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In our history, across our great divide
There is a glorious sunrise
Fields of green and skies of blue. A lone hawk flies across the road ahead, landing on a fence post and stretching its wings out just as Jeno’s car speeds by. The hills roll and tumble outside the lowered windows, trees growing and shrinking into the distance, sheep and cattle reduced to specks of brown and white amongst the dying grass of an unforgiving summer. The breeze that ruffles Jeno’s hair is warm and playful, teasing the dew drops of sweat cradling the curve of his hairline.
The radio is muffled by static as the valleys turn a darker shade of green, the sun disappearing behind native pines and flickering like a dying torch. A sigh, the radio is flicked off for the time being, the roaring of the wind in the car and tyres on the tarmac filling the silence.
As he turns another corner, the roar of an engine cuts through the noise and a blur of black races past. One, two, five more in quick succession, speeding so close to the side of his car that he gets nervous about accidentally swerving into them. They’re gone as quick as they came, disappearing around the hill behind him with nothing but the hum of their bikes fading into the distance.
Jeno lets out a small breath, checking his mirrors as the last one disappears from view. He turns another corner, sharper than the last one, mind far away with the bikers when another black smudge races into view, closer than the rest of them, close enough that Jeno has the terrifying realisation that he’s definitely going to hit him. He slams on the brakes as a body slams into the front of his car, flipping over the roof as the bike flies somewhere off the road, Jeno’s eyes squeezing shut as something hits the windshield and cracks it.
In the deathly silence that follows, the wind blows. Jeno’s breath leaves him in quivers and tremors, the car still shivering with aftershocks. He unbuckles slowly, wincing as his ribs twang where his seatbelt caught him. Assessing the damage, his windscreen and the front of his car seem to be the only things that took damage on his side. Good. Small victories.
Outside of the car Jeno’s leg pangs and he nearly topples over, hissing as hot pain shoots up the back of his spine. But there are more important matters.
For example: there's a body on the roof of his car, and even more importantly: it’s not moving.
“Fuck.” Jeno breathes out, lip quivering with the weight of what he’s done. He stumbles under the magnitude of the situation, clutching at his hair to ground himself. “H-holy fuck.”
“Ow.” The body suddenly groans, Jeno jumping out of his skin in fright and watching in disbelief as the man sits up with minimal effort to gaze down at Jeno, who’s begun rapidly spiralling where he stands. There’s a gash spilling red down half of the guy's head but he hardly seems to notice, his eyes wide on Jeno below, paying no attention to his surroundings at all.
"A-are you- oh my g- are you okay?!" Jeno settles into frantic mode. "Wait don't- don't move I'll uh- I'll help you down."
Except he takes one step and cries out as his leg shoots with pain again, having to clutch onto the open car door for support to get weight off of it.
"Shit." He hears, followed by the slide of leather over metal and the crunch of broken glass under boots, and- oh.
"Is your leg okay?" The guy crouches next to him, trying to get a look at the leg that's giving him trouble. He tilts his head down, lightly touching Jeno's calf, and Jeno's field of vision narrows to the gash splitting the man's head open, a pink fleshy substance visible beneath all the blood and hair and-
Jeno promptly and swiftly passes out.
Jeno comes to swaying in the crook of someone's arms. The sky is filled with the purples and dark blues of the end of a sunset, a few twinkling lights visible in the dimness. The landscape has flattened out to empty fields stretching across to the horizon on either side as he’s carried along a dirt road. Closer, he sees the underside of someone's chin.
"Uhng." He groans, mouth copper and dry. The person looks down at him and he realises that it’s the biker from before; the one he hit.
"Hello sleepy head." The man grins, far too normal and nonchalant about this entire situation, for someone who just got hit by a car. The blood staining his face is gone entirely; he's walking strong and sturdy with Jeno in his arms, not a trace of injury anywhere to be seen.
Now Jeno is just confused.
"Didn't I hit you?"
The stranger tilts his head back and laughs, mirthful and carefree. "That you did."
"But you're fine." Jeno continues, feeling feverish. Despite the buzzing in his skull and the race of adrenaline pumping steadily still through his body, he finds himself relaxing in the stranger’s arms against his strongest instincts.
The stranger's smile dims a fraction, softening around the edges. "That I am."
Jeno looks around them but sees nothing but farmland and livestock. "Where are you taking me?"
"To get help."
"Why didn't you call an ambulance?"
The man doesn't reply. Jeno is too curious — and trusting for that matter — for his own good. "Who are you?"
"Jaemin."
Jeno blinks, head echoing the name.
"Who are you?" The man — Jaemin — counters, his voice careful like he's not sure if he's allowed to ask.
"I’m Jeno."
"Jeno." Jaemin repeats, testing the name on his tongue, smiling wistfully to himself.
"Are you human?"
Jaemin laughs. "In some ways yes."
"In what ways?"
"Most of them."
Jeno huffs in frustration. Jaemin laughs again.
"In all ways but one." He clarifies. "I cannot die."
Somehow, the information settles into the folds of Jeno's brain rather easily. He already knew there was something different about Jaemin; in hindsight maybe he’d already guessed something similar.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can’t you die?”
Jaemin’s smile turns rueful. “That’s a rather personal question.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Stars twinkle to life above their heads and Jeno can’t tear his eyes away from Jaemin’s jawline.
“It’s alright.” Jaemin’s voice rumbles in his chest; Jeno can feel it if he concentrates. It lulls him, in a way. Jaemin sighs and it tastes of nostalgia; bittersweet on Jeno’s tongue. “Where do I even begin?”
There’s chaos in the capital. Jaemin’s sword pierces the torso of a soldier — scum, General Choe had called them; traitors. Execute every last one of them, he had said, before leading them to the outskirts of the capital and disappearing amongst the disorder.
Jaemin is not a very high ranking soldier. He knows that they’re losing, though, yet still refuses to die without cutting down as many traitors as possible, in the name of the king.
There’s screaming all around him; a soldier runs towards him, wearing the uniform of the traitorous General Yi, and Jaemin doesn’t think twice before blocking the sword aimed at his head and, in a movement so graceful and swift, plunges his own straight through the weak point of the soldier’s armour, stabbing through bone and flesh.
Jaemin never likes to make eye contact with the people he kills; considers himself superstitious in that way, but for this soldier he can’t seem to help himself. The boy looks young, as young as Jaemin would be if he had grown up outside of the capital, maybe, away from the power and greed and wars of the monarchy. His eyes are warm, kind, at odds with the blood and grime splattering the boy’s features.
Jaemin holds his breath, overwhelmed, watching as the light flickers and burns out in the soldiers eyes, as he slumps against the sword, as Jaemin has to wrench it out of the body with hands that tremble for the first time since he joined the national army. The soldier collapses in a heap at Jaemin’s feet — he can’t look away, can’t think of anything else but who this boy must have been to have affected Jaemin so much in his last moments of life. Something in him is telling him this is wrong, that this wasn't supposed to happen; but that doesn't make sense at all. This boy was his enemy, he was supposed to kill him, by General Choe's orders. Why does it feel wrong?
Jaemin hardly notices it when he’s run through with a sword. It must hurt, he knows it should, knows it should feel like more than just heavy weight pressing up against his organs. But it doesn’t, and the soldier on the other end hesitates at Jaemin’s complete non-reaction, until he pulls it out with a movement just as swift and runs off to find another soldier to kill.
Jaemin drops to his knees, blood gushing down the material of his armour and soaking into the ground, hot and sticky and red. No one pays him any mind as he lays down next to the soldier — the boy, his boy — and gazes into his lifeless eyes, wondering, as the coup rages on around them.
“As soon as I realised I wasn’t dying I fled the kingdom.”
“What about your family?” Jeno asks quietly. Jaemin has him propped up against a fence post, taking a moment to catch his breath. Jeno’s been looking for constellations as Jaemin’s been talking, absorbing the story as best as he can manage without getting overwhelmed by the raw emotion in Jaemin's voice.
“My father died in a similar rebellion when I was still a child and my mother died of a virus not long after.” Jaemin answers. His arm is wrapped tight around Jeno’s torso, carefully avoiding the bruises quickly forming under his skin. Jeno leans into his body heat and smells cinnamon.
“I’m sorry.”
Jaemin shakes his head and gazes up at the sky. “It was him.”
“He’s the reason you've stayed alive for all these years?” Jeno asks, already knowing the answer. Jaemin nods, expression unreadable.
“Are you cursed?”
Jaemin laughs softly, looking at Jeno like he’s a curious child. Maybe he is.
“Maybe.” He ponders. “It certainly feels like it.”
Death surrounds him. It’s in the air, stale and pungent with the smell of rot. It’s in the water; brown and green, tainted with the remnants of bodies left for too long. It’s on his hands, under his skin, in his lungs when he breathes too deep.
Jaemin doesn’t stray far from Goryeo before he’s surrounded by that which consumes him. At first he thinks it’s following him — what else could explain the swift hand of death struck upon so many innocent lives from something that can only be punishment from an unhappy god? But then it spreads and spreads, spreads to places Jaemin's never even heard nor thought of, and he tells himself that it's not his fault.
He first discovers an encampment filled with rotting corpses; no sign of attacks or inner violence, just the withering remnants of something diseased. He doesn’t think much of it, continues on his way with what little belongings he carries.
Then he finds another, this one bigger, the devastation much larger than the last, and the next, and the three more after that, like the disease has legs and walked its way through these camps, sprinkling destruction in its wake.
The last one he finds has survivors, and there’s a flicker of hope sparking up in Jaemin’s rib cage as he tries to help as much as he can. But even with the years he’s spent in this territory, around the people of this unfamiliar land, he still struggles to grasp the intricacies of the spoken language. He’s rendered helpless and watches as the victims struggle to hold onto their last breaths, lying in the middle of the encampment in misery.
He thinks they’re all gone and is ready to move on, the night carrying away the souls and bringing a sorrowful peace to such a tragedy, when he hears a low, hoarse cough from one of the tents that stops him short. There’s no reason for him to go, to watch one more person die, unable to aid them in any way, but he does.
The man is barely recognisable, his features indistinguishable under the sores and buboes plaguing his body. Even so, Jaemin recognises him instantly. The face gazing up at him, unseeing, eyes glazed over and fading quickly, is the face of the soldier, the same one that Jaemin killed back in Goryeo.
But it can’t be. Generations have past since Jaemin left Goryeo; Jaemin watched the life leave the boy’s body, he was right there.
But now he’s here, dying in Jaemin's arms once more, staring right through him as he takes his final breath.
“Do you think he’s your soulmate?”
Jeno’s voice is still quiet, if a little strained this time. The bandage Jaemin is reapplying to his leg is tighter than the last one, holding it firmly in place but until it’s tied, every time Jeno moves even the slightest he’s rewarded with a dull pain throbbing through his leg. Jaemin works methodically and carefully; Jeno has little doubt he’s done this before.
“I think he’s someone important.” Is Jaemin’s vague answer; not necessarily an agreement.
“Did he always die before you could talk to him?”
There's a mysterious look in Jaemin's eye as he pulls back, barely concealed amusement which Jeno can't place. “No. There were a few times.”
Of all the languages Jaemin has come across in his wandering life, German has been one of the more difficult ones to grasp. The first friend he makes and keeps after Goryeo is a German baker in the outskirts of Fulda who takes pity on Jaemin’s grotty appearance and offers him some leftover bread he was in the middle of throwing to a flock of geese. Jaemin takes it gratefully. Immortal or not, he quickly discovered that while he cannot die from starvation, he still feels the effects of his body disintegrating if he doesn’t feed himself at least somewhat regularly.
Volknand is the man’s name, though god forbid Jaemin can ever say it right. He is old but kind, caring not of Jaemin’s dark skin and brown eyes that stick out like a sore thumb amongst the paleness of the locals. He communicates as much as he can through body language just to let Jaemin know he can stay with him, if he’d like. He teaches Jaemin a touch of German; just enough to get him settled into the city, to not be totally dependent on someone else to get by, if he ever were to move on.
Jaemin feels indebted towards him and does as much as he can to help out, around the shop, the kitchen, the loft area above it all that functions as sleeping quarters. There’s not much he can do though, not after decades of wandering, of simply surviving each day, never building up any skills that he didn’t learn in Goryeo.
So he helps Volknand’s wife with the cleaning, though she is much less patient towards him than her husband, always sending him sharp looks when he does something wrong and mumbling to herself under her breath. But he stays, and life goes on, and Jaemin picks up on more and more German as the sun sets again and again.
Moon's pass and there’s an uproar in the city that trickles through to the outskirts in circles of gossip. A few of the regular patrons of the bakery bring news one day, of something exciting yet terrible and other words Jaemin hasn’t learned yet. Hexen he manages to pick out, but Volknand isn’t around to ask. He repeats the word to himself so he doesn't forget.
“Wo? Wann?” Jaemin asks the ladies, putting on the most pleasant smile he can manage. Where? When?
“Heute mittag neben den Dom.” One of the ladies replies, a sour look on her face as she answers. Jaemin isn’t welcomed much around here. Next to the cathedral at noon today.
“Vielen Dank.” Jaemin thanks them, making a plan to leave Volknand a note when he leaves. It's almost noon, he might just make it if he runs.
The woman turns up her nose at his awkward pronunciation. “Es ist mir egal.” Whatever.
The courtyard around the cathedral is packed. Jaemin doesn’t visit this part of the city often, but even still he’s never seen this many people in one place. Set up outside the steps of the cathedral are three wooden pyres, each with a woman tied around it in tightly bound rope and a cloth bag placed over her head. A priest is giving a speech in rapid German that Jaemin can’t pick up much of, not with the noise of the crowd around him. Whatever is happening, the general public seems excited about it. And there's that word again; Hexen.
“Wait- don’t do this- please!”
Jaemin startles. The language of his birthplace, the language he carries with him in memory and thought, the language he hasn’t heard in centuries; there’s a man in the crowd, yelling at the top of his lungs in the language Jaemin thought he’d surely forgotten. One of the women lifts her sack-covered head at the sound of the man, crying back at him in the same familiar tongue. Jaemin could weep at the wave of memories the sound of it brings back.
“She’s innocent!” The man babbles, repeating it over and over in both their native tongue and German as he’s grabbed by some of the nearby guards.
“Binden Sie dies Mann mit dem anderen.” The priest calls to them, glowering down at the man in disgust. Jaemin’s heart beats in his throat. “Er sprecht die Teufelzache und er wird wie ein Hexenmeister brennen.”
Tie this man with the others. He speaks the devil’s tongue and will burn as a witch.
Jaemin doesn’t understand every word but he knows. The man cries out as his hands are bound, as the pyres are lit, as smoke rises above the roof of the cathedral into the heavens and the women begin to scream. Still, Jaemin can’t tear his eyes away from the man no matter how hard he tries, and the longer he stares the more he begins to realise why.
Among the chaos, the man meets his eye in his desperate search for help.
“Save her.” He calls, the syllables so familiar. Jaemin wonders what it would have been like to hear him beg for his own life; if he would have, given the chance. Just another thing to keep Jaemin awake at night and haunt his restless dreams.
Jaemin nods without thinking, doesn’t even know how he’s supposed to help, but he’ll try. For this man, this mysterious face that’s following him to the farthest reaches of the earth, he’ll do anything just to know why.
“You really saved her?”
Jeno leans on his hand, exhaustion starting to settle in his bones. Jaemin’s voice keeps him awake, the soft melodic hum caressing his consciousness like waves on the shore.
“I think so.” Jaemin hums. “I got her out of the city but I never had the chance to find her afterwards. So... I don’t really know what happened to her after that.”
“I’m sure she lived a long happy life.” Jeno comforts as best as he can. Jaemin just smiles at him, a lifetime of exhaustion in his eyes.
“I hope so.”
Jeno is cautious when he asks. “And the man?”
Jaemin is caught rather easily; but only because he wants to be caught. For as much power as the city guards hold, they're actually pretty useless when it comes down to it.
Jaemin meets the man in the damp walls of the city dungeon. They're thrown into a cell on their own, across the way from where they keep all the women, from where a chorus of screams haunts the dripping brick walls.
"My wife- i-is she alright?" The man latches onto him the moment the guards disappear, clutching onto Jaemin's arms for dear life.
"She is safe." Jaemin reassures. He left her in an abandoned hut, one he used to live in before he got brave enough to venture into the city. He told her to stay, to wait for the both of them to return, to hide herself well if she heard footsteps and to not answer the door to anyone that didn't speak in their tongue. "She is waiting for you."
"Oh thank god." The man sighs, voice trembling as his legs give out. Jaemin catches him, still trying to keep his distance. This must be what the universe planned for him, right? To save this man, in this time and place, for whatever reason.
"How do we get out of here?" Jaemin asks, eyes peeled for any loose bricks or bars on their cell, looking for any sort of escape route.
"I… I don't know." The man responds, looking around warily. "I don't think we can."
"No we must." Jaemin shakes his head, wracking his brain. "We need to get you out of here."
"I tried everything." Jaemin's body is hunched over in defeat, his eyes unbearably sad. Jeno wishes he knew how to comfort him; understands there's not much he can offer to a man who's seen it all. "I was so sure that I'd finally found my purpose, to really save the man this time, but nothing I could think of worked."
Jaemin has never been burned — not with his original body, the one that could feel — so he can only imagine what it must feel like. The man beside him screams enough for the both of them, the sound grating on his ears and tearing his heart into shreds. It’s horrific. Jaemin can feel his skin blistering but can’t feel any of the pain.
He gains some sort of satisfaction from the fear in the eyes of the priest as he remains motionless and calm even as the flames reach the bottom of his thighs and his ropes start to burn.
Jaemin can’t look at the man beside him; not this time. Just hearing him is hard enough as it is. He knows he won’t ever forget the screaming, like the universe laughing down at him; forcing him to confront his failure, his shortcomings, his mistakes, everything Jaemin has ever done just because he didn't know any better.
Jaemin has had enough.
For the first time in his long, ceaseless life, he feels something other than that which weighs him down. He feels power in his undying body, he feels something that grounds him and pushes him forward. He feels angry. At the universe, at the priest, at this fucking city that loathes anyone different.
Revenge is a seven letter word.
Jaemin looks the priest in the eye, blinking as little as possible, watching the fear grow and manifest into something bigger and stronger and petrifying. The flames are around his neck by now, and still he feels nothing. The man has gone woefully quiet beside him, whimpering with whatever fight he has left.
Jaemin feels a sick triumph as the ropes around him burn through and he feels them loosen, flexing his arms just so until they drop to his ankles. He smiles as the crowd begins to scream in terror and he carefully steps off the pyre with flesh the colour of charcoal. He feels like a monster; maybe he is one. It doesn't matter anyway. So long as the man beside him continues to die, Jaemin continues to live.
And live he shall.
"They called me 'der Hexenmeister von Fulda'." Jaemin laughs, face to the stars. "I'm not sure if they still talk about me but Volknand certainly kept my legend alive through his descendants."
Jeno hums as his eyes slip closed, exhaustion weighing heavily on his body. They're somewhere near a farming town, according to Jaemin, he just needs to stay awake until he can get checked by an actual doctor. Jeno is trying, he really is, especially because Jaemin seems genuinely frightened that Jeno is playing down his injuries.
Like Jaemin can talk.
"Jeno?"
A hum, soft and breathy like a sigh.
"Come on, don't fall asleep on me."
Jaemin jostles him until his head slips off the shoulder he's been leaning against, free falling backwards until the muscles in his neck find the strength to catch him. Jeno blinks and rubs at his eyes until he feels a little more awake.
"Sorry." He mumbles. Jaemin shakes his head at him.
"We're almost there, I promise. You can sleep soon."
Jeno grunts his affirmation, really trying to wake himself up. “Tell me another story.”
For a while, Jaemin lived at sea. Jaemin can’t pinpoint exactly what it was that led him to abandon the life of the mainland; maybe he was running, hoping he could find some sort of reverie from the unforgiving hand his life kept dealing him.
He travelled with a crew of drunken pirates. He saw the seven seas. He made friends, sort of.
Nicholas was the first. Jaemin bumped into him one day, at a pub, and spilled beer all down the front of his shirt. He had braced himself for a pummeling, only to be thrown off kilter as the man had started laughing, a hefty belly chuckle that had warmed him from the toes up, and slung an arm over his shoulders.
“Not to worry, boy.” He had slurred in rough English, and raised his now-empty mug. “Another!”
Nicholas introduced him to Sebastian; a dark-eyed, brooding crew member with an eye patch and an unkind air to him. Jaemin was wary of being alone with him. That is, until their ship was attacked one day by enemy pirates and Sebastian had saved him from getting his head sliced clean off; looking at him with dark eyes and a brow slightly raised, before running off without another word. Jaemin had thanked him by sneaking a bottle of whisky from the loot and leaving it in his sleeping quarters.
Jacob was the last, and certainly left the biggest impression on his life.
Jacob's parents were immigrants from Korea — the place Jaemin still knows as Goryeo — so it's no wonder that Jaemin grew so close to him so fast. Jacob taught him English, told him the stories his parents told him of their homeland, as Jaemin wondered at just how much their language and land had changed over the years.
And so it goes, Jacob was the first man Jaemin ever loved.
It started slow, a burn deep in his gut, a magnetism drawing his eyes to Jacob whenever he was in the same room, until he was the only thing Jaemin could think about. He haunted his dreams; Jaemin was obsessed. And Jacob loved him back, truly. Jaemin was happy. It was the first fucking time in Jaemin’s life that he’d ever felt happiness in any form.
So, of course it couldn’t last.
Jaemin awakes one night to the sounds of cannon fire. He immediately searches for Jacob, only to find the man’s bunk empty and cold. Nicholas finds him amongst the chaos and hurries him, tells him to prepare, that they’re under attack. Jaemin’s head buzzes and he grabs his pistol and his scabbard and rushes after the last of the crew onto the deck.
Jaemin doesn’t think; just fights, and swings, and blows bullets into the heads of British soldiers. He keeps looking for Jacob, doesn’t care how many rifles are aimed at him so long as he finds Jacob. There are soldiers everywhere; there's no chance they're winning this. A cannon strikes and another hole is blown into the ship, and she's sinking.
And then finally, Jaemin finds Jacob, rooted to his spot by the barrel of a gun. Jacob spots him, smiles at him, but all Jaemin can see is the man with the gun. That face, so fucking familiar, his mouth pulled into a concentrated frown as he pulls the trigger without a second thought, smoke seeping through the hole in Jacob’s head. Jaemin watches as he collapses to the deck of the ship, feels a bullet blow its way through his own chest, and raises his pistol.
Jaemin screams, raw and pained and guttural, and cries as he pulls the trigger.
Jeno is quiet for a long time and Jaemin lets him be. He doesn’t look at Jeno at all, faking nonchalance but Jeno can hear the nervous thrum of his heart beating under his ear.
“I understand why you did that.” He says finally. The lights of a town fade to life ahead of them, the night reaching its end quicker than he anticipated.
“It was a dark period of my life.” Jaemin explains. “But thank you for understanding.”
“You poor things.” The woman cries, ushering them both inside her small cottage, outside of the ghost town asleep with the late hour. She's fully dressed, not a hint of sleep anywhere on her. Jeno wonders if she has slept at all, or if she just starts her day abnormally early.
“What happened? Put him over there.”
Jaemin does as she says, carefully lowering Jeno onto a settee as she starts pulling things out of cupboards.
“Nothing too dramatic.” Jaemin answers with an easy smile on his face. “I sped around a corner too fast and Jeno here swerved and hit a tree.”
It’s close enough to the truth that Jeno doesn’t feel too bad about having to lie; especially knowing that there’s no way they can tell her the whole truth. She pulls a stool up beside him and begins carefully unravelling the makeshift bandage around his leg.
Jaemin settles into an armchair behind them, quietly listening as the woman launches into a series of medical questions and Jeno tries not to get distracted by the way drowsiness softens Jaemin’s features, shedding him of several hundred years. Jeno doesn’t know how he’s still here, after everything, how he hasn’t given up and sealed himself away in a cave somewhere not even the universe can find him.
Whatever it is that gets him out of bed in the morning, Jeno is grateful for it.
Jeno is patched up, fed and tucked into bed before the sun rises above the horizon.
“Sorry I’ve only got the one bed.” The woman — Saerom, she’s called — offers with an apologetic smile, glancing down at the two of them lying shoulder to shoulder, the textbook definition of Awkward. “I don’t have guests very often. I hope it won’t be too much of a bother.”
“Not at all.” Jaemin gleams. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
“Get some rest, I’ll check on you in a few hours.” She flicks the light off, kicking the doorstop out of the way.
“Thank you.” Jeno calls from his cocoon of blankets, foot raised carefully atop three pillows stacked over the covers.
“Goodnight.” Jaemin says, just as Saerom pulls the door closed behind her.
In the daylight, Jeno will have to call a tow service for his car, and his life will continue the way it always has.
“Tell me another story?” Jeno asks, though he feels the dredges of sleep tugging him towards unconsciousness. He feels Jaemin smile beside him.
Jaemin is angry for a long, long time. Self destructive habits show themselves in isolation, excessive drinking and a handful of attempts on his own life. He’s reckless and careless and pokes every hornets nest he can find just because he can.
Surprisingly, he spends many many generations after Jacob never catching a glimpse of the man. So long, in fact, that he starts to wonder if he’s fucked it all up. Maybe killing his soulmate for the second time cursed him for the rest of eternity. Maybe the universe is just as angry at him as he is with himself.
(In hindsight, Jaemin wonders if the radio silence was the universe cutting him some slack for once. That, or trying to lure him into a false sense of security.)
He stays in London, in the grimy streets that reek of piss and reflect well with his self image. He brushes up on his English, properly this time, or as proper as the eastern suburbs of London can get. Anyone he meets he never bothers to learn the name of.
Life is bleak; life expectancy is short; there’s a serial killer in town.
Jaemin reads the papers for some form of entertainment. The Whitechapel Murderer they’re calling him. Fear clears the streets somewhat, but Jaemin still walks alone at night. Night after night he wanders, watching the women of the night as they scurry away from him, watching him back with fearful eyes.
A few dozen nights go by before Jaemin hears yelling coming from an alleyway. He rushes over, unsure what his purpose is, and stops dead in his tracks.
“You killed them, didn’t you? It’s you.” A man’s voice carries down the alleyway, distraught yet firm in his accusations. The shadow of another man stands before him, held against the wall by the collar of his uniform coat. A police badge shines under a dim streetlight.
“Who’s going to believe you?” The second man laughs. “I own this city, you’re just a fucking wannabe detective.”
“Maybe.” The first man agrees. Jaemin watches on with paralysed fear, breath caught in his lungs as he’s once more brought to his knees by the power of the universe. “But I don’t need reputation when I have evidence. We’ll see who the law believes when we take this to court.”
Jaemin doesn’t breathe, can’t even warn the man about the knife slipped out of the killer’s back pocket. He screams, but only when it’s too late, when there’s blood splattering the filthy brick walls of the alley and running it’s way towards Jaemin’s feet. The man gurgles, hands fluttering to his throat, coating them in red and dropping to his knees-
“Stop!” Jeno cries, breath shaking in his lungs. He buries his head in his hands and tries to breathe, tries to deal with the wave of emotions taking control of him as Jaemin goes quiet beside him. As the night wears on, Jeno's finding it harder and harder to separate himself from Jaemin's stories.
After a moment, his hands are tugged away and Jaemin fills his field of vision.
“I'm sorry.” He wipes the wetness from Jeno’s cheeks in a display of affection so domestic, so lovely and careful that Jeno’s heart yearns. Jaemin has been through so much bullshit and yet he hasn’t let it harden him, not in the least. Jeno wants to give everything to this man, to this stranger he hasn’t even known for a day. He deserves every little bit of happiness the universe has to give him.
“No, I’m sorry.” Jeno weeps. “You don’t deserve any of this.”
“It’s okay.” Jaemin reassures. His voice is so kind and gentle, Jeno’s heart pangs for him. “I’ve made my peace with it, you don’t have to worry about me.”
“But you deserve to be loved.” Jeno argues. “You deserve to- to fall in love with someone, to live with someone that you love.”
Jaemin smiles sadly at him. “Thank you, Jeno.”
The sun rises through the window outside, birds chirping as they begin their day. There’s only so much time left, so Jeno lets Jaemin continue his story, hoping against all hope that it has a happy ending.
Goryeo has changed a lot since Jaemin last visited. The name, first and foremost. It’s so typical, really, that Jaemin arrives in the midst of an occupation. The Uibyeong rebels find him wandering the coastline of Incheon one day, taking in a landscape that was once familiar to a younger, far more ignorant version of himself.
“Are you Korean?” One of them asks. Jaemin had heard whispers of the Japanese occupation during the arduous journey to the Korean Peninsula but hadn’t picked up on much.
“Yes, just returning. What’s going on?”
The rebels look amongst each other, before two of them wordlessly grab him by the arms and he’s dragged to their camp, his bags dragging along the ground behind him.
“They were paranoid, but I don’t really blame them.” Jaemin explains. “There were a lot of spies around that time and I did seem pretty suspicious.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” Jeno laughs. “The language must have changed a lot since you’d been gone right?”
“Bingo.” Jaemin chuckles. “They thought I must have learnt my Korean from some incredibly outdated texts the Japanese stole during the first invasions.”
“Which isn’t entirely wrong.”
“No, not really.”
One way or another, he convinces them that he’s on their side and he begins training. He’s admittedly a little rusty and unfamiliar with a lot of the weapons they have on hand so he settles for a rusty iron bar with a makeshift rubber handle to protect his hands. He enjoys the whistling sound it makes when he swings it.
They fight many battles against the Japanese, most of them unsuccessful, but their small rebellion grows in numbers when the army is disbanded, many ex soldiers joining their make-shift army.
Jaemin arrives at an encampment on the outskirts of Seoul, littered with rebels preparing for an attack the next morning, chatting with one of the rebels about his hometown when someone crawls out of a tent and nearly eats Jaemin’s boot.
“Woah, careful.” Jaemin laughs, assuming the guy is drunk. The man looks up at him, rearing back at the near miss and-
There he is. Jaemin stares down at him for so long, blood rushing in his ears, wondering to himself what the catch is. The guy says something but Jaemin doesn’t hear it, panic taking hold of him and rooting him to the ground, just like all those other times before.
“Jaemin.” His friend shoulders him and Jaemin blinks hard, eyes dry and sticky.
“S-sorry.” Jaemin stumbles over an apology, heart thudding when the man’s expression breaks out into a smile so breathtaking it rivals every sunset Jaemin has ever seen in his life. Jaemin gets lost so easily in the warmth in his eyes, in the pure life permeating out of every inch of his body. Life looks beautiful on him.
“It’s okay, I should be more careful.” The man laughs, rubbing his neck sheepishly. He stands to his feet and Jaemin reels at how tall he is.
“Jaemin, we need to report in.” His friend reminds, impatience clear in his body language.
“Right yeah, sorry.” He follows after his friend, refusing to let himself turn around purely for self-preservation.
“I’ll see you out there, Jaemin-ssi!” The man calls after him anyway.
Jaemin keeps walking, despair already settling into his bones like an old friend. He has no hope for this ending well.
“He died, didn’t he?”
Jaemin nods silently. “Not straight away. But yes.”
Jaemin refuses to learn his name. After all this time, it doesn’t feel right putting a name to the face that has haunted him for so much of his life. At least not yet, not until Jaemin actually figures out what the universe is planning this time. It couldn’t possibly be this easy, could it?
“Your dialect is weird.” The man says. Jaemin knows his family name is Lee because he saw it stitched into his backpack.
“Yeah, I know.” Jaemin replies, looking down at his feet as they walk. They’re heading somewhere up the coast where a regime of the Japanese army has taken up residence in a small fishing town, in the hopes of liberating it. Jaemin’s hopes aren’t very high. Of the men that Jaemin first fought with, there’s three left, himself not included. Their days are very much numbered, and yet they keep fighting.
“Where are you from?”
“Jeonju.” He answers, the actual truth or as close to it as he can get with his fuzzy understanding of the new names and places of modern Korea. “You?”
“Incheon.”
“Oh, you’re local?” Jaemin wonders if the original him was from Incheon too.
“Yeah.” The man nods. He keeps pace with Jaemin easily, backpack rustling behind them, wind playing with the hair falling into his eyes. He looks boyish in the early rays of dawn, sunlight illuminating his features with innocence and breathing life into a face Jaemin has only ever seen a ghost of until recently.
“Wait.” Jeno rolls over as best as he can without jostling his leg. The dawn light catches the curves of Jaemin’s face as he stares up at the ceiling, then at Jeno when he pokes at him.
“Hm?”
“How long did you get with him this time?”
Jaemin looks away, thinking. “I think it was a week or two, but we only interacted a handful of times.”
“Why?”
“Because I was scared.”
“Do you have family Jaemin?” The man asks as they’re setting up their camp just north of the town, where they’ll stay until the following sunrise. They’re sharing a tent, and Jaemin is more than terrified of waking up to a lifeless body lying next to him.
“No.”
“A lover?”
Jaemin pauses, tent material scrunching lightly in his hands. “They died.”
“Oh.” The man sounds genuinely sad. “I’m sorry.”
Jaemin’s hands have started shaking. The image of Jacob with a hole in his head appears at the forefront of his mind without warning and he squeezes his eyes closed as Jacob’s face is replaced with the face of his killer. He has to remind himself to breathe as his chest feels like it’s concaving.
“It’s fine.” He grits out. “It was a long time ago.”
“If you want to get it off your chest I can-”
“I said it’s fine.” Jaemin snaps, tightly bound and coiled like a spring. He feels cornered, claustrophobic, the walls of the universe looming over him and forcing him to choose his path with care. He has nothing to base his judgement off and he’s so fucking scared of messing up again that he doesn’t even want to try.
The man backs off with a softer apology and disappears to go on a supply run.
Jaemin wallows in self pity for hours in the pitched tent, staring at the backpack sitting on the other side of it, its owner yet to return, and as the minutes tick on by he finally realises he’s just wasted his first real chance the universe has given him.
The man never returns, and Jaemin can only be thankful that he didn’t have to watch it happen this time.
“After that, I wandered around Korea until it stabilised and found a place to settle near my birthplace.”
The morning is quiet, soft at the edges. Jeno can hear bees buzzing around the flower bushes just outside the window, a car passing in the distance. A rooster crows; Jeno yawns.
“Are you waiting for him?” Jeno asks softly, wishing more than anything that Jaemin finds the happy ending he deserves.
“I was.” Jaemin agrees. His eyes are closed, peace washing over him now that his story has been told. Jeno wonders if he planned to tell him everything from the very beginning; wonders what his plan is now that he’s told it.
“But not anymore?” Jeno gazes down at him and wishes he would open his eyes, just so he could at least know what he’s thinking. Despite the dredges of sleep tearing at his limbs, Jeno feels like he's touching a livewire.
Jaemin gently shakes his head.
“Why not?”
Jeno holds his breath, waits and waits, until finally Jaemin’s eyelashes flutter and his eyes find Jeno’s.
“Jeno.” Jaemin breathes. His eyes are misty, expression fragile and broken, and Jeno wants to kiss him more than anything. “You look just like him.”
“Oh.”
Jeno exhales as his chest explodes, eyes watering at the sudden rush of memories of his past lives, of Jaemin, of everything that they missed out on, of the first time he died at the hands of Jaemin and every death that came after. It hurts, and Jaemin must feel it too because his face scrunches up as he clutches at his own chest and cries out. It hurts, it burns, it seems never ending as Jeno lives out countless lives simultaneously and feels them all end.
Jeno blindly reaches for Jaemin, to ground himself, to try to ease some of the unbearable want tugging at the walls of his heart, yearning for the man he never got to know.
Jeno catches Jaemin’s lips under his own without looking and melts into them, heart burning with centuries of love and loss and careless want. Jaemin cradles the back of his head with hands so delicate and careful, like one breath and Jeno would blow away in the wind. Jeno can taste the worry seeping off of him and does his best to kiss it away.
"Why?" Jaemin whispers between their lips, fresh tears dripping from his long lashes. "Why now?"
"I don't know." Jeno answers honestly. "And I don't care. I'm not going anywhere this time."
"Jeno-"
"Trust me, okay?" Jeno makes sure Jaemin looks him in the eye, hopes he can see just how determined he is to fix this, to live for Jaemin. He hopes the universe will let them have it, just this once, hopes it knows that Jeno forgives Jaemin, he doesn't blame him at all, that he has repaid his debt a thousand times over.
Jaemin kisses him again and Jeno kisses back, pouring every little bit of his heart into it because it's Jaemin's now; it always has been.
The sun illuminates their embrace, bringing light to a lifetime of sorrow, bringing hope with the new day.