reverberations [secondary]
[BEFORE] [MASTERLIST]
- SECONDARY
Jiho is stumbling down a muddy oxen path that curves in haphazard slips through the woods. Dusk is already on him, deepening the trees’ violet shadows to indigo and sending strange sounds skittering through the underbrush. He wants to stop and investigate, but he doesn’t have time. Rain shuttles down in an early-summer typhoon that leaves his face dripping and hair plastered to the back of his neck. No part of his body is dry anymore.
He’s so dizzy he can hardly stand.
Every step jars the wound on his side, that aching fist in his chest that he can only breathe shallowly around. Warmth pools around the wound, and he’s sure the cotton clothes underneath his armor are stained dark red. He clutches his side, dismayed that when he pulls away, his hand is dripping with red for a moment, before the thick rain washes it clean.
The woods level out into a valley, cleared out into wide, rain-soaked fields. It’s early summer and they’re low with crop, deserted in the coming night.
Jiho falls near an irrigation ditch and digs his hands into the muddy water, scooping it up towards his face. The movement jars him and he coughs hard, gripping to the slippery bank with one hand. The pain in his side tightens until blackness appears around the edges of his vision. He gasps for breath. Bloody spit catches on his glistening hand, and when he gets his breath back it’s even shallower than before.
For a moment, wildly, he thinks that he’ll pass out into the ditch, but the pain subsides after a few long, breathless minutes. Rain beats down on the back of his bowed head and the shoulders of his armor and fills the air with sound. He feels too weak to move, barely able to sit up on his own. He’s completely alone in the empty fields.
Perhaps he’ll die out here.
The thought is enough to get him to rise, shaking, to his feet. He can barely keep upright as he stumbles towards the farm houses in the distance, at the edge of the fields. In the heavy dusk and shadowed by the thickening rain, their whitewashed sides glow oddly, almost entreatingly, soft beacons that direct him forward.
But when someone rounds the corner of the nearest house, Jiho immediately stills and yanks his short sword out from the sheath at his hip.
The boy, barely out of his teen years, drops the pile of the sticks in his arms and holds up his hands. He can’t be much older than Jiho, with his thin hands and big black eyes, but to Jiho, his innocent face looks like a child’s.
Even with his vision swimming with pain, he knows it’s Jaehyo.
“Where is the doctor?” Jiho rasps out, barely able to speak. Rain sluices over his face, running into his grip on the sword’s handle.
Jaehyo stares at him, and his gaze is less frightened now, more calculating. His eyebrows furrow as his eyes trace over the dagger wobbling in Jiho’s grip. They settle on the wound on his side and the huge stain of blood it has formed through his armor.
“The doctor!” Jiho yells, but it comes out as a groan as the pain tightens like a fist in his chest. He realizes he can’t hold himself up only a moment before his knees go weak and give out. The dagger falls from his grip.
In that split second, Jaehyo rushes forward towards it, diving down. As he collapses, Jiho thinks that this is it. To be killed by his own dagger, how fitting; a traitor for the coward he turned out to be.
Jaehyo catches Jiho hard around the middle and lowers him to the ground. His hands dig into the armor stretched over Jiho’s shoulders and his body cushions Jiho’s from the muddy ground. Jiho barely has enough time to be surprised before the pain stretches up his spine and blacks his mind out.
-
Time goes funny for a while, then, stretching long in the darkness of his mind and speeding up in the short bursts where he’s awake. It should be backwards, flipped around, somehow the other way, but being awake is more dreamlike than the odd nightmares that crowd the darkness.
Jaehyo watches over him, sometimes, wakes him with soft words and soft hands on the wound on his side. He soothes Jiho back to sleep, putting water past his lips or slips of soup, just enough warm broth to keep Jiho alive.
Once, Jiho wakes in the middle of the night with tears slick across his face and Jaehyo is there, hands pressing on Jiho’s chest and curling around the back of his neck.
“Shh, it’s okay,” Jaehyo whispers, voice lower than Jiho remembers. Remembers? They’ve never met before. His dark eyes flicker with the light of the lamp in the corner, his fine features thrown into shadow. Jiho can’t remember what he was dreaming about, though his heart is racing and his eyes burn with tears. The pain from his side has spread across his entire torso like a disease. Somehow, Jaehyo’s voice sets his heart back to its original pace, and his hands are soft across Jiho’s skin. “Go back to sleep, it’s okay.”
Jiho doesn’t know why he believes him, but he does.
Sometimes Jiho wakes in the day, when the light is thick through the open door, and Jaehyo is gone.
The first time it happens, he panics and tries to stand. He isn’t sure if he’s going to find Jaehyo or trying to escape, but when he begins to rise, that latent pain sears through him and slams him back on the straw mattress, gasping for breath. The blackness finds him easily, then, and he doesn’t dream.
The next time he wakes, it’s just barely dawn. Across the packed dirt floor of the hut, he can see Jaehyo curled up on another mattress. His face is smashed up against a round pillow and the slow rise and fall of his chest tells Jiho that he’s asleep. Jiho’s armor is stacked by his feet, cleaned of the dirt and blood that had caked it for weeks.
Jiho feels more lucid than he has in days and the pain in his side has faded to just a continuous throb, more of a reminder than a hindrance. He pushes himself up slowly, groaning.
Jaehyo stirs on the opposite mattress, and he wakes in slow starts, until he is blinking sleepily at Jiho for a few moments, hair mussed from sleep and clothes in disarray around his shoulders.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, voice low but enough to carry across the small room. His Silla accent is almost so strong Jiho can’t understand. It just reminds him that here he is, in enemy territory, and Jiho’s heartbeat kicks up, throbbing through his skin.
But Jaehyo rises sedately and comes over to kneel by Jiho’s side, slight fingers finding the edges of the bandage wrapped around Jiho’s waist. Somehow, the touch barely hurts. Jiho wonders how long he’s been asleep.
Jaehyo peels the bandage from his side and the pungent stink of cut flesh and medicinal herbs almost makes Jiho gag. He thinks he should want to fight back, but Jaehyo isn’t even looking at him and doesn’t seem to be asking for permission. “Ah,” Jaehyo says, reaching out and quickly fixing a few things. When Jiho looks down at it, stomach heaving, the wound looks a lot better than before. Even under the poultice spread across it, he can tell that it’s already healing.
“Are you the doctor?” Jiho asks, and his voice sounds strange, it’s been so long since he last spoke. His voice is so different from Jaehyo’s, the accent gruff and unchanged through his years in the military. He worries that his voice will give him away, but there’s nothing in the set of Jaehyo’s shoulders that betrays a misgiving.
Jiho supposes if a dagger threatening didn’t dissuade him, a voice might be too weak to.
“Yes. Or his son.” Jaehyo’s eyes flick up to him and he smiles. He’s so young, and in the soft, dawn light, he’s beautiful.
Desperately, Jiho wants to laugh, but the action catches over the wound and he groans as pain lances across his skin and up the arch of his back. Darkness curls at the edges of his vision until he can barely hold onto consciousness and his breaths fall shallowly in his chest.
He knows some men in the military take each other for lovers, and there are whispers of special sections of the brothels that hide the pale, painted faces of boys instead of women, but he’s never allowed himself to venture that far into his fantasies. Panic clutches at him. He can’t start now. Not here.
Jaehyo’s hands slip across his skin and up to his face, long fingers pressing into the cut of his cheekbone and over the thick beat of his blood in his neck.
“Are you alright?” Jaehyo whispers, the press of his fingers over the quickening pace of Jiho’s heartbeat. Somehow, the touch incites him and calms him at the same time. “Does it still hurt?”
Jiho clenches his jaw, trying to ignore how close Jaehyo is. “I’m fine,” he says, trying to force himself up further. Jaehyo’s hands grip his shoulders tightly and force him back on the bed, and he should protest, shouldn’t let this happen to him, but he goes, relaxing back until Jaehyo releases him.
“I should go,” Jiho protests in a weak voice, but Jaehyo just shakes his head and starts to work on rewrapping the wound. He doesn’t want to go back, he doesn’t know why he’s saying this, except wouldn’t it be strange that he didn’t think of doing so? “I need to get back to my encampment, they’ll be waiting-“ but Jaehyo shakes his head again, sharper this time. He isn’t looking at Jiho, but there’s something in the corner of his gaze that seems sharp, scared. It’s that look that keeps Jiho lying back across the pallet, the idea that Jaehyo might be scared for him.
“You can’t go back yet,” Jaehyo says, his voice more authoritative this time, as he secures the wrapping around Jiho’s waist. “You’re not even close to healed. You need to rest.”
Jaehyo gives him something after, that makes his head feel woozy and holds down his limbs like wood, and he falls into an uneasy sleep, full of dreams of soft touches and the sharpness of cold rain.
-
He stays two weeks or more in that dark room, lying in bed. The days pass in a strange tempo of heavy, medicated sleep, and hours spent alone while Jaehyo is out, tending to his other patients. Jiho isn’t allowed outside while the sun is still out, and rarely even when it isn’t, so he spends too much time lying on the pallet on the floor, cataloguing the sun against the rough walls and thinking about things he has no business to be thinking about.
He and Jaehyo spend hours tucked together in that little room, whenever Jaehyo isn’t called away or Jiho isn’t put to sleep. Sometimes they talk, of their lives, of Jaehyo’s patients, his friends, anything but the war they both know is going on so close by. There are mentions in the village, Jiho knows, of the battles fought many li away, of the resources that are being called for. Jaehyo doesn’t talk about it, sometimes just mentions the outrage that people express over the capture and confiscation of goods at the markets they frequent, how there are suddenly more soldiers than ever before, but refuses to talk of more.
Jiho knows he should care about these things, should press Jaehyo for more information about the battles being fought, but he’s lost whatever interest he might have had. In the dark of Jaehyo’s room, the memories of his encampment seem far away. Sometimes he’ll awake in the night, held down by the overwhelming sleep but mind racing with memories of blood on his skin, rain thick in his eyes, and mud up to his knees. When he falls back asleep, he finds his throat dry in the morning and the soft smile of Jaehyo enough for him, for now. He doesn’t want to worry Jaehyo by asking about something he isn’t sure he wants to know.
Jaehyo helps him get up in the dark of the morning, when the stars are still sharp on the horizon and dawn hasn’t made its way onto the sky, and takes him outside. The pain is so bad the first few days that Jiho can’t even stand without Jaehyo’s shoulder under his arm, but as the days pass, his feet become more steady on the ground and he can shuffle around the little courtyard with Jaehyo watching, dark eyes tracing over him as he walks.
It should worry him, the intent way that Jaehyo watches him when he speaks, or the way that he can’t stop himself from watching as Jaehyo prepares food for them both, his dark head bowed, or at the quickness of his long fingers as he changes Jiho’s bandages. There is something beneath the ease of their words to each other, a troubling undercurrent that Jiho can’t get a grasp on. It does something odd to him, unfurls something in his chest that is hot and somewhat quick like a wound, but too sweet to be from a knife or poison. It makes Jiho want to call across the short distance of the room to Jaehyo’s form at night, ask him in soft words to come closer, curl up with him, and he doesn’t understand it.
Another typhoon gathers in the faraway ocean and blows in one night, sending heavy rain scattering over the little front yard of Jaehyo’s house. Jaehyo is out most of the time and he doesn’t come in for hours yet, until the beat of the rain against the tile of the roof has become a constant murmur of sound that Jiho’s thoughts about Jaehyo bounce back and forth from, trapped as they are, as he is.
Jaehyo is dripping wet when he returns, his clothes completely soaked through. There’s something different in the set of Jaehyo’s expression that’s amplified by his wet hair plastered to his neck, seriousness marking the corners of his eyes, and he barely greets Jiho when he comes in.
As he strips off his wet clothes, Jiho swallows and tries to look away. But his eyes track back and follow the perfunctory movements as Jaehyo pulls the cotton and silk from his shoulders, leaving him in just his pants, his shoulders dotted with rain.
Desire races through Jiho and he wants to stand and cross the room, press his face in between Jaehyo’s shoulder blades. He wants to lick at the skin, cool still, until it warms under his mouth and he can taste Jaehyo. It’s so sudden and he wants Jaehyo’s breath to hitch and for him to turn until they’re so close and maybe he can cross the space between their mouths.
The shot of arousal that hits his stomach is so sudden and strong he feels his muscles clench, and he has to look away. They’re on the verge of something and Jiho can’t make himself stop, though he knows that he needs to.
“Hey, want me to check your side?” Jaehyo asks, and Jiho looks over again to see him fully dressed. Jaehyo smiles, but his eyes are dark and he’s watching Jiho more closely than usual.
That feeling unfurls between them, like a crane’s wings preparing for flight. It feels too big for Jiho’s chest, but he rises slowly and starts to unwrap the cotton tie around his waist. Jaehyo’s hands are steady and sure as they always are as they arc across his skin, checking at the edges of the wound where it has begun to heal.
Goosebumps rise all along his ribs and pebble his nipples, and he has to suppress a shiver at the touch. Jaehyo is standing so close that he can smell the slight touch of rain in his hair, mixed with the lower, musky scent of his skin. He wants to press closer and bury himself in that smell, but then Jaehyo looks up.
Jiho doesn’t know what to say, feels the words crawl back his throat and block it up.
“Are you okay?” Jaehyo asks, his voice loweredd. His hands are still on Jiho’s sides and Jiho wants, but he’s afraid of this, afraid of everything this might be and he can’t make himself speak.
So he just nods, and Jaehyo slips away. His heart sinks in his chest, at the way that Jaehyo doesn’t press him for anything more. Perhaps he doesn’t want it? and the fear of that truth makes Jiho silent.
They eat dinner together but there’s an undercurrent of awkwardness now that Jiho can’t push through. Jaehyo smiles and tries to be normal, but they both feel it. It’s the first night that Jiho thinks that maybe he should leave. But even for that, his courage has fled.
-
The attack comes in the night, two days later. Jiho wakes to a sense of unease that seems unsupported by the quiet pre-dawn. Jaehyo, across the softly-lit room, sleeps on. Jiho rolls slowly to his feet, shedding the blanket and supporting himself on the wooden wall as he makes his way towards the door.
When he steps out into the small courtyard, the unease tightens into a sharp sense of apprehension. The typhoon has cleared and left the fields full and the ground rife with puddles. Their glassy surfaces reflect the light of a weak moon, and the air is thick with petrichor. The world is still around him, even the breeze put to rest by the night, but something grates at his skin, like he’s missing something.
He turns, and the soft shadows across the wide swath of wet fields ripple with something like intent. Before he knows what he’s doing, Jiho has pressed himself to the wall of the house. It’s so dark he can barely see the soldiers crossing towards the village, the darkness of their armor bleeding into the night, but he can hear the thick sound of their footsteps growing closer.
He lurches into the house, ignoring the sharp ping of his healing wound, his heart slamming in his chest. Jaehyo is still sleeping on, oblivious. It won’t be dawn for hours yet, but they don’t have that time.
If only there was more time-
He falls onto his knees and grips Jaehyo’s shoulders softly, trying to keep his touches light. Jaehyo tenses and then rolls over, mussed from sleep and his voice thick with it. Jiho wants to kiss him, those dark eyes still half-closed, but-
“What is it?” Jaehyo mumbles, still caught up in sleep, before he seems to catch something in Jiho’s expression. “What’s wrong? Are you alright?” he sits up abruptly and reaches out for Jiho’s torso, his eyes suddenly more alert.
“We need to go, right now,” Jiho says, voice sharp, catching Jaehyo’s hands in his and starting to rise. “They’re here, right now, we need to go-“ Jaehyo rises more slowly, even as Jiho pulls at him, confused.
“Who- who’s here?”
Jiho keeps leading him towards the door but Jaehyo is beginning to pull back from his grip.
“Soldiers,” Jiho bites out, trying to keep ahold of Jaehyo but unable to. “Goguryeo soldiers. Our soldiers. They’re here and we need to go,” but Jaehyo pulls away from him completely, then, looking horrified.
“Soldiers,” he repeats in a quiet voice. “If that’s true, then-“
Jiho pushes in close and bundles Jaehyo up into his arms, before he starts to pull him towards the door. Desperation tries to mask his voice, but he says, “We can’t wait. We have to go right now.”
Jaehyo pushes himself from Jiho’s arms. “What if they’re injured? I can help them-“
“No!” Jiho yells, and the cry is sharp enough that Jaehyo looks caught out, surprised. “That’s not why they’re here,” he says, and he reaches out for Jaehyo but Jaehyo jerks away, spins around and starts to look for his supplies.
Jiho’s vision starts to narrow down to nothing as the panic grabs at his throat. They need to go, now. He grips Jaehyo’s wrist, holding him back from his strips of cotton and bottles of various medicines.
“That’s not why they’re here,” he says, trying to pull at Jaehyo, convince himself of something he’s known deep in his gut. “They’re here to destroy this village and we don’t have time,” but Jaehyo elbows him away, hands compiling his medicines. His hands are shaking but his eyes are fierce as he turns to glare at Jiho.
“All the more reason to stay. These are my friends and-“
Jiho opens his mouth to protest when a long, high scream makes them both pause and look over at the door. A stripe of unease flares all down Jiho’s spine; he recognizes that sound.
“Let’s go, please,” he pleads, voice shaky. There’s bravery and there’s stupidity, and this is definitely the latter.
Jaehyo strides towards the door and Jiho follows, barreling towards him in one last act of desperation. He slams into Jaehyo’s back, arms tightening around Jaehyo’s torso until they’re fully crushed together, Jaehyo’s back to his front. Through the thin cotton over Jaehyo’s chest, Jiho can feel his heartbeat, thrumming quick through his veins, and his breaths rise and fall under Jiho’s hands.
“Please,” Jiho asks, face buried in Jaehyo’s neck. Seconds pass, shouldered in together. “Please, don’t.”
Jaehyo’s breath hitches and Jiho slides his arms more tightly around him.
Then Jaehyo pulls himself from Jiho’s grip and turns. There’s something in his gaze that Jiho can’t read, though his heart falls at what it must mean.
Jaehyo reaches out and cups his face, warmth in his dark gaze. He looks prepared to say something, but the words are lost. “I-,” he starts, then surges forward into Jiho’s space. He kisses Jiho hard on the mouth, all of his normal delicacy gone.
Jiho grabs for him, holds him fast there even when Jaehyo pulls back briefly, mouth red, mumbling, “Sorry, sorry,” before leaning in to kiss him tenderly. Jiho kisses back, licking into Jaehyo’s mouth and opening him up until their tongues can slide against each other, hot. A burning lick of arousal slides down Jiho’s chest and curls in the pit of his groin and he moans around the feeling, desperate, greedy for more.
All of his fears from before have fled in the wake of this kiss, the way that Jaehyo grabs at his shoulders, slides his hands up and into Jiho’s hair, holding him in place.
But then Jaehyo pulls himself away a moment later, eyes wild and mouth slick with Jiho’s kiss. He makes an incomprehensible noise when Jiho reaches for him again, and turns to disappear out the door. Jiho reaches for him, but he’s not fast enough.
A different kind of desperation pours cold over Jiho’s skin. He swears and dives for his sword, propped up against the wall near Jaehyo’s bed and his long-untouched armor. There’s no time to put it on now, so he just runs out after Jaehyo, fear running cold through his veins.
The village is small and pressed compactly in together, but Jiho has never made it further than Jaehyo’s little courtyard. He loses Jaehyo easily in the dark corridors of houses pressed in together. The village is waking up quickly, he can tell, the faint lights flickering to life in windows passing, the sounds of confused voices raising behind mud-thick walls.
Another scream pierces the night, and Jiho swings towards it as it’s followed by another, harsher, screaming voice.
A darkly-clad soldier appears out of the darkness, flanked by two more. Jiho throws himself into hiding mere seconds before they pass, breath held in his throat.
Heart thrumming in his ears, Jiho threads through the village, towards the raised voices. He can hear doors being shoved open and more raised voices break the spell of night. He rounds the entrance to a large courtyard, flanked by an ornate gate. Fire blazes in the corner of his vision and soldiers push into the wooden doors of a large farmhouse, lit branches in hand or swords unsheathed.
A woman, grey-haired and disheveled, is screaming at a soldier in the center of the courtyard. She reaches out to beat on his chest and faceplate with her bare fists as she yells into his face. There’s a man, too, on the floor, blood pooling around the body. For a moment, blind panic paralyzes Jiho. But it’s not Jaehyo.
Jaehyo is crouched next to the man on the ground, hands pressing into the wound on his chest. His arms glimmer in the low light with dark liquid, and his white linen pants are already stained with blood.
The soldier shoves the woman off and steps towards Jaehyo. Jiho sprints into the courtyard before he can think, not breathing. The soldier grabs Jaehyo by the front of his tunic and yanks him up and Jiho has stripped the sword of its scabbard and lands a striking cut to the back of the man’s knee, where the armor doesn’t cover.
Blood spurts from the wound and he drops Jaehyo, sword raising, but Jiho lunges the blade upwards, cutting into the soldier’s throat. It’s so easy, so horrifyingly easy as blood spurts in a surprising rush from the man’s throat, against his control, spilling down his throat and over his dark armor. Jiho’s learned these moves from birth and even in battle he couldn’t find the heart to fight another man, had run at the first wound he received, and yet here he is.
Surprised numbness blackens Jiho’s thoughts.
I killed a man.
He turns to look at Jaehyo, who is staring up at him, open-mouthed.
“Let’s go,” Jiho whispers. He is barely able to speak. There’s a constant wail in the background and the buildings are burning and all of this is chaos they need to break free from. Smoke is beginning to fill Jiho’s lungs and burn at the corners of his eyes, sharp and acrid.
Jaehyo stands on shaky legs, hands grasping at Jiho’s arm. Blood from the man on the floor seeps into the cotton of his shirt. Jiho thinks he’s going to collapse himself but- but first, they need to get themselves out of here.
The others have seen them, he knows. He half-drags Jaehyo towards the winged entrance, adrenaline making him numb to everything else but that dark portal to somewhere else, towards freedom.
More time-
We just need more time.
The first soldier rounds Jiho on the right and Jiho drops Jaehyo’s wrist from his grip. He fights on instinct, on drills woven deep into his muscles through years of training, on fear that tightens his throat and narrows his gaze. The soldier falls and Jiho is bleeding from the thigh but he can’t feel it, and yet when he turns Jaehyo is on the ground.
Darkness has bloomed across his chest, the white of his cotton nightshirt disappearing under a fast-growing pool of dark liquid. Jaehyo is staring up at him, blinking slowly, his hands pressing into the wound on his chest.
Jiho can’t breathe.
The soldier standing over Jaehyo steps towards Jiho and he lunges forward in response, mind gone blank. Emotion crushes at him, trying to find a way through the numbness, but there’s nothing left but instinct.
He forces that soldier to fall, too, but his stomach is bleeding now, a larger wound cutting across the first and it’s almost a relief that a blow from behind knocks him down. He collapses on Jaehyo’s chest, hand pressed to that hot wound and the faint rise and fall of Jaehyo’s breath.
Tears glimmer at the edge of Jaehyo’s eyes, flickering across their dark expanse. His lips tremble.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispers, tears slipping past his lashes and sliding down his temples.
Jiho laughs, a little hysterical. Blood is draining from him, pooling into the front of his shirt.
“Me neither,” he says, pressing hard down on the wound on Jaehyo’s chest, but his arms are weak. Jaehyo is bleeding too fast. So is he, and there’s nothing to be done. “I don’t want to die alone,” he says, trying to laugh, but it comes out as a sob instead. Jaehyo jerks his hand up and grasps onto Jiho’s hand, the grip slipping a little because of all of the blood. He looks over at Jiho from the corner of his eye, another tear sliding down his cheek.
Jiho’s own breaths shallow and the pain is almost overwhelming. This can’t be the end, Jiho thinks, prays. This can’t be it, he demands. I need more time, he needs more time- we need time.
This can’t be it.
Jaehyo’s chest settles to a stop, his eyes half-open.
Let us meet again, for however long we can. Please, more time- Jiho thinks, before pain blots out the rest.
- ONE
He has the first dream that night.
Jiho won’t remember it, years later, that he wakes halfway into the humid darkness of a July night, covered all over in a fine sheen of sweat and heart beating a heavy, quick rhythm into his ears. He won’t remember only feeling an aching sense of dread that his sleep-heavy brain won’t be able to explain before the dim lights remind him that he’s here, alive.
In the darkness, he’ll still fear that the warm liquid sliding down his arms isn’t sweat, but the blood of someone he was supposed to help- supposed to save. And even when he raises his hands to his face and sees in the dim light of the apartment block opposite that they’re clean, and he lies down again, he won’t be able to sleep for a long time.
He won’t remember any of it- his heartbeat settling, the dream bleeding into the darkness like that blood, only wiped clean by sleep.
-
He won’t even remember that it’s Jaehyo in his dream, or that he dreamt at all.
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