timepiece — l.mh
description. time was often a concept too hard to grasp. for most things, it passes—irreversible—its marks left on whatever it touches. flowers wilting, buildings crumbling, people aging, all things fickle and impermanent. then there were those stuck in its loop long enough to become one with it like the seasons that changed in a number of months, and there were those whose clocks have already ticked their last—the dead.
pairings. lee minho x gender neutral reader
genre. angst, post-rumbling shingeki no kyojin/attack on titan!au
warnings. mourning, character death, aot spoilers, this used to be a jean kirstein fic lol JSHJHA
word count. 2.9k
playlist. summertime sadness - lana del rey | thinking of you - katy perry | the wisp sings - winter aids | where is my love (acoustic) - syml | only love can hurt like this - paloma faith
You were 15 when you realized that there were bigger enemies than the titans that breached the northern wall, bigger than the greedy nobles that kept citizens in the dark, bigger than the enemies across the border. And 19 when you thought there was bound to be something worse than the undoing of the coup d’etat, the dimming of humanity’s hope, the final stand in the battle between heaven and earth and the damage in its wake. Yet for years, there had been nothing.
To you, the years of tranquility were but the universe’s trick to catch you off-guard, like the century of peace before the titans breached the 38th parallel. It was the calm before the storm wiped out everything in its path, the quiet before the ground shook from the stomps of towering titans. Whatever it would be, you didn’t want to live long enough to witness it; utterly clueless that the biggest enemy had been by your side all along, orchestrating the events that have played out for the 5 years that veered your life off course forever—time.
Time was often a concept too hard to grasp. For most things, it passes—irreversible—its marks left on whatever it touches. Flowers wilting, buildings crumbling, people aging, all things fickle and impermanent. Then there were those stuck in its loop long enough to become one with it like the seasons that changed in a number of months, and there were those whose clocks have already ticked their last—the dead.
The field went on as far as you could see without the walls to obscure it, a blanket of green grass swaying along to the gentle breeze. The wind’s touch was warm against your skin, the telltales of spring making itself known on untouched territory. You never fancied the season; it was a tad too bright for your liking. But it was easy to forget with the fields outside of Gyeonggi Province still flowerless, just like they always were this early in April.
Cycles of seasons have passed since you were last here. The barks were longer, the weeds were wilder, and yet the footpath remained untouched as it slithered downhill in a winding path. Wildflowers bordered the hardened ground, tickling the skin over your ankles as you brushed past them. When you reached the stones, you parted with the path and wandered over to the field to get closer.
The view was enough to make your throat tighten. You were foolish to think that time would be enough to prepare you for it. It’s been long enough that once empty spaces were now littered with rows of stones and marbles engraved with names you no longer recognized. The stones were identical at a distance. Their sole difference being the jumbled letters and varying birthdates. The other date always seemed to end at 854.
You walked down the aisle with your eyes strained at the letters on each stone. Others were easily discernible, others in need of a bit of squinting. You passed quick enough to not let the names linger in your mind long enough to form a face. One person to visit was hard enough.
And you nearly missed it, stopping a few graves off the one you were looking for. The letters sank in slowly, halting you into a stop when you realized what had been etched into stone there. The letters burned into the back of your mind in the same manner they were chiseled into the grey piece jutting out of the soil. You weren’t at the graveyard anymore.
The bright afternoon sky turned dark in a blink, the field replaced by the ruins of Incheon Province, the first to fall under the Republic’s rule. It was quiet now, the confrontation was over. Minho stood across you in the moonlight, downcast like the other scouts you’ve seen so far.
“This is a war, Minho,” you said. “Your stupid self-righteousness is bound to get you killed someday.”
Even in the darkness, you can see the fury burning behind his eyes when he snapped his head up to stare you down. You’ve seen Minho mad countless times before, but never like this. “And it's grudges like yours that spark wars in the first place, and rage like yours that keep them going.”
The rest of the conversation droned out; wounds inflicted and the damage done. Minho is the first to offer an apology, one which you utter back in a whisper. Gazes were avoided, more things were left unsaid. His words left a gash too deep for you to insist any further and it was obvious there was nothing you could say to change his mind. He was right and it was unfortunate that you were too because he left to chase the Founding Titan the next day and never made it back home.
At times when you thought of it, maybe your own words spoken into existence had been the nails to his coffin.
“Being buried in a grass field? I never thought you’d be the type to be this sentimental,” you said, no audience present to listen but the pasteur and the rows of gravestones. His grave fared better than those left unattended, those buried along with the ones who were supposed to remember them. “Not that you had much of a say on where to be buried.”
You weren’t the first one to be here today. The weeds were freshly picked, the gravestone brushed free of green crawling algae. It was like he’d only been buried recently, but the chiseled text begged to differ. He’d been a resident for a decade now and in a decade more he’d be part of the earth longer than he’d walked on it. The bouquet you set down was too vibrant, the red spider lilies too bright against the dull grey stone. But Minho always wanted to stand out, didn’t he?
“I knew I’d find you here.”
There was no need for you to turn, recognition comes easy with your tethers to the past tugged by the same people who once rooted you here. Chan’s voice was more quiet now, a drastic change from what it had been. The grass rustled as he passed, crunching beneath his feet as he closed the distance between the both of you.
You turned to gaze at him, greeting him with a small smile that he mirrored almost immediately. “You think he’d forgive me for taking too long?” you asked.
Chan stifled a laugh, a giggle lost in the wind that blew across the barren field. “Can’t say he wouldn’t hold a grudge against you.”
“He’s soft. My grudges run deeper.”
He nodded, “Right. But he was just as bad. He’d tell whoever’s up there to keep his soul on earth just so he could haunt everybody that wronged him.”
The scene played out in your mind, a transparent ghost going for everyone and everything. The thought made you laugh. “Well. Maybe he did come back to haunt me, maybe that’s why I’m here after so long.”
He does haunt you; almost too often to say time’s passed at all. Minho passes you in the halls of the Capitol building, stands out in the crowds of Seoul, brushes past you in the streets of the provinces repopulated after the Rumbling. He’s in the pubs you’ve grown to frequent as the years passed, on the couch in your new office, in the quiet of your bedroom. Always there, even in places he’s never been, even after all those years.
You caught Chan’s movement in your periphery. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”
“There’s only so much healers could do.” You hope the reassurance helps to ease his guilt. You never held anything against him anyway. “You think things would’ve changed if he just enlisted in the Military Police instead?” you asked, but the answer comes just as quick as the words rolled off your tongue. There were accounts, several of them, all in high praise of a selfless charge towards the Founding Titan—an attack that dealt a blow on the untouchable enemy. But at what cost? “Selfish question, don’t answer.”
But Chan ignored you. “His conscience would never let him sleep a wink.”
Boisterous as he was at 15, he chose to enlist at the Scout Regiment, away from the peace and quiet he was striving for when he first signed up for the training corps. You never knew what changed his heart; maybe it was the titans breaking down the gates of his home province or the close call with an abnormal. The enemy was supposed to be confronted, not run away from. The resolution to all problems was to pull it out of its roots, even when those roots went beyond the protective barricade of the walls.
“You were fond of him, weren’t you?” Chan asked even when he knew the answer to it.
Fond was an understatement if it took this long to recover from the loss. But you couldn’t talk without your throat closing in, without feeling the sting behind your eyes. “I owed him,” you replied, more of an excuse than an answer to his question.
The gloom of that afternoon rivaled no other. You were a mere day away from being enlisted into your chosen regiment when the bells tolled—Gyeonggi Province had been breached. Fuel was running low and your legs were barely strong enough to hold you up. You’ve been flying across buildings for an hour now, failing to slice cuts deep enough into the titan’s napes to deal significant damage. Your dreaded moment comes when you miscalculate a step, slipping off the last tile of a rooftop and dangling meters off the ground with nothing but tired shaky hands to keep you from falling to your death.
You were muttering to yourself, trying in vain to pull yourself up. Pulling yourself up caused more strain to your already tired arms, the shattered tiles digging into the skin of your palm only made your hold loosen. From the corner of your eye, you catch a flicker of movement. It wasn’t one of the scouts whizzing past with their gear. A titan was rounding the corner, its head panning the junction for its next meal before it locked its eye on its next target—you.
“Grab my hand! Quick!”
And Minho manages to pull you up before the titan’s hand curled around the space you once were. The wind from the swing nearly knocked you off balance. Before you could thank him, he was already leaping off the roof, swinging to the opposite house then rounding back to make a clean cut across the titan’s neck. The titan crumbled into a pile of tissue and bone, the soldier landing on the roof where you sat dazed in disbelief.
“I owed him,” you repeated, even when the favor was evened out later the same day when you drew another titan’s attention away from him as he fixed his gear.
“I’ve known you long enough to know it’s more than just that.” His tone was laced with a hint of malice, passive but still there, all because he knew he was right.
Of course, it was more than that, because there were too many moments in between. Small and unnoticeable, quick yet unforgettable. There were playful insults every time you’d brush past each other’s units, holding each other at gunpoint deep in the forests of Manisan when the regiments were at war, quiet conversations on the Capitol’s balcony as the commanders brawled inside the meeting halls. He’d brag about his titan kills while you petted his ego with how the public’s opinion on the Scout Regiment shifted with the change of governance.
You felt the weight of the locket against your chest, the metal cold but its intentions warm. While you were away, it was the sole tether that kept you rooted here, to Minho. A flurry of happier memories from years ago resurfaced in your mind. You remembered him telling you how the locket caught his eye while he was out on an expedition beyond the border, how the light bounced off its mirror-like surface and straight into his eye, almost blinding. He asked the shop owner why an empty pod of metal cost that much and the old woman explained that humans innately wanted to be remembered, desperate for their own marks to be left behind. The metal pods provided a space for preservation of memory in the form of a small photograph—just enough to fit in its dimensions.
So he made the purchase, stole a copy of their group picture when their commander wasn’t looking, snipped off everything else until his face fit snugly inside the locket. He wasn’t sure if he bought it out of impulse or the sentiment of being remembered like the old woman said, but he had only one person in mind to hand it to.
“What’s that?” you asked then, pointing at the necklace Minho dangled in front of you.
It was a warm night in the capitol, a week after they got back from the secret expedition beyond the 38th Parallel. The commanders were brawling inside the conference hall, exchanging baseless accusations instead of hearing one another out. “This is called a locket.” Minho held out his hand, gesturing for you to do the same. He planted the pendant on the center of your palm, folding your fingers one by one until the pod was safely tucked in. “Don’t pawn it, alright?”
You snatched your hand away from him, studying the little thing under the light of the moon. Giving it a squeeze, it pops open to reveal its content. “What am I going to do with your face?”
Minho shrugged, “Remembrance. Just in case you miss me.”
You eyed the silver chain. “This is hardly worth anything in the pawnshops, it’s nothing special,” you told him, shutting the locket back closed and tucking it into your coat pocket. “You think they’d take something with your face on it? How much do you think that’s worth?”
Minho didn’t say it then but he had to look away to hide the way your words stung. “Would it hurt if you said ‘thank you’ for once? I saved up for that.” He was mumbling, unsure if he just wanted to vent it out or for you to actually hear him.
“What?” You asked, cocking an eyebrow for him to repeat himself. But he never does, shaking his head and moving on to talk about other things.
By the time he looked at you, he was looking out into the open sky—head cocked upward and star-gazing. He had his finger outstretched, telling you names of the stars he’d read about in his few days across the border. His eyes glinted back the starlight, like shooting stars fell and trapped themselves in the orbs of his pupils. That night you wished the camera captured this moment instead.
The visits to the Capital were few and far between but he’d make sure to barge into your office every chance he got. Then he’d disappear for months without a word, only to reappear wrapped in new bandages, sporting a new hairstyle, and an afternoon worth of stories of the world beyond the walls.
You finally spared Chan a glance, meeting his gaze that seemed to have never left the back of your head. “Why ask what you already know?”
“Because I wanted to hear it from you,” he answered with a tight-lipped smile. “Come to think of it, you made a good pair.”
Your mouth twists into a frown. “That’s unfortunate.”
“Right person, wrong time,” said Chan, and you knew he wasn’t only talking about how things have turned out for you but for himself too.
“Right person,” you echoed, as the image of Minho walking away replayed itself in your head for the millionth time since that night, “not enough time.”
Time was but a cruel thing; always either too much or too little, either taking too long or passing too quick. There was too little time to think of better plans against bigger enemies and too much time between the call for help and the reinforcement. It passed too fleetingly whenever you were with Minho but moved at a snail’s pace in dulling the ache of his passing. It was as if a decade hadn’t gone by at all. You still turned towards lined troops and wished to see a familiar face in the crowd, still stared too long at your door for someone who would never arrive, still saw him in the lovers you were bound to leave behind. But Minho’s image is distorted now, his memory blurred by time and daydreams.
Maybe time was mankind’s biggest enemy, one that couldn’t be killed, conquered or outrun. It flows with no anchor; unjust to all without bias. There was nothing in the world that was constant but change and time that watched from the sidelines. It will flow despite those who pray for it to slow and it will leave you with no choice but to wait for its passing—vicious, merciless.
Because unlike the dead, you will age with the change of seasons; your hair will turn grey and your bones will grow brittle. The fields will dry out in the summer, turn brown in fall, and blanketed in white by winter. The boats will come and go, they will take you away to islands across the seas where there will be people to meet, things to discover, sights to see. But a part of you will remain in Gyeonggi, tied to something beyond time’s grasps—waiting for your own clock to stop ticking, in wishful thinking that time would be more lenient the second time around.
© neo-shitty, 2022
