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Does the world end when you die?
I.
Bam’s world has ended multiple times, in small parts, like cracked paint falling off a wall, for as long as he can remember.
The first time it’d happened, he’d been new to the war, a few days after having enlisted in and thrown into a training camp. No one knew exactly why they were fighting or what they were fighting for, a war fought between Jahad and FUG extending for decades and them simply enlisting the moment they were of age with no say in it.
It was a senseless war with no end.
It’s the rule of the country that males born to the family were to serve the military and gain honour for FUG by winning the war, with defiance being met with death. So like every other male in the country, when Bam turns 18, his mother sends him off with a tearful smile and a “do me proud,” and Bam thinks one day I will come home to you.
All Bam recalls after that is feeling so, so homesick, an 18 year old in a barren land far from home where he curls up alone to sleep at night, family miles away.
He’s still new to all this, and it is only being here in this present moment that he realises what he’s gotten himself into that the fear starts to stir itself from the bottom of his stomach and has him burying his head into his arms in a poor attempt to sleep and forget.
He can only pray that he makes it home alive.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
II.
“Do you think we’ll make it back home alive?” Shibisu, a recruit who’d come in with him around the same time, asks him over dinner a month after they’ve started training. He's the closest person to Bam, and Bam guess he considers him a friend.
The stew that Bam is eating suddenly feels heavy in his throat. It’s something he’s tried to avoid thinking about- the anxiety in his stomach, the last glimpse of his mother who waves at him tearfully, the knowledge that coming here might ultimately lead to death,- but this question from Shibisu throws him off nonetheless and he feels the same unsettling fear all over again. When he tries to swallow it down, he chokes, sputtering soup everywhere as Shibisu pats his back worriedly.
“Are you okay?”
There's a pause as Bam catches his breath, “... no,” he replies, and Bam isn’t sure which question he’s replying to, voice hoarse, swallowing the last bits of his food down, and Shibisu can only smile bitterly.
Will the ones who’ve started this war let us go home alive?
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
III.
The third time Bam feels his world ending, it's one where it has him doubling over and throwing up, bile and undigested food spilling from his lips as he pants, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, tears already blurring his vision.
It’s when they’re first sent onto the battlefield. It’s when he’s made to kill for the first time in his life.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry , he thinks, sobs, as his sword slices through flesh and limbs, faces of his enemies distorted, mouths open in silent screams as they fall to pieces in front of him.
“It’s kill or be killed,” the reminder his commander repeats to them again and again ringing in his mind like a mantra, but I don’t want to do this, Bam thinks, witnessing bodies fall around him like flies.
I just want to go home.
-
That day, he gets sent to the infirmary by his commander for a checkup, who Bam vaguely remembers telling him, “you had the highest kill count today, you have potential!”, all along the way, and Bam just wants to hurl all over again.
It’s there that he first meets Khun Aguero Agnis, their resident military doctor.
“It’ll get better,” the doctor tells him reassuringly, voice gentle and soft when he first lay eyes on the shell-shocked state that Bam is in, “I promise,” and Bam lets his mind wonder, just for a split second, why the doctor knows and how he'd know not to ask the typical questions of, "are you okay?"
But the thought goes just as fast, and Bam only nods wordlessly, gold eyes dull and empty, and prays the doctor is right.
Khun passes him a few pills, and wonders why a man with eyes that look so kind and innocent had to be roped into this senseless war in the first place.
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
IV.
The nightmares find him just as he thinks he’s getting used to this, the bloodshed and deaths, 6 months after enlisting.
In his dreams, the dead find him, empty eyes and hands that claw at him, begging him to return the lives he’d taken, stolen , and they call him murderer, murderer, murderer, smearing blood all over his face even as he sobs, apologising for a war he’d wanted no part to play in.
On nights like these, Bam wakes up with a jolt in his sleeping bag, panting and drenched in cold sweat. He fumbles to throw his blanket off him, and scrambles out of the tent for fresh air in the cold night. It’s a ritual by now, these nights long and unending, when he stumbles to the medical tent in search of a certain blue-haired doctor.
Bam doesn’t know when this started, but he reckons it’s about 2 months back together with the nightmares when he’d found himself unable to sleep, finding Khun in desperation and begging for sleeping pills.
Khun had given him a sad but understanding smile, but had handed him a mug of hot chocolate instead of the pills, the words “I’ll stay with you till sunrise,” a quiet assurance for Bam. Bam would then sit by one of the patient beds, watching Khun cut up bandages in preparation as an attempt to distract himself.
On nights where he feels better, he and Khun talk about anything and everything under the sun, laughter rolling out of his lips easily and the weight on his heart lightening by the time the sun rises over the horizon again.
Bam, at some point, reckons that Khun is his safe spot, his safe haven where the nightmares and the reality of the war cannot touch him.
-
Tonight, he scrambles into the medical tent, nightmares fresh in his head, to see Khun hunched over the desk scribbling away, hair frazzled and eyebags lining his eyes.
“Khun,” he breathes shakily as a greeting and the man greets him with a tired smile of his own.
“I’m here,” Khun replies, and pats the spot on the bed next to his desk for Bam to sit, “and I’ll stay with you till sunrise.”
Bam allows himself to believe in the existence of a safe haven amongst this chaos.
-
That night, Khun asks him why he fights, and Bam tells him it’s because he wants to go home one day, before the world ends .
To that, Khun whispers, almost inaudibly, that he reckons the enemies that they have killed would’ve felt the same way too.
Bam shudders, agrees, and thinks of all the men he'd killed just to survive till today.
A voice whispers in his ear, murderer .
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
V.
A year into the war, Bam is mentally and emotionally exhausted. He’s not sure how or when, but he’d become a commander of a unit at some point as well, promotion given due to his kill count, for being the best and strongest amongst them all, something he can never be proud of, but he guesses this gives him more liberty and time to himself that he won’t complain about.
He knows the world is falling apart around him, the same way it’d been for the past few decades for everyone who'd once been in the same spot as him, but at this point, it’s hard to say whether or not he still holds it in the same regard as he once did, worn down and broken by the brutality and cruelty of it all.
Khun is the only constant in his life at this point, Shibisu having been transferred to another unit together with the friends he’d made along the way, the only contact between them the letters that they write to each other when they have time, and so Bam finds himself visiting Khun during the free time he has between training and fighting the new troops.
It’s weird to think he’d been doing this for only a year, for each morning when he wakes the weight on his shoulders feel a lot heavier than the day before, and the few times Bam catches his reflection in the blade of his sword, he’s haggard, cheekbones protruding, eyebags now a permanent dent on his face.
It’s not like Khun is doing any better, honestly. Being one of the only doctors on site, and with the number of casualties growing by the day, Bam wonders if the male even sleeps. Each time he finds him, he’s skinnier than the last time Bam had seen him, and Bam feels his heart twinge painfully at the sight.
Today, however, Khun is standing outside the tent, hands in his pockets as he peers at the cloudless sky.
“Khun,” Bam greets, the name familiar and rolling off his tongue easily, and Bam reckons this is the closest thing he can get to home around this place.
Khun doesn’t answer, face turned toward the sky.
“Don’t you think it’s weird, Bam?” Khun asks when he finally breaks the silence, “That I’m saving people just so they can go out there to kill off more people?”
Bam doesn’t know how to answer him. At some point, he’s stopped counting the number of people who’d had their lives robbed by him, although they visit him in his sleep at night. He shifts uncomfortably, and Khun lets out a quiet sigh.
“Aren’t you tired Bam?”
“... All the time.”
“I don’t like pretending to be someone who’s virtuous just because I save lives.”
“But we have no choice,” Bam points out.
“We have no choice,” Khun agrees, turning now to face him, and Bam’s heart almost breaks at the sight. The doctor is clearly worn out, eyes sunken and face pale, and Bam thinks that the thing he hates the most out of this war is what it has done to those eyes.
A beautiful, beautiful crystal blue, now stained by the ending of the world around them.
“I’ll stay with you till twilight,” he promises instead, a gentle hand grasping at Khun’s wrist, and Khun’s face breaks out into a small smile.
“That would be very nice.”
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
VI.
Two months later, Bam successfully leads the charge against Jahad’s forces in Name Hunt City and claims victory over the land. But these victories that he adds to his belt are not victories he is proud of. They came with the sacrifice of countless men under him, death count that rises with each passing day they’d spent on the war for the whole month in Name Hunt City.
By the end of it, Bam only recognises a few faces left amongst his unit, and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.
How many people’s worlds ended because of this? He wonders, but is unable to say aloud.
“You’ve done good,” are the words that leave his mouth instead, and his subordinates break out into smiles at the praise from the high-ranking commander. Bam knows that there is word that travels around that he’s the fastest to climb the ranks, that he’s merciless and violent on the battlefield, that he's the best, so the new soldiers that are assigned under him always look up to him with awe and respect that Bam feels undeserving of.
He doesn’t understand how anyone would deem a murderer like him worthy of any respect.
It’s a road I paved by climbing over the bodies of other people, he constantly reminds himself, the guilt settling over him like a coat that he can never get used to wearing, one that makes him shudder despite how coats were supposed to have kept out the cold.
As he turns around and leads the remainder of his troops back to their base, Bam feels a lot like crying, the weight of victory heavier on his shoulders together with the burden of the lives sacrificed on behalf of this win.
He swallows it down, and blinks the image of death left back in the land out of his eyes.
-
When they reach base for the first time after a whole month, it’s deep into the night, and Bam almost collapses at the sight of Khun who comes to greet them.
“Bam…?” Khun’s smile slips off his face when he notes the male’s distress even in the dark, a face he’s become so used to seeing on Bam each time they come back with a victory in one hand but so many deaths in the other.
“Khun,” Bam’s voice breaks, collapsing into his arms like a rag doll as Khun pulls him in immediately, tucking Bam’s face into the crook of his neck. It's a sight he's come to hate- Bam so weak and full of guilt and sorrow.
He feels Bam trembling in his arms, and feels wet, warm tears soak through his coat. Bam is crying, pained sobs muffled in his embrace. Khun has seen this sight so many times, - every time the military sends Bam to fight, telling him to come back victorious, and he does, always does, except with the loss of so much more,- but Khun’s heart still breaks for the man who always whispers to him that all he wants to do is to go home, away from the war he wants no part in.
“It’s okay,” Khun murmurs, stroking Bam’s back tenderly, planting a gentle kiss on his head in comfort, “you’re safe here,” and Bam cries even louder, wishing for the guilt to be washed off him with his tears.
Under the twinkle of the stars in the night sky, Khun holds him close, and only thinks the one thing that’s been on his mind ever since he’d first met Bam, that this man is too kind and fragile to be stuck in a war like this.
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
VII.
The seventh time Bam’s world ends, it’s an ending that is the sweetest he’d ever been through for the duration he’d been in war. He’s almost three years in now, and it’s when he’s on a walk with Khun in the middle of the night just before a planned major battle the next day, trying to spend as much time as they can together before they part, that it happens.
Khun stops suddenly beside him, and Bam slows to a stop as well, tilting his head up to look at Khun curiously. There’s a cold breeze that blows through their hair, ruffling at their clothes, and Bam breaks the eye contact to pull his coat tighter around him.
“Bam,” Khun’s voice is soft, tender, the voice Bam recognises over time to be a voice Khun has reserved for him and only him, and Bam looks up again, blinking innocently.
The moon is out tonight, slivers of silver light kissing Khun’s blue hair softly. Under the moon, Khun’s eyes are very much twinkling and Bam thinks Khun might really hold the sky in his eyes, a fact that has remained unchanged over the years.
Khun doesn’t say anything, but he places a hand on Bam’s cheek, cradling it, and Bam feels his breath hitch.
What’s going on?
Bam is suddenly very aware of how close Khun’s face is to his, and he realises Khun is leaning in toward him.
“... Khun, wha- mmph!” It happens quickly, but when Khun’s lips touch his, it is soft and eager. Bam finds himself shell shocked, eyes blown wide as he freezes from the contact, but Khun’s lips moves against his, hungry, almost desperate, and Bam finds himself kissing back just as eagerly.
When Khun pulls away, Bam is slightly flustered, confused, but Khun is gazing at him so tenderly, holding him like a treasure, and Bam feels his heart do happy small flips in response.
“Khun…” he murmurs, eyes searching Khun’s, expecting some sort of explanation.
Khun runs a gentle thumb over his cheek, “can you promise me to come back safe?”
“... why?” he asks instead in a whisper, and Khun smiles bitterly.
“I hate it everytime you leave,” he replies, still not breaking the eye contact. “Bam, it feels like the world will end without you here.”
My world has ended for far too many times to count, they both think silently, yet eyes shine with a similar kind of despair as they understand the unspoken words.
“I promise,” Bam says, swallowing the tears that at some point are threatening to spill over, for my world will end without you here, too.
Khun leans in again, but this time, he places tiny kisses all over Bam’s face instead. Bam finds his eyes fluttering close as Khun litters his eyelids, forehead, cheeks, and the side of his lips with tiny pecks, and he wonders why it feels a lot like Khun is imprinting prayers onto his skin.
Bam’s world explodes into colours behind his eyelids, and he realises, just maybe, the world can end in the softest, gentlest way like this too.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
VIII.
But the world is not kind in war.
The eighth time Bam’s world ends, it’s when the news of Shibisu’s death reaches him while he’s in field. It’s a fast one. Solemn, silent, a line of “Shibisu’s dead,” scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed into his hands, and it’s not until the middle of the night when the enemies have been taken care of, when there’s no sound of agonising screams of swords clashing against one another that Bam allows it to sink in.
It’s been a long time since he’d last spoken to Shibisu, if he were to be honest. After he was transferred they’d exchanged a few letters here and there, keeping up with each other, but with the way Bam had been constantly sent out for battles the exchange of letters between them became rare.
They stopped coming one day and Bam shrugged it off as Shibisu being busy, but now he realises it might’ve been because Shibisu wasn’t in a position to write to him at all.
Shibisu’s dead.
Dead.
Dead, dead, dead.
Bam sinks down onto his knees in the open field and wails, pained cries that go unheard by the living but that do not spare the dead.
The dead I’ve murdered.
I want to go home, home, home.
Bam cries louder and harder, sorrow for Shibisu, despair for the people he’d had to kill, for the people he couldn’t protect, for the person he’d become.
The dead do not return.
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
IX.
Bam knows Khun realises something had happened during the two months they’d been apart, but Khun doesn’t ask, not even when Bam crumples in his embrace and sobs without an explanation.
He merely holds him, gentle but protective, as Bam cries himself empty.
-
That night, they both lie on the sand by the shore, on the beach where their current base now is, fingers intertwined and enjoying the comfortable silence, the afternoon's incident going unspoken.
“Thank you for coming back to me safe,” is the only thing Khun murmurs that night, glancing at Bam, and Bam drinks in the sight of Khun, -Khun’s eyes that reflect the universe, Khun’s lips that he’d come to love kissing, Khun that looks and feels a lot like home, Khun, Khun, Khun.
Bam prays that there will never come a world without him.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of this tumid river
X.
The tenth time Bam’s world ends, it’s a painful one.
Five years into the war, Bam had gone mostly unscathed. Brushes with death were not uncommon, but he found he’d been lucky enough to get by each fight without any major injuries.
Perhaps this luck ran out.
When Bam is busy fending off an enemy on the battlefield one day, sword clashing with the other, he doesn’t see the arrow that flies through the air straight towards him.
When he does, it’s too late. He attempts to dodge, but he’s one step behind.
There’s a searing, burning pain that he feels pierce through his eyes and he screams, hand dropping his sword, it clattering to the ground, hands going to cover his eyes instead.
There’s something warm and liquid that trickles through his fingers, and that’s all he remembers before his world goes black.
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
XI.
When they carry Bam into the tent, unconscious and eyes wrapped with bandages soaked in red, it’s 5am in the morning and Khun almost doesn’t recognise him. It’s not until he sees the familiar tuft of brown hair and the badges that adorn the bloodied uniform that it clicks in his head.
“Bam!” He cries, dropping the clipboard of a patient he’d been going through and rushing to his lover’s side, “what happened?”
But he’s met with silence, Bam’s still body that almost scares Khun to thinking he’s dead until he sees the subtle rise and fall of his chest.
“Commander Bam… The enemy got his eyes with an arrow…” A soldier stammers anxiously, quivering where he stands beside Bam holding onto his stretcher, and Khun feels his heart dropping at his words.
The bandage around Bam’s eyes is bloodied, red blood soaking through and trickling down Bam’s cheeks, and Khun cannot even begin to imagine what Bam had been through on the battlefield.
He reaches a shaky hand out to stroke his cheek gingerly, feeling the warmth still there, Bam is alive, is here , and there’s a tension that releases itself out of his shoulders.
However, when Khun unrolls the bandages off to assess the damage, he almost wants to hurl at the sight before him.
There’s no way Bam will be able to see again.
He’s too kind for this, too kind for this, too kind for this.
That morning, it is Khun’s world that ends, a sob that tears from his throat and a despair he cannot swallow.
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
XII.
Bam doesn’t wake up for the next 5 days, and Khun almost tears himself apart.
He tries to stitch Bam back together, thinking of pretty golden eyes and long brown lashes, but he fails. He knew it’d have been impossible from the first time he lay eyes on the damage, but still finds himself gnawing his bottom lip open in frustration as he carefully bandages Bam’s eyes back up, the golden orbs locked and sealed below off-white.
He finds himself wondering if this is karma; for Bam who’d killed to save, and for him, who’d saved to kill.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
XIII.
On the sixth day, Bam wakes up in the morning. It comes as a choked gasp, a terrified “Khun!” and said man rushes to his side, grasping at trembling hands and whispering words of, “I’m here, I’m here.”
“I can’t see you,” Bam cries, afraid, and Khun stills.
“Khun…?” Bam calls again in the silence, desperate, although he feels Khun’s warm hands around his.
Khun stays silent, gritting his teeth and wondering how he’ll break it to Bam. He decides he will tell him in a place away from the people in the medical tent, where it’s just the two of them.
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
“Bam,” he supplies quietly, “will you trust me and come with me?”
“Always,” Bam nods, still afraid, but voice stable.
Khun smiles sadly and slides his arms around Bam’s shoulders and legs to lift him up, bridal style. He strolls out of the tent, both of them silent, and finds a spot outside that’s quiet, the only sounds being from the birds in the trees.
The sky is a gorgeous blue today, Khun notes, and the sun shines on them as though there’d been no tragedy that’d just occurred. Khun’s heart clenches painfully.
“Khun,” Bam starts, when Khun slows to a stop but doesn’t speak for some time, “w-what is it?”
“I- I-..." Khun hesitates, heart aching, how do I tell him, "... you cannot see anymore,” Khun says softly, and he feels the man in his hold stiffen immediately, “I’m sorry.”
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Bam doesn’t say anything for a long time, and Khun cannot see his eyes anymore, but he knows from the way that Bam’s lower lip is trembling and his eyebrows are furrowing that Bam is taking it all in, shaky exhales and heart running wild.
When Bam opens his mouth, Khun almost expects him to cry, except he doesn’t. There’s a broken chuckle that leaves Bam’s lips, and the sound almost breaks Khun’s heart.
The sound of defeat.
Life is very long
“Ah,” Bam murmurs quietly, “this must be punishment for a reaper like me, hm?”
Between the desire
And the spasm
“No,” Khun fires back immediately, you just wanted to go home , “no, never.”
Between the potency
And the existence
“It’s okay Khun,” Bam continues quietly, calmly, and it scares Khun very much, you don't deserve this, “it’s time I paid my debts,” he nods slowly, “I just didn’t expect it to snatch away the chances of seeing the person I love,” and Khun wants to cry.
Between the essence
And the descent
“I’m sorry, Khun.”
Falls the Shadow
Khun lets out a shaky exhale now, as Bam reaches a trembling hand blindly to cradle his cheek. He finds it easily enough, and Khun leans into his warm hand.
For Thine is the Kingdom
I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you.
For Thine is
I’m sorry you had to go through this.
Life is
Bam, this war should not have been yours to fight.
For Thine is the
“Tell me Khun,” Bam says, voice breaking, and Khun sees the tears that leak out of his eyes flowing down his cheeks freely, “is the sky today blue like your eyes?”
And Khun breaks.
“Yes,” he sobs, cradling Bam to his chest as the male starts to cry silently as well, tears soaking bandages, “yes, yes, yes.”
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
No, the world ends way before that.