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Nov 05, 2007 18:20

Lips press against his. Their shape is familiar, as if he’s felt them in another life, in another dream. He clings to their kiss, desperate for it to last, for the illusion to carry him out of consciousness. On some level, he knows this isn’t real, but he can’t help himself. The kiss tastes like embers, like metal and blood. It’s enough to indulge in without guilt.

A moan escapes him, an embarrassing little sound that draws a laugh from the other’s chest. He doesn’t feel chastened, more like encouraged. More like encouraging.

“Yunho…” His name is a whisper on pale pink lips. His heart skips a beat in response. “Yunho…”

Their limbs tangle and wrestle with the sheets, until he can feel cold air on his back and liquid warmth against his chest. Safe. He doesn’t need to see, he knows what’s where as he lets his hands wander, taking in smooth, unblemished skin. It’s the skin of a boy he knows well and the knowledge is maddening.

“Yunho hyung…”

There’s no correcting him this time. Moving in to claim his lips again, Yunho wills an apology into the gesture. Failure is as bittersweet as wet cotton when his eyes are forced open by the loud call of his name.

“What?” he snaps, rolling over in his bunk. He thinks about playing dead.

Light shines from the neon above his head, illuminating an electronic clock above the door. It’s 0600 and he’s going to be late for debriefing. As if he cares anymore.

Junsu kneels by his bed, a light blush on his cheeks that may be due to the sounds he was making before or the erection tenting his boxers. It’s no rare occurrence. They’re all men stuck on a ship for three hundred and thirty days every year. Sex isn’t a currency, it’s a basic necessity.

“You look like shit,” Ronson comments, on his way back from the showers. Steam still rises from his skin as Junsu flips him off. Good ol’ Junsu. Loyal as a dog.

Yunho blinks against lingering thoughts of soft hands and even softer skin and tries to be understanding. He can’t be blaming everyone else forever. He’s lost Changmin, it’s only right that he should torture himself for it. Evidently, Command disagrees. And so does Junsu.

“Thought you were having a nightmare,” he confesses sheepishly and Yunho forces himself not to latch onto the poor excuse.

“I wasn’t.” He sits up, nearly knocking foreheads with the other man, and rubs his hands over closed eyes. His erection is waning already. There’s nothing to desire or want in wakefulness.

Outside his field of vision, there’s a nod and Junsu stands, his shadow large and undecided as it looms above him. He lingers in confusion, looking as if he might say something when Yunho glances up expectantly. They’re in the business of split second decisions, and that seems to prompt Junsu to opt for silence and a quick exit. All the better, since Yunho doesn’t feel like talking anyway.

He showers under the cold spray, feeling his thighs itch and his head hurt but not moving to change the temperature. Who else is going to punish him? Command is happy to walk away from his failure. He’s too valuable to keep in the brig for long.

Teeth clenched, he dresses without hurry. The khakis of his uniform feel rough against his skin where only a few days ago he felt nails and teeth leave their mark. They’re all faded by now, like he imagines his own are-would be, if Changmin’s body wasn’t burned to smithereens on the surface of some godforsaken moon.

Yunho tries not to think of that, tries to go through the motions of everyday without thinking the mission, the crash; the silence that followed. To lose a man to those bastards and not even attempt to get him back - he can’t believe this is happening in the Imperial Guard. Can’t believe this is his doing.

“Captain?” It’s Kim’s voice again, interrupting his train of thought. He stands on protocol now; it must mean he’s really concerned.

Changmin would know.

“What?” Monosyllabic, curt, that’s what he’s become.

“Debrief’s in two minutes, thought I’d wait for you…”

Right. Out of the goodness of his heart, or because he thinks Yunho might give his suicidal thoughts another try?

“I’m not going.” Like school, he thinks. ‘I don’t want to go, Mother, please don’t tell Father.’ Pathetic. Weak. His mother always told and his father always tried to break him of the habit. Yunho spares a thought for the man’s failure.

Metal and metal connect with an uneasy hum. The door closes and locks as Junsu advances. Oh God, are they going to have a heart-to-heart now?

“You know… he was my friend too,” the younger man begins and Yunho sits down on his bunk, burying his face in his hands. It might not hide him for long, but it’s worth a try. Junsu makes no move to join him or persuade him otherwise. “He was my best friend.”

He was more than that to me, Yunho wants to retort but the words won’t come out. They’re probably a lie, anyway. More than what? Wasn’t it just fucking?

“I miss him, too.”

Yunho snorts. It sounds ugly and cruel, just like everything he’s been thinking and doing all this time. “I don’t,” he lies, stuffing his pockets with stones so he can throw them at his own head later. There’s nothing more pathetic than lying.

There’s a spot of silence and then the bunk dips with the weight of another body. “Then why are you acting like this?” Junsu’s tone is deceptively innocent and Yunho makes the mistake of meeting the other man’s gaze. What he sees there tells him everything he doesn’t want to know: I loved him, too; I understand what you’re going through.

And the worst: It’s okay.

“Fuck you,” he snarls, pushing up from the bunk, a beast raging inside him. “Fuck you, Kim, you don’t know shit!”

And it’s all he can do not to punch him, not to scratch his eyes out. Who does he think he is, offering advice? There’s rank separating them-not to mention experience. What does he know, a little punk of a kid?

“I know you’re thinking about him all the damn time,” Junsu retorts just as quickly, jumping to the bait. “I know you’re so fucking tragic the whole squadron’s been hanging on a thread. Do you know Command wants to reorganize us until you get back on your feet?” Standing to full height, he’s rather impressive, though not particularly eloquent. “You’re our Captain, we’re supposed to be able to depend on you!”

A physical blow couldn’t have hit him deeper.

“The fuck do you want from me?” he grits out and he’s aware that he’s yelling and he’s aware that he’s moving in to physically silence the younger pilot if he gives the wrong answer. He’s never felt more off balance in his life. That may be why he doesn’t chance letting Junsu speak out. “I made an error of judgment. You want to transfer? Fine, go ahead.”

“Yeah, you made an error,” Junsu agrees, ignoring every boundary that should make this argument impossible, and grips his forearm in a strong grip. “Why didn’t you fucking push for a rescue operation? My friend’s bones are scattered somewhere on that rock and we’re just going to forget about it? Pretend it didn’t happen? What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

Yunho jerks away, shoving the other man’s shoulder, shoving him into the door. “You son of a bitch… I couldn’t do anything!” It’s a weak excuse and it leaves his lungs on a half-sob, his own powerlessness bittersweet to taste. “I can’t… There’s more important things at stake…”

“More important things?” Junsu repeats, shoving back, shoving rank aside and getting down to blows. “Like the fucking useless mission we got sent on?”

He can’t deny it, can’t defend his superiors against this disregard for human life. Changmin was one of theirs and they let him down. In return, they have nothing but wasted ammo. She hasn’t been caught, She’s nowhere in sight. Command feels no guilt, yet Yunho is drowning in it. His shoulders slump dejectedly. He has no answer.

Junsu senses this. He’s always been led by his instincts.

“It’s not my place to say these things. I just…” He doesn’t finish, but Yunho can swear he knows what he means to say. ‘I want him back’. And God, he can relate to that.

“Head out to debrief,” he advises softly, voice barely above a whisper as he turns away. The photographs plastered above his bunk show images of home, of training. Rooks who barely made it into the black, now most of them dead. There’s not a picture of Changmin, not among his things. He doesn’t even have that.

Equally soft, Junsu seizes the question of the moment in his grasp. “What will you do now?” It’s no secret to anyone on the Acheron that he can’t go on like this.

Yunho shrugs, plucking open the door to his locker, hesitating in front of the one labelled Shim. He opens it anyway.

“Yunho?” presses Junsu and for a moment, his voice sounds like his friend’s. Like Changmin’s.

Then again, it may be the twice-folded snapshot Yunho finds on the top shelf. It shows Changmin smiling at the camera, his arm around an old woman’s shoulders. His mother, perhaps? Yunho can’t be sure, he never asked. He never cared.

It’s Junsu who comes to his aid, perching over his shoulder to get a better look. “I think that’s his grandma. She used to be a priestess before the old regime fell. That’s why she’s wearing that headdress.”

There’s no date at the back, so it could be that Junsu is right. He wonders if the old woman’s still alive, if she’s waiting for her grandson to come home one of these days. The thought makes cold fingers clench around his heart. If he stays, it’ll be his duty to make that uncomfortable visit when they make port again.

If he stays… He can’t be sure exactly when the thought of leaving entered into his thoughts. Today, yesterday, a second earlier. But it’s there now and it won’t be silenced. It changes. What used to be ‘if he stays’ is becoming ‘if he goes’ and the list of consequences is endless and horrible. His family will never forgive him. No one will.

Except, maybe, for Junsu.

“I’m going to clean up his locker and put his things into storage,” he’s saying and Yunho understands. Someone else will take Changmin’s place. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, slowly, his locker will bear a different name; his place in formation will be written under a different call sign on the charts.

He can’t live with that.

“You’re missing your debriefing,” he sighs when he feels Junsu’s breath on the back of his neck. “I’ve told you already, I’m not going.” Not in that direction, at least.

“Fuck that,” the younger pilot sighs, his hand warm on his Captain’s shoulder. “I don’t care about anything the Commander has to say anymore. They fucked up one too many times.”

Is it that easy, he wonders? Is it that easy to give up his life’s work? Then again, what life’s work? He’s only twenty-seven. There’s years ahead of him if the rebels don’t blow him to pieces. Somehow, he thinks he’s got a better shot when not flying Imperial colours in a fighter craft.

Hexagons of green light change the time. Six-thirty.

Junsu’s face is too close, too dark. The neon light flickers overhead.

“What are you going to do?”

Yunho shrugs, as if it’s evident. As if he’s been waiting for this question all his life.

“I’m going to bring our friend back.”

***

It is unnaturally still.

Not a silence, but an absence of sound, heavy and oppressive, bearing down on him from all sides. His bare feet make imprints in a marble floor, the hard surface slipping away like beach-white sands, leaving a trail of footprints in his wake. There is a flash of dark and a blinding smile and he is running, the floor falling out under his feet.

Yunho, he calls, the cry lost to the vacuum that surrounds him, swallowed whole and he’s pushing through the dense fog that’s taking shape. Becoming figures without faces, blocking his path, shoving and pressing at him from all angles, even as he tries to claw through them.

Yunho, and the man is turning away, features still, liquid like the swipe of a painter’s brush, fluid and slipping through the barricades, slipping from his sight and he makes a lunge and is falling falling---

There are grunts in his ear, heavy and male, and rough sheets under his cheek. Hands so familiar press against his back, holding him to the mattress as he’s driven into, as he writhes and turns and sees that form, that body, that gaping hole where a face should be-

Changmin wakes with a start and in a cold sweat, slumped against cool stone and still cuffed. Still imprisoned. He takes a steadying breath, eyes falling shut again and for a moment, he thinks he’s still in the dream, the sound of low moans reaching his ears.

Eyes open and he twists, dry lips parting in shock as he takes in the sight.

A man, bare-chested and covered in tattoos, holding a whimpering woman against the wall, hand fisted in her hair and fucking her roughly. Raping her. Changmin watches as her hands scrabble at the stone, a choked “you bastard” falling from her lips.

The man growls in response, pushing her face against the rough surface.

Chivalrous fury writhes in his chest, and suppressing the grunt of pain, he pushes himself to his feet, back against the wall for leverage. Changmin moves towards them, features dark with anger, with hatred for these monsters and with utter terror that this may be his own fate.

“Get off her, you fucking savage,” he spits, the man’s black gaze moving to him for the barest of seconds.

“Mind your own business, boy,” is the retort, another harsh thrust to punctuate the words and frustration washes over him. His hands are bound where the other man’s aren’t, and if he picks a fight, it’s most likely one he’ll lose. But he’s not going to sit here and do nothing.

A snarl on his features, he shifts his weight and delivers a vicious kick to the back of the man’s knee, stumbling backward and off balance.

With a cry, the larger man crumples, pants slipping from his hips even as he stands, his sex still erect and fury in his eyes and Changmin backs away until he hits the wall, heart pounding wildly in his ear. Focus. A kick to the groin and the bastard will go down like a stone.

He’s bracing himself for an attack when the sound of keys jangling in the lock diverts his attention, enough for the man to get in one good hit to his jaw before he’s dragged off of him. Changmin is crumpled against the wall, mouth bloodied, when hands take a hold of his good arm, dragging him from the cell.

It’s the men from before, the ones who’d found him. The slighter of the two looks concerned, whilst the other simply pulls him along, pushing him ahead of them into a small, windowless room. And even he knows what this is.

An interrogation room.

His shoulder gives out a bright spark of pain as he’s shoved into a chair, a soft jumble of words coming from the pretty boy’s lips. It almost sounds like a warning and he watches their eyes connect, the other man giving a dismissive snort.

They move toward him and he’s tilting himself back in the chair, defiance etched on his features. “Stay the hell away from me,” he snarls, sitting up straighter. Prideful. “Find another gangbang. You try and touch me and I’ll kill you.”

There is a startled silence, those dark gazes meeting once again and Changmin can swear they’re communicating through their thoughts, words a distant formality. Not that he understands their words when spoken aloud.

Deceptively soft eyes meet his, bending down, the slap to his cheek a harsh counterpoint.

“Where are they?” It’s asked firmly, coldly, the tone leaving no room for lies.

Changmin stays stubbornly silent, eyes boring into the other man’s, even as another blow splits open his cheek. “I asked you a question. Where are they?”

“Yoochun…” comes the soft reproach, the doe-eyed man inches away, watching without expression. There is no tone to his words, nothing to indicate disapproval, but it’s how the man, Yoochun, seems to hear it.

“Dammit, Jaejoong. What?”

A slight incline of the chin. “He’s just a child.”

Changmin bites down on the automatic protest, clenching his teeth. Arrogance almost wanting to prove that he is a threat, but even he has limits to his stupidity, checking himself before he can make this a hell of a lot worse. They want to pity him, let them. It will be in his favor.

“A child who shot down three of our people, unless you forgot,” Yoochun retorts, not buying it in the least and Changmin both resents and respects him for it. “Kwan, Oka, Sunho…all gone.”

The steps forward would seem menacing on any other, but the reception of the accusation deflates the threat and for a moment, it’s as if he ceases to be in the room. Another silent, furious conversation and a tilt of the head and suddenly the focus of the room’s charge is back on him.

A cruel hand wrenches at his injured shoulder even as Jaejoong murmurs, “They left you behind, didn’t they.”

There is no rise to the words, no real volume, and yet he hears them through the scream that tears from his throat.

“Fuck you,” he spits, eyes blazing, knowing he should keep silent. Unable to.

The fey man moves to stand behind him, leaning down to whisper in his ear. “They left you.”

Another wrench to his shoulder and he’s screaming himself hoarse, tears leaking from under his eyelids. It’s not true. Yunho, Junsu…they wouldn’t have. They couldn’t have. Junsu was his best friend, his confidant since the Academy, he wouldn’t just forget him. And Yunho…

“They left you.”

Changmin chokes, hanging his head, even as soft words pass in a foreign tongue, Yoochun exiting the room after a moment’s hesitation.

“Where are they, dongsaeng?” comes the quiet entreaty, the long-forgotten word of affection hitting him like a blow.

“Go to hell,” he grinds out, raising his head to sneer at the other man, his words having no effect but a soft, almost disappointed sigh, the slim man turning to leave the room, bootheels clicking on the stone.

The door shuts with a heavy clang, darkness surrounding him.

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