Chapter Text
A month before he’s supposed to leave Korea, Oh Beomseok wakes up in the hospital. His forearms are bandaged almost up to the elbow; there’s an IV in his wrist. He feels like shit.
So it didn’t work.
An aide or a nurse is watching him at every moment. They don’t talk to him beyond the most basic necessary communication. It’s a week before his father visits; as usual, Beomseok feels the change in the air before he even enters the room.
His father dismisses the nurse and stands looking down at him. Beomseok keeps his eyes lowered. He doesn’t dare to move.
“Are you trying to ruin me, you piece of shit?” His father raises a hand to slap him, and despite himself Beomseok flinches. “Do you know what it would do to me if my pathetic fucking son commits suicide?” Then he really is slapped. “Goddamn it! I should have you killed myself.” As he looks down his tone evens out, which is always scarier. “You had better not try again, you worm. If you die I’ll stop paying for that fucking kid you almost killed. Do you understand?”
Beomseok is trembling all over his body. He still doesn’t look up. “I understand, Abeoji. I won’t do it again.”
So he’s sent to the Philippines. He sleepwalks through the last two years of school. His schoolwork is - fine. At least the others leave him alone. No one talks to him, and no one hurts him. In that sense it’s the best time of his life.
Once he graduates, he’s presented with a plane ticket back to Korea and no other communication. He hasn’t bothered to make any plans. His father will have chosen something for him. Once he’d thought about trying to get into a program for architecture, or maybe civil engineering; math was one of his best subjects, and buildings had always seemed interesting, intricate but solid, purposeful. Though his father had expressed an intention for him to study business or politics, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that Beomseok would be able to convince him that architecture was still respectable and prestigious enough.
But he doesn’t have the energy to fight for it any more. It feels uneasy just to think of getting to pursue his comfort or his interests while Suho is… anyway. So once he’s back and has been summoned to an audience, he just stands in his father’s office and waits to be told what he will do.
His father studies him for a minute. His manner is cold, which is pretty much the baseline, so it could be worse.
“Your grades last year were barely acceptable. You would think you would try to devote yourself a bit more to studying after all the trouble you caused.”
Beomseok knows from experience that there’s no answer he can give to make his father happy, so he stays silent and still.
“Why am I still wasting my money on your education?” His father sighs. “You’ll do your military service before I send you to university. You’ll enlist next month. No public service for you; we can’t have people saying politicians’ sons get special treatment. And maybe they can sort you out.” Beomseok’s nerves are straining to keep himself as reactionless and unobjectionable as possible.
Not getting a response, his father looks back down at the papers on his desk.
“Get out.” He goes.
It was going to happen sooner or later, no matter what his father decided, so there’s no point being upset or dreading anything. He’s heard the stories like everyone else has - that bullying and violence is rampant, even worse than in the schools. Well, he should be used to it. He doesn’t have any expectation that the military will be different than any other experience he’s had in life so far.
Things are set in motion very quickly. He’s barely been back two weeks before he’s received a letter telling him to report to basic training in two weeks more. It’s probably for the best to just get it done, anyway. It’s not like he has any friends to catch up with.
During that month, he mostly just tries not to be home - he goes to random neighborhoods to walk around, sometimes sits in the corner of unpopular cafes with his back to the wall. When he has to be in the house, the tension in the air is just as oppressive as ever. He’d forgotten, somehow, the real weight of it during the years he was gone.
He stays as far as he can from Byeoksan. On the subway one day he thinks he sees Yeon Sieun, and his whole body seizes up for a moment before the guy turns around. It’s just some other boy in a similar school uniform; when Beomseok can see him clearly, his eyes are nowhere near the dark burn of Sieun’s. He still gets off the train as soon as he can, the next stop, and washes his face once, twice, in the station bathroom. Then he locks himself in a stall until his hands stop trembling.
Like that, it feels as though a month passes in the span of a day. He goes to get his head shaved at a random barbershop; he doesn’t even look at reviews. There’s no one at home who would do it, and despite his resolve, he doesn’t completely trust himself to spend that much time with a razor.
The barber is a friendly older man, maybe in his fifties. He chatters about his own military service, half-complaining, half-nostalgic, as he cuts Beomseok’s hair.
“Your friends going to see you off when you go?” he asks curiously, halfway through a story about army rations. “They didn’t want to shave your head for you?”
Beomseok just sits there, looking down at his own lap. He might have gotten up to leave if this question had come at the beginning, but the man has already started, and he can’t really walk out on the street with half a head of hair.
No, there’s nobody to see him off, nobody to shave his head for him. It’s better that way, obviously. Beomseok is like… algae, on the top of a pond, that starves everything else beneath it. It’s not even the algae’s fault, it didn’t ask to be that way. It just wants to be alive. But nobody else can live around that.
With Suho and Sieun he’d thought that he’d finally found - some little ecosystem that would welcome him. A chance like that doesn’t come around every day. He knew that, and it had made him desperate and crazy when he could feel it slipping away. But in the end they’d had a world between them where he didn’t fit, and it wasn’t the bullies, or his father, or any cosmic force of unfairness crashing down on him. It was just him.
When he gets home his father’s eyes narrow when he sees Beomseok’s head.
“Chosun Ilbo is coming to interview me on Friday afternoon,” is all he says.
He doesn’t need to elaborate; that’s Beomseok’s order to show up and look like a dutiful, patriotic son for a photo.
“Yes, Abeoji.”
His father doesn’t look up from his desk as Beomseok leaves the room.
The journalists from Chosun Ilbo smile at him and ask if he’s nervous before posing them in the study. His father looks over coolly. It’s a strange kind of double vision; his father’s behavior is, as always, impeccable in front of outsiders, but Beomseok doesn’t know how they can’t see the contempt bleeding from his father’s eyes.
“He’ll survive,” his father answers for him, something like a laugh in his voice.
That’s the last time his father speaks to him before Secretary Jo drives him to the induction ceremony.
——
Basic training is the most physical exertion he’s had in ages, maybe his whole life. He’s never been particularly athletic, and he’s lost a lot of weight over the past two years; not on purpose, but he’d just found himself without any sort of appetite. So he’s not well prepared for this. Even the stronger boys are clearly finding it difficult, but Beomseok is too exhausted at the end of each day to do anything but fall down to the hard bedroll with its thin pillow. It would be hell to sleep on if he wasn’t so bone tired.
He tries his best to empty his mind out. Just the next step, the next ten meters’ run, the next task, the next morning.
Of course there’s friction. Everyone is on edge and at their limit, most of the others missing their homes, resentful to be trapped here. The officers yell at them all; one of the sergeants makes them all scrub the floor with shitty, barely-absorbent paper towels for half an hour when someone spills a little ramyeon on it. The more annoying guys call anyone a bastard, a cocksucker, an asshole, at the slightest provocation.
But worse than any of the other new soldiers is Lieutenant Shin. Some days he is mild-mannered, even sort of paternal to the recruits, although he can’t be older than forty or so. He even calls off the sergeant when he tries to punish them for inadequately cleaning their bunks.
And some days the most innocuous remark can become a grave offense in his reckoning. He makes Kim Jaewoo run laps until he throws up for informing him that he was mistaken about the date of the next recruit class’s arrival.
Beomseok has been doing his best simply not to attract attention, from Lieutenant Shin or anyone else. He’s not naive enough to think this is any guarantor of safety, but his skin crawls when anyone looks at him too long.
They’re all in the mess hall after a long, hot afternoon of target practice and running drills; Beomseok is finishing up some flavorless miyeokguk when he lifts his head to a commotion on the other side of the room.
It seems like one of the privates in his cohort, Park Myungjin, has tripped, and the miyeokguk on his tray has arced perfectly to spread all the way across Lieutenant Shin’s sleeve.
Park Myungjin is bowing rather frantically. The other privates who had been walking with him are bowing too, even as they are visibly moving away from him.
“Private Park Myungjin.”
“Yes, sir!” Myungjin looks horrified. Lieutenant Shin dabs at his sleeve with a napkin.
“What’s this? Is this you expressing disapproval of my training methods?”
“No, sir!”
“You might be offended that I made you all run so many laps today, although it was for the good of our nation’s military preparedness.”
“Sir, no, sir!” Even from here he can tell that Myungjin is sweating. “There was a puddle on the ground, sir, I slipped - maybe the floor was just mopped! It was an accident!”
Beomseok doesn’t dare move, but internally he cringes. The worst thing you can do is try to explain.
“An accident?” Throughout all this, Lieutenant Shin’s voice is low and smooth; it makes the hair on Beomseok’s neck stand up. “Are you going to have an accident if the fucking North Koreans come down here? You’re going to accidentally trip and open up the fucking gates for them?”
“No, sir!”
“The discipline in this group - have we failed you this much?” He sucks in a breath through his teeth. “How are you going to survive your postings if you’re like this?”
Myungjin has finally gotten enough sense not to answer, eyes roving side to side as if the others could or would rescue him. Lieutenant Shin stands up and addresses everyone in the hall. “Soldiers! Despite all our efforts, your fellow private has made me aware that your training is still lacking. As your officer, I can only apologize. To rectify our shortcomings we must work harder.” He taps his chin. “You all know the old armory by the back gate.” It’s a shabby building that looks like no one’s used it for years; Beomseok’s never stepped foot inside. “It seems to me this is a good opportunity to clear it out. In ten minutes, after you finish your meal, you will begin.”
A palpable deflation spreads across the room, but nobody even murmurs a complaint. The hall is silent as they finish eating. Everyone is noticeably careful with their trays as they leave to gather outside.
Lieutenant Shin leads them to the armory and unlocks the padlock. If it’s possible for a group of people to groan without making any sound, that’s what rolls through the assembled soldiers. The place is in terrible shape. Underneath a thick layer of dust are a bunch of old boxes, broken equipment, and other detritus apparently tossed in here to rot. From the look of it, animals have gotten in here at some point.
“Sort out what needs to be thrown away, and clean this place up. I think you can finish before midnight? If you’re still working by then, I’ll let you sleep a bit late tomorrow. But in that case you won’t have time for breakfast; I don’t think the mess hall needs to prepare anything for you.”
“Yes, sir,” they chorus out miserably. There’s no way they’ll be done by midnight; they’re going to be here all night.
He starts to walk away, then turns back as if he’s just remembered something. “Right. I do need someone to sort through the personnel files before my meeting tomorrow. Kim Kwanyoung!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Come with me.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Lucky bastard,” Jeong Minho says as the rest of them start to dig through the junk. “Why’s he get to go?”
“That’s because Kwanyoung is sucking Shin’s dick,” Lee Jongsoo says resentfully, as he picks up what looks like a thirty year old printer.
Minho rolls his eyes.
“I’m serious! He’s Shin’s pet for real. See how often they’re alone in Shin’s office together. Why the fuck else do you think he got out of this? He got out of extra drills last week too.”
The next night in the mess hall Beomseok looks over from his usual table at the edge of the room. Kim Kwanyoung is an average looking, average height, quiet guy from Gwangju that Beomseok had never really noticed before. He doesn’t look like someone who would be sucking their lieutenant’s dick, although Beomseok can’t say what exactly that type of person would look like.
But Kim Kwanyoung’s face flashes vividly into his mind later that week, when he’s walking to the infirmary for scheduled checkups, and Kim Jaewoo stops him in the hall.
“Lieutenant Shin asked for you,” he says.
“What?” He stares at Jaewoo. “Why?”
Jaewoo shrugs, uninterested now that his errand is complete, and turns away.
His muscles feel frozen and stiff as he walks himself there. The medical center suddenly sounds like the most appealing place in the world, a haven of boredom and routine. But it’s not like he can say no.
“You’ll be going to your main post soon,” Lieutenant Shin says, almost absently, as he rearranges some papers on his desk. “I wanted to meet with each of you, check in before you all leave basic training. It will be an adjustment for you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What sort of post are you hoping for, Private Oh?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You must have some preference?”
What is this? What is this? He’s paused too long. “I’ll complete my service wherever I’m sent, sir.”
Lieutenant Shin raises his eyebrows, nods. “Your service will be smoother if you get along well with others. Do you know how to get along with your officers?”
All the hair on the back of Beomseok’s neck is standing up. His throat is dry. He can’t think of any safe reply.
“No answer? You’re not an idiot, are you?”
“No, sir! I- I will get along with them, sir.”
Lieutenant Shin puts the papers down and looks at Beomseok. As he stands there it feels like he might shiver apart. Beomseok doesn’t know how to save himself from whatever this is. He’s never known how.
Who knows. Maybe Kim Kwanyoung has the right idea. Could it be worse than what’s already happened to him?
Lieutenant Shin is still looking at him, and his stomach is churning like it wants to escape his body, when the door abruptly opens. “Captain Ahn,” Lieutenant Shin says, rising smoothly, as Beomseok stutters out his own greeting.
“Have you got your report ready? The officers from HQ are almost here,” Captain Ahn says without preamble, then turns to Beomseok. “Private - who are you?”
“Private Oh Beomseok, sir!”
“Aren’t you all supposed to be at the medical center? You’d better hurry, they’re about to get started with the checkups.”
He doesn’t wait another moment, just bows shallowly to them both and goes. In the hallway the air already feels lighter, but he doesn’t pause to catch his breath. When he reaches the clinic, the unfriendly faces of his fellow soldiers have never been a more welcome sight.
Kim Kwanyoung leaves the base that weekend for his main posting. Beomseok sees Lieutenant Shin watching as he gets on the bus.
He doesn’t try to get Beomseok alone again. Beomseok doesn’t know what he did, or failed to do, to shake his attention.
Maybe Lieutenant Shin was just trying to ask after the wellbeing of one of his soldiers. Maybe Kwanyoung never did what Jongsoo said; maybe the pressure Beomseok felt in that room, nearly cracking him apart, was all coming from him.
He doesn’t want to know. Probably it’s silly to hope his main posting will be better, safer. Like running gleefully from a burning house into a forest fire.
——
A few days before the end of basic training, Captain Ahn calls him and a few other graduating soldiers into his office.
“Private Oh.”
“Sir!”
“Your file says you studied overseas. You speak English, right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Any other languages?”
“A little Japanese, sir!”
The captain nods. “It’s a little out of the way, but I’m sending you to the guard post up in Yanggu. They need some new soldiers to handle their radio communications.”
He was going to be sent somewhere or other, so it doesn’t really make a difference where he goes. Communications sounds less terrible than a lot of the alternatives, honestly. It’s pretty clear he’s not especially physically gifted.
He’s the last one dropped off the military transport as it winds through the mountains of Gangwon. Corporal Kwon from the training base has been taking advantage of the ride to nap; he pulls himself together just long enough to usher Beomseok off the bus.
“The captain is off base today,” he says, not looking up from his phone. “Your senior soldier said he would come to meet you.”
Before he can turn around and see for himself, an arm claps around his shoulder. Beomseok startles badly and jerks backward, nearly clipping the guy in the chin. At his side, the face attached to the arm appears.
“Welcome to the unit, new recruit!” The guy’s face is serious at first, but in the next moment, his expression cracks open into a grin. “I’m Corporal Park Humin!”