A/N: title reads as "Sarhad" in Hindi, the word for "frontier"

The tent is stuffy but at least it keeps them warm.

Taemin jostles next to him with a throaty laugh, already a few drinks deep. The booze isn’t really booze just low-grade rice wine. You need to really pour it down your gullet to get high. Jonghyun himself keeps his hands empty and his head clear. He’s on watch duty tonight, there’s no telling what could happen.

Voices bark with b jocundity, dog tags clang with wild movements and silly dancing. The Eastern Front hasn’t seen as much action as some of the other parallels but they haven’t seen enough supplies either. Food is sparse, so they make do with some roots of plants that grow in the area despite snow. There aren’t any villages this high in the mountains but sometimes a naive sheepherder strays into their camp and gives them reports from either side.

Tonight the boys are exceptionally rowdy after a successful airstrike by the USAF. Some lines have been maintained, others have been regained. It’s being called a victory on the radio, so it’s celebrated as one. Most of these soldiers are young privates who can’t comprehend what’s going on out there between the two nations. But first lieutenants like Taemin and CIC officers like Jonghyun often spend their days counting bodies as they’re loaded onto backs of trucks.

"What does a woman feel like?" Taemin drawls, pushing their shoulders together. He’s wearing the uniform of a POW Northerner because his own was soaked through by blood and soot some days ago. No one’s complaining about the switch. Whatever those reds stuff into their uniforms keeps them extremely warm; a little treachery like this will go unnoticed. Everyone does it. Everyone changes sides like that.

"Jonghyun ah, what is a woman?" Taemin tries again. "I don’t remember anymore…"

"A woman is everything beautiful with the world, Lee jungwinim," someone supplies to the other side of him. Jonghyun grins at the words. A pair of hands draw titillating curves in the air. "A woman is everything perfect and heavenly… Ah~!" The man scrubs his head roughly with apparent frustration. "Why can’t there be women in the army?! We’ll definitely win the war then, so why don’t we have some female recruits?!"

"Because ers like you will lose their in the first week, that’s why," Taemin replies, the men around him chuckling stupidly. "Women in the army… yah, no one give this idiot any more drink, arasseo?!" he shouts and then there is uproarious laughter. Jonghyun shakes his head, brushing off crumbs from his pants and getting up to leave. He needs some fresh air. He needs to be alone.

"You didn’t eat," Taemin is behind him by only a few steps, speaking out clouds of steam.

"I wasn’t hungry."

The other clicks his tongue, shakes his head. “That’s not why you eat,” he informs. “You eat so you’ll have the strength to carry your dead friend on your back,” he sighs, voice dropping to a mumble. “That’s why any of us eat anymore, …” He looks away, his eyes fogged over by some memory from the time they were apart, perhaps.

Jonghyun doesn’t pry, he’s seen enough welts and scars on the other’s back to keep shut. Even serving different companies or leading different squadrons they’ve both seen one form of hell or other.

"You remember how you used to dream of the end?" Jonghyun starts. "The end of this war, the end of all our differences."

Taemin scoffs at himself. “I was a child back then. We both were,” his eyes flick up to Jonghyun’s face, the light in them softening only a fraction. “This war… swallowed us in our youth. It makes sense that we’d be spat out old men, right?” His jokes are always this macabre now but who can blame him?

He points his chin at the ashen valley before them, covered in mist and nightmares. “That hill will be taken tomorrow,” he says with the accuracy of someone who knows the future. “And the day after, we’ll snatch it back. This is their war.” He mirthlessly laughs. “And it will continue for… years. Centuries. Until one day they realize—”

"Until one day they realize that isn’t a hill at all," Jonghyun cuts in, gritting his jaw shut. "Just a pile of cadavers."

Taemin slaps his back appreciatively. “Good. Your eyes are still young, then,” he jokes. And soon the voices in the tent die down to timid whispers, scared and trembling over each syllable. A song rings through the night, striking out at a moon hidden behind angry clouds. Jonghyun isn’t surprised by the sudden silence. He welcomes it.