Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hands poised over the keys, the last few notes of the nocturne reverberate and fade into silence. Kei only opens his eyes when the first of the applause cuts through the air, the first of many that trail behind. He stands. Bows. Meets the eyes of a few of his regulars. He feels gratified that even now, they take the time to listen.

No matter how many years he’s been a performer, he still gets nervous. Cold sweats and jitters in the green room are weekly occurrences, abated only a little with just the right amount of a Riesling wine. But once on stage, it’s the knowledge that these people all share the same thing with each other that keeps him going – a beacon of light in these troubled times. The urge to protect this bond has never been this strong, perhaps due to the growing awareness that any day could be his last. That one day he will walk out to an auditorium that’s completely devoid of people. But until the auditorium has heard its very last, lingering vestiges of applause, he will continue to fuel what’s sacred.

The same eternal love of music.

Tonight, a boy wearing an orange cap approaches him, and Kei’s heart beats faster. Daiki is the boy’s name, and while he usually has a jaunty summery smile on his face, tonight is different. Tonight, Daiki will say two little words, and Kei will know that even musicians aren’t immune from the harsh effects of reality.

An embrace. A kiss. Then,

“I’ve enlisted.”

They have dinner by candlelight, next to the fireplace. Why fill up the space with words when Kei can spend it memorizing every feature? Daiki is indulging him, he is sure: eyes cast downwards towards his plate to hide his discomfort. Kei marvels at how his long lashes frame his eyes, how the corners of his mouth can’t keep from turning slightly upwards, how his ears flush red at the tips.

Kei will take this moment, and Daiki will let him have this, because after tonight, what is there to give?

Unsurprisingly, it is Daiki who breaks the silence. “You knew, right?” His once confident demeanor betrays a slight tremor in his voice.

“Play me something,” he says suddenly, putting his chopsticks down, with an urgency Kei has never heard.

The pieces he plays are dances, fugues, preludes all in major keys. Ballrooms full of couples dancing, soldiers marching triumphant, bluebirds chirping down by the lake. Songs entrenched deep in sadness have no place here tonight, when all Kei wants to do is forget.

And when Arioka has had enough, is pulling him, laughing, from the bench to his feet, they fall to bed in each other’s arms, and shut out the world around them.

Tonight, Kei will not grieve. Tonight, he will not mourn the boy who danced into his life; turned his world from monochrome into a dazzling display of technicolour. The boy who began and ended every day with a laugh; who shared his love of music but with electronic beats.

Instead, he will wait until he’s gone.

That crawling underneath your skin; the prickling sensation at the back of your neck—it’s almost never caused by the fighting. The rush of adrenaline and the white noise roaring in your ears as you duck, and weave; aim and shoot. It’s the marching, and the waiting: of having too much time to think and fear the worst. To wonder whether you’ll ever see your family or your friends after this, or if you’ll even leave in one piece.

Down in the front lines, there’s no time to hope. No time to ponder your next move. It’s all actions go until you’re injured, or the enemy retreats, or someone taps you on the shoulder to replace you on the battlefield. An hour or two of sleep is a luxury, and battle scars become badges – “a reminder to be grateful for living another day,” officers like to remind them during hastily whispered pep talks. Personally, there’s a part of Yuto that wonders if there’s anything left to be even be grateful for, when there’s destruction all around and lives ruined every day.

So the drudgery of life in the reserve trenches, to put it lightly, feels like a special kind of mental torture. Cleaning weaponry, moving supplies, or repairing the trenches offer no reprieve from the bitterness; the rage at being taken away from solving calculus equations to learn how to assemble a gun. And after this—if there even is an after—the paranoia and the nightmares will remain a souvenir.

If time permits, later Yuto will write letters to his family. He prays that the war will be over before Raiya’s birthday, so at least his mother won’t be left all alone.

There’s a new soldier sleeping in his barracks when he returns: uniform too big on his thin frame, and a pale, haggard face that’s seen the worst of humanity. Maybe, just maybe, this sharp jawed man had a baby face, and slept peacefully long ago, but now he’s just another treasured beauty tarnished by the war.

Climbing into the adjacent bunk, Yuto dreams.

The ominous clicks of rifles firing.

All around him, a shower of bullets, cascading into a beautiful arch.

Yuto stands there, paralysed, as soldiers beside him fall to the ground.

In front, a single shot, aimed directly at him. He closes his eyes and braces himself for impact.

And then, there's nothing.

Yuto awakens with a gasp, a pounding heart, and sweat dripping down his neck. He rolls over to stare at the ceiling and steadies his breath by counting to ten in his mind. If he can help it, he won’t close his eyes again for a long while.

The room is dim, thanks to a small kerosene lamp in the corner. There's a rustling of sheets from another bed, and when Yuto turns to look, meets eyes with the soldier from before, donning his uniform with one arm in a cast. The familiar badge of a ranked officer glistens on his lapel. Yuto feels a pang in his chest: a mix of nostalgia, grief, and a twinge of guilt.

“Nightmare?” The captain asks.

"Something like that." Another moment of silence. “What happened?” Yuto asks, unable to help himself. At this rate, any distraction is welcome.

The captain grimaces. “Bullet shattered my elbow. Real stupid. Doctor said I'll be out of commission for at least two months." He doesn’t need to say what Yuto already knows from his expression—that he’d like nothing more than to be in the field, too.

Yuto contemplates talking about his own injury from opposite beds in the room; the final minutes of pillow talking before the sun truly rises. Their eyes meet across the room, and it is this one moment before the resulting chaos that Yuto will never forget. In another lifetime, they could be on a date, two young soldiers taken from home, across the table at a coffee shop not knowing where to look or what to do with their hands.

Instead, they’re stuck in the trenches together with no end in sight, and nightmares that will haunt them until they die.

Because war is unpredictable, in the distance, there's an explosion. The bunker shakes and debris starts to fall from the ceiling. Clutching at bed posts, they stare at each other in alarm. Then, deafening silence. And outside, the screaming starts. Sirens begin blaring throughout the compound, and heavy footsteps run up and down the corridors.

An officer bursts into the bunker and starts barking orders. “Captains, they need you in the briefing room.”

Yuto grabs his crutch, and the other captain quickly comes around to the other side to help him. It’s only when they make it to the officers’ headquarters that they hear the story. It’s 4am, and a boy has died in no man’s land.

The pain isn’t going away. Every other time Chinen has fallen, gotten into scrapes, or that one time he impaled his leg on a garden spike of all things, the pain hasn’t lasted long.

“Captain Fearless” Yamada liked to call him, because Chinen was always clambering back up and chasing after his friends, regardless of how much bigger they were than him, and how many times he fell.

But now, the searing pain is so, so sharp; angry flames licking at his entire body. There’s no way to isolate the source. Is this how one dies?

There is one thing Chinen knows with absolute certainty: that he doesn’t want to wake up in a world without…

His eyes fly open to burning flames, and hears people yelling all around him. Then, faces peering from above.
And then once again, the curtain falls, and his vision fades to black.

“He’ll die if we don’t. The infection…”

“Preparing for operation.”

The sound of a drill.

There are snapshots of time where Chinen regains consciousness: some moments shorter than others, and never for too long. They somehow moved him to a bunker; one he doesn’t recognise, but then he can’t move his head. His vision is limited to the dirt ceiling, and whom he hopes is not the enemy’s doctor.

“Why are you here?” he rasps one day when the same serious face appears from above. He sips gratefully from the cup provided.

“I’m trying to keep you alive,” the doctor says with quirk on his lips that hasn’t been there in days.

“I mean here. In the war.” Chinen clarifies, adding, in a way he’ll look back on one day and recognise as pleading, “Please distract me.”

The doctor disappears from view to rummage around his tray table. It takes a while for him to answer, and when he does, he sounds reluctant. “I followed a boy.”

A needle gets pushed into a vein, forestalling any more questions. The last coherent thought Chinen has before slipping back into unconsciousness is, “I hope that worked out for you better than it did for me.”

His right side is heavy. So… numb and listless. Chinen tries to lift it, but finds that he can’t.

There are more casualties in his bunker now. Chinen doesn’t know how long has passed since he’s been here: it could be a week or three, or even a month. If there’s been any visitors, he hasn’t seen them, and no matter how much information Chinen pushes for, the doctor will just smile and continue to work.

Considering he is a survivor of a covert suicide mission into No Man’s Land, Chinen supposes he can’t blame the guy for being cautious.

Still, today the usually hushed whispers are louder. They must think he’s sleeping.

“I was a pianist in my past life,” the doctor says, voice kind in a way Chinen hasn’t heard before. “Maybe when the war is over I’ll play again.”

If Doctor Inoo is speaking to a patient, that means the patient is still alive. Which means that the patient could be…

Chinen tries to push the thought away from his mind. There is no place for hope in a battlefield. He was there that night, he knows what happened. His missing right limb will forever serve as a painful reminder of one daring soldier, and the two stupid ones who loved him too much to caution him.

An arm for a life, he lays there thinking before the doctor walks over to see him. It should have been me.

“You can do lots of things with one arm!” Doctor Inoo is insisting, mistaking the reason for his sudden wave of grief. Chinen is bored, in medical, and when he’s bored, he thinks. Remembers. Feels. And he hates it all.

“Like what?” Chinen asks, just to be humoured. He won’t cry in front of this doctor. The bandages are off, and smells absolutely foul. He winces as the doctor dabs ointment onto the drasted wound.

“You can still eat and wash your hair!” The doctor’s grin is infectious, and Chinen finds himself wanting to smile despite rolling his eyes. Perhaps this was the doctor’s plan after all, because Chinen feels slightly better during their brief interaction. They’ve come to know each other a bit more during his extended stay at medical. There are worse ways to spend one’s time. “Or you can even play piano.”

“There’s no way I could play piano with one hand,” he objects. Chinen doesn’t even think he’d be able to play piano with two hands anymore. Not when his hands have caused so much bloodshed, and pain, and suffering. These hands don’t deserve to play piano.

The doctor’s face becomes somber again. “I’ll make it happen,” he promises, and somehow, Chinen believes him.

Shintaro visits a day before he’s discharged, nasty gashes and half-healed scars still etched on his face. Trust Shintaro to be the sort of person to refuse medical treatment for anything that isn’t a priority one urgency.

As happy as he is to see him, it is also this moment that Chinen has been dreading. He’s certain that there’s nothing either of them can say to ease the suffering of their shared loss. Looking at the haunted shell of Shintaro, all he wants to do is to look away from the sorrow mirrored in his eyes.

This is a wound that will never heal. The flames that eat at wounded hearts will grow, stronger and deeper, each month and each year. But perhaps, if they both can get out of here, they won’t have to suffer alone.

Going into No Man’s Land was asking for trouble, which is why Ryutaro was so excited to be assigned a mission there.

“It’ll be the perfect place to gather information,” he’d insisted. “Think about it. If we get information we can use, the war will be over soon.”

To nobody’s surprise, Shintaro had instantly agreed. The Morimoto brothers, always looking for excitement in all the wrong places. Warnings fell on deaf ears, as they had even before the war.

But in every universe, every galaxy, history repeats itself. There is no scenario in which Chinen won’t follow Ryutaro until the end of his days.

“You two stay back,” Ryutaro commands, the newly-appointed First Class private coming into his role with ease, and before Chinen can protest, he’s off, leaping between shell hole to shell hole towards the border.

A pause. Shintaro lasts all but twenty seconds. “There’s no way you’re leaving us behind,” he whispers, fierce, already rearing himself up to go.

Chinen grabs at his shoulder. “Shin, no!” They haven’t surveyed the area yet - there are always eyes watching, everywhere. But Shintaro has been stronger than both him and Ryutaro since he was fifteen, and overpowers him easily, knocking Chinen to the ground and chasing after his brother.

Up ahead, there’s a shout – have they been spotted? Heart pounding, all of his instincts are screaming at him to stay on the ground: to remain hidden in the dark of the night. But there’s no way he’s being left behind.

What Chinen lacks in strength, he makes up for with speed. He leaps to his feet and charges. Puts years of winning at capture the flag to use to race past twenty feet of barbed wire that scratch at his face and his arms. Past Shintaro. He has almost caught up to Ryutaro when he hears it.

The whistle of the grenade as it soars in the air.

“Ryuu!!!”

People associate different stories with the ending of the war.

Some will recall the horns blasting their victory song on that triumphant morning. Others talk about the lines that formed in front of the telephones, of weary soldiers waiting to tell their families they were coming home.

Years later, few will remember a soldier in the reserve bunks, playing the piano with only his left hand.