Troops line up in front of a large, political corporate building; on their sides are their rifles, long, lean machines ready for armed combat. They stand like sticks in a matchbox, but their eyes move readily, watchful and observant of anything that seems like a threat. Sewn onto their dark green uniform’s collars are the well-known red insignias of the North Korean military, and they wear their uniform with pride and patriotism.

Amongst them is a new recruit, Oh Sehun.

Due to his late-father being the army’s commander, his conscription into the army was one birthed from tradition. At the young age of 17, he stands out in the cold, frozen into his position – with his chin up and his back straight. He’s been taught to follow rules and strict guidelines. To feel nothing – not even pain. The only feeling they are allowed is hatred, and that is for the enemy. They are forced to forget everything – everything, including remorse.

But Sehun is only a child compared to his counterparts.

He’s only been training for the past few months ever since his father’s death.

Previous to the threat of war, Sehun lived a sheltered life in his North Korean home. He would go to school as every other child, and come home to be welcomed by his parents and his older brother. There would always be a warm bowl of gimbap on the table when he got back, and in a way, he managed to find ways to escape the noose Kim Jong Il had around the nation.  

Some days, Sehun would go to visit the pond near his home in the country. There would be a flock of ducks on the water, and sometimes Sehun would have some bread to feed them. Days like those flew by so quickly that Sehun wound up staying till the evenings, just sitting on the bench as he watched the sunset. The orange, pink sky would never fail to astonish the boy, as he’d stare up to see the next fighter jet or passenger plane rush past him above. He wouldn’t admit this to his father, but he’s always been interested in flying. He’s kept it a secret because, really, he didn’t want to disappoint his family. They didn’t want Sehun to fly away from his home; they wanted him to fight with his country. In place of his dreams, Sehun looked at his father for inspiration. He followed Commander Oh, watching on the news as his father smiled, and shook hands with the country’s leader.

At the tender age of 6 he began visiting his father at the military base.

Sitting on the side with his feet swaying side to side, Sehun sipped the straw of his milk carton; watching wistful looking boys practice with guns that were bigger than the size of their hands.

Somewhere along the way 6 year old Sehun grew up.

Somewhere along the way, his dreams died.

A broad shouldered man walks out from the building, and the soldiers along the gate (including Sehun) turn and salute.

The man was Captain Jim-Sung, a naval officer, and following him was a man with evil eyes - General Ku – the head of air military. They saluted the recruits back, and took several steps down the stairway to meet with them. As they walked, they walked simultaneously – as if they were robots. Their eyes were sharp, and General Ku had his peak hat between his arm and his chest. The Captain was red all over, puffing his cheeks out furiously– and he barely looked down to see the steps he was walking on – his eyes dead set on the soldiers below.

In the line of soldiers, the current 28-year-old Commander in chief – Kim Jongin (a long time trainee under Sehun’s father’s league, who took over his post) and the divisions leader who was three years younger than him, Park Chanyeol – both took a few steps forward from the fleet to greet the men.

Their stances were like solid rock, and Sehun had to resist the urge to not cower away and hide behind someone.

Jongin quickly gestured for Sehun to follow him with a pointed finger, and Sehun took a shaky breath before doing as he was told. He stood, keeping his back as straight as he could – as he felt pairs of eyes staring into them.

General Ku shook Sehun’s hand before speaking, in a solemn tone that sounded well-rehearsed.

“I am sorry for your loss. Your father was a good man.” He said, as he shook Sehun’s hand slowly. His grip was loose, and it didn’t feel sincere at all – not that Sehun returned the favor.

Sehun merely nodded his head, looking down at his feet, before glancing up at Ku. He felt a cold shudder as he looked into the eyes of the general, and found in the elders eyes he found nothing but a vast empty blackness – akin to the depths of an ocean. Blank, cold and unnerving. The Captain was by his side, and repeated the verse – almost exactly as the General, and then they both turned to Jongin.

“Commander, we have gotten news that three Southern fighter jets have entered our homeland’s airspace.” The Captain said. His eyes told the story his words could not. It was an impenitent look, a look that said ‘kill them’ without any thought or hesitation.

“We are in a state of war.” There was a menacing spark in the Captain’s eyes, a look that looked dangerous to toy with.

The head of air military, General Ku also spoke.

“Take your best combat men on-foot to the area. Spare no survivors, unless you believe it is in our best interest to keep hostages.”

Jongin nodded twice. Once for understanding, and the second with agreement.

With that, Chanyeol picked a handful of his subordinates and they followed their journey out towards a small town east coast of the country where the jets sighting had been. Jongin joined them, and forced Sehun to come along with him because in Jongin’s words ‘a 17 year old is never an adult until he’s watched a man of enemy be killed in front of his own eyes’.  

Death in war is a procedure everyone had been grown into.

But Sehun thinks it’s actually because they’re living a life following rules that didn’t make sense.

-

Remembering is hard when memories burn.  

For Kris, it’s when his aircraft stops in mid-flight that time blurs into one and his memories turn to ashes.  

It was only moments ago when all three jets were in the air, flying side by side.

It was seconds ago, when Kris could hear Chen’s obnoxious laughter as they headed out racing towards their targeted destination.

But then it stopped. Chen’s laughter was cut off, and in its place Joonmyun’s screams to retreat rang through Kris’ ears.

They were in a situation no amount of training could have prepared them for. Out from the clouds appeared two sniper planes. The planes were painted red with its wing tips blue. Kris hadn’t noticed much, except for the all too familiar red star in a white circle – the enemy flag.

The jets first chase after Chen’s aircraft. Chen followed his instincts, and swerved smoothly to turn – almost taunting the enemy jets into sky combat. The jets obliged to Chen’s proposal, and locked their missiles onto the male’s plane.

Through his headpiece, Kris could hear Joonmyun yelling at Chen to turn back and fly back to base, anything – but provoke the enemy. But that’s the last of what Kris hears before watching Chen’ jet spiral down the sky – his right wing, blazing with fire. His jet nose dives down at an ungodly speed, whirring and clattering as pieces of metal tear apart.

Whatever Joonmyun commands after go to deaf ears, as Kris stays stationary in the sky. He hears the desperation in Joonmyun’s voice and the choked sob the elder tries to muffle isn’t missed. Kris’ fingers clasp around the steer, desperately clutching trying to hold on as if that would save Chen. His eyes are locked onto the burning fire pit below, but all he can see is Chen’s wide smile and glittering eyes. Sounds and shapes go hazy in Kris’ vision. He lets out a few jagged breaths, his chest heaving when he slowly comes back to reality. His body numbs, and he feels paralyzed.

It’s flight or fall.  

Kris does neither.

“TOWER COME IN! JET DOWN! DECLARE EMERGENCY! REPEAT, JET-991 DOWN!” Joonmyun yells over the violent blasts from the snipers, as he turns sharply to outfly the fighter. But what he doesn’t realize is that the second sniper is right ahead of him. Joonmyun’s life flashes before his eyes. He’s only 24 - and he thinks about all the life’s firsts he’ll never be able to do. He wonders about the life when there wasn’t a war. But then he thinks how ironic it is, dying in one.

But that is only for a split second.

Soon, there is a loud burst echoing through the aircraft. He thinks he’s screaming – but as he opens his mouth no sound comes out. There are warning signs lighting his dashboard, and tens or twenty alarms ringing from the bells in the cockpit. The jet blares with loud beeps, one after another, and there’s a sinking feeling in the bottom of Joonmyun’s stomach. He’s been through this dozens of times in the simulator – and one thing he knows for sure is that he’s never survived any of these stalls.

His jet hovers in the sky – both engines failed completely after being hit with the shooting missiles. He’s stalling, the control slipping from his fingers as he frantically clambers at the gears, and pulls the steer down to gain height. But it’s useless.

It’s flight or fall.

And Joonmyun is falling. Fast.

-

There’s a thundering sound that echoes across the forest, and the ground shakes violently. Sehun grips onto Jongin’s arm, his nimble fingers across the expanse of strong, stealthy arms and he doesn’t care how weak he looks, because leaves are flying viciously in front of them, and trees fall from their roots. It looks like the end of the world.

The thunder turns into crashing – a resounding heat circles them, engulfing the forest in flames of white and orange. The heat was searing, and Sehun watched as a few of the soldiers were flown away like bags in the wind. Of what looks like a crash site burns ahead, occasionally combusting, spiraling soot and burning material out of it aggressively. Sehun squints at the fiery pit, before flinching away violently. There is a heat pointed on his cheek, and Sehun buries his face behind Jongin’s back. He’s screaming in pain, but Chanyeol’s yelling is louder. Chanyeol calls out orders to his men to turn back at least 30 feet away, and they all run whilst holding onto their helmets. Jongin turned too, running, as he tugged Sehun’s thin wrist.  

“Sehun,” Jongin said breathlessly when they get a safe distance away; he kept his hand, protectively, on Sehun.

Sehun looks up, with black soot covering his face and his uniform.

“I promised your father that I’d look after you…” Jongin mumbled under his breath, as he wiped the soot off of Sehun’s face with a damp cloth. Sehun merely shied away, biting the inside of his cheek. Jongin looked at him with a frown.

The pain from the burn hurt, but the way Jongin’s fingers felt from the opposite side of the cloth hurt more.

“…are you alright?” Jongin asked, staring at the small scar on the top of Sehun’s right cheek. It was a small ‘X’ shape, and it was a sore red. Sehun winced a little when Jongin dabbed the moist cloth onto it, but he nodded at Jongin nonetheless.

“Just stay with me and you’ll be fine,” Jongin smiled, letting Sehun take hold of the cloth.

“Commander,” a low voice boomed from behind him. Jongin turned and nodded curtly at Chanyeol, “what are our orders, sir?” he said, straightening his back as he saluted powerfully. Sehun thought Chanyeol would have cut off his own head if he had knives for hands.

“We are to investigate.” Jongin said, starring off into the direction of the combusting explosion. The fire had died down, but there was a thick smoke fogging up the air to where they were.

Chanyeol was ready to turn, but Jongin stopped him.

“Tell the men to take precaution – we do not know what we may find.” Jongin said, cautiously, before picking up his satchel and hoarding it over his shoulders. He gestured for Sehun to follow closely behind him.

As they walked through the forest’s greenery, the sound of dry branches and leaves crunching beneath their boots, one of Chanyeol’s men called out saying that it was a plane crash. Jongin ran towards the scene, hurriedly, rummaging in his satchel to get out the first aid supplies and ran towards the scene. The burning had come to a complete halt, and there was nothing but ashen fuselage dusting the forest floor. A huge crater could be seen, travelling for miles, and the jet’s nose was dug into the ground. Jongin climbed up, ignoring Chanyeol’s barks of protest, and managed to pry the cockpit’s shield open through the smashed window.

He manages to drag a small, frail bleeding body out from the cockpit onto the ground.

Chanyeol watches in disgust. His arms are folded, as he looks at the body like it was scum.

Sehun runs to Jongin, and opens the cap of his water bottle. He gives it to Jongin, and watches as Jongin tries to revive the man. Jongin ignores the Southern-Korean uniform, or the medals on the shorter male’s body, and chooses to drop driblets of water onto his lips.

He checks for a pulse, and there is a moment where everything goes silent.

Jongin can’t hear one.

He’s trying to make a dead man live.

And when he realizes, he lowers the body onto the ground and covers the deceased with a white cloth. They take the males credentials, his name, ‘Kim Jongdae’ – a member of the royal South-Korean air force. Sehun notices the ring on Jongdae’s finger. The gold ring glitters in the light, before the soldiers take his body away on a stretcher, and Sehun thought about what Jongdae’s last words had been.

However, not all are as lenient.

Chanyeol clenches his jaw as the body goes past him.

It’s just another rat exterminated in his books.

After rummaging through what was left of the jet, they salvage a page with coordinates penciled onto it, and leave to set up camp someplace safer.

Jongin calls in to military base through telecommunications, and lets them know of the Southern soldier’s death. Unsurprisingly, the Captain and General are all too happy, congratulating both Jongin and Chanyeol on their triumph.

Jongin masks his heartbreak with a laugh and ends the call.

Although it was a compulsory part of being a fighter, no one ever said death was easy.

-

A sore, bone shattering pain is all that Joonmyun feels.

He hangs upside down, his head skimming past the top of the cockpit as his aircraft sits heavy on the ground. Somehow, he managed to survive his crash landing, and he finds himself having awoken in the middle of nowhere.

He can hear his engines dying, and the whirring fades. The wheels of his jets spiral, slower and slower, until stopping. Luckily, his aircraft hasn’t caught fire, and it’s a miracle considering he’s stuck in a forest full of flammable trees and leaves. Outside the craft, there’s an unmistakable smell of fuel, and all Joonmyun sees is red – for danger.

As he barters for his life, Joonmyun thinks of Chen and forces down a sob. He can’t seem to tarnish the image of Chen’s burning jet out of his mind. All he sees when he closes his eyes, is the aircraft spiraling down, and all he feels is utter anguish and hopelessness. There’s a hollow, emptiness in his heart, and for a brief moment he wonders if Kris is okay too.

But the blood rushing to his head wasn’t easy to ignore, so Joonmyun went back to helplessly fiddling with his crossover seatbelt. After minutes of haggling, he unhooked his belt and felt the aircraft shake - nearly toppling over. After maintaining somewhat balance, and he used the hard edge of his helmet to try breaking through the surface of the top of the cockpit’s glass so he scrounge an escape.

It was hours before he could break into it, but even with that, he barely made a crack in the glass.    

By then, Joonmyun’s arms were tiring, and his body ached from post-crash injuries. He wasn’t sure how long he could stay, upside down, practically dangling for his life, and he wasn’t sure that, after Chen’s death, he even wanted to.

So he closed his eyes, and silently counted the seconds passing by.

No matter how long he waited, dying seemed near impossible.  

-

The night envelopes the forest, painting ribbons of blue and black in the sky, and Sehun has to pry his eyes open as they walk back to the camps base. As they reach a cleared part of the forest, Chanyeol tells his men to begin setting up and Jongin joins in helping to pitch in tents into the ground.

After a meagre dinner and a small slice of crusty bread, the exhausted men began preparing for their tents. Two unlucky souls were picked on guard duty, but their droopy eyes were nothing to go by as they leaned against the trunk of a tree.

Back at his tent, Sehun tossed and the ground, the blankets thinly covering his lean body as he squeezed his eyes shut a number of times. He couldn’t stop thinking about the smoke from the distance, and he was eager to go look for himself. So he rose from his tent and slowly began to sneak out from the base. Luckily the two guard men were too busy napping to even notice Sehun’s shadow passing them, and Sehun managed to tip toe himself away.

As Sehun walked, the smoke got thicker and thicker. There was a fog misting the atmosphere, and it took him a few heavy breaths for the blood to rush back to his head. After what felt like hours, Sehun saw a dismantled plane’s wing on the ground, and ran further ahead to find the rest of the crafts broken body. Amongst the devastation was the aircraft – dangling, upside down, on the lower half of a tree. It was cushioned by burned out bushes, and the smell of jet fuel was livid against Sehun’s senses. He looked inside the cockpit, to find a figure inside and tried to break the glass with his foot. But he wasn’t strong enough, so he tried knocking against the glass with a large concrete piece of rock. The cracks in the glass were becoming bigger and bigger until Sehun was able to break through completely. He tugged the lifeless figure out from the jet, and dragged him over his shoulder a few meters away to safety.

The body against him was warm, and surprisingly light. However, it did take most of Sehun’s strength to bring him to the other side. But then the body’s hand reached his shoulder, and Sehun nearly jumped – his eyes widening in fear. The man escaped from his clutches and collapsed to the ground, and Sehun scrambled to grab his water bottle.

Now on his knees, the man gasped for air and coughed violently before his legs gave way as he leaned his back against the bottom of a tree trunk. He opened his eyes slowly, before closing them again and breathed out one last shaky sigh. Sehun watched carefully from a few steps away, but walked closer nevertheless. He lifted the survivor’s chin up, and the man’s mouth parted, slightly, as Sehun angled the top of his water bottle to the males plump, pink lips.

Joonmyun can’t believe what’s happening, and he swallows every droplet gratefully as Sehun offers it. As Sehun lets go, Joonmyun lightly grabs hold of the boy’s thin wrist as to keep him there, and smiles.

“Thank you,” Joonmyun quietly croaks out.

Sehun doesn’t really know what hits him as he shyly returns a small smile.

“It’s okay,” Sehun replied quietly.  

There’s a flush of something akin to euphoria that travels through Sehun’s body, and his cheeks burn up with a heat he’s not used to. The stranger continues smiling, his twinkling eyes looking straight at Sehun, and Sehun has to mentally stop himself from flustering. So he opts for staring back at the man instead.

Brown eyes, is what Sehun notices first. Eye’s he thinks he can melt into, like chocolate that sinks onto the tongue of someone’s mouth. Addicting. And it’s the oval shape of the male’s eyes that scrunch up as he smiles that almost steals Sehun’s breath away. He’s never met this man before, but Sehun wonders what it would be like with the man’s arms circled around his waist. He wants to sift the stranger’s light, brunette curls between his fingertips, to see whether it feels as soft as it looks. The stranger doesn’t let go of Sehun as they both stare at each other intently. It’s a look between fascination and enthrallment as the male’s hand is still clasped around Sehun’s wrist.

But the moment doesn’t last long enough when Sehun hears a faint sound of men shouting and running getting louder. He doesn’t even have time to get up from crouching before he’s yanked away from Joonmyun’s grip.

It all happens at once.

Sehun can feel himself being pulled away, and he can barely hear Jongin asking if he was okay. But the words are muffled against the soldier’s battle cries, and their cheering as Chanyeol crouched down to the man leaning against the tree trunk.

The man who held onto Sehun’s wrist.

The man who Sehun wants to get to know.

The yelling is unbearable as they whoop for Chanyeol to do it already, to just kill the imposter because he deserves nothing less. Sehun wants to protest, he needs to, but it was like the words wouldn’t come out; especially when the barrel of Chanyeol’s gun was planted against the side of the stranger’s head.

Sehun was scared to blink.

Joonmyun’s life was hanging by a thread.

And Chanyeol’s finger was on the trigger. 

dun dun dun 
i dont even know why i post this anymore lol