Chapter Text
The first time, it puts him back outside the row of lockers, Seok-chan just starting to open the door concealing the shivering girl.
Moments ago Yeong-hu had been newly split open. He still feels the gasping shock of strength leaving him in pulses of red; sees the last dredges of blood stuck around the bend of the winding transfusion tubing, no pumping heart to bring it the rest of the way to his unwilling arm.
Give it back to Seok-chan, he thinks, and then: Give him back to me.
The thought pulls a trigger in him, his finger doing the same. He’s already yelling for Seok-chan to use the fire by the time the girl’s head snaps back, thuds in messy chunks against the back of the locker. But it’s not enough. She was always expecting them to hurt her. Seok-chan’s gentle refusal to acquiesce was the only thing that had bought them that final reprieve, temporary as it was.
The stabbing limbs that explode from her pierce Yeong-hu low on the side. Where else? he thinks, hand already going to it, finding it by memory. Seok-chan is not so lucky—or, maybe, is luckier by far. The thorn-like point spears through his eye and keeps going. He is dead before he realizes. Well before he hits the floor.
Yeong-hu should be glad. This time he doesn’t have to drift in and out of the long minutes of it, Seok-chan’s slow fade into unconsciousness and beyond.
Then it’s just him and the girl’s panting breaths as she waits to heal and Yeong-hu waits to die. He wonders if this time it will last.
It was stupid of him, firing on the girl. He had been angry in a way he thought he’d trained himself out of long ago. Seo-jin was always the hothead of them, and Yeong-hu knew, all those years and however many ranks ago, that someone had to be the counterweight. He’d made the conscious decision for it to be him, and for the most part he’s lived up to it. It’s been coming back out of him in flickers over the last year, though. The beating he’d given Park Chan-yeong for his failures supervising the wall, the many times he’s lost his temper on Tak. Mostly it’s felt justified. Righteous, even.
This did not. It was the most uncontrollable of any of his urges toward violence, with the most brutally immediate repercussions, and Yeong-hu understands cause-and-effect well enough to know what that means. She’d let them walk into that hell, is all. Struck Yeong-hu down, put the gun down in front of him, stood there as Seo-jin was torn to pieces. Still wearing the warmth of Seok-chan’s kindness as much as his jacket around her shoulders.
But of the two of them it had been Yeong-hu and Yeong-hu alone she led away—Yeong-hu who’d ordered her to take him in the first place, and Yeong-hu who’d shot her superior and meant to do worse. If she’d killed him there and been done with it, he thinks he could have forgiven her. Who knows what would have happened if Seok-chan had stayed put on the floor outside the isolation cell, clasping Yong-seok’s hand with the same irrepressible compassion he’d shown minutes before to a girl he’d just met and had every reason not to trust.
Maybe she would have pled Seok-chan’s case before the others, the man in the suit and his pet sadist in the stripes—other candidates for people Yeong-hu would like to shoot in the head on sight. Or maybe they would always have tried to turn Seok-chan even without her intervention, the way they claimed they’d wanted to turn Yeong-hu. He’s not convinced. The spectacle they’d arranged for him had the rusty edge of torture to it, the man in stripes taking too much joy in killing Jong-hyun and chastising Yeong-hu for it afterward for him to believe it was anything else. Even Lim had been unimpressed with their reasoning. Called the experiment meaningless, and who would know better than him?
Still, maybe they had other methods. Methods that might have worked on Seok-chan. He could have been turned, could have lived on in some other form. Any form would do. Yeong-hu remembers Seok-chan asking what they would do if Yong-seok had already turned by the time they’d found him.
It seems so obvious now. He can’t believe he hadn’t known.
But none of that happened. Seok-chan died because he wanted to save Yeong-hu, the way he always did. I had to protect you, Sarge, he’d said, eyes sorry but unflinching as Tak and the rest had walked in behind him. From his final plea to Yeong-hu it was shiningly clear that he believed Yeong-hu was capable of the impossible. He could—and would, Seok-chan was sure—save everyone else still trapped in that place, no matter that even with Seok-chan’s blood refilling his empty veins Yeong-hu would still be half-dead, unarmed, alone.
And then he would—what? Go on living afterward? Like he had any reason to at all with his men butchered, the last and best of them cold and bloodless at his side. Colder still without his jacket.
Tak was right. Yeong-hu was never any different. Certainly never worthy. It’s a bitter thought to die on.
He tells Seok-chan as such, in a fashion, the next time he comes to. Whatever is doing this puts him back to the moment before they’d all split up just inside the complex, corpses at their feet illustrative of what is to come. He can feel it, now, the lurking specter. He doesn’t have a name for it, but he feels its cold eyes like a laser dot on their backs.
Seok-chan must have felt it too, the first time around. He’d crossed himself—discreetly, his back to Yeong-hu and the others, but still shockingly obvious for how closely he normally held that particular secret to his chest. He’d been under Yeong-hu’s command for months before he’d trusted him enough to let it slip, and he’s never mentioned it again since.
Perhaps he’d thought it made Yeong-hu uncomfortable. Had known it made Yeong-hu uncomfortable. Jealous, down in the pit of his stomach. Don’t you know? Yeong-hu had wanted to say. Don’t you know I will take care of you better than any god?
Laughable, now.
Peter had known, somehow. Now and then he’d spot Seok-chan in the crowd and come sauntering in their direction, that knowing gleam in his eyes, and each time Seok-chan would deftly duck away before Peter could reach him, Yeong-hu solid and oh-so-casually in the way. It always earned him a grateful glance later whenever Seok-chan reappeared from wherever he’d vanished to. Not once had they ever needed to discuss it.
Perhaps it was something else Seok-chan had known: that Yeong-hu would put his body between Seok-chan and anything, anyone, always. No questions asked.
It was that old jealousy that had made him remark on Seok-chan crossing himself. And it’s that moment he’s dropped back into now, Seok-chan’s earnest gaze locked onto his.
Ask the one you believe in. That’s why I’m asking you.
It was, is, so warm: the sun of Seok-chan’s belief, absolute. His throat seals up. He can’t summon up the casual don’t ask me, jackass from before. He hadn’t meant it then. He’s never wanted Seok-chan to stop asking him.
“You shouldn’t,” he says instead.
Seok-chan is unmoved. “I shouldn’t do a lot of things,” he says, the slyness Yeong-hu likes so much creasing softly at the corners of his eyes.
Yeong-hu doesn’t have to die this time for the moment to end. When it takes him, he’s just standing there looking at Seok-chan, remembering how they’d passed the cigarette back and forth between them in the car.
Put me back at the stadium, he begs it. I won’t take them into that place, not so unprepared. We’ll find another way to save Yong-seok. We’ll never go at all and I’ll beg his forgiveness for the rest of my life. I’ll go alone, in stealth; I know now where to find his cell, and they’ll never realize I’m there. I will free him, even if I die doing it. But the rest of them will live. Seok-chan will forgive me, in time. I will see him in another life, or else wait for him outside his god’s doors. Put me through this charade forever if it amuses you, if that is the toll, but let me know first that he is safe.
It does not listen.
He finds himself back on his knees, one, two, three times, his men always suspended in the air before him.
He tries something different each time. He doesn’t bother trying to shoot the girl or either of her companions; he will not give the man in stripes another excuse to cut Jong-hyun loose. He does not think he can stand to watch it again. The sound of it will never leave him.
When she puts the gun down in front of him, he picks it up and shoots himself before any of them at his back have the chance to stop him. His hands are as steady as he can keep them when he does it, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing him waver. And there is nothing to waver over. If this constantly rewinding nightmare is about extracting some measure of penance, surely this is the end result it desires of him.
He’s back on his knees almost before he’s registered the bullet. She puts the gun down in front of him.
The next time, he does the unthinkable—does as Seo-jin had accepted, and shoots.
Not aiming for the rope.
Perhaps the lesson being taught here, he thinks when he is capable of thinking again through the ragged screaming in his head, is that Yeong-hu should have made the hard call to save who he could. Has he not already thought that Tak was right all along? But he stalls out, watching Jong-hyun and Yong-seok sob where they’re strung up, Seo-jin’s body swinging loosely beside them. Kill two, save one. That was the deal that had been offered.
Jong-hyun had already been killed by the man in stripes, the first time around, when Seo-jin met Yeong-hu’s eyes across the distance. No one thinks it’s your fault, he’d said, for Yong-seok and Yeong-hu both. You have to survive. He’d wanted to protect their men to the last, as he and Yeong-hu have always tacitly understood to be their true duty: the trade-off, and the privilege, of the rank they hold, no matter how much the world has tried to convince them it should be the other way around.
Yong-seok and Jong-hyun hold no such duty; they only ever should have been the beneficiaries of it. There is no way to choose who gets the second bullet. There can be no lesson in this.
He’s still frozen in that thought when she puts the gun down in front of him a third time.
He changes his mind. He picks it up and shoots the freak in the stripes. To make himself feel better, and because none of this seems to change anything, and because he can.
He doesn’t wake up on his knees again. Maybe he’s made his point.
He’s following her down the hallway, the pattern on Seok-chan’s jacket coming in and out of range of the flashlight’s glow. He stops.
She does too after a moment, head turning toward one shoulder. Not far enough to look at him, just enough to hear him better. He can’t see her face, has nothing to go off but the line of her back.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. Her back stiffens. “All I want is to take my men and go. They’re my responsibility, you understand? I have no interest in harming you. Or anyone you care about,” he adds, dubiously. Neither of the men she stood with had seemed to regard her with any particular kindness, nor she them. But she’d still flinched when Yeong-hu had shot the man in the suit, looked anxiously between the two of them as negotiations went sour.
It reminds him of how Seok-chan gets when there’s a fight amongst the men. The tightening of his face as he steps between whoever is quarreling, using himself as a buffer, trying anything to calm them down. An accomplished soldier in his own right, accustomed to combat and gunfire and explosions, and nothing makes him more visibly, painfully nervous than people yelling in his near vicinity.
Yeong-hu’s wondered before how Seok-chan ever made it through basic training. Wondered, too, who had made him that way, and what he might do to them if he ever found out.
“Please,” he says to the turned back. “If you really don’t know how to open the isolation door yourself—find out how, or get us the equipment to do it ourselves. We’re resourceful. We’ll be gone before anyone but you even knows we’re here. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Her spine is still rigid. She doesn’t believe him. She’s right not to. He would keep his word and not touch a hair on her or the other two’s heads if it meant he could take his men home safe, yes. But he’d just as easily put three bullets through their heads to do the same, and she knows it. He’d pointed the rifle at her, a young girl, small and shivering and afraid. She will never think he is safe.
Seok-chan, not one to make Yeong-hu’s mistakes, had looked at her and seen the pain shuddering through her, not the danger she posed. He’d put his weapon down before she’d ever looked up at him with clear eyes, sclera white and deceptive.
Yeong-hu has always known what kind of man Seok-chan is. And where Yeong-hu falls along the measure of him.
“He’ll die, too,” he says. It’s the last thing he can think of to sway her. It’s the only thing that might have swayed him, in her position.
“No one’s going to die,” she says.
She could have kept walking. That she bothers to lie at all tells him he’s struck a nerve.
He never knows if it would have made a difference. He blinks and he’s there against the broken slab, the needle already in his arm.
No, he thinks, NO. The horror gives him enough strength to fumble for the tape on Seok-chan’s neck. There’s still blood flowing weakly through the tubing. There’s still time. But Seok-chan doesn’t move even after he’s detached it, doesn’t protest as Yeong-hu puts trembling pressure on his neck, trying to find the middle ground that will staunch the flow without cutting off his air.
He has only ever been too late. Too late to realize Yong-seok was acting strangely. Too late to stop himself from pointing a firearm at a young girl in pain. Too late to have told Seok-chan, back in the car, why it was he never dated; too late to have taken the cigarette back from his mouth the way he’d wanted to and kissed him, hard and hot and deep, until both of them forgot about the dwindling ammo or the roll call or any of the other hundreds of concerns that swallowed up the day, all of them pointless and fading and nothing compared to what the two of them could have had, just for a moment, if Yeong-hu had only taken what was freely given.
He’s awake this time to feel Seok-chan’s heart stop.
He blinks, and there are no tears on his face. Seok-chan is alive, unbloodied, kneeling down by the hatch at the bottom of Yong-seok’s cell. Seok-chan must have already thanked the girl; she has turned away, waiting. Yeong-hu is meant to follow, and to watch them all die all over again.
He walks back toward the cell.
“Kang Seok-chan,” he says.
Seok-chan startles, looking up at him. Yeong-hu’s given his orders, and he is not the sort to linger. He’s gone and worried him now. Seok-chan scans Yeong-hu’s face, like he can divine what’s wrong from the furrow of his brow alone, like he’ll do anything to fix it.
“Sir?”
Yeong-hu has killed, and not killed, and begged for either of those decisions to mean anything. He has told Seok-chan not to believe in him. He has seen Seok-chan die three deaths. None of it has mattered. He says this now only so that there is a universe where it has been said.
“If I’m not back in twenty minutes, do not come looking for me. Do whatever it takes to get away from this place. There is nothing you can do to survive that will change the fact that you are the best of us, and better than I have deserved. I would ask you to take care of the platoon in my stead. But mostly I would ask you to live.”
Seok-chan is frozen where he kneels at Yeong-hu’s feet. His eyes are wet and shocked. Yeong-hu hears the girl breathe in suddenly, a sharp, surprised sound. Ja-yeong, he remembers at once. That’s what the man in the suit had called her.
He doesn’t look away from Seok-chan. Nothing could make him.
But from the corner of his eye, he sees Ja-yeong turn back to face them.