“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.”
What a hollow victory.
The engineering sergeant didn’t know what he expected—platitudes? Reassurance? Some terrible attempt at positivity, or any indication that the other boy was looking forward to sharing a more civilized cohabitation between them? It wasn’t fair, the exercise or the aftermath. Eoran knew it wasn’t fair because he was getting his way at the expense of his lover. This was a rigged system that was always going to be one or the other.
Still, it didn’t make him feel any less awful.
“I’m sorry, Kasse,” he said, reaching out to touch the boy’s cheek with the back of his fingers. “I know this really hurts you.”
Eoran sat the pale attempt at coffee down on an errant rock. Feeling like a fink in the shadows, a rat contaminating the other boy’s happiness with the sick of his own rot, he turned away and slunk back to the bed to bury his miserable body beneath a shell of clay-marked canvas ripped to imitate bedlinens. He folded in on himself despite the length of his limbs, as if the smaller he made himself, the easier it would be to feel some comfort in the finality of placing the final coffin nail on the lid of their passing paradise; as though he could steel himself to bear the weight of the hammer that would ensure it was fully shut. Already, Eoran was overcome with regret, hoping he hadn’t just forced them to make the biggest mistake of their lives.
Kasse could tolerate a lot. He could bear starvation, homelessness. He’d always been adrift, surviving on what opportunities came close enough to grab. He coped with storms and predators as they arrived, in the order they arrived in. Now he’d permitted Eoran’s tide to coax his ghostship to shore and that impromptu helmsman was going to wallow?
“Yeah—no. You’re not doing that. I’m not letting you fall the fuck apart. I love you too much to watch you do this.” The older boy was after him immediately, hauling Eo out of the piteous grave he was digging for himself. With a force their relatively equal weights shouldn’t have allowed, Kasse had him out of bed and dropped him into one of their salvaged seats unceremoniously.
“We’re gonna go and you’re gonna have to help me.” The older wright set himself on a rock with a sigh, tightening his boots. “I have no fucking idea where we are. That’s your job.”
When Eoran’s eyes met Kasse again, they were ripe with exasperation that his pity party had been abruptly canceled. The look didn’t last long, however, as the boy picked himself up and started dressing himself to leave their abode. Being put to movement did very little to quell the turbulence of his melancholy in the immediacy of that moment, but maybe it would in time.
“Are you going out? I need to walk to get our bearings.” Eo stepped into one boot. He began to shuffle through the schizophrenic arrangement of their items, collecting the two sections of their captors’ map, his busted compass, flimsy army-issued protractor card, his other shoe.
“Do we have a pencil?”
Somehow, the sullen apparition of Kasse Sejan managed to hold himself together under assault of Eoran’s indignation, biting back his words so brutally he could have shattered his teeth.
Regardless, a few escaped as he pulled a stub of a pencil from his soap dish survival kit still stashed in his pocket.
“Yeah. We need to walk the area. I don’t think I can stay here anymore.”
Kasse winced at the stark undress of his strain. He’d always considered himself a skilled liar, but evidently previous skills held no bearing between them. Eo left him raw, incapable of cloaking his hurt in distance and sarcasm, false smiles, silent years.
He didn’t, however, apologize.
To apologize would imply that the words weren’t true.
Kasse had spent weeks carving away at the guts of their stone protector, to render her belly habitable, but if the older boy was allowed everything he wanted—save changing Eo’s mind—he didn’t think he’d spend another night in that home now hollowed.
It hurt just to breathe here.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Eoran tucked the shard of wood and graphite betwixt his ear and skull, precariously secured by a tuft of inky hair that filled the space the sliver could not. He went to turn away, but thought better; his bones were testing breaking points incurred by the acute stress of that situation. The duress was causing damage.
In a sudden movement, Eoran’s collection fell to the ground with a quick to fade racket. The boy grabbed Kasse by the shoulders. Stared him down.
“Have you ever felt like this? Have you ever had to bear the weight of knowing that you just completely crushed the person you care about most in this world? Look, Kasse, you’re entitled to go through whatever mourning period you’re going through, but… Stop holding back on me. You’re not fucking helping as much as you think you are. I poured my fucking heart out to you and all I get is your resignation and commands to get up and get moving so we can go do what I want to do because you’ve sacrificed so fucking much for me by just agreeing to give humanity another shot. When this shit is done, we don’t even have to completely go back to the city proper; we can exist on the very edge of civilization, but Gods, a place with a mailbox would be really nice.
“I would rather you stomp my face in than have to live a minute more under this tension. So what can I do. What can I do to help you? Please. Please, this is ripping me apart.”
“I’m fucking scared.”
Kasse’s shout was percussive as he stripped himself of Eoran’s grasp with frazil hazard, stress swirling beneath the hairline fractures now splitting at their golden seams, the dericho annihilation of the deathmask he’d donned for 18C’s benefit. He tramped through Eo’s abandoned matériel, so immaterial in his moment of cornered animal honesty. Head in his hands, personnage out of reach, Kasse came to rest in exasperated petrichor against the wall.
“I’ve been running away my whole life. Trespassing and stealing and making do in little bits and pieces. I have friends, yeah and I miss them. I miss Lia. I miss her so fucking much.” He tried to quell the quaking of his seismic hands, tried to hold them together to dismiss their omen. “But I know she’s okay. She’ll survive and she’ll be fine. If I get caught, I can run cause she’s a ghost too. We’re nobodies. Fucking nobodies. That’s why we escape so well. Because no one fucking cares. But you—” Standing, he finally looked at the other man as he dared a step or two towards Eoran, braved his broken pyre and his choking flame with all his smoke whispers boxed in. “You’re somebody. You’re connected. You have a family. You can’t run.”
The wraith in him was a mere flicker now, all but defeated. A dying mewl in the creeping dark.
“I hid and ran and escaped so well because I didn’t have to worry about a somebody and all their somebodies—but now there’s you. I can’t run anymore because there’s you. Do you understand? If I get caught, when I get caught, I’m gonna have to stay caught. Because I can’t risk you. And I’m fucking terrified.”
“Yes!” Eoran barked, “For once, I understand. You’re not the only one who’s scared. I’m scared too. All the fucking time because this world is hard for people like us and there are no guarantees and even when we try our hardest sometimes it’s just not fucking good enough for anyone. But that’s no reason to forsake everything outside of this microscopic hole in the ground. You’re so sure of the breadth of your life because you’re in complete control of it—but how can you speak for anyone else? Ghosts can still be exorcized; nobodies are still bodies. You don’t know what’s happening outside of our perimeter. Neither of us do.” Though his voice was barely raised, the frustration in his tone was resoundingly clear. And yet that emotion soon allayed into something less. Shoulders slumped, lips heavy with some forlorn consequence, Eoran ran his eyes over the other.
“I’m sorry that my very presence has made a mess of your way of life, but you don’t have to carry all of this burden. You don’t have to be the lone pillar that is supporting our relationship. I hate that you think I won’t fight for you, that I wouldn’t raze this Earth if something happened to you, that you reduce yourself to nothing despite the fact that I fucking love you. When there are people out there who you’ve left your mark on, that means you’re not a nobody anymore, Kasse. It actually sounds like you’ve been a somebody for a while now. You just have to fucking accept it.”
Kasse recoiled under scrutiny, substratum breathing a coffin cough.
“…There are places even you can’t burn, Eo,” he said in quiet dissolution, virga sound atmospheric in harmonic discord. Looking up, the young soldier was tired of holding it in—angry and petulant, narrowed glances captive to the dither wracking his outline. “Places where I can’t find you. And that fucking sucks.”
Dropping his gaze, Kasse stood, lean body shifting like slow water as he idly crossed callow feet.
“Besides—I actually liked it here. It’s quiet. Everywhere, anywhere, there’s so much noise. I can barely hear you breathe. I can barely see stars. Everyone’s so eager to be distracted. I don’t really get it.”
“What would you do if something happened to me out here? Say I got injured or incapacitated in some way. What would I do if something happened to you?” Eoran tilted his head as if to consider the scenario. “Watch you die? And then what, either waste away out here with your corpse or try to risk the desert alone and get back to some town?”
“I already said yes. We’re going. You don’t have to convince me anymore.” Kasse pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, looking down at the grooves in the rock. “It… was a kid’s story. Wishful. Please. You can stop rubbing it in.”
“You’re right. I’m being an asshole and I’m sorry,” Eo relented, voice tightly coiled with contrition. The boy turned away from his lover and began to recollect his cartographic accouterments, tucking the lackluster collection into the pockets of his fatigues before he headed to the collapsed section of passable void that made their doorway. “I’m going to walk and sort this map out.”
“Mm.”
Kasse was a muted phantom in Eoran’s long shadow, willing to accompany from a distance long enough to grieve.
×××
Soon enough, it was back to old habits. Logic and reason dimmed the glow of lingering emotions for what could have been and what now would be. In brief bouts of introspection, Eoran came to the conclusion that dismantling the necessary takealongs of the other boy’s handmade home was something that he’d be able to clearly recall in the future alongside that Ossan man he’d put out of his misery, with the look in Kasse’s eyes when Eo let him down—gods, the way the atmosphere misshaped him in misery to the vivid color of his pain to the agony of their verbal shunting. The process was immensely cruel. Now each boy had scavenged the coffin of themselves in that hovel the dusklight did not reach, picking apart necessities from non, rendering gifts of goodwill useless to their futures. Eoran was glad to get a move on. Apart from seeing Kasse happy (also something that he would never forget), he decided that he would miss the pull of the mountain-rock void the most, or more precisely, the consumption he felt in the subatomic skinship shared between the three of them.
Through telltale mappings of elevation and dense, ancient rock formations that served as kinda poor landmarks, the engineering sergeant was able to pin their position down on their broken map via resection after a few hours of figuring, then point them in a definite direction. He’d sat quietly on the bend of a boulder with his pencil and protractor, marking over brown splashes of blood in thin lines of muted argent. The marginalia came to be a mess of calculations, divisions and formulae toiled with outside of pre-printed gridlines, his numbers whispered to the wind, fingers counting in some silent mathematic ritual that, if satisfied with accuracy, would be kind and not usher them to certain death.
They left that same night like thieves breaking into the crystalline darkness, robed and wrapped in rags and riches robbed from rotten corpses. The boys traveled for two days. Sun down, sun up. Day and…
Night again. That meant movement. The moon smiled down upon them, soft sliver of a crescent perched just above whatever was obscured by the haze of midnight in the distance.
Over the course of those days, the landscape had slowly morphed. The ground was leveling out to become something in which humanity could build lasting structures: sturdy, solid, easier to cross, but still remote. Maybe mankind was still too scared of the vast emptiness beyond the jagged ridge breaking the horizon, since he was barely testing its edge with his hither and yon reach.
Kasse’s half of the journey had been marked by silence.
Every moment spent dismantling their survival shelter sowed a deepening dread in his gut and, instead of covering it with pretense, he remained quiet, solitary.
When they left, their packs stuffed with dried dates, jerky, canteens, and all their scavenged supplies, the ghost sealed their otherworldly passage behind them. He dressed his sorrows in efficiency, but his thoughts on their final journey through the void lambasted his secrecy:
I’ll always miss who we got to be here—
please don’t let this be a mistake.
After a few days, it was a little easier to feel normal. Kasse found the brume of his human dissimulation on the horizon, every step toward civilization a descent into the ipseity disturbance he’d worn his whole life, derealization a scar branding his insolent surface.
Nihil ad rem,
irrelevant, but—
ah,
he digressed.
“Wait—hold on a sec. He made a big mark here,” Eoran whispered after some hours spent walking, ducking into a gentle cleft between a tall gathering of cuspid-shaped stones. “Maybe an outpost. Can you see anything?”
“Nothing yet,” the older boy replied as he scanned the horizon, bumping Eoran’s shoulder with his own as he came to rest next to him. “Maybe we can get higher, get a better vantage point.”
“I guess,” Eoran replied absently, eyes scanning the markings he’d made upon their map beneath the dim red glow of his expiring flashlight. “I don’t want to stray too much. I’m a little tired.”
When he said tired, he meant it in a manner all encompassing. Where the pair had spent weeks sleeping together, now it was back to a watch schedule from hidden holes dotting the landscape. Their trekking seemed endless across an imposing horizon somehow moreso, but this wasn’t anyone’s fault but Eoran’s own and he was tired of having that truth restated in perpetuity—if not in Kasse’s hushed reservation, then in his own vicious reminders reverberant through the meatspace of his guilty mind.
“Let’s just continue on. If we come across something, then we can make a decision.” Light clicked off, Eoran was on the move again.
Before he could even get a single step in, Kasse had him shoved back up against the stone, too brusque to be anything but
absolutely in love—
even if he couldn’t speak,
couldn’t look at him directly.
Kasse swallowed the grit of the desert as he squinted at the horizon, grasp lingering on Eoran’s shoulder as he attempted to reorganize his head, his days of metered silence.
Even as his back forcefully reacquainted itself with the rock, Eoran’s eyes found Kasse in the intrepid night, nerves on tenterhooks amid an air of anticipation. After a moment unfulfilled, a hand found the boy’s cheek with coaxing fingers, gripping chin and jaw to align their points of view.
“Are you avoiding me, or did you see something?”
“…do we have to finish our tour?”
Forced to focus on Eoran, Kasse was a tinderbox, hinges broken, gunpowder spilling from that caisson mouth.
“We can just… not go back. Stay in Ossa. Far away.” That thin plea lingered, waning in the desert,
limping through
his wounds.
“Is that really viable?” Eoran asked in serious consideration. “How do we do it—ditch these uniforms and turn ourselves over as traitors to Amstead, heads bowed, hands up? Or what, do we just find an abandoned house and become indefinite squatters? Wander into a village, no past, questionable future? What’s the plan?”
“There’s still big cities to the north, past the mountains.” Kasse took Eoran’s grasp from his jaw, clinging to the life of them. “We could ditch the uniforms, head up to Tareija, just fucking disappear.” Kissing his palms, the psalm of him, lip pierced by the splinters of their love affair’s casket. “We can make money, start new. Buy a place. Just us. You speak the language, I can fucking learn. Please, Eo. Please.”
Grey eyes imploring in the shadows, Kasse was beyond his breaking, but he remained, Eo’s bond too strong to violate.
“Please, start a life with me. I love you. Please.”