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Chapter Text

He pulls Seok-chan aside one day, as covertly as he can, to ask if the joke bothers him. 

He doesn’t like to intervene in these kinds of matters. As a general rule Yeong-hu prefers to trust his men to sort things out amongst themselves, and he doesn’t want to set a precedent that he’s there to referee snide comments or manage hurt feelings. Life in the military has plenty of the former, and no room for the latter—even before this ongoing crisis he had precious little patience for either.  

Given his unintended contribution to the situation at hand, though, he feels some measure of obligation to ask, even though he mostly knows the answer already. Seok-chan is too affable, too naturally cheerful to be offended by much of anyone or anything.

A tall column of dingy stacked boxes shields most of the corner he’s corralled Seok-chan into from view, but Seok-chan still scans the space over Yeong-hu’s shoulder for outside eyes before looking back to him. His head tilts, curious. “What joke, Sarge?”

If it had been just the once, Yeong-hu could have ignored it as a throwaway comment. But it hadn’t been once, or twice, or three times that. In fact, it’s become something of the go-to running joke among the platoon. It seems like multiple times a week now that Seok-chan will get up to accompany someone on patrol or for a visit to what passes for the canteen, and whoever he’s stepping into pace with will turn solemnly to him and intone, “Seok-chan, with me,” in their best Sergeant Kim voice.

Sometimes Seok-chan rolls his eyes. Mostly he laughs.

He laughs now too when Yeong-hu answers. He settles back against the wall behind him, completely at ease. “Not likely. They need to work on the voice, though.” He flashes Yeong-hu a faint grin that warms the back of his neck. “The real thing’s better.”

Yeong-hu gives him his mildest look, the one that means that’s enough now, soldier. But he leans just a little closer as he does it. Lets more of his shadow fall over Seok-chan, imagines it covering him completely.

It’s no slight against the rest of his men that he doesn’t ask for them. He doesn’t doubt their skills. It’s simply that this new world is even less forgiving of failure than the old, and Yeong-hu is better with Seok-chan at his back.

Seok-chan drives on the way out to the next supply raid, the two of them in the Jeep at the front of the column. It’s the usual arrangement, so universally understood it doesn’t even require the perfunctory and much joked about you’re with me.  

Seok-chan isn’t the one who drives them back at the end of it, due entirely to the monster that tackles him to the ground halfway through them loading up their finds and smashes his head into the road before Seo-jin can get there with the flamethrower. 

Yeong-hu can’t think of where he was when it happened, why he didn’t stop it. The information simply vanishes out of his head, as if he were the one to take the hit. Time shudders ahead and then he’s kneeling over Seok-chan, one hand on his jaw, the other wrapping carefully around the base of his skull. He tilts the bruised face toward the light to see the damage. 

“Seok-chan. Kang Seok-chan. Look at me.” 

The body below his is limp, stunned, but the eyes open. It would take more than fresh head trauma for Seok-chan to disobey Yeong-hu, it seems. Blood trickles down from his hairline. Yeong-hu lets go of his jaw to wipe it away before it can get in his eyes, which are struggling blearily to focus on Yeong-hu. Red smears across the brow under Yeong-hu’s thumb. He feels skin furrow over the ridge of bone. Confusion, or pain. 

“Sarge?” 

Concussion protocol first. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Monster.” Commendable military brevity. Worrying. It’s not like Seok-chan. “Did we get it?” 

It occurs to Yeong-hu that he doesn’t know. Another thing that’s vanished out of his head, pushed out to make room for this. He looks up in time to see Seo-jin land an investigative kick on a charred corpse a ways down the road. He gives Yeong-hu a thumbs up without looking away from it. 

“We got it.” 

Seok-chan starts to sit up. “Stop it,” Yeong-hu says curtly, tightening his grip around the back of his head. Seok-chan's hair is unexpectedly soft against his palm.

He subsides back into Yeong-hu’s hands. “Anyone else hurt?”

“I’m supposed to be the one asking questions.” 

His eyes close. “Sir.” 

“I need you to stay awake.”

“I’m awake. Light’s hurting my head.”

Well, that’s one question answered. 

“Alteration or loss of consciousness?”

A thin smile. The blood at his hairline starts to drip again, running together with the sweat dotting his forehead. Jong-hyun appears over Yeong-hu’s shoulder, handing him some halfway clean scrap of cloth to wipe it away. “Both,” Seok-chan says. 

“Last thing you remember before it happened?” 

“Don’t know. Finding those batteries, maybe.” 

Post-traumatic amnesia, wiping out at least a few minutes from before the incident. “First thing you remember after?”

He reopens his eyes, offers Yeong-hu something closer to his usual genuine grin. “You.” His tone adds: of course. 

Damn it all, Yeong-hu thinks, with a rush of something so strong it turns to pain in his chest. 

He doesn’t let his expression change. Seok-chan’s still smiling when he lets his eyes shut again.

“Dizziness or nausea?” 

“I can stand.”  

He takes that for a no, if only because there’s not much they could do here if the answer were yes. It’s been a long time since they had a proper medic; they’ll need to get him back to the stadium for anything more useful than a questionnaire and whatever is left of their dwindling first aid kit. Yeong-hu doesn’t particularly care for Dr. Lim, but he’s what they’ve got. 

Jong-hyun and Yeong-hu manage to get Seok-chan on his feet. He stands steadily enough, face tense against the light. “Where’s my gun?” he asks the group at large. The strap at his shoulder's been ripped clean through by claws.

Dong-jun finds it in the dirt on the side of the road, knocked clear by the force of the monster’s tackle. “What kind of rookie are you? Losing your firearm, honestly,” he ribs as he hands it back, but it lacks his usual bite. Near misses make them all nervous. Their numbers have fallen so far already. “They should send you back to basic for that.” 

“Sure,” Seok-chan says, “you guys can take it from here. Good luck with the monsters.” 

One side of Dong-jun’s mouth quirks up. “Get in the car, asshole.”

“Not the driver’s side,” Jong-hyun adds. 

Dong-jun takes over for Yeong-hu, helping Jong-hyun bundle him into the car. Yeong-hu walks down the road to where Seo-jin is still standing, back turned to them to scan ahead for trouble. 

“We should head back,” Yeong-hu says, falling into place next to him.

“I figured. You good?”

“I’m not the one with the concussion.” 

Seo-jin looks at him sideways. “Do kind of look like you want to kill someone, though.”

You look angry all the time. You should smile more. “I’ve been told that’s just my face.” Besides, he thinks, looking down at the monster’s blackened husk, there’s no one left to kill for it. 

“Man, they weren’t kidding. You think you can make it back in one piece without your chauffeur driving?”

He doesn’t bother stopping the eye roll. “When was the last time you drove yourself anywhere, Sergeant Min? Round up everyone else and get the rest of the supplies loaded. We’re out of here in five.”

“Fuck you, Kim, we’re the same rank,” Seo-jin says, and then does as Yeong-hu says anyway. Maybe he hasn’t hidden how rattled he is as well as he thought. 

He doesn’t feel any less unmoored when he climbs into the driver’s seat five minutes later, which means he does as half a lifetime in the military has taught him and retreats to the safe, impartial confines of protocol. 

“What’s the current date?” he says evenly as he starts the engine, picking up as if they’d never left off. 

“Sarge,” Seok-chan groans. “Please don’t make me go through the whole fucking form.” 

He knows the protocol as well as Yeong-hu does, sounds downright plaintive at the thought of it. Yeong-hu relents, smothering the start of a smile. “Only nine pages to go.” 

“It’s not necessary. I’m fine.” He doesn’t turn green as Yeong-hu starts to drive, at least, so maybe he really isn’t having any nausea. 

The thought reassures Yeong-hu enough that he can’t resist. Messing with Seok-chan is one of the tiny joys of his days, and this has been one of his least favorite in recent memory despite vigorous, abundant competition. “What's the name of the Prime Minister?”

“The new guy or the one we set on fire?” 

That actually gets a snort out of Yeong-hu. From his peripheral vision he sees Seok-chan turn toward him, mouth curving. 

“You were starting to worry me there, sir.” 

For the second time in ten minutes, Yeong-hu has to remind the person he's speaking with that he’s not actually the one with the concussion. 

 “Oh,” Seok-chan says, as if suddenly understanding, “that’s why I’m not driving.” 

“You must be fine if you have the energy to be a smartass.” He’s not mad about it. Another of those tiny joys: Seok-chan messing with him right back.

When he glances over, though, Seok-chan’s gaze is blurry, unfocused. A stab of adrenaline goes through him. “Seok-chan.”

“I’m here,” he answers right away. Blinks hard a few times. “Just tired. Talk to me so I don't pass out into the dash?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“Well, yeah. We just don’t normally. Not on the way back from an expedition.”

Not like this, that is, all casual banter and teasing. Talking on the way back from supply raids is generally reserved for breaking down how the mission went. What they found, what went wrong. On bad days, who they lost.

Yeong-hu doesn’t particularly want to talk about what went wrong on this one. There’s dried blood flaking off his thumb; an invisible print on Seok-chan’s brow. 

“Fine,” Yeong-hu says, then: “Not about my dating life.”

“Nah. Was wondering something else.”

Save him from the things Seok-chan wonders. He focuses on the road, doesn’t let his face react. “What?”

“The joke you asked me about the other day.” 

He’s gripping the wheel harder than he needs to. “It bothers you after all.”

“No. I wouldn’t lie to you.” 

I know you wouldn’t, Yeong-hu thinks. But you might have changed your mind. 

It’s a dumb thought, born of some worry he doesn’t quite understand. Seok-chan is the steadiest thing in his life. 

“The boys don’t mean anything bad by it anyway,” Seok-chan continues. “I was just wondering—why you do it. Always choose me, I mean. Like with the driving.” 

Sometimes, very rarely, the particulars of a mission will require that Yeong-hu and Seok-chan ride apart, but Yeong-hu doesn’t care for those, will rearrange what he can to avoid them. He doesn’t feel as sure in his aim when it’s someone else behind the wheel, when it’s not Seok-chan in the seat beside him.

“You’re a good driver,” Yeong-hu says simply.

And he is, both in and out of combat situations—attentive, with fast reflexes, good judgment, and a vital knack for carrying out Yeong-hu’s orders the moment he gives them. No complaining, no getting flustered.

In some corner of his mind, Yeong-hu imagines other kinds of orders he might like to give. Ones he thinks even Seok-chan might be flustered by. 

“I am good,” Seok-chan allows. “But I’m not the best fighter, or the best shot, or the best scout.” A few of the dozens of roles Yeong-hu has asked him to play across as many separate occasions, all in order to keep him near, to keep Yeong-hu level. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

The question is broken glass in his throat. He swallows the blood of it down. 

“No.” The same conviction, immediate and immovable: Seok-chan opening his eyes to look up at him and say, you. Of course. The first thing I remember is you. 

“Then there’s no problem,” Yeong-hu says.

He means, good.

Means: I could choose no other. 

He loses track of how long they sit in silence. It’s not awkward, just contemplative, both of them more than a little tired and willing to let the road noise fill the gap.  He keeps an eye on Seok-chan, mindful that he’s newly concussed. Seok-chan puts on a good show, sitting perfectly upright, looking forward at the road. His brow is still furrowed, though, pain carving faint lines through his forehead, eyes narrowing when the light changes. Occasionally he closes them entirely. A respite of ten, twenty, thirty seconds. 

“You were hard on yourself,” Yeong-hu says, when his eyes stay closed for a little too long. 

Seok-chan blinks back to full awareness. He doesn’t have to ask what Yeong-hu’s talking about. “I didn’t mean I’m bad. Just that there are others better.” He gives Yeong-hu a meaningful look. “Not all of us can do things like, I don’t know, blow up a gas station a mile away with a single shot. In the pouring rain.”

“Give it time,” Yeong-hu says, rather than try and explain that Seok-chan, jack-of-all-trades, is just as valuable as Yeong-hu, master of some. “Not all of us can navigate a state-of-the-art system we’ve never seen before to abort a missile launch that would have killed hundreds.”  

Surprise smooths away all the pained lines, his face going soft and blank. “Sarge,” he says, shy happiness in it. “I—thank you. God, I haven’t thought about that part in a while.” He barks out a laugh, remembering. “I didn’t even know if I’d be able to do it when Tak told me what he needed from me. That kind of tech's not really my specialty. But it all worked out in the end, I guess.” 

The mention of Tak stomps on all his nerves at once. He remembers, too, stepping through the doorway into the sheer chaos of that scene. It’s done, sir, Seok-chan had said at the end, wrung out and covered in gore. Addressing Tak, not Yeong-hu. There’s blood on his face, Yeong-hu had thought, you brought him here and let him get blood on his face, and had gone dizzy with the kind of rage he thinks monsters must be born from. Went black at the core of his eyes, a dark seed planted unseen below the surface. 

He tries not to think about the blood that’s there now, and whose fault it is. 

He can’t control everything. It’s one of Seo-jin’s old, exasperated refrains, as if his methods for dealing with the stresses of this new world are any better. Yeong-hu doesn’t know how to explain that it’s not control he wants, anyway, not exactly. Or rather, not entirely. He wants his men alive, safe, and as close to content as this life will permit. If he no longer trusts anyone but himself to make the decisions that will keep them that way, well. He won’t apologize for paying attention. Once upon a time, that was the sort of thing the men up top had paid—and promoted—him for. 

He’s not sure how a single name has brought all this back. It’s possible Seo-jin might have a point.

It’s possible Seok-chan crosses all the wires in his brain.

“Sir?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Just tell me something.” 

“What do you want to know?”

“Something about you.” Something no one else here knows. 

His expression says plainly that he doesn’t understand why Yeong-hu is asking. But he answers without hesitation. “I had a guitar before all this happened,” he says. “Acoustic, nothing special. Played mostly classical stuff. Took lessons here or there.”

“Were you any good?”

A laugh, real. “Not professionally or anything. But yeah, I was pretty okay.” 

Yeong-hu turns the revelation around in his mind. It fits. Seok-chan hums constantly as he goes about his days at the stadium. Plenty of the men do as well—it’s one of the many odd ways people cope with being underground half the time, things starting to pile up in their heads, in the dark. The noise has to get out somehow. But the men sing, too. Bits of lyrics when they think no one’s listening. Seok-chan only ever hums. Nothing with words, instrumental.

It’s a shame. He thinks Seok-chan would have a nice voice. He can’t help but find the image of Seok-chan and his guitar charming, though. Something about it drains the worst of the tension from his shoulders. 

“Thank you,” he says as the stadium comes into view, calm again. 

Seo-jin spares his blood pressure and reports in to Tak for him. Yeong-hu takes the opportunity to steer Seok-chan to the infirmary, hand firm between his shoulder blades. Seok-chan puts up a feeble protest as he’s propelled along—“What can Dr. Lim even do?”—which is all the more infuriating when Lim proves him right a few minutes later.

Lim doesn’t smell like rubbing alcohol for once, which gives Yeong-hu misguided hope that he might be useful in any measurable way. Yeong-hu waits until Seok-chan is sitting safely on the examination table before he takes his hand away and launches into a terse summary of what has happened for Lim: head trauma, AOC and LOC, PTA of at least a few minutes. Headache and light sensitivity, no nausea or vomiting, no difficulty with walking or word-finding. 

Lim looks between him and Seok-chan while Yeong-hu talks. Amused, almost. When Yeong-hu finishes, Lim says only, “What kind of monster was it?” 

He was wrong. There is still someone left to kill. 

“Oh, don’t make such a scary face, Sergeant Kim,” Lim says, not looking remotely frightened. “As adorable as your protective husband act is, what are you expecting of me here? Do you see a working CT machine anywhere? If his headache is bad enough to warrant dipping in to our reserves, he can have some acetaminophen. Otherwise you should channel all that energy into watching him to make sure he doesn’t get worse, or else we all get to find out what kind of neurosurgery I can manage with whatever power tools we have lying around.” 

Seok-chan has a hand on Yeong-hu’s arm before he can even lift it for the punch. “I don’t need acetaminophen,” he says. 

“You’ll take the meds,” Yeong-hu says through his teeth. 

“Would you like an antibiotic shot for the road?” Lim offers, magnanimous in his cheer. “Clean bandage?” He taps his hairline in the same spot where blood has dried on Seok-chan’s. 

“I would appreciate that, Doctor, thank you,” Seok-chan says, with the impeccable politeness he defaults to with civilians—even the ones as creepy as Lim. It’s made him the darling of every elderly woman in the stadium. People sigh in relief when they see it’s Seok-chan’s turn for roll call.

He doesn’t let go of Yeong-hu’s arm as the doctor works, which suits him fine. From here Yeong-hu can stand and stare down at Lim with every ounce of coldness he can manage. It’s a stare that says Yeong-hu can kill him with one hand if necessary. He wouldn’t have to dislodge Seok-chan to do it. He wouldn’t even muss his hair. 

“Thank you, Doctor,” Seok-chan says again once Lim has finished. He lets go of Yeong-hu’s arm, lets Yeong-hu take his instead and lever him to his feet. 

“Oh, thank you,” Lim says, entertainment for the day achieved.

The door to the infirmary isn’t one that slams. Nothing about this place would ever give Yeong-hu the satisfaction. 

“Useless excuse of a man,” Yeong-hu murmurs under his breath as they walk.

Seok-chan, held close by the hand around his upper arm, hears him. “Not his fault. Just the way things are now.” 

“You’ll tell me if anything changes.”

“Don’t worry so much, Sarge. We’ve all had worse than this.” 

Yeong-hu stops. His grip roots Seok-chan in place alongside him. “You’ll tell me,” he repeats.

Seok-chan turns to look at him.

Yeong-hu lets go of his arm, hoping some space will clear the red haze in his head. It just makes him antsier instead.

“I will,” Seok-chan says. “Have I ever not told you something?” 

He says it before he can stop himself. “I think there’s a lot you haven’t told me.” 

“Haven’t I?” 

His face, as earnest as ever underneath the bandage. Seok-chan is such a natural chatterbox when indulged that it’s easy to forget how well he knows Yeong-hu—enough to take a page out of his book when necessary, when what he needs to tell him can’t or shouldn’t be said aloud. He follows Yeong-hu more faithfully than his shadow. What more would Yeong-hu have him say? 

“...Maybe you have,” he allows.

Seok-chan’s not quite smiling, but the hint of it’s there in the warmth of his eyes. “Lim was right, you know. It’s a shame you don’t date. You’d make a good husband.” 

That, Yeong-hu thinks, the haze in his head taking on a different hue of red. That’s what Yeong-hu would have him say.

“Seok-chan,” he says. Not knowing what comes next.

“Don’t pay any attention to me, Sarge. Concussion and all that.” He’s already turned to go. 

Yeong-hu catches his wrist hard. The hitch in Seok-chan’s breathing is nearly silent. But Yeong-hu sees the faint jump of his shoulders, the shivering glint of the chain of the tags around his neck. 

“You’re concussed,” he agrees, low, “and there are cameras in this hallway.” 

Seok-chan doesn’t say anything for a moment, taking careful, perfectly spaced breaths. Not quite flustered yet. Yeong-hu knows he can get him there. “Where aren’t there cameras?” he asks without looking back. 

“Ask me again in a week,” Yeong-hu says. Follows the line of his spine with his eyes. 

The blinking red dots lining the ceiling are the only reason he can bring himself to let go. Seok-chan is slow to reclaim his wrist. He doesn’t put it back down at his side, instead keeps it behind his back to grip with his other hand. Covering where Yeong-hu has touched.

“A week.” 

“You have a head injury,” Yeong-hu reiterates dryly. “I wouldn’t…take advantage.”

“No.” He looks back at Yeong-hu, just a little. “You’d kill anyone who tried.”

Slowly and painfully. It’s probably not wise to admit it. “With my bare hands,” he says, which is worse. 

He can sense the grin, even as Seok-chan turns fully away. “Good thinking, Sarge. Save on ammo.” 

Seok-chan walks away first, some silent agreement between them not to return to the barracks at the same time. Neither of them able to handle whatever joke the men might invent this time, seeing them come through the door together at the end of a day where Yeong-hu has already fallen to his knees in the middle of the road to cradle Seok-chan’s battered face in his hands and try to remember how to breathe. 

Yeong-hu watches him go. He gives him a twenty second head start before following in loping, satisfied strides, humming something familiar. Instrumental, no words needed.  

Chapter Text

He gives Seok-chan a twenty second head start, but it’s a few minutes later before Yeong-hu actually makes it back to the communal area of their makeshift barracks, waylaid just outside by a messenger. Tak needs him for something. No, it can’t wait. 

It’s downright unnatural, Tak’s ability to sense when Yeong-hu is in a good mood. Even worse, how he always seems to know what to do to most effectively torpedo it. Yeong-hu tries not to take it out on the messenger, who looks visibly uncomfortable at the task he’s been given, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he relays the order. It’s no secret that things are not harmonious amongst the upper ranks, not when Yeong-hu has openly yelled at Tak for his failures in front of the men and stormed away without waiting to be dismissed.

He needs to get a handle on that. He’s always thought of himself as stoic, level-headed, able to walk through the most destabilizing of storms and come out the other side with steady hands and intact judgment. 

Recent events seem to have proven otherwise, and not just the ones pertaining to Tak. 

He sends the messenger away with a confirmation that he’ll be there shortly. There are arrangements he needs to make first. Lim’s voice in his head: Watch that he doesn’t get worse, or else we all get to find out what kind of neurosurgery I can manage with whatever power tools we have lying around. Smug to have seen through to what he thought made Yeong-hu weak. Sounding intrigued, in spite of himself, at the prospect of getting to play hacksaw-surgeon again. Seok-chan, cut open on a filthy table in a rundown infirmary. 

Yeong-hu tastes bile. He takes a minute there outside the door to get himself back into order, schooling his face into as normal an expression as he can manage. It’s unnecessary effort—he doesn’t get more than a few distracted nods and half-assed salutes as he walks into the barracks, everyone else busy peeling off their well-worn boots or inhaling their nightly rations or complaining about how tired they are.

Well, almost everyone.  

He spots Seok-chan and Yong-seok sitting together companionably on a footlocker in the corner. Seok-chan is still gamely putting on a show: smiling like the shitty fluorescent lights aren’t exacerbating his headache, chattering away like there’s not a bandage at his hairline and bruising down the side of his face. He doesn’t trip over his words, but he isn’t managing the breakneck speed he usually revs up to the longer a conversation goes on. Having to think hard about what he’s saying and trying even harder not to show it.

By the sound of it, he’s giving Yong-seok an abbreviated summary of what they found on the expedition. What he remembers of it, that is—he’s missing some time off the end, thanks to what happened afterward, but Yong-seok doesn’t know the difference, and everyone who does is either preoccupied elsewhere or disinclined to get involved. 

Still, Yong-seok shoots him an unimpressed look when he cuts the summary unceremoniously short. “And then, what, you ran into the car door face first? Five or six times?”

“Workplace accident,” Seok-chan says. 

“You need to get looked at?”

“Already did. I’m fine.” 

“Why does everyone in my life always say that,” Yong-seok mutters.

The remark goes over Yeong-hu’s head. He can’t think of who Yong-seok might be referring to, especially with such a gloomy expression. But Seok-chan looks unsurprised, just flicks him hard in the middle of the forehead and primly says, “Don’t be a fucking buzzkill,” and then Yong-seok is distracted from his odd melancholy by the important matter of finding a way to pay Seok-chan back in kind without aggravating his exceedingly obvious head injury. 

Yeong-hu decides to leave them to it.

Seo-jin’s on the far side of the room, sitting alone in a small bubble of quiet as he devours a protein bar he’s probably stolen from the pantry again. Yeong-hu stifles a sigh as he crosses to him. 

He nods up at Yeong-hu, unabashed. “Hey.”

“I need a favor.” 

That gets his attention. They don’t often use the language of favors. Why bother when they don’t have the resources or manpower to do more than what is strictly necessary anyway? If something needs to be done for the good of the platoon or the stadium, there’s little point in assigning or leveraging debts over it. Beyond whatever temporary relief from boredom such petty drama might provide, and Yeong-hu doesn’t market in such things.

Using the word now is as good as admitting that what’s he asking runs across more personal lines.   

“Yeah?” Seo-jin says. Nobody’s paying them any mind, not with the sideshow going on in the corner, but he’s lowered his volume. 

Yeong-hu’s never been sure how much Seo-jin knows. Nor what the rest of the men know, for that matter. No one with a brain can have missed that Yeong-hu has a favorite subordinate—and the running joke that’s set off this whole situation in the first place is proof enough that they’re all more than aware—but what assumptions they might have drawn from that are not anything that Yeong-hu can safely inquire about.

None of them are technically soldiers anymore. There are no functioning courts to convict him. That doesn’t mean he forgets the sword he’s lived his whole professional life under: two years in prison, and the end of the only career he’s ever cared about.

He’s always been cautious. Occasional hookups met in bars hours away from base, when he’d had time and the inclination. Anything more than the sporadic fling, he’d thought, would have to wait until his days in the service were over, or wouldn’t happen at all. Either outcome would have been something he could live with. He wasn’t lying when he told Seok-chan he has no need for it—want and need, of course, being different things, but even then he’s always known how to prioritize, known what was worth the internal struggle versus what just was. A skill inherited from his parents, who’d long understood certain things about their son without the need for anything as basic as a conversation and loved him just the same. 

He tries not to think about where they might be now. Refocuses on the situation at hand. The favor, too obvious by far; Seo-jin, who might know too much already. 

Yeong-hu lowers his volume, too. “Tak’s calling me,” he says. “Lim couldn’t do much.” 

The two sentences have nothing obvious to do with each other, and are out of order besides. Seo-jin squints at him, puzzled, waiting for him to elaborate. His distaste for Lim wins out over his infamously limited patience. “Of course he couldn’t. Creepy fuck.” 

Yeong-hu almost smiles at that. He starts to look toward the far corner of the room but catches himself halfway, eyes stalling along the back wall. Seo-jin’s gaze traces his and keeps going. Seok-chan and Yong-seok, squabbling and laughing, unaware. 

He doesn’t look so puzzled now. “Looks okay,” he says neutrally. “A little beat up, maybe.” He doesn’t name what—who— they’re talking about: a level of plausible deniability for Yeong-hu. No judgment, either. Just a lead-in to what Yeong-hu’s not said. 

It gets him the rest of the way over the first hurdle. “He lost at least a few minutes,” Yeong-hu says. “Didn’t come to on his own.” Not until Yeong-hu told him to. The first thing Seok-chan remembered. 

One of the best medics Yeong-hu has ever worked with was a surly, foul-mouthed fellow who liked to give impromptu lectures while he tended to less urgent cases. Dumbed down for your dumb asses, he’d say, setting a shoulder or examining someone’s pupils, but who knows? Something might stick. Might even save your lives when I’m not around to do it for you.

Rather prescient, all things considered. He’s long gone, but his lessons are not: Loss of consciousness—lights out—means your reticular activating system took a beating. You know where the RAS is, Kim? In your brainstem. You know what your brainstem does? Only manages your breathing and your heart rate and all the rest of the shit that keeps you alive without you having to think about it. Speaking of the stem! Where’s the rest of the brain go when it swells after trauma? Not much extra room in the skull. Well, maybe your skulls. But if the swelling is bad enough, the brain herniates—out through the hole at the base of the skull if it has to, which compresses the brainstem. Recipe for respiratory arrest. Good way to end up a vegetable, assuming you live long enough for that. You listening? You hit your head hard enough to check out, you go and get checked out as soon as you can. By someone who knows what the hell they’re doing, preferably. 

“It was a hard blow,” Seo-jin acknowledges.

Yeong-hu’s own memory of it is still patchy, a stop-motion lurch between two distant frames. In one, Seok-chan is on the ground, impossibly far away, unmoving under a monster’s claws. In the next, Yeong-hu’s reaching for his face, the blood on it very red. During the space in between Yeong-hu knows—vaguely, without actually being able to pull the picture to mind—that Seo-jin must have been the one to get the monster off of him, to beat it back down the road and burn it to ash once he wouldn’t catch anyone else in the flames. He was there when Yeong-hu was not. He would know how hard the blow was.

Yeong-hu pushes the thought down.

“No CT,” he says, then echoes: “He looks okay.” He leaves off the for now at the end.

Seo-jin hears it anyway. “I’ll keep an eye on him. Might not be necessary, though.”

As if to prove his point, more laughter comes from the corner. More than one voice. A glance reveals that Jong-hyun and Dong-jun have dragged chairs over to join Yong-seok and Seok-chan, all looking more relaxed than they’ve been in weeks, shooting the breeze like none of the last year has happened. Squadmates killing time on a slow day back at base. U-seok and Jin-ho are scattered elsewhere around the room, but they look over from time to time too. Even Jin-ho looks like he could, conceivably and with great effort, crack a smile. 

One of theirs might have died today, and didn’t. Now that the nerves have settled, spirits are high. Seok-chan won’t be short on company while Yeong-hu is gone. At least one of them will have to notice if he worsens. Dong-jun usually has good sense. 

Seo-jin’s still eyeing Yeong-hu. “Is that all you wanted? C’mon, I would have done it without you asking.”


It’s a nice sentiment, especially since he and Seok-chan are hardly friends. In some ways, they’re oil and water: Seo-jin and his mean streak, a bully when he’s bored; Seok-chan and his perpetual good humor, up for a joke but never at the expense of the vulnerable.

Yeong-hu gets the sense that Seo-jin is baffled by Seok-chan more than anything, unable to fathom why someone would ever care to speak up on behalf of a nuisance of a man with a mop or defend the honor of a weeping monster in a ragged wedding dress. Seo-jin pushes back, sometimes, almost yelling, like he can’t believe the shit he’s hearing. But he doesn’t sneer that Seok-chan is weak or soft or any of the myriad of worse things that men call each other even before they join the military. For all his faults, Seo-jin seems to recognize that there’s a solid spine behind the soft heart. And Seok-chan is undeniably a good soldier. For Seo-jin, that’s enough to overlook the rest. 

Even the things he can’t understand. Even the things he may have found distasteful otherwise. 

It’s nothing Yeong-hu hasn’t thought about Seo-jin before, but it feels revelatory this time. Suddenly he is sure that Seo-jin knows. He must. He knows and doesn’t care, wouldn’t say a single word against either of them. Yeong-hu and Seok-chan are both of them soldiers through and through. They’ve shed buckets of blood for the platoon, much of it from their own veins. To Seo-jin, that makes them family. 

It’s a relief years in the making. It’s the only reason he can ask the real favor he’s been dancing around. 

“Not just that. Keep an eye on him, and get him to Lim if things worsen, yes.” Useless as Lim is. Maybe he’s a better surgeon than he is whatever he counts as now. “But make sure that I know, too. Call or send someone to get me. So I can be there. In case.”

Seo-jin sighs, long and exasperated. “You’re killing me, Kim. I would have done that too. You think I wouldn’t tell you your boy was in trouble? Let him die alone under Lim’s knife? Go see what Tak wants before he sends another search party after you. Fuck’s sake, man.” 

Yeong-hu smirks at him, on steady ground again. “Stop stealing shit out of the pantry,” he says, and goes. 

The impromptu party has dissipated by the time he gets back too many hours later, chairs dragged back to their proper places. It’s late—anybody not on the afternoon or night rotations should be asleep already. Sure enough, the sleeping quarters are almost fully dark, sounds of breathing and the occasional snore or grumble emanating from within. He stands in the doorway and waits for his eyes to adjust.

Eventually he discerns a small rectangle of dim light coming from the area where he knows Seok-chan’s cot to be. Yeong-hu weaves through the room to it as silently as he can manage. Let the men get uninterrupted sleep where they can.

When he reaches the right cot, he finds Jin-ho sitting up sideways next to it in lone waking vigil, periodically glancing over from some project or another on his tablet to peer at Seok-chan, assessing. He’s turned the light of the screen down as low as it’ll go. “All fine,” he tells Yeong-hu quietly. “Just resting. He took another round of acetaminophen, mostly at Sergeant Min’s insistence. Breathing’s normal.” 

However it all ends, this shambling parody of survival they’ve managed to eke out at the stadium, Yeong-hu will never not be grateful that these are the men he’s been given to make it happen. 

“Get some sleep, Jin-ho,” he says. The screen, dim as it is, betrays the heavy hollows under his eyes. “I’ll take it from here.” 

Jin-ho doesn’t argue. “Good night, sir,” he says, leaving the tablet and its light for Yeong-hu. He vanishes into the shadows of the room more silently than Yeong-hu had managed, a black cat at home in the dark.  

Yeong-hu takes the vacated spot, muscles protesting as he folds himself down to the floor. It’s cold, grimy, uncomfortable. He’s had much worse. 

He spends a couple minutes scrolling through the pages of the project Jin-ho’s left open, but it’s solidly out of his wheelhouse. Nothing he’d be much help with—not that he has the energy to work on anything right now. He closes out of the file. Neither he nor Jin-ho had thought that’s what he meant when he said he’d take over. He’s burned a few futile minutes pretending otherwise solely because it was something to do other than stare at Seok-chan, and for reasons he doesn’t understand the thought of looking at him right now makes his heart start to thrash against his ribs.

It would hardly be the first time he’s seen him asleep. Seok-chan, like any military man worth his salt, can sleep standing up in a puddle if he has to. He’s catnapped slumped against Yeong-hu on at least one occasion, side of his face pressed heavy and exhausted into the back of Yeong-hu’s shoulder. Forty-something hours into a mission gone bad with no end in sight, the two of them cut off from the rest of the squad and hunkered down where they could while they waited for backup or evac, whichever came first.

Strange to feel nostalgic for a mission gone wrong. But it had been the two of them alone. No one’s breathing but theirs. A dozen men asleep in this room right now, and he can’t even look at the one he’s most worried about. 

Yeong-hu closes his eyes for a moment and rewinds to the weight on his shoulder. Neither of them out of danger, but Seok-chan uninjured and unafraid, trusting Yeong-hu to keep the world at bay while he slept. He’d held as still as he could, trying to lock down any errant muscle twitches that might disturb him, but Seok-chan had jolted awake of his own accord less than an hour later. “Your turn, sir,” he’d said, face lifting off Yeong-hu’s shoulder as he turned to fix his gun on the door. And Yeong-hu had made some comment about which of them was supposed to give the orders before closing his eyes, because the trust went both ways, no matter that the chain of command did not. Sleep deprivation did no one’s aim any favors. Seok-chan would handle it. 

He’ll fall asleep here, too, if he doesn’t stop this. 
 
He shakes his head to clear it and taps the tablet to reset the timer on the backlight. He makes himself turn and look. 

The light doesn’t do much. He sees mostly shadows and vague impressions in greyscale: Seok-chan facing away, head pillowed on one arm. Fingers curled around the back of his skull, like he’d been gripping it as he’d fallen asleep. Had his headache gotten worse? Another lecture he hasn’t forgotten: red flag concussion symptoms…But he can’t get too worked up, because Jin-ho was right—Seok-chan’s breathing is steady and unlabored, no distress in the sound. Resting only. 

Yeong-hu can’t figure out why he was afraid to look. Now that he is, he's in no hurry to stop. He settles his gaze on Seok-chan’s hand where it wraps around the back of his head and remembers the way his hair had felt against Yeong-hu’s palm.

Despite the circumstances that had brought it about, it’s a good memory. As soothing as the weight of Seok-chan’s head on his shoulder. 

He snaps awake at soft pressure on his forearm. The tablet’s gone dark, and the room the rest of the way with it. Through the black he can just barely make out the movement of Seok-chan’s head on the cot. Tilting toward him like he already knows who’s there.  

“Hey,” Seok-chan says, so quietly Yeong-hu has to lean in to hear. Too dark for lipreading. “You can go to bed for real.” His hand tightens just a little, reassuring. “I promise I won’t die in the night if you lie down for a few hours.” 

Yeong-hu takes the hand on his forearm and turns it over, runs his thumb along it until palm turns into wrist. He finds the pulse.

“See?” Seok-chan says, just as quietly. “Still beating.” 

“Best be sure,” Yeong-hu murmurs back. He traces up from Seok-chan’s wrist, following his arm all the way to his shoulder, his clavicle, the base of his throat. Up his neck until he reaches the pulse point there, stronger than the one at his wrist.

Faster, now, too.

“You said a week,” Seok-chan says. So softly it’s barely a breath. “Want to skip ahead?”

Yes, Yeong-hu wants to say. Wants to lift him in his arms and carry him somewhere, anywhere they can be alone, where they can be as loud as they want. Somewhere with enough light that he can see every flush, every change in expression, every mark that Yeong-hu will make. And then he wants to do it all again and better the next night, and the next, and the next, until he’s forgotten what it’s like to sleep apart and knows neither of them ever will again.

He won’t wait until his days in the service are over. He won’t go to the end of his life never knowing.

A week, though.

A week he can manage. 

“No,” he says, and takes his hand away while he still can. “Don’t be late.”

He gets up and goes to his own empty cot on the other side of the room. He doesn’t stumble in the dark, but he feels Seok-chan’s eyes the whole way. 

Chapter Text

Seok-chan has two thoughts in relatively rapid succession. The first is the bone-deep, clinical certainty that the man in front of him could kill Seok-chan with his thumbs alone and then go for a casual twenty kilometer jog after without much in the way of effort. The second, because Seok-chan does have enough of a functioning survival instinct to order them appropriately, is a much more dismayed what the hell, do all UDT look like this?

If so, how did Seok-chan ever get in? 

“Staff Sergeant Kim Yeong-hu,” the man says. Unfairly attractive. Handsome, with a face you’d see on the leading man of an old classic film, and tall and well-built to boot.  “I’ll be getting you up to speed before we deploy.” 

Seok-chan is twenty-two and terrified. “Yes, sir,” he says, and nothing else. 

Kim Yeong-hu looks at him for a long moment. Measuring. “You’ve made it through basic and SQT. Do you think you’re ready for the field?”  

Seok-chan considers the question and Yeong-hu alike. Yeong-hu carries himself with the kind of easy, unassuming masculinity that speaks of being very good at what he does and too secure in that knowledge to ever need to brag. He doesn’t seem the sort of man who is interested in baseless bravado. He also doesn’t seem the sort of man who has time for people who can’t do their jobs. 

“No,” Seok-chan says honestly, “but I won’t slow you down. I’m a fast runner.” 

It’s not quite a joke. Yeong-hu’s head tilts. “Were you much of a class clown in school, Kang Seok-chan?” he says, tone blandly implacable. 

“No,” Seok-chan says again. This he doesn’t have to think about. “Wasn’t funny enough.”

Yeong-hu’s face doesn’t move, but Seok-chan feels the change: a first flicker of true amusement. Interest. “Neither are most class clowns,” he says. “Come on, then. Show me how fast you can run.” 
 
He takes Seok-chan to an unoccupied running track on the far edge of base. He doesn’t stand off to the side and shout criticism like other trainers Seok-chan’s had, instead electing to run alongside him, silent but for his easy, controlled breathing.  

Seok-chan respects him for it. The nerves that set in the moment he was assigned to a squad start to settle as they run. He hadn’t lied about being fast—he gets the sense that lying to Yeong-hu would be a very poor idea, even if it were in his nature to try. Yeong-hu has two inches of height on him and probably ten extra years of conditioning besides, but Seok-chan keeps pace. Sometimes he feels like he has it stored up in him, the running. All those years stuck at home, silent and still and afraid. 

Seok-chan might not be able to kill a man with his thumbs, but he’ll take the twenty kilometer jog any day of the week. 

Yeong-hu calls them to a stop when it becomes clear Seok-chan isn’t tiring. “Fast,” he assesses with a nod, “stubborn.” 

No one’s ever called him stubborn before. No one’s ever known him well enough to. It feels like a compliment from Yeong-hu. So are you, sir, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t know if that’s allowed yet. He suppresses as much of the smile as he can. 

Yeong-hu reaches out and smacks him lightly where the back of his head meets his neck. Seok-chan gives up trying to hide the smile, the glorified tap shaking it loose. Yeong-hu shakes his own head just a little. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he says, that flicker of amusement back. It warms Seok-chan more than the running did. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do. Let’s go.” 

He turns and leads the way off the track, trusting Seok-chan will follow. He does. 

It’s not Seok-chan’s first concussion. He hit that dubious milestone—and his head—missing a step off the edge of the playground at school when he was seven. The fall, he remembers, was short; the landing, hard. His father had picked him up from the hospital, and though Seok-chan had interrupted him at work he didn’t yell in the car on the way back, didn’t say anything at all.

Seok-chan had lied down in the backseat, jacket bunched up into a cushion for his battered brain, and through the blurry haze he had been deeply, thoroughly grateful: for the reprieve of his father’s silence, for the pain in his head that bought him it. 

He’s considerably less grateful this time around, twenty-nine years old and the world in pieces. Dear Dr. Lim, he composes mentally, I would like to apologize for wasting our limited medical supplies: this acetaminophen isn’t doing shit. 

Things are at least winding down for the night. A relief. He doesn’t have much performance left in him. Sergeant Min scans the group before jerking his head in Seok-chan’s direction. “Who’s on concussion watch?”  

Seok-chan dredges up a smile for them, abashed, sorry for the inconvenience. He doesn’t say that he’d rather it be nobody—doesn’t open his mouth at all, afraid the truth or something worse will come spilling out. Nothing in his head is fitting together right. It’s no wonder, given the spike of solid pain stabbing through it. Everything else in there has to make room.

He wants nothing more in this moment than to curl up on his cot and be safely miserable in the dark without having to pretend otherwise, no matter how well-intentioned the observer. He’s operating on wounded animal instincts, he knows, that old fallback: hide until you’re better, or until you’re gone. Don’t let anyone see the part in between. It’s a habit he’s never entirely grown out of. At least not with anyone currently in the room.

His eyes go to the doorway: empty.

Get it together, soldier. He’ll be back. 

You like these people, he reminds himself. You know them (at least, the ones who are left). You trust them (sometimes; less and less).

He doesn’t often have days like this anymore. He attributes it to the concussion that all the old panic is rising up to the surface, those accumulated years of white-knuckled efforts to prove to himself, somehow, that he doesn’t live under that roof anymore, doesn’t have to be that person again.

He remembers lying down in the backseat the same way you remember having been someone else in a dream. It only ever seems odd after you wake. 

“—I’ll do it.”

Zoning out. Zone back in or they’ll bundle you back off to Lim. He glances automatically at Yong-seok, the most obvious volunteer, so desperate of late to be of material use to someone, anyone he cares about. But Yong-seok isn’t looking back at him, or even at Sergeant Min—he’s looking at Jin-ho, surprised.

Seok-chan blinks, belatedly recognizing the source of the voice. He turns to Jin-ho, too. 

“I have work to do anyway,” Jin-ho says to the group at large, as calm as ever, unbothered by the startled eyes suddenly on him. There’s an authoritative finality to it. 

Sergeant Min flicks a mock salute at him. “Good man.” 

Yong-seok’s shoulders sag, deflated at having been beaten to the punch. “Wake me when you get tired. I’ll take over.” 

“Of course,” Jin-ho says as the rest of them disperse, and though his face is its usual smooth stone Seok-chan immediately clocks it as a lie. There’s only one person he’s planning to give up that vigil to, and it’s not Yong-seok. 

Jin-ho would know better than to do anything else. He and Yeong-hu are so much alike: serious and focused and dangerously good at their work; loyal to the point of obstinance, maybe to folly. The only issue either of them has with the other is who they’ve chosen to be loyal to, with Jin-ho’s choice being the exact person Yeong-hu thinks will get his killed. It’s a major enough sticking point that for all their similarities, they still don’t necessarily like each other. 

The similarities do mean, however, that Seok-chan can’t help but like Jin-ho a little by association, no matter that they’ve barely ever spoken.

Some of his reluctance fades. He feels a bit less like a wounded animal, less the child who wore his name first. He feels—like himself, mostly, and a bit touched that Jin-ho made the effort to volunteer. 

“Thanks,” he says. No performance required. 

Jin-ho gives him a tiny smile, the barest upward tilt of one corner of his mouth. It’s the first time Seok-chan’s ever seen it. “Of course,” he says again, more genuinely this time, and goes to get his tablet.

Maybe it’s a two-way street, Seok-chan thinks. Maybe Jin-ho is so similar to Yeong-hu that he can’t help but like Seok-chan a little by association, too. 

Sergeant Min forces a second round of acetaminophen on him before the lights go out. Miraculously, it takes enough of the edge off that he’s able to relax a little, to ignore the strangeness of Jin-ho sitting up next to his cot and working on his tablet with casual aplomb, like this is something they do all the time. 

It takes him a while to find a semi-comfortable position that won’t aggravate his head or the worst of the bruises on his back. He’s done his best to avoid drawing anyone’s attention to those, not particularly wanting to strip down in the middle of Lim’s infirmary. Jin-ho doesn’t say anything as he tosses and turns, ultimately settling on his side. 

It’s fine. His shirt isn’t sticking to him, so he’s probably not bleeding anywhere. With that cheery thought, he’s able to fall into something like sleep.

He needs the rest. It’s still a mistake.

If he’d thought things were jumbled in his head before, it’s nothing compared to what happens when the brakes are cut, meager inhibitions of consciousness tapping out as he slips under. Barely coherent enough to be called a dream, and all the more a nightmare for it. A whirlwind of sensory input: gravel under his back, the sound of screaming in the distance.

They’re not screaming for him. Seok-chan hitting the ground is secondary to something much worse, something happening not far away. He can’t get up, air knocked out of him, but he rolls his head sideways across the ground and sees—he can’t remember the name. Why can’t he remember his name? Seok-chan knows him, the squadmate trapped under the shadow of a monster some handful of yards away. They’re friends, have been for years. 

Oh, Seok-chan realizes as the monster raises a cinderblock fist. This isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. 

His squadmate turns his head toward Seok-chan, meets his eyes across the ground, and Seok-chan cannot think of his name. The face, though, he will never forget: how easily it breaks under the fist, the sharp slivers of skull white amongst the pulp.

The pain in Seok-chan’s head surges. He thinks he might know what it had felt like.

He awakes with a start, disoriented, crash-landing back into reality. Even awake, he can’t remember his squadmate’s name. It terrifies him more than the dream. He knows he would have remembered it yesterday. For a single, horrified moment he is sure there is something very wrong with him after all. He’s bleeding somewhere in his brain. He’ll die here in the dark the way his squadmate died in the dirt, helpless to stop either.

Rustling from the floor next to his cot. “It’s okay,” Jin-ho says, a faint shadow against an even fainter light, voice so calm it borders on monotone. “We’re safe here.” 

It’s a while before Seok-chan can force his lungs to inflate. 

“Sorry,” he says eventually.

Everyone always sleeps like the dead the night after a supply raid—enough that nobody’s snoring wakes anyone else, and that’s saying something—but he tries to be quiet anyway. “Just one of those dreams,” he adds by way of explanation. “You know.”

He has to know. Thirty-two names crossed out in red on Yeong-hu’s roster. More besides, before this all began, and some just as messy. It was never a low-risk job.

Jin-ho hums, non-committal. Seok-chan hears the tapping of industrious fingers on the tablet. 

Seok-chan feels suddenly guilty, embarrassed, not sure why he ever thought Jin-ho might feel any amicability for him beyond the basic courtesy required for one’s coworkers. “You didn’t have to do this, Jin-ho,” he says. “You have a lot on your plate already. Yong-seok can take over.” 

Jin-ho is unmoved. “It’s fine. Occupational hazard.”

If not a hazard, then certainly a duty. Seok-chan hasn’t had to sit up with a concussed comrade before, but he’s carried injured squadmates, doubled up on shifts, given up rations. It’s what you do. 

“Regretting it?” Seok-chan says lightly. He doesn’t specify which it he means. Volunteering to watch Seok-chan, staying with the Crow Platoon, joining the Special Forces at all. There are a lot of things about their current situation to regret. 

“The job is still the job.” That’s a no, then. Probably. Hard to tell with Jin-ho. “You?”

“No,” Seok-chan says.  

He sees the silhouette nod, never turning away from the tablet. Seok-chan thinks that’s the end of the conversation, but then Jin-ho says, “You don’t seem the type.”

Seok-chan tries to smile. He doesn’t know why he bothers in the dark. He does know what Jin-ho is saying. “For regrets? Or the UDT?” 

“The latter.”

As expected. He doesn’t say it cruelly, though, nor try and backtrack his way out of the blunder, the way people often do when they realize what they’ve said and how it sounds. As if Jin-ho would ever blunder—he only ever says exactly what he means. Seok-chan rewards the level honesty with some of his own. “I probably wasn’t, back then.” 

“Then why apply?” 

He’s been asked the question dozens of times over the years, the answer seeming to change every time he gives it. The words gathering at the tip of his tongue feel closer to truth than they’ve ever been. It’s easier in the dark, Jin-ho not even looking at him, too absorbed in what’s on his screen. 

“It was kind of a go-big-or-go-home situation,” Seok-chan says, finishing the bad joke in his head: and I couldn’t go home.

“An ultimatum?”

“Nothing like that.” Or if it was, it was self-imposed. “I just needed to make a choice. Something big. Or else I’d end up…giving in. Going back.”

Lying down in the backseat. Grateful for any pain that earned him an hour of quiet.

Jin-ho doesn’t ask for details. He just hums again, that low drone devoid of judgment, or much feeling at all. It’s strangely comforting. 

A memory strikes Seok-chan. Funny now with time’s careful distance. “I was a semester away from graduating,” he says around a laugh. “The university admin who processed my dropout paperwork thought I was insane. They said, just finish your degree first, go in as an officer. But I just kept saying no. No, it has to be now.” 

Shadow bends briefly across the tablet. Jin-ho, nodding, deeper than before. He’s seen something he recognizes. “I was wrong.”

“What?”

“You were suited. Are.” 

He’s lost Seok-chan. “How so?”

“Once you’ve made the call, delaying just makes it worse,” Jin-ho says. “No point putting it off. Someone has to pull the trigger.” 

Seok-chan opens his mouth to say—something—but Jin-ho’s already disengaging. “I need to work,” he says, “and you need to rest. Or Sergeant Kim will chew us both out.” 

No, Seok-chan thinks, staving off a laugh like a tickle in the back of his throat, he wouldn’t.

A lot of work to do, Yeong-hu had said. It’s a laughable understatement.

Running aside, it doesn’t take long to realize that “getting up to speed” before they deploy is going to be the hardest of any of the rounds of training he’s been through thus far. The food is better—though after Starvation Week, his standards are borderline nonexistent—but Yeong-hu does not relax the conditioning regimen Seok-chan started in SQT for a goddamn second, making no concession for the dozens of new skills Seok-chan needs to somehow acquire in what time remains. His days are an unrelenting loop of conditioning, demonstration, practice, assessment, broken up by as much food as he can inhale in fifteen minutes and brief stretches of unconsciousness he couldn’t accurately call anything as restful as sleep. 

As it turns out, the person putting him through the training is also the one who makes it bearable. Yeong-hu is clear in his explanations and expectations both, direct without being cruel, poker-faced but not unfeeling. Most importantly: he doesn’t yell, which is an undeniable relief even with the small buffer of immunity Seok-chan’s built up over the last few months.

He’d been sure he’d flunk out of basic. There had been a few close calls, moments when he’d nearly crumbled, capitulated, said I knew I couldn’t do this. The trick came to him the first time he’d caught one of his many interchangeable instructors discreetly checking their watch mid-diatribe and thought, with detachment and an odd curiosity, this is nothing. You’re nothing. None of the people getting paid to scream vitriol in his face mattered to his life, and he sure as hell didn’t mean anything to theirs—not enough for them to believe what they were saying, no matter that they were shouting it. 

His father had always meant it. His father had mattered, the way a hammer matters to the nail. Somehow that made a difference.

It wasn’t, isn’t a perfect trick. But it keeps him functional, keeps the panic off his face and his hands steady enough to aim. He can’t afford to be otherwise. He’s made a promise, after all. He hadn’t meant it as one when he said it, but somewhere on that track it took on the weight of an oath: he won’t slow Yeong-hu down.

Thank you, he thinks at every calm correction, at the end of another day without him finding out what will push Yeong-hu over that ledge. He appreciates Yeong-hu not putting him in a position where he has to find out if the trick will be enough.

He appreciates a lot of things about Yeong-hu. If he weren’t running Seok-chan into the ground for a minimum of twelve hours of training a day, Seok-chan might even have the energy to make a fool of himself about it. As it is, he clings on to his promise with every ounce of the stubbornness Yeong-hu had seen in him and allows himself a sole, secret thrill each time Yeong-hu nods and says, “Good.”

Yeong-hu is especially pleased when Seok-chan turns out to be good with the tech, remarking offhandedly that Lee Dong-jun still hasn’t gotten the hang of the finer details yet. Seok-chan had thought it was just a generational skill, but Dong-jun, though having enlisted a couple years before Seok-chan, is hardly any older than him.

It’s nice, knowing that he might just be good at something in this business on his own merits, that he might not drag all the rest of them down with him before they wise up and show him the door. For however long it lasts.  

As the weeks go on and Seok-chan ticks off more boxes, his time with Yeong-hu shortens. Seok-chan gets shuffled around to other trainers for the more niche skills and even starts taking on proper duties of his own. But Yeong-hu’s face is still the one he sees most. Seok-chan is admittedly not at all displeased by this—it is, after all, a very attractive face—and is more than a little relieved that Yeong-hu doesn’t seem to mind that Seok-chan’s supervision continues to monopolize large swathes of his week.

He flatters himself to think that Yeong-hu might enjoy it, just a little. He’s getting better at reading the poker face. Sometimes, when there’s something like a break and Seok-chan has the breath for it, he’ll make a joke, some dumb comment, anything ridiculous that he can think of in the moment. A tiny verbal poke to Yeong-hu’s ribs. He thinks he knows, now, what it looks like when Yeong-hu is hiding a smile. He likes to be the one who makes it happen.

Maybe this will work, Seok-chan thinks. If he just…does everything right, does his job without messing up. He can be perfect. He can be good.

It’s tempting fate in the worst way. It’s not long before it comes to collect. 

The first time Seok-chan fucks up in training, really fucks up, his blood turns to ice, freezing him in place. Everything is suddenly so quiet. 

He realizes in a rush of sheer horror that Yeong-hu is not like the drill instructors whose vitriol he can shake off by virtue of not caring about them. He cares about Yeong-hu, about what Yeong-hu thinks of him. The obvious caveat. It’s been in front of his face the whole time.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do when Yeong-hu starts to yell, but he thinks it will be deeply shameful. He has always been, at his core, a shameful thing. A wretch praying to the first god that ever showed him a speck of kindness that no one will notice the weakness of him, the broken pieces haphazardly assembled.  

But Yeong-hu just taps him where the back of his head meets his neck, a smack in name only, as lightly as he had that first day on the track. Says, “Get it together, soldier,” as mildly as if Seok-chan had forgotten to tie a shoelace.

Seok-chan nods, unable to form words, and does as he’s told: gets it together, tries again, doesn’t fuck up as badly the second time. “Again,” Yeong-hu says, the same mild tone, and Seok-chan obeys. He doesn’t fuck it up at all this time. Does it again, correctly, to make sure he can. “Good,” Yeong-hu says, “next,” and Seok-chan breathes. 

He’s exhausted when the session is over, more than he’s been in the weeks since he started to adjust to the conditioning. Yeong-hu looks at him with inscrutable intent, this particular manifestation of the poker face out of reach of Seok-chan’s fledgling understanding.

“Kang Seok-chan,” he says at last. “You work like a dog and come back the next day determined to work harder still. I won’t abandon you. Do you understand?”  

He doesn’t. He nods anyway. It’s enough that he believes Yeong-hu when he says it. He thinks there isn’t a thing he wouldn’t believe if it came from Yeong-hu, looking at him like that.

Of course he falls in love. Of course—what else? 

The next time he wakes, there’s no sounds of tapping on a tablet screen, no dim glow to light the space beside his cot. Someone’s there. Not Jin-ho—for all their similarities, Seok-chan could never confuse one for the other. He doesn’t need to see to know. He reaches out and finds the arm in the dark. 

He knows Yeong-hu too well to be surprised by how the conversation goes. 

That’s just like you, Seok-chan thinks as Yeong-hu walks away. Leave me waiting for seven years, then ask another seven days. You ridiculous, impossible man.

He’s not sure whether to feel exasperated or fond. He falls asleep before he can decide.

Yeong-hu is already gone from the barracks when Seok-chan and the rest of the men get up for the day.

A tiny voice in the back of his head says that Yeong-hu is avoiding him. Seok-chan stomps it out before it can find a shred of panic to latch onto. Yeong-hu’s an early riser even by military standards, often going to check in with the night rotation before anyone else is up. This is business as usual, and they both have jobs to do. 

The squad gets ready for the day at varying speeds. By the time some have started wolfing down their rations, others are still resentfully lacing up their boots. Seok-chan has them all beat. Not as early a riser as Yeong-hu, but still a morning person at heart. In keeping in line with his business as usual mantra, he’s dressed and ready to go by the time Yeong-hu comes through the door. 

He salutes and gives Yeong-hu his normal morning smile like nothing has happened. “What’s on the agenda?” 

It’s the same question he always asks. He means: what can I help with? There’s a duty roster, of course, but depending on what the night rotation has said it’s not uncommon for Yeong-hu to have to rearrange half the damn thing to make room for whatever wild goose chases demand their attention that shift. Seok-chan’s been assigned more than his share of those: the curse of being what Yeong-hu calls their resident jack-of-all-trades.  

Yeong-hu gives him a look. Well, strictly speaking, his expression doesn’t change, but Seok-chan’s had nearly a decade of practice deciphering the meanings behind how Kim Yeong-hu’s face does or doesn’t move in any given moment.

This one’s an easy read. It’s disconcerting and somewhat humbling, seeing his own exasperated-or-fond dilemma reflected back at him. “Doesn’t matter,” Yeong-hu says. “You’re off duty.” 

It’s the answer he was afraid of. Seok-chan stands up a little straighter. “Sarge?” he queries, not letting the frown into his tone, onto his face. It won’t do any good. 

“You’re a day out from a brain injury.” His voice is level. “Sleep it off. If the night rotation gives you shit for it, you’re authorized to tell them to fuck off.” 

“Naturally I only say such things with your permission, sir,” Seok-chan says, slanting a reluctant smile.

He forgets, sometimes, that Yeong-hu’s had nearly a decade to learn him too. His posture relaxes minutely when Seok-chan smiles, like he knows the hidden frown it’s supplanted.

It makes Seok-chan think he might be able to press his luck a little. “I could…help with roll call?” It’s as close to light duty as tasks get around here. 

Now that is proper exasperation.

If Yeong-hu stands his ground on this, Seok-chan will back down. They both know it.

“One block only,” Yeong-hu says. “You partner with Dong-jun. If he decides you’re done, for any reason, you go back to the barracks. No arguments.”  

“Thank you, sir.” He's grinning, nothing reluctant about it. He still keeps it small. They’re in public, and it’s rude to be too smug about getting your way.  

“Take the painkillers before you go,” Yeong-hu says. “And don’t make me regret this.”

Seok-chan does his best doe-eyed stare, who, me? Yeong-hu huffs what’s almost a laugh at the sight, disbelieving, shaking his head slightly as he goes to give Dong-jun their orders. The sound of it does more for Seok-chan’s headache than the acetaminophen.

“Ready to go?” Dong-jun asks when he joins Seok-chan at the door a few minutes later. “Or did you want to suit up first?” 

Seok-chan, with full awareness that he’s walking into something, gives him the questioning look he’s fishing for. 

“Your bubblewrap tiara,” Dong-jun clarifies, innocent look putting Seok-chan’s doe eyes to shame, “for your fragile little head.” 

“Fuck off,” Seok-chan says agreeably. Morning pleasantries exchanged, they get going. 

Dong-jun sets their pace. It’s slower than usual, which Seok-chan appreciates. He’s not dizzy, exactly, but every now and then the pain hits wrong and makes his legs go wobbly, like—fuck if he can wrangle his bruised brain long enough to remember. The second name he’s forgotten in less than a day. You’re not dying, he tells himself firmly, just a little…scrambled.

“What’s its name again?” he wonders aloud for his own peace of mind. “The cartoon deer.” 

Dong-jun squints at him. “Are you having a stroke?” 

“No.” Maybe. “The one from the Disney movie. Falls all over the place trying to walk.” 

“Oh. Bambi.” 

Seok-chan snaps and points at him. “That’s the one.” 

“You need to sit down?”

“Nah. Just don’t laugh if I fall on my face.” As if Dong-jun would ever pass up an opportunity to do exactly that. 

“The point of sitting down is to stop it from getting that bad, dumbass.” 

They go silent by wordless agreement as they pass a couple civilians—well, one civilian plus Park Chan-yeong, giving obliviously sincere directions to the blushing girl who almost certainly needed nothing but an excuse to talk to him. 

“Remember being that young?" Dong-jun drawls once they're out of audible range. Like the two of them are so ancient. "Brand new to the service, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“No,” Seok-chan says. Park Chan-yeong is a level of irrepressibly earnest that has nothing to do with his age, experience, or lack of either. Yeong-hu will forever hold a grudge for the landmine incident. Seok-chan, for his part, can’t help but hope Park Chan-yeong hangs on to that instinct. “I remember being scared out of my mind, though.” 

“Most everybody is. You make it through basic and SQT and think you’re such a badass. And then you get assigned to a squad and realize you still don’t know shit, and if you don’t figure it out fast you’re going to spend the next year sorting paperwork at base.” 

Seok-chan hadn’t known he was supposed to have ever felt like a badass, but the rest of it's a masterful summary. “I think that was the most sleep-deprived I’ve ever been in my life.” 

“Oh yeah, you got the full Kim Yeong-hu Training Experience, huh? You’re lucky, you know. Not everyone did.”

“They didn’t?”

It’s the first he’s ever heard otherwise. He’s always thought it was just standard operating procedure, a set arrangement: the rookies transfer in, Yeong-hu pummels them into shape. He never paid enough attention to the training of the newbies who joined after him to see if that were true.

He presses on his sternum. Behave, he tells the heart hiding underneath it.    

Dong-jun shakes his head. “He has a say in who he trains. Had a say.” Talking about the way the world used to be is an exercise fraught with wistfulness. It creeps into their tenses when they’re not looking. He starts again. “Train enough people, you start to get a sense of who’s worth your time and who’s going to flake out. Guess he saw something in you. Fuck knows why,” he adds, because saying anything too nice makes Dong-jun break out into hives. 

“Guess so.” Seven years and Yeong-hu still surprises him. Thankfully Seok-chan has put that time to good use learning to stay under a reasonable level of suspicion, which is perhaps the only reason this latest revelation doesn’t make him turn red or trip over his own already wobbly feet or do anything else exceedingly suspicious. Not like that time with—

“Ji-hun!” Seok-chan says, almost shouting. Dong-jun jumps, swears, but Seok-chan pays him no mind: he’s finally remembered the name, can reattach it to the face of the squadmate from the dream. “Oh thank god, I’m not brain damaged after all.” 

Dong-jun’s staring. “Are you fucking sure?”

Ji-hun is complaining.

Something about a patrol Seok-chan wasn’t assigned to. Seok-chan’s not sure what it is about him that makes people decide he’s worth entrusting their pettiest grievances to, but it’s a lifelong trend. Friends, acquaintances, strangers in line at the grocery store.

Now apparently also squadmates. “Fucking hell,” Ji-hun says, jamming a cigarette between his teeth and lighting it like he’s angry at it. He's inhaling hard almost before the flame's even caught. “You’re lucky you weren’t there,” he continues, smoke trickling back out his mouth with the words.

“That bad?”

“Worse. Kim alone took ten years off my life.” 

Seok-chan startles. “Staff Sergeant Kim?” 

“That’s the one. What’s his damage, you think?” 

Seok-chan’s mind goes completely blank of possible responses.

Part of it’s his honest-to-god bewilderment at the idea of someone finding fault with Yeong-hu, as an officer or a person. The other part is that he’s still relatively new—not even through his first term, only a few months out from getting the all-clear to deploy out with the squad—and the nuances of these sorts of interactions still elude him. Is he, as the greenest rookie around, expected to participate in complaints like this? Just stand there and nod, jump in with venting of his own? Or maybe it’s a test to see if he’ll badmouth a superior officer the moment the opportunity is handed to him.

Is this how all twenty-two-year-olds in a new workplace feel? Granted most of their jobs probably involve fewer explosives.

He feels a phantom tap on the back of his neck. It’s routine now, Yeong-hu’s hand waking Seok-chan from whatever tangle of thoughts has made him go quiet at a meal or recheck his equipment a few too many times, the gesture so fast and light it escapes most everyone's notice—not a criticism meant for an audience, merely a reminder to let go. Refocus.

It resolves his quandary before it can get off the ground. Obvious, in retrospect: he will pull his own teeth out before he stands there while someone talks badly about Kim Yeong-hu. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says. He’s aiming for cool, disinterested; it comes out flat, cold. “The Staff Sergeant is one of the most professional people here.”

The here is deliberate. I don’t see him shit-talking his superiors right now, it means. It’s the wrong tone to take. Ji-hun snorts incredulously, pushes off the wall they’re both leaning against to grind out his barely touched cigarette beneath his mud-coated boot. “Yeah, maybe when you’re around,” he starts angrily, and then pauses, struck.

“What?” Seok-chan says, baffled. 

“When you’re around,” he repeats, and then, contemplatively: “Huh.” He thinks on that for a moment, then looks down at the mangled cigarette in the dirt, forlorn, as though he hadn’t been the one to put it there.

Seok-chan sighs. Says, “Here,” and pulls out another from his own pack. It’s the end of a shitty day, and his squadmate is tired and covered in mud. It’s not his fault that Seok-chan—that Yeong-hu is—it’s not his fault. 

Ji-hun accepts the peace offering and the cigarette, lets Seok-chan light the latter for him. He settles back against the wall and smokes at a more sedate pace for a long, silent minute. “Do me a favor, Seok-chan,” he says at last.

“Yeah?”

“If you care at all for the safety and wellbeing of this squad: do not get your rookie ass killed. Or reassigned.” 

What is that supposed to mean?

“Sure,” Seok-chan says, because he has to say something. An attempt at humor: “But only because you asked.” 

“Thanks. I’ve been wanting to live past thirty.” Matter apparently settled, Ji-hun glances at his watch and pushes off the wall again, throwing a wave goodbye over his shoulder.

Seok-chan nods blankly and lets him go, doesn’t call him back to demand he explain himself. Once he’s out of sight, he leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes.

Don’t be so defensive next time, he thinks to himself, you fucking moron.  

He wasn’t even on the patrol. Maybe Yeong-hu really did… whatever it is that had Ji-hun so agitated. It occurs to him that he hadn’t even asked. 

A handful of months is plenty of time to fall in love. He knows better than to be so obvious about it. 

Seok-chan manages to convince Dong-jun he’s not having a medical event just in time for roll call to start. Park Chan-yeong passes them briskly on his way to his own block, blushing girl successfully repelled. Seok-chan nods at him, and Park Chan-yeong looks surprised, almost grateful to be afforded such a basic acknowledgment. 

That won’t do, Seok-chan thinks, making a mental note. Earnest as Park Chan-yeong is, he’s trapped between groups. Too military to be embraced by the increasingly distrustful civilian population of the stadium. Too late enlisting to stand anywhere but awkwardly at the periphery of the Crow Platoon, its bonds woven strong without him, many of its members soured against him. 

He must feel very alone. 

“Hey.” Dong-jun snaps, fingers inches from Seok-chan’s face. “You good to do this or what?”

Seok-chan pushes his hand away. “I’m fine. You get that side, I’ll start with the line over there.” 

Dong-jun nods, and they split up to get to work.

Seok-chan takes a steadying breath. It’s a monotonous, depressing task. He hates the knife he carries for it.

He’s seen more monsters than he’d like—seen and burned and killed. He knows very well how dangerous it could be if someone turned in the middle of crowded underground quarters. He won’t shirk this duty, but he bends its rules where he can, feels sick at the hints of how other men choose to enforce them. Sometimes he’ll take the shaking hand held out to him and find fresh cuts made well before the old ones have healed. Longer than they need to be, edges jagged and poorly done. Never on the hand of someone well-liked or looked after—it’s always the loners, the outcasts, the chronically mistreated. People who avert their eyes when he asks who did roll call the day before. 

Oh, no, it’s not a big deal, they say, polite, terrified. It was an accident. They’re just doing their job. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Please, their eyes say, please don’t get me in trouble. Please don’t kick the hornet’s nest and make it worse. And then they look so relieved when Seok-chan puts their hand down without unsheathing his knife, they look grateful, like Park Chan-yeong had, like—

He’s gone to Yeong-hu about it. Yeong-hu had checked the duty roster for whoever had the shift before him. He doesn’t know what Yeong-hu had found, only that it ended with a closed-door conversation with Tak that Yeong-hu emerged from looking incandescently furious. One more manifestation of a power struggle that’s already exacted a hefty body count. Thirty-two red lines crossed through names on a roster; that many and more carved into the skin of the civilians they’re sworn to protect.

It isn’t hard to think of suspects. The worst of the dead-eyed veterans under Tak, or the young bullies from other branches, brash with new power and the failing oversight of a collapsing world. The part of him that recognizes and recoils at the gratitude of those he leaves unhurt whispers that he can’t trust the rest of the men either, can’t overlook the possibility just because they’re his friends. It’s a grim habit, keeping a subtle eye on whoever he’s partnered with. He can’t turn it off.

He wouldn’t if he could. That’s another duty he won’t shirk.

He’s distracted, glancing briefly over his shoulder at Dong-jun’s handiwork when the line moves and someone new steps up. “My,” a voice remarks, lofty with faux-concern. “You’ve sure taken a beating.”

Seok-chan turns back, stops short in surprise. Peter is a slippery one, rarely in attendance for roll call in the same block twice in a row. Providing pastoral care requires him to travel freely amongst his flock, he says whenever concerns are raised. It makes Yeong-hu grind his teeth.

Seok-chan has always done his level best to avoid him entirely, a goal made easy by the fact that Peter has never spared him the slightest notice. His battered condition has landed him squarely in Peter’s crosshair this morning, though.

“Pardon?” Seok-chan says blandly: go away. 

“The bruising.” He taps at his own face. It sparks a moment of deja vu, an overlaid image of Lim doing the same the day before. There is something oddly alike about them. “Are you well?”

“Perfectly. Thank you.” 

“Dr. Lim thought otherwise.” 

Seok-chan nearly laughs at his intuition’s five seconds of advance warning. Of course the two of them—what, trade information? Gossip? He can’t imagine those conversations. “Sleep is a miracle drug. I’m fine.” 

“Pardon me for saying, but you don’t look well-rested.” More faux-concern. “You seem quite weary, in fact. In more ways than one. Perhaps you need somewhere to lay down your burdens? Someone to entrust them to.”

“Your concern is kind but unnecessary, Father.” Stop talking to him. Don’t use that title; don’t give him the legitimacy. Just get back to business. “May I see your hand, please?”

Peter offers it obediently. Seok-chan reaches out to take it, short sleeve of his shirt riding up with the motion, and in a flash Peter’s hand darts past his, grabbing Seok-chan high up on his forearm instead. His fingers are cold and strong. He rotates Seok-chan’s forearm outward in one firm twist, the elbow and bicep above turning a little with it. “Ah,” Peter says. “I thought so.” 

He means the tattoo. 16:22, the small numbers on the inside of his bicep easy to miss with his arm resting naturally at his side, usually hidden safely under his sleeve. Peter has keen eyes. Damn it, Seok-chan thinks. Damn you. 

“The gospel of John, I presume?” Peter says. “So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. A good choice.” 

He channels Dong-jun from across the room, tries for sardonic and unimpressed. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Dong-jun wouldn’t stop there. The remark pops fully crafted into his head: numbers aren’t just for labeling bible verses, jackass. But it’s a step too far into fabrication. Lying isn’t any more in Seok-chan’s nature now than it was all those years ago. Peter knows his scripture, no matter that he wields it with questionable intent.

He’s looking at Seok-chan with eyes that could almost be sad. “Oh, soldier. You’re in a dangerous line of work. Wouldn’t you like to return to the fold? Be loved, protected?”

Seok-chan plucks Peter’s hand off him, scans the old cut there, healing the slow human way. “I’m lacking for neither,” he says, Dong-jun’s biting edge fading into Yeong-hu’s ironclad certainty, “and nothing you could provide will ever compare.”

He moves on to the next person in line. Peter doesn’t stop him. 

It’s not a bullet meant for him. It’s not a bullet meant for anyone. It’s an accidental discharge from someone who was trained better, and Seok-chan is twenty-three when an idiot’s shoddy trigger discipline nearly kills him in one of the most pointless ways imaginable. 

By the time Seok-chan registers the near miss, he’s already on the ground, sprawled backward on his palms in the grass. Bewildered, almost. He’d thought himself accustomed to gunfire by now, but this hadn’t been combat, hadn’t even been training. Just a moment of downtime and someone else’s stupid mistake. He stares unblinkingly up at his almost-killer, eyes starting to dry out and sting against the air, but they won’t close.

“Oh, shit.” Face blanched bone-white, staring back at Seok-chan in equal horror. “Are you—” he starts as he steps forward, one hand reaching out for Seok-chan, and that’s when Yeong-hu appears in between them. 

The sound of his fist against the pale face is somehow louder than the bullet was. Seok-chan’s ears start to ring, as if they’ve just now caught up with what’s happened. “What is wrong with you?” Yeong-hu is saying. “You could have killed him. What the fuck is wrong with you?” 

It’s the loudest he’s ever heard Yeong-hu, loud enough to pierce through the high-pitched ringing that’s turning everyone else’s words to mush. Two of the men are struggling to pull Yeong-hu off their cringing squadmate. Someone else is kneeling next to Seok-chan—trying, he thinks, to coax him off the ground. He watches the muscles of Yeong-hu’s back bunch as he twists against the restraining hands on his arms. He feels like he’s underwater.

This is what it takes to get Yeong-hu to yell, he thinks, dazed, and finally feels safe enough to let his burning eyes close. 

There’s a hand in his hair, fingers clenching down around the short strands in one hard, purposeful tug. Rattled, he looks at the person kneeling next to him. “Seok-chan,” Ji-hun says, perfectly enunciating every syllable, “you need to get up, or he’s going to kill him.” 

Seok-chan gets up. He stumbles and Ji-hun catches him by the elbow, hoisting him up and toward the thrashing mess of limbs. 

“Staff Sergeant Kim,” he says cautiously as he approaches, “sir.”

One of the men hanging on to Yeong-hu’s arms looks over his shoulder at him meaningfully. Fix this. But Yeong-hu’s back is to Seok-chan; he’s not listening, if he can hear him at all.

Seok-chan reaches out and puts his hand at the top of Yeong-hu’s back, fingers trailing up to the base of his skull. Not a tap or a smack, just resting there in careful pressure.  

Yeong-hu goes still.

“Yeong-hu,” he says, trying for low and soothing, close enough he can almost say it directly in his ear. This isn’t for anyone else. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Don’t get court martialed over this.” 

It’s enough. Yeong-hu stops. 

He and Dong-jun reconvene. Seok-chan leans against the wall and lets his eyes go out of focus while Dong-jun phones in the results of the roll call. They’ve done their one block. He’s ready to sleep for a week. As a start.

Dong-jun hangs up the phone, waits for Seok-chan to give him his attention before asking the question. “What did he want?”

Seok-chan doesn’t waste anyone’s time asking who. “What do you think? Trying to get me to go to one of his meetings.”

“What did you say?”

Seok-chan looks at him flatly.

“I don’t know, man, I didn’t want to…assume.” 

Funny, and a little heartwarming, the things Dong-jun manages to be considerate about. The fact that he’s noticed at all says something; Seok-chan doesn’t talk about it as a general rule. In his seven years in the UDT, he can count the number of times it’s come up on one hand. “Not my scene,” he says with a shrug, taking mercy on Dong-jun’s awkward shuffling. “I’m a shitty Catholic anyway.”

“Well, good. Sarge would have an aneurysm. Too many jokes about deserters already.” 

 Seok-chan rubs his aching forehead. “Going to one meeting is not a slippery slope to desertion, Dong-jun.” Not that he’ll go regardless. 

“Shit, you think he knows that?”

He smiles wryly. He’s not sure Yeong-hu does. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. A promise meant for another’s ears. 

He’s almost twenty-four when there’s talk of promotions on the wind. For a handful of Staff Sergeants, mostly, plus a few people too far up the chain for Seok-chan to know or care much about. It’s all the rumormongers on base talk about for what seems like weeks, until one evening Seok-chan nearly collides with Yeong-hu in the doorway of the canteen and takes a proper look at him midway through his automatic apology, getting a feeling he can't explain. 

Yeong-hu meets his eye, seeing the question there. He nods, very slightly. Still not one to brag.   

Seok-chan doesn’t know if he’s allowed to feel proud of a superior officer, let alone one he’s been unadvisedly infatuated with for nearly a year. He feels it anyway. “Couldn’t have gotten better news,” he beams. “Congrats, Sarge.” 

Yeong-hu considers him, eyes oddly intent. “And what about you?” 

He blinks. “Me?”

“Your term is almost up. Are you sticking around?” 

“Of course,” he says, startled. He hadn’t realized that was in question.

Yeong-hu watches him closely, like he’s not sure he’s telling the truth. After a moment he nods, slow and satisfied. “That’s better news.” 

He steps neatly around Seok-chan and walks away without another a word, smooth, nearly a saunter. Seok-chan stands there and tries to remember whether he was coming in or out of the canteen, tries to look normal for any prying eyes, tries to think something other than he was keeping track. He wanted me to stay.  

Seok-chan sleeps for a few hours and wakes up bored. Tech work doesn’t tend to require any heavy lifting. He finds Jin-ho and hovers in his general vicinity until Jin-ho sighs. “Nothing that involves looking at screens. You’ll thank me later,” he says, sending Seok-chan to untangle a mess of extension cords. 

Yeong-hu finds him by nearly tripping over him. “Sorry, Sarge,” Seok-chan says, flashing a sheepish look up at him from where he’s kneeling among the catastrophe of wires on the floor. 

Yeong-hu looks down at him. His face is blank, but his eyes are warm. “Stubborn,” he says. 

Seok-chan smiles. “Of course,” he says. “I was trained by the best.”

Chapter Text

Perhaps accepting from the previous afternoon that leaving Seok-chan at loose ends for too long will only result in him finding something to do of his own temporarily impaired accord, Yeong-hu starts off day two post-concussion by remanding Seok-chan into Jin-ho’s employ.

Good luck with that, Dong-jun mouths at Jin-ho from over Yeong-hu’s shoulder.

Seok-chan makes a face at him, then regrets the movement of muscles an instant later when the bruises and still fragile scab along his hairline protest. 

The pain in his head has stabilized somewhat, steady enough that he can tune it out for minutes at a time, and now everything else is shoving to the front of the line to demand its fair share of attention. His back most of all—he was trusted to sleep unobserved last night, and he took advantage of the lack of assessing eyes on him to wince without reserve at how every sleeping position he tried managed to put pressure somewhere painful. Even stretching out on his uninjured side like before had offered little respite. 

Less restful still: the confused mishmash of memories that found him for a second night in a row when sleep finally fell, stirred to the surface by the day’s events. Not as intense as the nightmare of Ji-hun’s death, but not much more coherent either, unfinished ends of disparate days stitched mistakenly together.

Even awake, things overlap. He looks at Jin-ho and thinks, Ji-hun, knowing it’s wrong. He tries deliberately to call to mind Ji-hun’s face, the hard-won prize he’d dragged from the wreckage of his memory yesterday, and sees instead the ashen expression of the one-time squadmate who’d almost killed him with a misplaced finger and an accidental bullet. 

I’ve been wanting to live past thirty, says Jin-ho in Ji-hun’s voice.

You don’t seem the type for the UDT, Ji-hun says, sitting up at Seok-chan’s bedside.

Someone has to pull the trigger, his long-dismissed squadmate says, pointing the gun. 

Stop it, he thinks to no one in particular. He gets the urge to shake his head like a dog, shake off the grim malaise seeping into all his thoughts. What’s left of his common sense after two nights of minimal sleep politely reminds him that his brain is still bruised, and rattling it around like mints in a tin box is perhaps not conducive to a speedy recovery. 

He hopes to god this isn’t his new normal. He can’t function like this forever. Not with any measure of maturity, anyway. He’s tired enough that he’s making faces at Dong-jun like a middle-schooler.

Dong-jun isn’t bothered. Once Yeong-hu has left on his own agenda for the day, he just cuts his eyes over at Jin-ho, says, “Have fun babysitting,” and heads out with one last smirk at Seok-chan.

Seok-chan decides that it’s fine. Possibly more people should make faces at Dong-jun, it seems like it might be good for him.

Jin-ho, to his credit, accepts this added supervisory burden to his workload with grace and little visible annoyance. It must help that Seok-chan is one of the few people here who can just about keep up with him on all things tech. 

He was right about not looking at screens, though. A fact Seok-chan discovers a few uneventful hours in when he spends all of two minutes doggedly reading off of one and becomes so violently dizzy he nearly topples off his chair.

Jin-ho barely glances at him before his hand is on Seok-chan’s back, pushing him to bend forward at the waist.

“Head between your knees,” he orders.

Seok-chan obeys. He closes his eyes and glues his mouth shut, listening to the sounds of Jin-ho placidly returning to work. In the dark, the memories blur again. When he’s not fighting tooth and nail not to vomit on the floor, he tries to cut them loose, snip the haphazard stitches threading them together. Ji-hun, Jin-ho, squadmate, he thinks, and then, nonsensically: dead, awake, trigger. 

It’s gibberish, but it helps. Several minutes of repeating the words in his mind finds him able to sit up again. Nothing’s spinning anymore, at least. 

“I think you’re done for the day,” Jin-ho says without looking away from his work, a very polite I told you so. “Can you make it back to the barracks on your own?” 

“Yeah, I got it. Thanks, Jin-ho.”

Jin-ho waves him off absently. Seok-chan gets to his feet, balance tentative. The walls and floor stay where they should. More or less.

He goes back to the barracks as instructed, not with any intention of sleeping another afternoon away but because he doesn’t know where to go otherwise. His first instinct when at loose ends is always to find Yeong-hu, but Yeong-hu had made a point of assigning him elsewhere. To keep him from overdoing it while his brain knits itself back together, he knows. It still stings anyway. 

What is there left to do? He could go help the afternoon crew with throwing together the midday meal, but the thought of food—if what they’re making do with these days qualifies—doesn’t sit well with his uneasily settled stomach. He settles for collapsing in a graceless heap on a foot locker in the communal space outside the sleeping quarters proper, not wanting to disturb the night rotation. 

He’s massaging his shoulder with the opposite hand, experimenting to see if he can divert his brain’s attention away from the pain in his back with enough pressure, when there’s a cough off to his side. He turns bodily toward it, not wanting to twist his neck and risk setting off his head all over again. He’s just finally got it on straight again. 

He’s surprised, but not by much: Park Chan-yeong, there to speak, standing a hair too far away. Not quite sure of his welcome, but emboldened enough to try by the simple act of Seok-chan acknowledging his existence at roll call the day before. 

“Staff Sergeant Kang Seok-chan, right?”

The question is diffident, borderline leery. Ready to duck out at a moment’s notice if Seok-chan tells him to buzz off.

It’s a bad day to be this tired and on edge. If Park Chan-yeong notices, he’s anxious enough to think it’s because of him—and if Seok-chan inadvertently scares him away, he might not ever try again.  

Seok-chan nods, trying to keep his expression open and encouraging. “What’s up?”   

The hand at Park Chan-yeong’s side drums its fingers once, twice, then stills. Mind made up. “I’ve been meaning to thank you for a while.”

He can’t think of anything he’s done in recent history that requires thanks, let alone from someone he barely knows. Then again, he and his thoughts are on confusingly fluid terms at the moment. “For what?”

“You helped carry Oh Jun-il back inside.”

After the mess with the landmine. This, Seok-chan remembers clearly. I’ve got him, Park Chan-yeong had said quietly, face already starting to swell, not meeting anyone’s eyes as he took Oh Jun-il’s arm from where it was braced around Jong-hyun’s shoulder.

Jong-hyun had stepped away immediately, rain-soaked and exhausted and all too happy to surrender the task of keeping a half-conscious and muddy Oh Jun-il upright. Seok-chan, responsible for the other arm, had at least waited to make sure Park Chan-yeong could take the weight alone, asked if he needed help getting him to the infirmary. No, the response had come. Eyes still lowered. I’ve got it. Thank you. 

He’s surprised Park Chan-yeong had made note of him at all with how hard he’d avoided looking at any of them—not ashamed of his actions, Seok-chan suspects, but acutely aware of how publicly he’d been reprimanded. He inclines his head in a shallow bow rather than say any of that. “You already thanked me, but you’re welcome anyway. I’m glad he had someone looking out for him.”

And his mother. In their final days. 

Park Chan-yeong’s gaze goes distant. Thinking the same. Seok-chan isn’t all that much older, but it’s—sad, still, seeing that vacant look on someone so young.

All bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Dong-jun had said disparagingly, but he’s not. None of them are. Not anymore. 

“Yeah,” Seok-chan says into the silence. Affirming what neither of them has said out loud. “Shit’s fucked.”

 It surprises a shy ghost of a smile out of Park Chan-yeong. “Can I use that in my sitreps? Update, 1100 hours: shit’s fucked.” The smile solidifies when Seok-chan snorts—he can’t not laugh at this clean-cut, baby-faced twenty-something trying on swearing for size. “Too unprofessional?” he asks with an innocence Seok-chan almost buys. 

“Depends on your audience. Sarge doesn’t tend to mind.” Seok-chan tries to verbally bemoan the state of things as little as possible, though. It’s more Dong-jun or Sergeant Min’s style, and adding fuel to that fire doesn’t feel all that helpful, least of all for the Platoon’s collective mood.

Last time he can remember saying something similar was early on in the crisis, day…four, maybe? When it started to sink in that this wasn’t some collective fever dream they were having, that this was their new mission for the foreseeable future and no one, absolutely no one above them in the ranks had any better plan than to kill monsters and hope for a vaccine. Hey, Sarge, Seok-chan had finally said around a cigarette, too tired to catch the thought before it came out. Is it just me, or is this kind of fucked? 

Yeong-hu had just looked at the cigarette. Seok-chan had taken it from his mouth and offered it to him in response, meaning to let him have the whole damn thing—with the new, unfathomable responsibilities landing on the senior officers’ shoulders, god knew he needed it more than Seok-chan. But Yeong-hu’s hand had risen to hold Seok-chan’s wrist in place as he took a single drag, grip so strong Seok-chan felt a long flush of heat bloom along his spine. And then he’d let go, a half-second slow, and left Seok-chan with the cigarette and no answer, off to check for more orders from base like it hadn’t been the nicotine he’d needed to steady him first. 

Park Chan-yeong’s face falls a little, snaps Seok-chan out of the memory. He traces backward in the conversation to figure out what he’s said wrong. Sarge. “Ah,” Park Chan-yeong says, playful edge gone. “Sergeant Kim.” 

Right.

“Yeah,” Seok-chan says. “It’s not worth much, but: I’m sorry. He’s…overprotective, sometimes. By all rights that should include you, too. It’s nothing about you, nothing wrong with you. It’s just bad timing.” That he didn’t become one of them earlier, safely cemented as belonging under Yeong-hu’s care before Yeong-hu saw what they were up against and let the gate slam shut, limits and resources stretched to their last snapping sinew. First come, first serve. The weight of all their lives, outmeasured only by the weight of the dead. 

An odd contradiction: to trust a man down to your bones, believing with all the fervency no church could ever instill that he is capable of the impossible, and still somehow dreading the day he hits the wall. Just let me help, Seok-chan wants to say. He’ll beg if he has to.

He’ll go to his knees. Any way Yeong-hu needs.  

“It is, though,” Park Chan-yeong says. When Seok-chan blinks, he clarifies: “Worth something. But please don’t concern yourself over me. I’ve never blamed Sergeant Kim. It wasn’t smart, what I did. But I needed to try anyway. He was right to be angry. ”

Seok-chan twists his mouth. Displeased, somehow, by Park Chan-yeong’s easy acceptance.  “Yeah, well. The point was made after the first punch. You looked as messed up as I do.”

He thinks, anyway. He’s been avoiding mirrors.

“I…can’t disagree with that. Sir.” Amusement, gentle concern. A good guy. “Are you okay, by the way? Everybody I asked just said something about a supply raid gone wrong, no real details.”

He can’t seem to keep his squadmates’ faces straight anymore, looking at screens makes him want to vomit, and the passing of the hours has him feeling increasingly like an abandoned pet about to gnaw through the steel wires of its cage. By the standards of stadium life, that amounts to still alive, should stop complaining. He tests the words internally: yeah, I’m okay. The balance of them is off, heavy where they sit sour and unsaid on his tongue. He elects to bypass that part of the question. “Honestly, they probably know more than I do,” he says, passing a hand vaguely in front of his face. A magician’s misdirection: look at these injuries here, don’t worry about the rest. 

“You don’t remember anything?” 

Yeong-hu folding over him, face drawn, pupils blown wide. Grip strong and careful. He won’t give Seok-chan up for anything.

Yeah, he tries again, I’m okay. 

Lighter, this time. But the conversation’s moved on. He settles for a shrug. “Monster tackled. Slammed my head into the ground.” The bruising on his face and clustered toward one side of his back suggests he hadn’t landed straight on. The cut at his hairline he’s not sure about, maybe a graze from loose gravel or an errant monster claw. “That’s about all I’ve got. Head’s doing better, it’s the rest that’s a pain.” 

“Is your shoulder bothering you?” His eyes go to where Seok-chan had been massaging.

“Mostly back. Shoulder some too.”

“I have some pain gel,” Park Chan-yeong volunteers. “Good for swelling. It helped back when I’d tweak my arm. I used to play a lot of baseball.” Astonishingly genuine in the explanation, as if he were just some nobody hobbyist who occasionally overdid it on weekends. His face is still on billboards. 

Seok-chan wants to decline, wounded animal instincts lurking in the periphery from the other night. But he looks at Park Chan-yeong’s timidly hopeful expression. Thinks to himself: get over yourself, this isn’t the time.     

“All right,” he says, and knows he’s made the right choice when Park Chan-yeong lights up, relieved. 

“Come on,” Park Chan-yeong says, jerking his head down the hall, so happy to be of use, to have gotten something right. Seok-chan hurts at the sight: an old wound, imperfectly healed. “I know where we can go.” 

When Yeong-hu can’t put it off any longer, caught up attending to the morning’s tasks treading dangerously close to insubordinately late, he goes to check in with Tak. 

Tak is watching the monitors when Yeong-hu comes in. As usual—what he expects to see gazing at grainy footage of mundane activities and empty hallways for twelve hours a day is anyone’s guess.

Less usual is his failure to acknowledge Yeong-hu in any way. He doesn’t move as Yeong-hu approaches his chair, doesn’t bother to look as Yeong-hu salutes. 

“Sir,” Yeong-hu says. When there’s no reply, he adds, reluctantly, “Master Sergeant Tak.”

He’s been in the military a long time. He’s disliked more than a few superior officers. No one’s rank has ever been so distasteful to say.    

He needn’t have bothered. Eyes fixed on the monitors. No response.

Yeong-hu shifts further into his space, his line of vision, trying to make him look at Yeong-hu, if only by default.

It works too well. Tak’s head turns as if motion-activated, robotic and painful in the pivot, like the vertebrae of his neck have started to rust.

The movement is mechanical. His gaze is not. It has the perfect, impenetrable concentration of a predatory animal: something cold-blooded and stealthy, vanishing at will below the dark water it inhabits. 

Yeong-hu stills halfway through the step.

He’s felt rage at the sight of Tak before. Spite. Seething frustration. Revulsion, even, at the way he calculates acceptable loss, mentally shuffling men from one column to the next in pursuit of the most bleakly confounding priorities Yeong-hu’s ever encountered: the Second Platoon is dead, so send everyone who can still stand in after them, no matter that they’re half awake and out of ammo. He’s looked at Tak and thought, coldly, bitterly, what a fine pile of bodies you’ll leave, family killer. Resentment in every word.

He’s never looked at him and felt unsettled. 

The sole of his boot makes it the rest of the way to the floor. He broadens his stance. Waits, pinned under the unmoving eyes, but ready to respond.

It’s a long moment before Tak blinks slowly, seems to register the need for words. “Kim Yeong-hu,” he says. Almost normal. No acknowledgment of what has passed. 

Yeong-hu stares. Says: “Yes.”

“Reporting in?” 

“Sir.”

Tak’s head turns again. Back to the feed, interest already lost. Focus boring into the screen. “Staff Sergeant Choi’s assisting Ji with maintenance. Go make sure he’s representing us well in front of our landlord.” 

It’s not a task that requires supervision. It’s an excuse to get Yeong-hu to leave. 

Yeong-hu turns his back to go. The vulnerability of it raises the hair of his neck. 

Not just the vulnerability. The angle of Tak’s gaze. He’s not looking at the feeds, Yeong-hu thinks as the door closes behind him. He’s staring at the black borders around the edge of them, intent, like there’s anything there to see. Like something’s looking back. 

Ji—Chief Ji, as the civilians of the stadium glowingly call her—doesn’t like the Platoon. She speaks politely enough, but there’s no emotion behind the words and even less interest in pretending there is. As though she’s done the math and decided not to expend the energy on a smile she doesn’t mean when there’s a stadium responsible for the shelter of hundreds to maintain and only twenty-four hours in a day to make it happen. 

In this, at least, Yeong-hu respects her. Understands her, even. No one has ever accused him of being too approachable. Rationally he knows morale must be maintained, he’s just never understood how or why or when a facial expression might mean more for that than something else he could do, something substantive, something real.

He also knows that his inability to understand this doesn’t mean he can disregard it entirely. There’s only so much that the drilled obedience of the military can do. If his men aren’t convinced that he cares about their wellbeing, they’re not really his. It’s a distinction that leads to distance, distrust. In the field, that gets people killed. 

Seo-jin fancies himself an interpreter of sorts between Yeong-hu and the lower ranks. You need to loosen up, man, he says, an assessment that is rendered useless by virtue of it being the only one he ever makes, to say little of the fact that his own attitude toward his men’s grievances tends to be suck it up, are you a fucking Marine or not?

Yeong-hu could have pointed this out on any of the dozen occasions Seo-jin’s tendered his advice if he’d thought there were any chance at all of it actually registering. Instead he’ll just say, not today, or mind your business, Sergeant Min, and Seo-jin will put up his hands in mock surrender and go away for a while. 

As tends to be the case in his life, Seok-chan is the solution he’s landed on. 

If Seo-jin is a barometer stuck on the same reading no matter the weather, Seok-chan is almost too sensitive to its vicissitudes for his own good. He’s leveled out some since those early days, but the signs are still there if you look—and Yeong-hu does, more than he should, as uncontrollably tuned in to the fluctuating anxieties camouflaged by Seok-chan’s easy smile as Seok-chan himself is to the atmosphere of whatever room he’s in. All of which means that when Seok-chan looks sideways at him in a moment of downtime and says, apropos of nothing, U-seok will kill a man if he doesn’t get off the night rotation, or Dong-jun will get over this shit mood, he just needs to sulk for a while, Yeong-hu believes him.  

Depending on the problem, he can’t always do anything to fix it. Whether because of the constraints of their less-than-ideal circumstances or his own inadequacies, the failure grates the same. But he always believes him. He has to hope that makes up some of the difference. 

And sometimes—more than he likes to admit—he finds himself standing in front of someone particularly intractable and wishing Seok-chan were there to take a reading of the situation so Yeong-hu might understand it too, could read it in the careful tracking of his deceptively casual eyes.

“Sergeant Kim,” Ji says. More aware than Tak, but just as monotone. Not a single tense muscle in all her face. “What do you need?”

Asked the right way, it could mean, is there anything I can help you with? That is not, Yeong-hu notes, how Ji has asked it. “Has Staff Sergeant Choi been by?”

An aborted twitch of the mouth, a tiny fraction of the way to a grimace. Did Yong-seok do something to displease her? Is she just annoyed at having to keep track of them all, these jackboots who have invaded her stadium and stomp around like it’s theirs to patrol? Neither, he can almost hear Seok-chan whisper. It’s actually—but Yeong-hu doesn’t have the imagination to invent some sufficiently outlandish gossip, the kind Seok-chan somehow always stumbles across and then keeps in reserve to ambush Yeong-hu with whenever his guard is down. It’s their longest running pastime, respective win states unspoken but well understood: Seok-chan’s, to get a reaction out of Yeong-hu; Yeong-hu’s, to deny him one at all costs. 

Yeong-hu hasn’t cracked yet, but there have been close calls. How Seok-chan finds out about these things is a mystery for the ages. 

“The pipes were acting up,” Ji says. “Maintenance room, left hallway. He’s taking a look.”

Yeong-hu doesn’t waste her time with a goodbye, just nods as he goes. 
 
Yong-seok is most assuredly not looking at the pipes. He’s not looking at much of anything but his hands, turned palm up on his knees, sitting crossed-legged on the dingy countertop next to the inset utility sink.

He jolts as Yeong-hu approaches, an apology already forming, but Yeong-hu shakes his head. “It’s that sort of day,” he says. A busywork day, where anything that gets done is for the sake of doing something than out of actual necessity. For Yeong-hu, that looks like ping-ponging back and forth between distant ends of the stadium, confirming that nothing is happening at either. For Yong-seok, it’s sitting morosely above the pipes that are always acting up for reasons none of them have ever been able to divine, pretending if anyone asks that he might know how to fix them.

“Sorry, sir,” Yong-seok says anyway, settling back onto the counter. He looks back to his hands.

Yong-seok is one of Seo-jin’s men, as much as the distinction matters these days, but he and Yeong-hu interact on occasion, get along well enough. He’s an affable sort, generally in good spirits despite their circumstances—it’s part of why he and Seok-chan became such fast friends, Yeong-hu suspects. This sullen gloom and downturned stare aren’t like him.  

Tak, Yong-seok. It’s a fine day for Yeong-hu to have loaned his emotional barometer out to Jin-ho. 

“Something wrong, Staff Sergeant?”

“Oh, you know,” Yong-seok says. A non-answer pretending to be otherwise, the kind of thing people say because outright silence is rude but the truth is worse. 

“Pretend I don’t,” Yeong-hu says. 

Yong-seok is quiet for a long time, long enough that Yeong-hu thinks he’s weighed the options and decided to risk the rudeness. Then, abruptly, fingers curling into his palms: “Why don’t we do supply runs to hospitals, Sarge?” 

Whatever Yeong-hu was expecting, it wasn’t that. He considers how to answer. “It’s a higher risk than we can manage with one platoon. A leftover mess from the early days of the outbreak, before anyone knew what was going on.” No one below a very high security clearance, at least. Far beyond any rank he’ll ever reach. The scattered reports he’s been privy to in the days since have been horrific enough. “People experiencing early symptoms of monsterization tried to get treatment. ERs filled up. Patients with hemorrhagic nosebleeds they couldn’t stop. Suddenly hearing voices. A lot of them turned before they could be discharged. Hospitals were overrun. It’s likely many are still there.” 

Whole floors of them, when all it ever takes is one.  

Yong-seok absorbs that in silence. “What about—” he manages eventually, face twisting, “what about—clinics? Outpatient facilities?”

Not much better off than the hospitals, but he’s not looking for another logistical explanation, not really. “Yong-seok. What’s this about?”

Yong-seok closes off, folds in on himself. “Nothing,” he says, “it’s nothing.” 

Yeong-hu doesn’t dignify that with a response. He waits. 

“Really,” Yong-seok tries again, “I just…I worry sometimes, that’s all.” 

An understatement, if he’s brought this to Yeong-hu and not Seo-jin. Unless he’d tried and been rebuffed: are you a fucking Marine or not? He likes to think Seo-jin would have seen the honest distress in him and experienced one of his rare moments of tact. He and Yong-seok have a longer history than most. If Yong-seok had tried, maybe Seo-jin just hadn’t picked up on it. Obliviousness is one of his more forgivable flaws. 

“Worry,” Yeong-hu repeats. “About what?” Not because there aren’t things deserving of it—he could list dozens off the top of his head, with more seeming to materialize every morning—but because he needs details to address the problem. He’s a marksman by nature: precision shooting, small targets.

“We…we’re really low on supplies. Not just food and ammo. Medicine. We find the basics on expeditions sometimes, over-the-counter stuff, but what if someone got sick, really sick? What if they needed something more…complicated? What could we even do?” 

It’s a reasonable concern. It’s still not the whole picture. There’s the shape of something specific in the questions, something desperate. “Who are you thinking of?” 

His gaze skitters away. “No one. It’s just a hypothetical.”

Yeong-hu lets the silence fall. Lets Yong-seok squirm under its weight. He’s not a practiced liar, let alone a convincing one. It won’t take long. 

When Yong-seok looks up again, he’s wild around the eyes. Desperate in a different way now that Yeong-hu’s settled in to wait. “I mean,” he blurts, “look what could have happened to Seok-chan!” 

Yeong-hu doesn’t flinch. 

He doesn’t breathe for a moment, either. 

The words are even but feel like they’re coming from somewhere far away, like someone else has borrowed his voice to say them. “Seok-chan is going to be fine.”

He is fine. Was fine, this morning, and the one before that. 

Yong-seok pales at whatever he sees on Yeong-hu’s face. “Sure, of course. Just…” He licks his lips anxiously, rallying. “What if he’d needed surgery? No anesthesia, nothing sterile, no antibiotics.” 

As if Yeong-hu hadn’t thought the same, Lim’s jabs taken root—hadn’t almost made himself sick with the image and how certain it had felt, the searing panic turning possibility into inevitability and Yeong-hu all but useless in the face of it. As if he hadn’t walked away from Seok-chan that first night to sleep in his own cot and woken two, three, four times in the hour that followed, cold with dread, thinking go back to him, go back, until at last it was near enough to morning that he could get up and walk the halls without anyone marking it as unusual. To fill his head with the words of the night rotation’s report and pretend that this situation hasn’t sucker-punched him more mercilessly than any blow he’s ever weathered. Sergeant First Class, more than a decade in the field, and brought low by a measly concussion that’s not even his. 

But that’s not Yong-seok’s burden to carry. Nor his right to know. 

Yong-seok’s talking faster now. Backpedaling. Nervous. “Food for thought, Sarge, that’s all. I’m going to check in with Ji, make sure she doesn’t need anything else.” 

He makes his escape. Yeong-hu lets him. Then he goes to find Jin-ho.

Yeong-hu’s stomach turns over to see him working alone.

Jin-ho points him back toward the barracks, unconcerned. “He looked at the screens,” he says. “Rookie mistake. But he was walking fine, just a little green in the face.”

The sleeping quarters are still, the room outside them empty. He’s sick of this day, the endless circles around the stadium. Nobody acting the way they should and the person who might be able to tell him why nowhere to be found, kept out of the hustle and bustle on Yeong-hu’s own order. He inhales as deep as he can, holds it until his lungs begin to protest, then lets the air out as slow as he can bear. 

He tells himself it’s the breathing that calms him down. He knows it’s the voice he picks up in the silence between breaths, familiar tones drifting to him from down the hallway. 

He’s walking with something that feels like relief, automatically ticking off the rooms to either side as he passes. They stripped the stadium for useful parts months ago—swept through it like a tempest, dismantling machinery and repurposing furniture with a vengeance—but often the original purpose of each room is still visible in its layout, the odd item that’s been left untouched. This, a locker room. That, spare equipment storage.

The voice draws him toward the end of the hallway, to the room that must have been used for physical therapy for the players. The treadmills and other machines have long since been broken down and hauled away piecemeal, but they never did get around to the adjustable exam table still bolted to the floor in the center. 

He doesn’t make it far past the open door before he wrenches to a stop. 

He doesn’t need to see the face to put a name to the figure sitting upright and sideways on the table, back to Yeong-hu and the door, legs kicking casually where they dangle off the side. There isn’t an angle he wouldn’t recognize Seok-chan from, the lean shape of him as familiar as the warm lure of his voice. It’s the man standing next to the table behind him he can’t place, features obscured by the indulgent tilt of his head, listening with an air of fondness as Seok-chan talks. His hands are on the bare skin of Seok-chan’s back and shoulder, careful yet firm, as if they’re entitled to be there. 

Yeong-hu’s head tilts, too. Considering those hands. There’s a sound in his head, cold and distant, like the cracking of faraway ice. Bone, snapping. 

Then he looks, really looks at the stretches of skin peeking out through the gaps between the interloper’s fingers, and the silence sweeps through him. Rage rerouted in an instant. He can see the bruising from here, the swathes of purple and blue so deep they’re nearly black in places. Their existence is an accusation. You didn’t notice, they say. You didn’t even think to ask. 

The man turns. Insult to injury. 

“Sergeant Kim,” Park Chan-yeong says, cutting Seok-chan off mid-sentence. Seok-chan’s neck starts to twist, but with a flinch he faces forward again. Park Chan-yeong looks back to him, feeling the shift of skin. The hand he lifts away pauses halfway to an open tube of something on the table. “His injuries were giving him trouble,” Park Chan-yeong continues, awkward in the unnecessary explanation. His other hand falls away with one last absentminded pat to Seok-chan’s back, audacious with familiarity. “I was—I’ll leave it to you.” 

Yes, Yeong-hu thinks, hearing the ice crack, you will. 

The door had been open when he arrived. Park Chan-yeong pulls it over most of the way behind him with one casual tug of his wrist as he leaves, as if by accident, not looking back at either of them. Not even stopping to salute. Smarter than Yeong-hu’s given him credit for.

He waits until the footsteps are gone before pushing it the rest of the way closed with a click. 

Seok-chan doesn’t try to turn around again, muscles in his back rising and falling evenly. For the first time since Yeong-hu’s known him he seems unaffected by the atmosphere around him, another casualty of the weirdness of the day. Yeong-hu tries to match his breathing, slow and oddly serene against the backdrop of bruising. 

“Anyone could have seen,” he remarks when he’s calm enough for it, stepping in to fill the spot Park Chan-yeong’s vacated.

“What’s there to see?” Seok-chan asks mildly.

Yeong-hu knows what he means. The men patch each other up in various states of undress all the time. Even before the world—and the courts—fell apart, it wouldn’t have raised any particular eyebrows. Point well made, and yet Yeong-hu wants to sweep a frustrated hand around the room in reply, a gesture somehow meant to encompass the image that jabs into his mind like a splinter: Seok-chan, and another man’s hands. 

Seok-chan wouldn’t see the gesture anyway, still facing away. Patiently waiting, relaxed. Yeong-hu picks up the tube Park Chan-yeong’s left behind just to give his hands something else to do. The text on the label’s worn off, but the gel he squeezes out onto his fingers has a faint scent, cooling and earthy. Menthol and arnica, maybe. More placebo than anything, in his experience, but placebo is often all they have anymore. Up close he can see the sheen of a thin layer of gel already partway applied to his shoulder. 

“People might have gotten the wrong idea,” he says instead.

“I doubt it,” Seok-chan says, amused now—then jumps when Yeong-hu’s hands meet skin. 

The bruised areas are warm to the touch, inflamed still. No one makes it seven years as active duty military without learning how to tolerate pain, but Yeong-hu tries to keep the pressure as light as he can anyway. Seok-chan is quiet and unflinching as he works.

 “Anything you’d like to add to last expedition’s incident report, Staff Sergeant?” Yeong-hu says after a while, toneless. 

“Did you have something in mind, sir?” All subordinate politeness. Not buying into the game, making Yeong-hu spell it out. 

He stops rubbing the gel in for a moment and instead rests one hand high up in the dip of Seok-chan’s shoulder, the other near the base of his rib cage. Pointedly framing the extent of the damage, capturing the bruises in between. 

Seok-chan’s shoulders sag: fair enough. “Didn’t really want Lim poking and prodding,” he says, which Yeong-hu can’t fault, even if it’s technically part of a doctor’s job to do just that. He’s not convinced Lim wouldn’t dig into a bruise for the fun of it, and then Yeong-hu really would have to kill him. “He and Peter like to talk shop, by the way,” Seok-chan adds.

Yeong-hu feels his lip curl, the distaste automatic. “That so.” 

“Seems that way.”

He’s seen Peter skulking around in the block that houses the clinic a handful of times, but never near enough to piece it together. No matter that Yeong-hu’s spent the morning missing Seok-chan’s uncanny ability to pick up what he has missed, he still has to ask. “And how exactly do you know this?”

“Don’t sound so tired, sir.”

He sounds suspiciously like he’s trying not to laugh.

“Don’t be tiresome, then,” Yeong-hu says. 

“Is that all it takes? To tire you out?” 

He asks it airily enough that it can pass for a jab between friends. A taunt to cover the tease underneath, and five days still between them. Yeong-hu’s eyes trip along the nape of his neck, the shift of shoulder blades under the skin, the center of his back. A spot free of bruising, but still holding tension, from pain or stress or the glancing touch of Yeong-hu’s stare. He puts his thumb there and pushes.

Seok-chan’s breath leaves him in a soft, shocked rush. 

“No,” Yeong-hu says, “it’s not.” 

A nod. “I didn’t think so.” Voice still thready, not enough air for the words.  

Yeong-hu rubs his thumb over the spot, now significantly less tense, and then lets him go to get another round of gel. 

He’s halfway done with his back when Seok-chan speaks up again. “Question for you, Sarge.”

He’s past the point of thinking he can predict what’s going to come after those words. Rather than try, he deadpans, “A question? You?”

“You know, the boys might not be so afraid of you if you cracked a joke with them from time to time instead of saving them all up to use on me.” 

“Maybe you bring that out in me.”

Seok-chan’s head turns to one side, considering. “Nah,” he decides. “You do make jokes, don’t you? In your own way. And no one realizes it because you wear that serious face when you do.” 

“Perceptive.”    

“You keep me around for something, right?”

He does. 

“Your question,” Yeong-hu says. 

“Oh, right. Is this what you always pictured yourself doing? Not the monster bullshit, the special forces part.”

As a kid? Yeong-hu has to think about it for a moment, pausing in his work. He’s been out of childhood now for more years than he ever spent in it. The monster bullshit, as Seok-chan has neatly summarized it, feels like it’s lasted a decade or more on its own. “Something like it,” he allows. “For a while I thought I’d be a firefighter. Paramedic, maybe.”

Seok-chan nods wisely. “Where public servant meets adrenaline junkie.” It’s a joke and not a joke all at once. “How’d your parents take that?”

“They said there were jobs that would let me try and save the world with better pay and a lower risk of getting killed. Pleaded, more like.” It wasn’t ever about saving the world, though. Yeong-hu works on a different scale than that. He sees the problems in front of him and wants to fix them. Sees the orders his superiors give and knows they’re wrong. It makes him crazy, sometimes. The lack of logic in it all.

“They sound like good parents.”

“Long-suffering,” Yeong-hu admits. A lawyer, his mother had wearily tried to convince him over the years, a judge. Civil engineering, even. Something, anything where people weren’t bleeding out and things weren’t on fire or exploding. “But I never could have stood being a lawyer.”

The back stiffens under his hands. “No,” Seok-chan says distantly. Somewhere else. “That wouldn’t suit you at all.”

Yeong-hu doesn’t say, who are you thinking of? Just files it away with the rest of the things that have made him go quiet or tense or anxious over the years. The chatterbox who talks about anything but his life before: an open book with torn out pages. “What brought that up?” he asks instead, reaching for the gel again. One last round should do it.  

“Oh.” Seok-chan waves a hand. Trying for dismissive. “Something Jin-ho said got me thinking is all.”

That gets his attention. Jin-ho is a bit of a wildcard at times, big emotions packed tightly away under a cold exterior. A mirror turned in Yeong-hu’s direction, not always to flattering effect. If time and age had been different, if he’d been Jin-ho’s mid-twenties when Seok-chan came under his care…he likes to think he still would have seen the grit in him right away, the ceaseless drive under the goofy smile. He’s afraid he never would have made it past the initial ah, the class clown. He never had much patience at that age, not for that sort of personality. How easy it would have been to turn away. To say something dismissive and cold and never know.

“What did Jin-ho say,” he has to ask, resigned to the answer, another wincing glance into a decades-old reflection. Seok-chan isn't the only one to have leveled out over the years. Yeong-hu had done some of the work already by the time Seok-chan came around. He did more of it, after. Enough to finally make Sergeant, apparently. He wonders if Seok-chan’s ever thought about the timing. 

Seok-chan doesn’t hem and haw around it. He knows Yeong-hu won’t let it go, even if he’d draw the line at shaking it out of Jin-ho himself. Probably. “That I didn’t seem the type for the UDT. ” 

“Did he.” He hears the cooling of his own voice.

“It was just an observation. He didn’t mean anything by it.” Hesitation. “He’s not wrong.” 

“He is.”

“He did change his mind at the end.”

“Good.” Youth and ill-advised hero worship of Tak aside, Jin-ho’s usually got a steady head on his shoulders. Yeong-hu would hate to have to downgrade his opinion of him. Reliable soldiers are in increasingly short supply these days.

“You sound very certain,” Seok-chan says, wistful.

“Have you ever known me to be uncertain?”

“Oh, never,” Seok-chan laughs. “Just wishing I shared it sometimes.”

It’s easy to be certain when you’re right. Far closer to forty now than twenty, he knows what kind of man the UDT needs most. It looks more like Seok-chan than it does Yeong-hu. “He changed his mind at the end. You don’t agree.”

“I’m probably just tired. Or brain damaged. Fifty-fifty.” 

He needs to see Seok-chan’s face for this. He’s finished with the gel. Has been finished, really. He lets Seok-chan go abruptly, not letting himself think about it, and wipes his hands off on a spare cloth Park Chan-yeong has left further down the table, next to Seok-chan’s neatly folded shirt. He picks it up on the way around the table. “Let the gel dry first,” he orders, Seok-chan automatically accepting the shirt as Yeong-hu stops in front of him and crosses his arms, settles in to look him over.

The table’s not been raised high enough to put Seok-chan at eye level. From this angle the overhead light skims the line of his nose, the cut of his impossible cheekbones. Shadows collect under his eyes and along the far side of his face, conveniently concealing the bruising there. 

Less so the exhaustion. He’s not sleeping well. Given the state of his back, it’s no surprise. But that’s not all it is. 

Seok-chan looks evenly back at him. “Bad day, or just stupid?” he asks, apparently having taken a silent inventory of his own. 

He thinks of Tak’s empty stare, Yong-seok’s sullen agitation. “Undetermined.” 

That earns him a faint smile. Sympathetic, but wan. Not up to his usual standard. “Pretty sure this job wasn’t always this complicated.” 

The job. It’s as good a segue as any. “Jin-ho,” he prompts. 

Seok-chan gives in. “He was saying that sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. Metaphorically speaking?” he adds when Yeong-hu’s eyebrows rise. “Literally, sometimes, too, in this line of work. He seemed to think I had that in me. But then yesterday I thought of—you remember that guy who got kicked out? A year or so after I joined.” 

The idiot who nearly got Seok-chan killed with an accidental discharge, yes. He dreams about it sometimes. Not the bloodied face under his fists, but the voice in his ear: Yeong-hu. No rank, no distance. Just his name and the brush of Seok-chan’s hand. 

“I remember,” he says. 

Seok-chan nods. “It’s stuck in my head. Over and over. I can’t help thinking—that’s what just pulling the trigger gets you. Someone you never meant, almost dead. Almost, if you’re lucky.” His gaze drops from Yeong-hu’s face, plummeting to the floor instead. “Something the monster hit loose, maybe. I’m not making sense. Or Jin-ho was right the first time. Not about the trigger. About me.” 

He doesn’t like where this is going. “Seok-chan.”

“I’m not running off on you,” he says suddenly, eyes snapping back to meet Yeong-hu’s dead on, like it’s important that Yeong-hu hears this. “I just thought you should know.”

Know what? That Seok-chan’s first instinct is always to err on the side of restraint, of mercy? That he’s an uncommonly kind man in a bloody line of work? Seok-chan rapidly obeying Yeong-hu’s orders is part of what makes him so useful in the field. Yeong-hu is not so simple-minded as to think that means that Seok-chan always likes them. There’s a gap, sometimes, between what he would do and what Yeong-hu asks. When he crosses that divide, he does so with his eyes open, making the split-second choice to trust Yeong-hu’s judgment. Hold this, Yeong-hu had said, and Seok-chan had accepted the metal skewer, even as the monster on the other end of it cried. We’re going as far from the stadium as we can, Yeong-hu had said, no explanation, and Seok-chan had only paused to make sure the road was clear for the turn. 

There are many kinds of shame it would kill Yeong-hu to bear, some faster than others. Backing down when he knows Tak is wrong. Abandoning his men, his responsibilities. Proving unworthy of Seok-chan’s trust, though. That would break him first. 

“Did you think I didn’t know?” he says at last, puzzled.

It flashes across Seok-chan’s face, there and gone in an instant, but Yeong-hu recognizes the look all the same. It’s been years since he’s seen the abject dismay so clear, cut through with shame. Something that might be terror if it weren’t so resigned.

He’s standing on the wrong side for the usual half-hearted smack. He steps in close instead, Seok-chan’s knees pressing into his legs, and wraps a hand around the back of his head. Reeling him back in from wherever he’s gone. 

For a moment, they’re back on that stretch of road. Ash in the air, blood and bruises fresh, but Seok-chan safe under Yeong-hu’s looming shadow, all of him surrendered into Yeong-hu’s hands.

Seok-chan looks at him silently, pupils wide and black as the borders around the security feeds. He sees the draw, now. Staring into that endless dark. 

“Two days and you’ve forgotten?” Yeong-hu says. “The men joke about it often enough. Seok-chan. You’re with me.” 

A heartbeat of silence. The slow, slow curve of his mouth. There you are, Yeong-hu thinks. “Seven years and counting,” Seok-chan says. 

Make it ten, Yeong-hu thinks, so relieved he could shake him. Twenty. 

He should let go. Step back, put the proper distance between them.

It’s been a long morning. For them both, from the way Seok-chan closes his eyes, sagging a little in Yeong-hu’s grip. Yeong-hu holds on.