Over the course of three or four weeks, Kasse and Eoran had gone from barely surviving to actually living a life.
In his sheer boredom, that adjunct soldier so tuned to the frequencies of stone had carved out the inside of their temporary home. He’d rendered small repositories into the burrstone walls to hold embers, kindling, fuel—their grotto was lit a bit more evenly throughout, those makeshift lamps built into the structure of their roost going so far as to light the path to the avalanche the two stranded soldiers had learned to conquer.
Every day Kasse dragged salvage home. Grates from vehicles abandoned in the desert, seats ripped out of trucks, canvas covers, radiators, car batteries, instant coffee canisters, anything that could be used as a receptacle. He’d fixed a bed on a slight platform cut into the rock, a nest filled with foam guts liberated from automotive interiors, scraps of upholstery, bolstered with sand and covered tight with canvas.
On a particularly long trek when Kasse dragged Eoran out of the mountain, they stumbled on a date palm. They were there for an hour, stripping a single tree of resources: a huge cluster of dates, fronds, and stray cluster stalks for cordage. Returning home with the huge haul of resources had taken twice as long as their initial venture out to their discovery, but the boys were amply rewarded—fresh dates for dinner and an enormous number to dehydrate. They filled their crude pit smoker, to that point only used to preserve meat from occasional kills, with stacked engine grills overflowing with the small fruits and covered them with a sheet of corrugated tin.
It wasn’t exactly the easiest existence, but Kasse was happy. Between the freedom and the face he woke up to every morning, he considered the idea that maybe he didn’t need much more than this—maybe he didn’t need anything other than this.
But even as he ground down date pits with a makeshift mortar and pestle by the fire, Kasse remained wary that maybe Eoran did. He felt a lurch of what must have been dread in his belly when he considered the conversation he knew they were bound to have—the conversation where they planned their journey home.
In that respect, Eoran was very much biding his time as it was a conversation he was not looking forward to having. Pangs of guilty selfishness curdled in his gut for every smile the other boy gave him, not for the reason that he didn’t want Kasse to be happy for once in his life or that he didn’t like his smile, but because Eoran was silently languishing beneath constant attempts to stave the fiendishness of isolation.
The plain truth of it was that where Kasse was feeling liberated from the tethers of society that had caged him in, Eoran was starting to feel depressed that such normalcy was not there. In this aspect of their relationship, the boys were a stark contrast. Kasse had been a child of the streets while Eoran was raised in a relatively structured environment—he had a home, and a family, and friends, and comforts of modern existence that did not translate very well out there in the shelter of their rock-lodge, no matter how much effort his companion had poured into making their castaway existences cozy. When Kasse was out and about picking scrap from the sun-scorched sands, Eoran sat in silence, listening to the beat of his own heart ticking away the seconds of his life. It was in those lonely times where he was hyper-aware that every breath and beat were passing moments he would not get back.
Over time, the engineering sergeant read and reread the dead man’s notebook. There was some novelty in reading it aloud to Kasse over the span of a handful of days while he fussed with the finer points of their accommodations, but that enjoyment was quick to fade, and the miner’s mish-mash story was bogged down both by age and repetition. When his lover found a deposit of chalk in one of the various enclaves he’d excavated, Eoran used it to entertain himself on a wall-section of flattened chert. Once plainly obsidian, it was now more frequently busy with the scribblings of that bored boy: x’s and o’s, numbers arranged in a grid, words spreading from other words like veins of limited verbosity. The sex was good and Kasse spoiled him to make sure he had it aplenty, however Eoran was beginning to imagine himself a nymphomaniac for how much he was coming to rely upon it as an activity to motivate his unproductive mind.
They probably should’ve communicated better. When Eo imagined desertion, promised in the stillness of a sleepy Camp Losi rooftop, he pictured them traitors, freedom fighters rather than forced conquerors, hailed by brethren of their blood and exalted for their shirking of Amstead’s racial disparity. They would be welcomed into a village, or city, and cultivate their new lives there. Was kidnapping not eligible for a similar outcome? Maybe he was out of touch, like so many of his teachers had long ago said of him in aptitude assessments sent home to his parents.
Eoran fretted for how long their luck would hold. Would the desert always give their scavenger claws the gift of more dead and post-mortem detritus? Or would that luck eventually bottom out and leave them in survivalist turmoil yet again. He didn’t know; he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to find out.
“What are you making?” Eoran asked from his sprawled out position on the assemblage of their bed, dark eyes watchful from the edge.
“When I used to live nights in libraries, I read a translation of this Ossan man-romancing-the-wild book by Rengo Vostat—Kerepraska? Kind of a Thoreau sort of deal, I guess. Down by the river with my beard, fuck the world, that sort of shit. Less civil disobedience, more shock and awe at the power of nature. And I guess less water.” Kasse continued to grind the date pits until he was satisfied, stuffing it into a bit of washed canvas and tying off the end before dropping it into the water boiling over the fire.
“Anyways, Vostat tells this story toward the end about how the worst thing about abandoning the world wasn’t any one big thing, it was missing all the smallest things all at once that made it tough. The smell of bread. Music. The cold feel of a wrought iron handrail. Spices. Arguing over who said what. Clean clothing. Marketplaces. All these things create this blanket of sound and scents, like a comfort object.” The boy too comfortable here turned toward the boy who wanted to leave, even if his eyes continued to watch the flame.
“He made coffee out of date pits and the smell of it was close enough that if he shut his eyes and breathed it in, he could imagine himself sitting at a mosaic tiled table trading stories with his friends. He said that it was enough to make the loneliness subside when he was feeling weak.”
Kasse scratched at a cut halfway healed on the back of his hand, like picking at it would keep him from having to continue.
“I… know you wanna go home.” Head bowed, he tried to organize his thoughts, his words. “I know this isn’t enough.”
“I’ve been warring with myself,” Eoran confessed, picking himself up off of the bed, legs delivering his form to the fire, “Because I’m not entirely confident that returning to civilization is worth the hurt it’s going to cause you. It’s obvious that I miss all those things I had—but is the withdrawal of creature comforts an experience similar to the withdrawal of starvation? Am I too ready to throw in the towel too soon? Is there some measure of time where once I’m over a hump of emptiness, then I will finally be able to accept these circumstances as my own, and inhabit them rather than haunt them?”
He bent down by the flames, watching the heatstroke sway of their hedonistic choreography as if they had any answer to his posited hypotheticals.
“When I went for a run the other morning, dawn’s breeze was brisk and cool on my cheeks. The sunrise was beautiful with its daybreak cloud patterns lazily swallowing the remnants of stars, clearing the way for large splashes of color that could have been stolen from the palette belonging to an old master of a simpler age, back when man understood the fragility of his existence and took pleasure in the smallest gifts of beauty that the world offered in his limited lifetime. It was nice. I felt peaceful and hopeful that maybe this was something I could actually do and I wouldn’t have to be weak or let you down. But then the sun got higher, and the ground got softer, and my legs got tired, and my chest grew empty, and I came back frustrated.
“I think sometimes you know me better than myself, or maybe it’s just that I am very predictable,” Eoran exhaled a laugh, but the humor behind it was lacking. “You’ve done so much to make a mansion out of this molehill. I know you’ve tried so hard to show me that there is happiness here, in this house and in your arms… and I love you, Kasse, I truly do. I just have the taste of constant betrayal in my mouth for every thought I spare wondering about what my parents are doing, how my brother is, or what is going on back in that cursed city of Port Haven. It’s like you were made for this, with wilderness wrapped around your bones, while I’m over here trying to talk down the precepts of my indoctrination, the populated world’s hold on my feeble mind.” The boy ran a hand through his black hair, strands left to flop in odd, unnatural directions.
“I can’t help but feel like we are up against a decision whose outcomes are something that I am not going to be happy with either way, and I don’t know what to do… But if there is any truth to be had in your frontiersman’s anecdote, then I’m willing to give it a try.”
“If I’m honest, I think that the reminders are what make it hurt more.” Kasse was softer now, bereaved. That feral boy knew loss when it crept through his bones. He lingered in that cold ocean dread pooling in his guts, sick from the salt. Rainwater defeated his cardboard body like so many box homes abandoned, lean-tos felled. “It’d be easier to move on if you could just forget the past existed at all, wouldn’t it?”
Even in his warring state, he poured Eoran a cup of that makeshift coffee. The ghost brought it to his lover still breathing, crippled by that yearning to live, like he was unaffected by the threat of exorcism. He smiled weakly. His eyes weren’t capable of masking the folly of imagining every outcome, every tragedy, every fear he had in returning to what would inevitably end in capture.
“Here.” Kasse struggled to be a liar. “Try it.”
The other boy took the enamelware offering pilfered from the garbage of some abandoned badlands campsite, eyes scanning the stained dots splattered around its metal form. In the face of his heartfelt outpouring, he was ready to buy into the story Kasse had shared whole-hog, eyes closed in silent prayer that the scent of the fruitseed brew would conjure the hallucination necessary to separate him from his amassment of hardships.
Eoran sighed. Sipped. Opened his eyes. Stood. Stared. Swallowed.
“It’s good. Unique, but not in an off-putting way.” He offered the cup back to Kasse, faced him in full. “How do you do it? How do you not miss the people that have been good to you, even if the list is small. Help me.”
“I… don’t think I can.”
Blank, Kasse looked just past his friend’s features, line of sight grazing the edge of his cheek. He was a hazy thing, head a cloud of forward planning that yielded nothing.
“I’ve never had something permanent—really permanent. Even my own body is not a guarantee. It’s not even something I feel like is mine, half the time. Like it’s just a place I live for now, and I can trade it off or give it away. I’ve gotten better about that, with you, but you can’t really reprogram the way you approach shit like that. Not entirely.” Kasse’s gaze carefully travelled the distance to sacrifice himself to Eoran’s eye contact. “You always need a tomorrow. I’ve never really been good at thinking past today. Your people come back. Mine never really do. Maybe that’s the difference.”
Eoran was gutted. He would have been more comfortable to feel himself bleed out rather than endure the ache that was held inside of him; the fits of his floundering, the suffocation that came coupled with the difficult task of making contingency plans of their lives.
“You said that when we got out of this, then we would give us a chance,” the younger boy reasoned. “You promised me this. So let my people become your people. If you love me enough to make me a home, then I love you enough to give you a family.”
To leave this home they’d built, subsisting solely on the utility they conjured of their own free will, to return to a world that sought to harness their energies to make life easier for a people who could only take was a tall order, but Kasse bit his tongue. Bowed his head.
He’d spent his entire life on the run, escaping, remaining invisible, or at the very least inoffensive. He’d done pretty well for twenty years or so—it stood to reason that he could continue doing it for the rest of his life.
Eoran was worth that constant vigilance, wasn’t he? Worth the pernicious trickle of energy dedicated to evasion, right?
Wasn’t Eoran’s permanent presence worth every risk?
Wasn’t Eoran worth his life?
“Okay,” Kasse agreed succinctly, without elaborating on the clashing of his better sense and his blinding love. “We’ll go. This week, we’ll go.”