Kasse always craved the stillness of the hours before dawn, the dark quiet between nocturnal wind-down and diurnal stirring.
He’d eased himself from Eoran’s somnolent grasp, loathe to leave that boy who loved him so, but found he needed the moment of solitude his lover’s inevitable exhaustion afforded him. 18B was susceptible to 18C’s assimilating structures even when the Bloodwright lay sleeping, drawn to his haughty air, his pretty gaze, his febrile surface temperature, his caustic poise. Especially after they’d dared lay their situation at the feet of Locke and Dev and seeing it turn up a favorable alliance between two pairs seeking to remain hidden, Kasse’s nervous energy needed somewhere to go, since it absolutely was not going to sleep.
So the ghost took his cigarettes and went up.
That hoodlum of a boy with his ride-or-die habits popped the lock at the end of the hall, left the door just slightly ajar. He was three stories away from another grated door—he left that one open, too. Then, there was simply the roof access. A single deadbolt from the outside kept Kasse from the open air of night, so he simply left himself enough room to reach through and unlatch the deadbolt, then relatched the door when he was through.
He’d fix the hole when he went back inside.
Camp Losi’s 3am rooftops were cooler than Kasse had anticipated, but the quietus more daunting. The night didn’t howl like it did in the wilds, in the open desert: instead, the wind here lingered like it waited for the sounds of secrets, hungered for the sighs of regret, lapped at even the faintest lilt of confession, and sought to absorb them into the hungry velvet belly of its vesper hymns.
Kasse hung his legs off the edge of the roof of their apartment building turned barracks, cigarette between his lips, marveling that, even with Losi’s flickering streetlights, he could so clearly observe Ossa’s vivid starscape.
“Did you pick the B&E life or did the B&E life pick you?” Dev’s voice smoothly announced his presence behind his squadmate shortly after the boy was comfortable. Ten minutes only ever seemed like ten minutes when a pair of hands, meticulous and disciplinarian, were supervising. Absent this atomic, hyperfine accounting, ten minutes lived its life in the span of either hours or seconds.
Dev’s boots were repurposed as makeshift slippers, laces unwound and tucked beside his ankles, sleeping pants a further mess at their sloppily hanging open tops. This placid rebellion proved itself a middle finger up to every blousing strap he’d lost to sunless mornings and sleepy motions and screaming drill sergeants.
“Do what you’re good at, do what you love,” the first-to-the-top weapons sergeant offered to his friend, now something closer than mere hours before.
“Heh. Mind if I join you?” 18F asked, lingering just beyond where he’d spent too much time trying to figure out Kasse’s door puzzle. “I can’t sleep either.”
“Mm,” Kasse hummed, placing his cigarettes to his side, where he anticipated Dev might choose to sit. “C’mon. Today’s been something.”
“Yeah,” the older man agreed. Dev sat next to Kasse, palms flat beside him. “What’s your deal, do you just have trouble sleeping? Like insomnia?”
“You tell me what I can’t sleep through, Dev, you figured out my door.” Kasse, grey eyes cast down, picked up his pack and flipped the top open, offering a precious cigarette to his plus one.
The intel sergeant lifted a hand, polite declination.
“Don’t be like that, Kasse, I’m not trying to rile you up. Besides, the door didn’t really give you away.” Dev glanced aside, eyes swathed in shadow. “I don’t want to make you talk if you want to just enjoy your cigarette, but I’ve been thinking about stuff, our recent missions, our whole squad, and I’d be really appreciative if you helped me understand some things.”
Hollow cheeked, the boy clicked idly at the back of his teeth, slow in thought as he put his cigarettes down.
“You can chat me up about it,” the ghost decided, squinting up at the sky. Still he avoided the other man’s gaze, not yet ready to brave this discussion face to face. “But I wasn’t being shitty. You’ve suspected for a little, yeah? Then you know why I don’t sleep too good, why every little sound wakes me up.”
Every rustle in the night was a trenchant’s threat
straight from the blackout days of
his absentee childhood.
Dev nodded. “Thanks, man. So what exactly is your ability? And who all knows this about you?”
“Eo. Brint. My best friend back in Port Haven. You. Prolly a few real angry Ossans.” The mudblood smirked, figuring he was wildly underestimating on that last one, even though there was really no way the Ossans were connecting his activities back to him in specific. How could they pin all that mayhem on one soldier? Impossible. He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t really know how it works. I’ve researched and theorized and like to think maybe I know something. I’ve tried explaining it to myself so many times. I sound really fucking smart when it all comes out of my mouth, but at the end of the day, I don’t really think I get what’s actually happening. I just know how it feels.”
Pressing his cigarette to his lips, Kasse took a deep, steadying drag before he finally looked over at Dev and grabbed him firm by the wrist. He lingered momentarily in a personal affirmation of his decision, then sank his fingers through the older Sergeant’s flesh straight to the bone, bore his thumb through the center of his wrist till he was between two bones, till he held him by ulna alone.
Grey eyes unwavering in their narrowed observation of his friend’s most microscopic of responses, Kasse didn’t even blink.
“Don’t freak out.”
Dev wore startled well. He was a man of constant appraisal, one who took the time to breathe and to study. Calm, collected. This facet of his nature was responsible for making him skilled at his MOS—talking with people pushed past all their possible edges was useless if the speaker, too, had thrown themselves to the wind.
“This goes beyond this though, doesn’t it?” The larger man tried the feeling pressed into his bones. He manipulated their contact, rolled his wrist in his friend’s grasp. “You and Eoran were fucked up the other day. Real haggard messes, like you’d both been wrung out and tossed aside. What’s your relationship with Brint? Does he know about you and Toriet? Is he making you two work overtime?” He may have put it nicely, but the sharp tension that suddenly controlled his stern gaze had much harsher things to say.
“He’s not making me do anything,” Kasse asserted, near instant as he drug his grasp through Dev’s bones and out, idly swirling his fingers in concrete made water by his quantum illusion. “He was me and Eo’s CO back on a mission in Biko, I saved his life with my shit after some Bloodwrights wrecked him real good, and then we became friends—he put me in for this spec-ops spot, Eo too. He doesn’t know about us like that, just thinks we’re close friends.” A quick drag had him looking away, contemplative, then back with a nervous sort of earnest query, like he hadn’t considered where Dev’s line of questioning was obviously leading. “Dev… I was completely out when we got back from Treyat, so yeah I know I pushed myself way too hard, I passed out after I nixed a ton of snipers, I remember that—was… was Eo really that fucked up when we got back?”
“You got to sleep, Eoran didn’t. He still had to help us take apart camp so we could move up the road toward this place. Also, the papers you guys brought back were full of Ossan and Ari pretty much only knows ‘hi, bye’ and ‘fuck you’, so he had to make sense of all that shit for Brint so he could then make sense of it for command. I don’t think he was mad about it or anything. He was really worn down though, yeah. Visibly. That’s the lowest energy I’ve ever seen that boy and I know you guys don’t get your full nights in, even when we’re not parked in some ditch in the desert running though two hour watches.”
Dev looked out onto the quiet morning, starlight flickering above them like the lights of cities a million miles away.
“I like Brint. I’m not trying to undermine him or his authority. There are some really shitty LTs out there and he’s not one of them. I just wanted to know what was up since you’re obviously his favorite. If this is all part of the plan, if he’s not making you, then fine.”
“There’s more,” Kasse sighed, carding a hand through his hair. “Me’n Eo have been teaching Brint how to think with utility. I can fry every electronic in a city block. I can loosen up the boundaries in things, in walls, buildings, people, their individual parts… I mean, how often do you see me fire my rifle?”
The ghost was fracturing, losing his confidence in his autonomy. His perimeter rippled, lashed out in smoke wisp curls along his solar flare outline, hands white knuckle tight gripped hard around cinder block parts, mortar no longer relevant to that boy in the midst of the existential panic room scenario unfolding in his mind: where he was nothing but the things Brint could use him for. And when that knife’s edge went blunt? Both him and Eo would be sent back to Port Haven as captured commodities—Kasse stuffed into some power generator in electric pain for the rest of his very brief life and Eo either castrated of his gift or, more likely, just fucking executed, fresh corpse left on the curb for scavenger Glow cooks to tear apart.
Gods, Eo was worth so much more than that meaningless death, that violence, didn’t deserve the fear Kasse knew would run through their theoretical future’s veins. All he saw was the loop of his lover’s terror and it snapped the adjunct’s reason in twain,
splinters and stakes
every sharp edge
self-facing.
“Fuck Dev, if you’re here with this, how many other people have figured me out?” the adjunct rasped, hoarse through his lying calm, his attempt to control his reality faltering at every step. “We are fucked—so fucked.”
He bit at his top lip to keep his saline composure, lab captive eyes running back and forth across the night like he could memorize every possible escape route.
“I’m not gonna get out of this with him, am I?” 18B shook in his anticipation of failure. “Not alive, not free, fuck, I’m not gonna be able to give him that, I—”
“I don’t think anyone else in the squad suspects anything.” Dev’s voice was turnabout soft, gentle reassurance against all that was suddenly wrong in the world. “Think about this: it’s only ever really us out there. We’re a good enough unit to accomplish our missions without supervision from a higher command. This is spec ops, we’re silent raiders, we leave as fast as the dust storm we rode in on. We’re not privates anymore. Even when we land at these bigger bases, we’re all kinda segregated from the rest of the conscripts. No one knows shit about us, and for good reason, too.” He tilted his chin, plush lips an even line.
“Our squad is small, right? Ten of us and Brint. We’re like brothers out there, you know? Working together to accomplish the same thing. Every one of us would take a bullet for you. These guys aren’t like me, watching how much you eat, what you eat. They’ve got their eyes on the hills, where they should be, looking for trouble.”
“On the last run, the target called me something: Varakaiso,” Kasse continued on his downward spiral tumble of viable paranoia, the low rumbling of his acute phobia so rooted in the real. Maybe Dev’s points stood, but there was an entire warzone of people watching him now. And what the fuck was Riki really there for? Hadn’t he just dismissed Eo’s queries about her? About her intentions to fuck them up real good? Gods, how was Kasse still alive when he was so fucking stupid. “I’ve heard them yell it at us, heard them whisper it in the aftermath of the zones we’ve cleared. Fuck me, how long before Amstead catches on? Before they start connecting every new Ossan ghost story that crops up to some fucking place I’ve just been, Dev? How long does that take?”
18B pressed a hand over his mouth to stifle the threat of hyperventilation, to corrupt his access to volume.
Dev lifted a hand to rest atop his friend’s shoulder blades. He wasn’t a very outwardly affectionate man, an entire novel of contrasts compared to the med sergeant he’d recently taken such a shine to.
“Now’s not the time to put all your energy into negativity, let’s get proactive. Let’s throw them off,” he posited. “We can come up with a plan to scatter your traceability, do some counterintel. I’ll see what information I can dig up on Varonian’s ghost and for every story they sow or sighting they report, we can seed a few false ones in between. We have a native speaker. They’ll never know, and if they do, then at least Amstead probably won’t. We can get ahead of this Kasse. And in the meantime, you can start using your ammo up.”
The boy instinctively winced away from his friend’s touch, wild thing stuck fast under scrutiny. He forced himself to calm, but his shoulder still twitched under Dev’s hand, coiled so tight Kasse was destined for a system wide stress fracture.
“And all this shit I’m doing—Gods, I wanted this for Eo, so I could stay with Eo, so we could get out better off and start our life together but what the fuck am I doing? If I get caught what happens to him?” All feral angles and straight edges, that avalanche boy was a wreck to behold, months of anxiety spilling unbidden down the side of that old converted building in a scroll of stark text, confessions black and silver in his stargazer night. “Is Brint taking advantage of me? Am I a fucking idiot? Am I getting played?”
Shaking hands tried to bring his cigarette to his lips, but the violence of his tremor lost the lucky red to the wind, the ember glow of the cherry quickly fading as it fell.
“Fu—fuck,” Kasse brayed, the casualty too much to bear. He hung his head. “He probably doesn’t even think I’m human, fuck.”
Dev took a deep breath, a pitiful gasp in the midst of the adjunct’s snowsheet. “Kasse, come on—“
“What’re you guys doing?”