everything when it came to sex began to show, Yoseob weaseled his way between them and soon found himself requesting physical demonstrations and practical applications of the theories they were discussing. Junhyung was hesitant but eventually willing. They explored each other thoroughly from that time on, and at the age of seventeen, clutching tightly to bedsheets and Junhyung's shoulders, Yoseob found out that the young man really did know a thing or two about sex. Yoseob wondered if Junhyung knew even half that much about matters of the heart. Because despite himself, Yoseob could feel his heart falling into Junhyung's hands whether either of them wanted it to or not.
Her name is Goo Hara, Junhyung had told him one afternoon in late summer when Yoseob was nineteen. Yoseob had pretended not to hear him, because hearing him meant acknowledging things he didn't want to acknowledge. She doesn't know about us. Maybe we should stop.
Yoseob placed the dishes he'd been washing down in the sink and took off his gloves before turning to Junhyung and pressing a fierce kiss to his lips. His arms wound around his friend's waist to pull him close. When he pulled away, he practically growled, I was here first.
But from then on, Yoseob would hear that name tossed around as commonly as any other topic that made its way out of Junhyung's lips. And with each passing month, the young woman became more and more prevalent in Junhyung's everyday conversations. Yoseob refused to meet her. He would not encourage the breaking of his own heart.
Yoseob was only really half-aware of the heat and anger building up in his gut against the poor unknowing girl, until one evening, as Junhyung pulled on his boxers and Yoseob tugged the blanket over his nude body, Yoseob heard himself hissing out, Are you gonna marry her? You guys gonna reproduce and make sarcastic, foul-mouthed little brats that you can chase around until one or both of you gets killed in this fucked up war?
Shit, Yoseob, yeah, I'm gonna marry her. Junhyung was silent for a long time before muttering out another, Shit.
I fucking hate you, Yoseob spat, climbing out of the bed and dressing himself.
I fucking hate you too, you little bitch, Junhyung uttered.
Only pussies get fucking married, Yong Junhyung. You're such a fucking pussy.
Yoseob had known all along that this was how it would end up, that Junhyung was never really his, but still his heart felt like it had shattered all over the room as he left, slamming the door as he went. He was twenty years old, finally legally able to buy liquor, finally legally an adult, finally able to sign his life away to the military if he so chose. As he went home and packed his things, that was exactly what he chose to do.
The first time he held his gun in basic training, Yoseob felt lost without the hands of that eleven-year-old boy around his own to show him what he was doing. But he was recognized for his shooting skills immediately. He followed directions well. He was quick and efficient. He was compliant and submissive. He didn't cry when they tried to break him down psychologically. Yoseob was the model soldier.
Afte basic training, Yoseob's unit was deployed immediately to the West to help another unit that had been very badly devastated in a recent attack. The sight of the soldiers in the infirmary turned Yoseob's stomach, but he did his best to ignore it all, focusing instead on the things he'd been learning, and doing his best not to spare a thought on Junhyung and what he was likely doing in his life, with his brand new wife.
Rumors traveled around the camp from the seasoned soldiers to the newbies of talk on the topic of peace that had been taking place for a few weeks. According to the tales, they would all be out of there within a month if a conclusion could be reached at the top level, and in the eleven years this war had been going on, this was by far and away the closest to an agreement the two sides had ever reached. Yoseob felt empty as he heard about it, as though a lifetime of this war had taught him that without war, there was nothing. And that much was basically true; if Yoseob was sent back home, who would be there to greet him? Yoseob held his gun close to himself. No matter where he went, he was all he had anyway.
Yoseob got his first taste of battle a few days after they arrived, rushing alongside the other soldiers toward their enemies and firing his weapon when he was within a close enough range. The air was quickly filled with dust and gunblasts and the cries of uniformed men as they filled each other with tiny lethal pieces of metal, hot death held in all their hands. Yoseob was terrified, far more than he'd expected to be, as he aimed at the enemy soldiers. His drive to feel nothing had abandoned him as soon as he'd stepped foot on the battefield. He set the sight of his gun on men's arms and legs. He shot to wound, never to kill. Somehow, madly, he found himself thinking of games of Soldier they'd played when he was a child, and as the battle lasted hour after hour, Yoseob felt like standing up and asking everyone to just pause for a second because he really had to check the time since his mom would be expecting him home for dinner by five thirty.
The moment Yoseob got shot, he didn't even really know what had happened. He felt himself falling to the ground almost as though it wasn't him doing so but someone else entirley. The his face felt covered by mud, which was weird since he'd seen the dust from the dry ground swirling in the air around their heads for this entire fight, and as he touched a hand to the wet dirt on his face and looked at his slick fingers, he saw the rusty color of dirt mixed with blood. His own blood. Pain shot through his body starting from his chest as his nerves finally recovered from their initial shock. A scream tore itself from his lips, his body on fire.
It must have taken less than a minute for the medic to arrive, but for all Yoseob knew it may as well have been a lifetime. There were footfalls all around him, soldiers running past to get closer to and further from the action. The medic pressed at his chest, and Yoseob cried out again. He heard as though from a very far distance that the medic was saying something to him, probably something about him pulling through or some other ridiculous nonsense. Yoseob knew that when you got shot in the chest on the battlefield that you didn't just recover. He knew he was dying, and he was completly petrified.
Yoseob closed his eyes as a weird sensation came over him, the pain in his chest beginning to fade, his breaths short and shallow. For the first time in years, Yoseob felt tears filling his eyes. His breathing had almost completely stopped by then. As the tears spilled over and ran past his temples, he vaguely recalled the voice of his best friend telling him so long ago, Wuss, only total pussies cry.
~끝~