[Jinki / Minho] In Me (5/7)
Rating: R
Warning: PTSD, gory descriptions, character deaths
Genre: broken!ship
Length: 4099 (this chapter)
A/N: Writing this story was not easy, and I don't imagine reading it will be either. Please take heed of the warnings, and do not venture into this if you suspect you'll be shaken by it.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4
The cannons of fate blew the ground around him to smithereens. Everywhere one turned, there was fire. Everywhere the eye searched, bullet shells littered the ground. Missiles were detonated, bombs were dropped, hidden knives came into the light and secret guns shot retreating backs. Young soldiers rushed forward from their trenches and were flung back by the force of the battle, their bodies falling and becoming lifeless.
Lee Jinki shot through a few people then gripped his helmet and waited out a barrage of bullets. Soil flew up and sprayed him with dust, rocks loosened around him and caved in the edges of the trench, blood seeped out of uniforms and watered the earth like a rain of thoughtless anger. Three years. Three years of his life had gone by and there was nothing to show for it besides the dirt in his boots and a now-permanent indent in his thumb from reloading guns. But they say he had saved a lot of lives by then, pulling the youngest recruits out of harm’s way, keeping them safe and telling them to stay invisible so they could go home alive. They say every solder tried their best to keep the youngest orphans from dying a stupid and horrible death. They also say all their efforts had been in vain because every time they saved one, another would fall through the teeth of oncoming massacre.
Everyday, Lee Jinki would meet a new face before the melee and everyday he would have to forget it, when its lifeless eyes started back at him with a macabre envy. How are you still alive? the eyes would ask. How have you not joined our ranks yet? Why do you not die?
We wondered too, and we liked to believe that Lee Jinki survived because of his love and longing for Choi Minho - because he wanted to come back to warm and welcoming arms that would envelope him and never let him go again. We like to believe in the power of love stories and how the hero always survives, always returns in the end to his beloved, his everything. We like to sigh and think this is the case with Lee Jinki.
But then we remember: this is not a love story.
When we look at him now, he is gentle, he is polite. When we encounter him at the grocer’s he smiles at us all, courteously bowing to us as he asks us to come back. When we turn and watch him return to his cleaning and his sweeping and his stock-taking, we see him as he wants us to see him. We see his clean clothes, his shaved face, his combed hair. He is an ideal man, an ideal citizen, an ideal human being.
But when a few foolish boys jostle him to the bar and try to force a drink to his lips, we see the other side of perfection. Even as Junghee yells for him to stop, even as the old ahjussi who runs the place hobbles over and pries them apart, even as we threaten to call the police… even then, Lee Jinki’s fists pound his oppressors’ faces until they are a bloody mess or loosened teeth and bloated eyelids. Then we shrink back in fear. Then we say, this is what helped him survive the War. And then we add, no, this is what helped him survive the monastery. But in our hearts we whisper the truth at the core of all this. Lee Jinki is dead. What we see before us in his body, in his form, is no more than a monster of our own making. We have concocted this beast. We have sculpted him from our most vile and most heinous natures.
Only Choi Minho could love a monster like that. But even he bore the brunt of all that hidden rage in Lee Jinki, some of us mutter under our breaths. Even an innocent like him would sport bruises sometimes, we seem to remember, as if remembering the last dregs of a recurring nightmare. Or perhaps that was all it was - a bad dream, a despicable work of fiction. Perhaps we are confused. It is hard to tell the difference. This story has gone on too long and resided too deep in our hearts that we cannot be sure anymore. We cannot differentiate between fact and fable.
So we ask for the truth.
Junghee nurses the few bruises on Lee Jinki’s face when she finds him. “What is wrong with you?!” she hisses as she pads cotton and iodine against his skin. He does not answer, just as he does not acknowledge the concern on her face. But she stays, watching as she cleans him up and stands back with an exasperated sigh. She stays like we stay, inspecting scrutinizing probing his very existence for something to console us. “Really,” she says more softly. “What’s wrong with you?” she reaches out to touch his arm, but he rejects the touch.
“What happened to him?” is the barter Lee Jinki strikes. An answer for an answer. His eyes are clear of any confusion. His mind is as piercing as his pronunciations. “Where is Minho?”
We blink. We look down at our feet because the day of reckoning is upon us. We hadn’t expected it to come so soon, so suddenly, in the middle of a night like any night. We didn’t think we would be cornered like this. In fact, things have been so mundane recently that when we woke up this morning, stretching out of our beds and padding to our bathrooms to look at ourselves in the mirror - when we studied our reflections and thought “maybe things are going to be better now”, or “maybe the past is finally behind us and we can move on.” When we smiled reassuringly to ourselves, we forgot that Lee Jinki still held on to the past we were trying to abandon--still held on to it by his teeth. We were stupid, and we forgot, and now Junghee must answer for us.
“You’ll wish you had that drink,” she scoffs at him. But she sits down on the pavement and lights a cigarette, motioning for him to join her.
***
Three years ago, a train arrived at our town. The first of many to follow. This town had never been on a railway route before, and the tracks that had been laid some time ago were finally being put to good use. The state had decreed that since its soldiers came from remote parts of the country, the least it could do to thank them was connect their hometowns together. When they came back, they wouldn’t be rewarded by hours of waiting for flights or ferries. They’d come straight home to their eagerly awaiting families.
And so, a train system was devised.
When we heard it would be operational soon, we expected good news. We expected victorious boys returning home. We expected a feast and a celebration. We expected all our worries to be washed away by the tears of reunion. So we swept the tracks clean of weeds. We polished them until they gleamed in the sun. We hung banners so our soldiers would be heartened even from a long distance away. We gathered with garlands, with kerchiefs waving above our heads, with corners of scarves wiping the corners of eyes. When the train came into sight, we applauded, we jumped, we hugged each other, and some of us flashed salutations. When the engine hushed and came to a halt and its following carriers squealed against the tracks, we held our breaths, clutched at our fronts, let out little whimpers of awaiting joy. But when the doors slid open and no one stepped out, we didn’t know what to do. We looked at one another and wondered if we should call out for our sons, our husbands, our brothers.
The bravest of us decided to board.
The state had decreed that a train system be organised, and we had lauded the idea until the first of the wretched things arrived: filled to the brim with the bodies of our young and deceased.
When the bravest of us decided to board, they alighted with pale faces and faint hearts. They warned us not to go looking. They told us it was pointless. They said it was a cruel joke. They barred us, physically held us back. But we went after our deepest suspicions, and then we regretted it.
We saw the flies on half-recognizable faces. We saw the footprints dried in blood. We saw the severed limbs and nameless uniforms and wordlessly open mouths. We saw the pile upon pile of what we had held in our arms once, breathing, beating: now no more than a heap of ash.
We ran, we retched, we cried, we shook our heads and held them with our hands. We beat our chests and we beat the ground. We wept to the skies, we wept to each other. We screamed and pulled and scratched and wailed. We were at once reduced to nothing. What had begun as a day filled with hope had deflated and lost all shape and meaning in our very grasp, even as we watched.
When the burials were completed, and the prayers were muttered, we returned home. We sat down, feeling robbed and ravaged. We turned to each other, the abuse of our souls showing on our skins. We wept some more, remembering sights we will never be able to fully erase. And then we lived on.
Or some of us did. Some became halves of their former selves. Some disappeared like wisps riding on the wind. Some turned to stone, unable to live and unable to die. A few others wondered if they could find a way to keep breathing, and when they discovered no answers, they gave up. Those who hadn’t left in a previous exodus decided it was time to make their exits. Wherever the road would take them, as long as it would lead them out of here, they could leave. The journey's end did not matter. It could be Seoul. It could be Gwangju. It could be Daejeon. They left, and they didn’t look back.
We didn’t stop them.
But on a night like any night, we remember. Choi Minho quietly left his bed and wandered out. We would’ve put our hand to his shoulder, told him to go back inside. Had we not been soundly asleep in our own beds, we would’ve said something. But he walked the streets barefoot towards an unlikely destination.
They found him the next morning, sleeping in Lee Jinki’s old bed at the monastery. Cobwebs hung low and sunlight dared not creep in between boarded windows. But Choi Minho had walked in there as if magnetized, fighting his parents’ pleas and pushing his brother’s admonishment away.
They couldn’t bring him back, so they let him live there. They couldn’t talk him out of it, so they let him clean the place up. They had nothing better to offer him, so they let him build a new future for himself.
Some of his friends from school helped, pulling out the boards, polishing the furniture, wiping the windows and mirrors. Old eomonis brought them food and drink in gratitude. Old ahjusshis patted their backs and congratulated them on showing initiative.
Choi Minho accepted their well-wishes and stowed them away in large cardboard boxes, along with the remnants of the old church’s old ways. He vowed to make it a place of renewed faith - not in a god, but in oneself. When we saw him outside, tending the trees back to health and waving to us, we gulped in the odd sense of relief in the air and we waved back. He vowed to bring purpose back to this town and he delivered, for every Sunday there were football matches in the yard instead of service in the hall. Cookies would be handed to everyone who stopped to watch. In the weekdays, at seven in the morning, Choi Minho would rise with the sun to toll the large old bell of the church and wake us up to a new day, a new tomorrow. In the afternoons he would walk around helping people with little chores like fixing a chair, or carrying out the rubbish, or repairing fences. It set an example for the remaining young children of the town. They forgot their uncertainty and followed him everywhere, looked up to him for friendship and advice. He became a beacon, of slowly returning normalcy, of slowly accepting our grief and venturing towards something else. Something lighter.
The War was ignored. Peace came upon us in a surprising and sprightly form. Young boys and girls once again roamed the streets. Townsfolk ventured out of their homes and confronted laughter, happiness - or whatever they could afford of it. Women wore make up again. Men remembered pleasant stories again. Serving your country was not an obligation anymore, but a choice. What became a compulsion in its place is the search for joy, for long-forgotten bliss. We all looked for our own contentment. We searched in the cracks of the streets and the bricks of the walls. We looked up at the skies and we stared down at rippling water. We let the sun burn us, we let snow pile in our driveways. We welcomed everything. We resented nothing. This town shed its old skin and was reborn.
So engrossed were we in it all, that we never noticed when Choi Minho vanished.
***
There is no Lee Jinki and no Choi Minho now.
There is only the voice of truth, as she sits on the curb, her skirt too short, her nails too long, her makeup too gaudy. She smokes her cigarette and stares at the man. He stares back, unabashed. We wait with bated breath. We wait and hope there is no storm coming so everything remains silent. All sound dies. The only thing that can be heard is Junghee.
“I remember your boy,” she says behind a cloud of nicotine. “Yeah, he was cute.” Her teeth flash with mischief and secrets. She takes another puff and her eyes narrow through the action, her cheeks hollow in. She makes soft rings of smoke and chuckles at them, her demeanor leisurely. Too leisurely. We grow impatient and nearly run out to shake her by the shoulders. But Lee Jinki doesn’t prod her, and this is his story. He is a placid lake, no urgency in a bouncing foot, no nervousness in a troubled lip.
So we follow his lead, and we keep still.
Junghee puts out her cigarette after many eons and sighs a heavy sigh, fingers smoothing her skirt and then linking over her knees. And suddenly she looks like her younger, childish self. “When they took you boys away,” she begins. “Things went to shit here.” Her head shakes and we mirror the action, our memories worn out tyres and our hands scabbed with discomfiture. “We lost a lot-of men, of peace, of confidence, of… we lost a lot and then we gained a lot. Gained a lot of graves, a lot of hysteria. This town,” Junghee motions to us. “It was ruined.”
The utterance holds the disappointment of a girl, who once wanted to reach for the stars but was swatted down by the hand of fate. She twists to face the man better and he continues to stare.
“Did you ruin it?” Junghee asks all of a sudden. “I don’t know. Did your leaving ruin it? Maybe,” she shrugs. “Did the church ruin it? I never liked that place. Never liked dressing up every Sunday morning when I could go out and play, but my mother-” she bites her lip, nods as if remembering a long-lost memory. “My eomma took us there all the time, me and my eonnie. Never liked it, but some old folk did. So it wasn’t that bad, I suppose.”
Lee Jinki doesn’t contest it. He doesn’t tell her about the beatings or the starvation or the possibility that he lost his mind in there, never to be regained. He keeps his words to himself, and we don't stand up for him either.
“But your little toy boy?” Junghee tilts her head meaningfully. “He ruined everything.”
Here and only here does Lee Jinki show dissent. “I loved him,” he simply states his argument, his body tense as if before a fight, his eyes full as if fury would spill from them in a blink, his tone sharp like a shattered mirror. “I loved him.”
“That’s right, you loved him,” she agrees, flashing her own anger. “I loved him, too. We all loved him. He was the purest, the kindest, he was never going to be touched by any of that out there,” she points at us, at this country, at the world. She points at the War. “We were going to make sure he was never touched by it. We kept him here, we didn’t let him leave. Not even when he was old enough, not even when that idiot brother of his went to fight. We didn’t let him go, not even when he begged us, when he asked us to let him go. To you.” Junghee leans in, challenge in her face. “You know why?” she hisses. “Because we loved him. And he loved you.”
Lee Jinki says nothing. We say nothing.
“He loved you, so we kept him safe for you. We protected him for you,” she eases up, then. Her hands prop her up on the sidewalk, and her legs stretch out, crossing themselves and rocking a little like she is at a picnic. “We thought-this guy. This Lee Jinki, he must really be something. He must either have a big heart or a big dick. Really, he must be a great guy if even a boy like Choi Minho says he can’t live without him.”
Boys like Choi Minho were beautiful. They would walk into our sights, beaming, shining, radiating love wherever they settled their eyes. And we would be drawn to them for it, for the love we were starved of our whole lives. Boys like Choi Minho made us hold ourselves dear: from the warmth of our chests, to the pulse on our throats, to the blood of our veins. They helped is live on.
Boys like Choi Minho were beautiful when they ran up to us in the street, bowed and took our burdens away, walked us to our doors. They were perfect in the way they would study our broken toasters, our broken bicycles, our broken hearts; the way they would handle everything with the care of a lover. The sun would shine against the sweat on their foreheads and the gloss of their lashes. And when they turned to us, smiling and holding out our fixed toasters and bicycles and hearts, we would smile back for the first time in many months. Boys like Choi Minho held the frayed ends of our minds and pulled--pulled with all their might so they could tie it all back together into one piece. So they could bring everything back to the way it used to be. Boys like Choi Minho were beautiful when they sat outside the church yard in the evenings, looking out to the mountains like trying to reach their pinnacles with vision alone. Sometimes, watching from a distance, we wished they would. Sometimes, as we hummed long-forgotten songs, as we flipped through dusty photographs, as we fingered thought nearly-faded books that were once dear to us, we find ourselves thinking of boys like Choi Minho; wondering if they arrive at their own scraps of peace while smiling for us. Boys like Choi Minho were beautiful when we saw them the last time, their bags hefted on their backs, their gazes sure of themselves, their jaws grit with decision. Boys like Choi Minho were beautiful when they turned around to look at us one last time, said I will bring him home, and waved goodbye.
We should never have waved back.
“I loved him,” Lee Jinki reiterates, like what he’s been told is impossible.
“Then you should’ve fought them! You should’ve run away from the draft! You should never have left!” Junghee yells at him, her face twisted in guilt and tears. She sinks in her place, and we reach out to touch her, but stop short.
“I… I loved him,” Lee Jinki insists, gripping Junghee’s sleeve and asking wordless questions.
“Then you should’ve taken him with you!” she lifts her head from between her hands and shouts. “How could you leave him here?! Do you know what it did to him to be away from you?! How could you make him like that? Did you really love him?” she demands.
Lee Jinki shakes, with shock with denial with pleas. “I loved him… Please, I loved him.”
“Then you should’ve come back sooner,” Junghee shakes as well, sobbing now and reaching for the man in return.
In her embrace, Lee Jinki breaks.
***
White puffy clouds floated across his vision, harbingers of oncoming rain. It would wash away the fatigue from his weary frame, and soon him and his brothers in arms would rise up to drag themselves back for a warm meal at the camp. Rocks prickled the back of his head, reminiscent of the grass back home, when he'd lie down and dream of better tomorrows. It felt good to think of home, to remember its brightness and its clean streets and its smiling, welcoming faces. In the distance, reeds stuck out around the bodies of fallen comrades, the stalks colored in blood and autumn. Seasons would stroll along these parts and pick up what they could. Time would continue to tick on wrists regardless of who fell and who got back up. So Lee Jinki remained there for a minute longer, breathing in and out as a habit.
He raised his hand and felt a cool zephyr waft through his stubby fingers. Closing his eyes, he absorbed the sensation.
A set of fingers closed around his extended arm.
Slightly surprised, he opened his eyes to look at the trace of humanity in a mass of ruthlessness. It had been months, perhaps years since someone had so much as touched him. When the grip pulled at him to stand, he allowed it to take control, happy to just follow someone, content to sense a living heat so close to him… holding him so kindly, radiating so much benevolence through his outstretched limb and into his chest. Long fingers bound around the sleeve of his uniform, finding purchase and exuding warmth from their tips even through the fabric. Their gentleness glided to his wrist and settled into his palm, a warm calloused thumb stroking his knuckles lovingly.
"Are you OK?" a gentle pair of lips asked him from behind a medic's mask.
The hand linked with his digits, comfortably housing itself in Lee Jinki's hold, the rough pads of the fingers feeling so familiar. He faintly felt the other’s heartbeat on those fingertips, pulsing in time with his. And his unraveled mind imagined their two hearts dancing in the middle of the battlefield.
"M-my shoulder..." Lee Jinki replied, expounding no more.
"Let me help you, then," the medic assured.
All the pain, all the suffering, every tear, every ache and every cry of anguish dissipated into the lazy wind. Sorrow became an unknown concept. Anger, loss, destruction… these made no sense anymore. Fear became non-existent. Lying and cheating sounded like alien notions. The War became a distant memory the minute their eyes met, considering one another unhurriedly. The world could end right then, but this glance would still go on. Lee Jinki gripped the other's hand tightly, like a tree setting its roots in soil, preparing to grow tall and large. He walked closer to the other as they headed for safety. As long as they were together, he knew everything would be OK. As long as they were together this War did not matter.
A few feet away, someone called out in agony. The medic made to move towards the voice, and Lee Jinki tugged him back. "Don't leave me," he shook his head.
"I'll be back before you notice I'm gone," a pair of sympathetic eyes smiled at him, and then the heat disappeared.
Perhaps the landmine had been expecting them. Perhaps it was dug too deep for them to have ever found it in their initial sweep of the land. Perhaps someone had made a dumb mistake. We don't know. We weren't there. But Lee Jinki scorched his eyebrows when it exploded. He fell back with the impact, hitting is head on a rock.
The sky was no longer blue, but an ugly pool of gray- filled to the brim with hate, full of chaos and despair. Dejection pooled out of his eyes.
He raised his hand and felt the hopelessness waft through his stubby fingers.
"No..." he pleaded.