War fanfic

[lanlan]

Title: fanfic about war
Pairing: yunjae
Rating: pg
Summary: AU - Jaejoong and Yunho are soldiers in a war.
warnings: I don't have a beta. :)

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Jaejoong hated men like Yunho, men who crop their hair short and have never seen it outside a mirror’s frames, men who worship their fathers even if they don’t love them, men who stand upright not because they feel entitled to but because they have never questioned their right to.

He hates Yunho also because of his natural bend to authority that come not from softness or cowardice but a deep rooted trust of society, not just the people in it but every principle that ties them together.

Jaejoong hates that the trust is returned, results tenfold. Men like Yunho who are brought up righteous slide through life with an ease Jaejoong bites his cheeks thinking about.

It’s here in the army where such masculine conformity matters too. Out in civilian society, Jaejoong could play the wild child, the rebellious artist, and did. In high school he cut class and pierced his nipples. After school he got a job tattooing likeminded people and avoided college, avoided education to avoid all the educated pricks that come with it and huddled in his small bubble of likeminded “freethinkers”. Before the draft, Jaejoong was allowed his trite rebellions.

He discovered how powerless he was to the beast he calls society and tames in his head with judgment, however, when his person was declared valuable for it by the state. The government shaved his head, issued him an uniform, and sent him marching alongside every other man suddenly turned soldier.

Some of those men were already naturally soldiers, Jaejoong thought, had been just waiting for the title since boyhood. Hell, they were even soldiers as boys, playing with their little plastic green men and calling their fathers “sir”. Subordination was by no means humiliating to these men. Subordination shined their already white collars. If they were clean before, now they glistened.

Not all men were like this, but most pretended to be. Jaejoong hangs around alone, sneering at them inside his head and smoking cigarettes, trying to kill himself off before he could be sent out to die honorably for his country. When he runs out of cigarettes, he throws rocks at rats.

 

Six weeks later, they are being sent out to dig trenches.

Suddenly the weight of the gun in Jaejoong’s hand is as new as when he began all his training. He thinks about loading it, aiming it somewhere outside of target practice and can’t breathe. He can’t think anything beyond that.

Even though his shoes match the other men with him, Jaejoong can’t convince himself that he is really sitting here, dressed the same as them, digging the hole in the dirt where he would live for God knows how long. He doesn’t think about the alternative.

When Jaejoong realizes he is digging next to Yunho, he chokes his desperate fear on rage and suddenly Yunho is everything he hates, everything he has to unfairly die for. He throws dirt on Yunho with his shovel.

Yunho, who must think it was a mistake, shakes it off and continues shoveling. Somehow, the anger that Jaejoong thought he could chase away with easy spite grows and swells into hatred, incomprehensible and undeserved. He wanted to fight Yunho, beat him bloody, gnaw on his bones. The desire dizzies him. He knocks a ledge of dirt down with his foot, filling the hole Yunho dug and rendering his past hour of work useless.

Yunho straightens this time, looks at Jaejoong. Jaejoong sees the confusion and narrows his eyes until it disappears. He lets Yunho know that, yes, he is picking a fight with the intention to follow through.

“Don’t shovel dirt in my hole,” Yunho says, cautious, still trying to feel out Jaejoong.

“That’s what your sister told me before I fucked her cunt,” Jaejoong winces inwardly at the schoolboy ferocity of his own words. It does the trick, though. Yunho’s face darkens like a storm.

Jaejoong knows men like Yunho don’t dilly dally with words much and expects the punch that follows, dodges it mostly. It hits his arm instead of the stomach it was aimed at. He’s glad for the excuse to hit back, though, and does so eagerly. He gets Yunho on the jaw and regrets it immediately. While Yunho aimed for the center of his body, Jaejoong’s tap seems more like a slap.

Yunho’s pushing into him before he knows it and he trips over his feet, tries not to twist his ankles, and ends up under the other man. Yunho tries to hit him in the stomach again and this time he doesn’t miss. It knocks the wind out from Jaejoong before it hurts and Jaejoong is left gasping for breath, humiliated.

“Hey,” comes a voice behind them. “Hey!” It sharpens when Yunho raises his fist again. A hand grabs it and the commander attached comes in Jaejoong’s field of vision.

“Get up.” Yunho is up on his feet, guilty head slightly bowed before the words are fully out. Jaejoong lies on the ground, gasping like a fish, hating Yunho and himself.

“Kim, get up.”

Suddenly Jaejoong hates Yunho even more because the man is helping him up and Jaejoong actually tries to struggle away because he won’t, won’t, become a tool of appeasement for whatever guilt the perfect boy has over a little fight. The commander is watching, though, the sort of short and squat man no one successfully disobeys and gets away with and so Jaejoong stands on his feet, assumes what he hopes to be a guilty looking posture. He wants to scowl when Yunho matches him by his side.

Jaejoong and Yunho are promised punishment never properly delivered because the outbreak of real war finally breaks through the forced regimens and rigid customs of their military community. Suddenly and finally, the enemy are upon them.

Everybody shakes in their boots for the first few days until the prospect of danger is dulled down by the boredom of trench warfare. The enemy is miles away, a pinprick on the infinite horizon. They shoot at the pinprick out of courtesy, but never with the expectation of results.

Then it rains.

They stand knee deep in gray mud and sleep covered in it. The mud is not good, pure dirt but filth mixed with their urine and excrement. Whole guns are lost in the mud and one man is accidentally shot in the foot from stepping on the wrong thing amidst all the confusion. It’s their first unglamorous injury out of the whole war.

Jaejoong wakes up in the night with a pain on his right arm and finds two rats eating the dry skin of his elbow. Red, inky blood mixes with wet dirt and the baby pink wound is soon marked only by its smoothness and tenderness.

He hates the cold and the rain until it clears up and warm, sunny weather clears the air, solidifies the ground. Suddenly, all the energy Jaejoong spent on day to day worries of keeping the shit and piss out of his mouth and rats out of his boots is replaced by fear.

My God, he thinks. Life continues. I will die here and life will continue.

As soon as the thought becomes clear and runs through his head, an enemy bullet rings through the air. Swing.

This is nothing new as, being in a war, one must expect to be shot at now and then and the enemy’s bullets, sent from just as far away from them and with no better at aim, almost never produced results.

Jaejoong was aware that a bullet had passed him somewhere only momentarily. He goes back to his useless existential pondering without even a glance at where the bullet might’ve landed until a man’s yell wakes him from his daydream.

The yell was from the man who had been conversing with Yunho who has suddenly developed a perfectly round black bullet sized hole on his left temple that was gushing red blood.

Shit, Jaejoong thinks, numb. Yunho’s face is pale and eyes confused before they glaze over. He’s dying, Jaejoong thinks, too late. Yunho is dead when he thinks it.

 

Somehow Jaejoong makes it through the war, scared shitless by nightmares of the hole on Yunho’s head every night, unharmed. He makes through it to Yunho’s funeral, where he salutes Yunho’s casket, hugs his mother, calls his father “sir”.

All this he does out of guilt. He acts more like how Yunho acted these days.

Jaejoong keeps his hair short. He doesn’t go back to the tattoo parlor where he once worked. He doesn’t go to school either, though. He sits in the park by himself and smokes cigarettes, as many as he wants now. Sometimes, for old times sake, he throws rocks at squirrels. Jaejoong aims to kill.

And one day he does. The firm, gray rock that had been lying in his palm so light and ready to spring just a moment ago is lost somewhere in the dirt. A deal squirrel slumps in the grass.

Jaejoong’s mouth is dry. He didn’t mean to kill the squirrel. He didn’t mean anything, just like how he hadn’t meant anything when he picked a fight with Yunho, before it all mattered. It could’ve been anyone, didn’t have to be the dead man. He had been afraid in his surety that he would be the one to die and taken it out of the one he thought would make it out alive and shining out of jealousy, not hate.

When Jaejoong cries, becoming a pathetic, crazy man crying in the park clutching a dead animal children and housewives skirt their glances and step around, he does it not out of guilt for any of these reasons – not for the squirrels, not for hating Yunho, for slapping him as a boy.

He cries because when Yunho died he was self absorbed in his ponderings of Godot and when Yunho was dead but still warm, he thought to himself, he’s dying, then, finally the perfect boy dies, right before the gravity that it was death he was thinking about here and shot through his body and then the relief sunk in.

It’s him, Jaejoong had thought, that the bullet struck. Not me. Thank God. Thank God it wasn’t me.