Crushed so efficiently and profoundly, Eo couldn’t find the strength to fake himself even the smallest bit put together. So, he looked away from the other still, to the uncaring desert and its ancient, time-battered landscape.
“We can go back.” Kasse was decided, gathering Eo’s frame into his arms. The navigator’s shuddering lament wouldn’t still beneath his ghost touch, fluttering so hummingbird tremulous it almost seemed that Eoran’s grief had left him an effigy—marble and beautiful and wan in the moonlight. “We’ll go back. We’ll go home. I’ll take you home.”
Even as Kasse pressed his nose to his lover’s head, he had the taste of ashes in his mouth, dust of that old world ritual in his eyes.
Eoran was a catafalque aflame, a pyre laden with kyphi, cedar, rose, lavender, and thyme. Kasse was a sati who wouldn’t immolate, no matter how many times he threw his camphor vapor body across the living flame he loved so desperately. He lingered on Eo’s smoke with his phantom wisps of myrrh, the dead man’s parallel grief like menthol brisk and bright against his funeral rite’s cassia sorrows. Kasse lived, now, in the flame of him. Immixed. He had no home—only this bonfire he called his own.
And everyone else?
Everyone else burned.
Eoran’s arms engulfed Kasse’s midsection with a lugubriosity exacerbated by the lingering impact of his newfound destitution. In silence, he waited until the pull of his wayward intensity had stilled and waned to a degree more manageable; left his rage little more than a mess of embers kicked up by the busy traipsing of illgotten thoughts. It was an overdrawn silence, in which Eo listened to the distant whistling of the night-breeze and let himself be steadied by the reliable thrumming of the heart held within that boy he loved so much.
“… I’m sorry,” Eoran said after a while, as a hand found his cheek and wiped away the remnants of his raw dismay. “For… all of this. I’m so ashamed. I should have known better, considering my life has been one massive failure after another. Did you hear me screaming at him?”
“I didn’t hear it, but I felt it. Felt you. Your voice in my chest like a knife. Echoing through my lungs. Rattling every bone.” Kasse lingered half dead in the decision he’d made, the charted course they would inevitably sail. “I know you have to find them. You need to do everything you can.”
The ghost knew if Eoran didn’t try it would break him apart. Kasse had a selfish heart—it was a hungry, harmful thing that wouldn’t settle for Eoran in parts, in pieces. It wanted him whole and it would risk everything to get it.
It would risk Kasse’s life to get it
(that terrible, lovesick thing).
“Ok.” Eoran nodded and put himself back together enough to stand. He buried the hurt still aching in his bones as best he could; defeated, numb, the slightly younger boy regathered the mess of his pack and made to leave again.
Whatever it was that had been marked on the map was no longer there. In his eagerness to see his death through, the injured driver that had given them the foundations for their direction must have hallucinated an inaccurate recollection. The horizon was mostly clear, save for a nearly imperceptible aura twinkling in the distance, calling them to emerge from the desert wilderness.
×××
By the next nightfall, the soldiers’ situation had grown more precarious. They were closing in on civilization, evidenced in the growing amount of trucks that passed them by, bumbling along tracks dug into the Ossan ground unmarred by pavement but still scarred from overuse.
From their hidey-hole etched in a conglomeration of stone, Eoran watched the headlights of a dilapidated supply convoy bounce in the distance, bright in the post-diem blue of astronomical twilight. Light was scattered about the landscape in an all or nothing manner—lumps of clay-marked stone were either showered in focus, or bereft in their shunning.
Without a word, Eoran pressed the curled fingers of a hand to his closed lips, hesitant and contemplative.
Kasse’s mongrel stare evoked a jackal’s vigil, the quietus before an adrenaline rush. He only abstractly registered his partner’s movements as the distant truck began rolling to a stop, brakes only operating as a suggestion to the truck’s momentum in the sand.
Pricked by opportunity at 150 meters, the older boy was silently speeding through every outcome of this ambush opportunity—he was fitting the pieces of a slapdash and fragmented jigsaw plan together, picture side down. Remaining fixated on the truck that now ground to a rust-screeching halt, Kasse grabbed Eoran’s hand and found him beneath the cool surface of his skin.
Even if it’s a squad,
we’ve got high ground.
The protests of two men rose from the bed of the truck, floating above the silent desert. The driver’s side creaked open, slammed shut—the driver himself coming into view around the back of the truck.
“I’ve got to piss, I can’t do it out the back like you fuckers.”
“Use a fucking bottle, Ari, we gotta go—”
“I’ve got a full 2-liter already, don’t fuck with me, man!”
Eoran’s eyes narrowed in the darkness, trying to determine the movement of man from tricks of sight played out across the distance between them.
Slip in and go, or
do you want to eliminate them?
Plenty of cover along the way.
No witnesses.
No survivors.
I won’t risk this chance to get you home.
Leaving his pack behind, the contents unimportant until the completion of their survival directives, Kasse was a whisper along the rocks. He was seeking, searching out proximity, sought to place himself within range of taking these men
completely apart.
When Eo settled next to him at a more advantageous vantage point, close enough now to hear the engine still running, Kasse trespassed 18C’s wrist, thumb stroking along the curve of bone there, his automatic affection unwitting, always unconscious.
Can you take the driver?
I’ll take the two in the truck.
Yeah.
Let’s go.
I love you.
Just in case. On the tail end of a glance, Eoran pulled away from Kasse and slid silently into the night with a fluid motion, a snake in the sands of their heritage seeking to destroy with the utmost efficiency, a hunter intently focused on his unsuspecting prey. His hand dipped into a fold of his Ossan costume, whose extravagant draperies had been expertly secured in strategically placed pleats along his form, fingers finding the grip of a knife he’d pulled off a corpse a month ago. Its blade was warm from being pressed against the boy’s skin, a gentle glimmer of light slid along its sharpened edge in some macrocosmic appraisal beneath the wicked smile of the moon. The metal was a mirror of dusk and it seemed the audience of stars awaited their show with a twinkling anticipation.
Eoran’s approach was silent, breathless. They were on the edge of an uninhabited wasteland. A vast emptiness unfit for sustaining anything but the wild winds that combed through the incessant dunescape, and the occasional flora that managed to adapt to the harsh conditions along the way. The driver’s guard was down—he should have used the buddy system.
Suddenly, the young soldier pounced with all of his weight, attaching himself to the driver with an irrefutable grasp distributed along the upper half of him—one hand over his mouth, the other plunging the knife into his neck. As they toppled back into the sand in an unfair struggle, it made Eoran sick to feel how easily the metal slid through the meat of the man, like butter, splitting him open to the night; augmenting his gasping mouth with a maw anew, fresh and coruscating, gurgling sanguine spit-up until the muscles there and deep within him no longer had the auto-impulses to fight against that which was inevitable. The sound of streaming piss had commingled with the sound of spilling blood, fluids resigned in their seeping into the bibulous granules of interminable silica.
Eoran laid there until his gruesome deed was definitively done. Until the twitching, wet waste of a man atop him was nothing more than dead weight.
In the dark, Kasse’s arms were black to the elbow, a desert trick in the moonlight leaving him oil slicked, glistening. Whatever deed he committed in the back of that 4×4 had been shielded from the night by the LMTV’s shell, the briefest of shouts the only evidence of two more tally marks on that boy’s conscience.
He already dropped the pair of bodies off the side of the road, rolled them off the natural plateau that seemed to form along the edge of this single road, isolated and quiet in its winding path through desolate terrain. The wind started to cover the evidence of his necessary delictum with its sandstorm sastruga and Kasse, squinting to where Eo lay, began to make his way over to help with the third corpse.
Without word, 18B hefted the driver’s shell off 18C and looked into the blank stare he found dressing his lover’s features, his own mouth a tightly kept crooked line.
“I found some cigarettes,” Kasse said feebly before he bit his lip, suddenly taciturn. He was helpless in Eoran’s sorrow, a useless witness to the spectacle of Eo’s collapse. “There’s water and food supplies in the truck, gas tanks. It’ll get us home, okay?”
“You know I don’t smoke,” Eoran replied plainly as he shed some of his layering soaked through with blood. The boy’s footsteps led him away from the idling truck, gently chuffing in the stilly night, to collect the assembled detritus of their survival that had been briefly abandoned in lieu of murder. When he returned, he hoisted the packs into the back of the LMTV. They hit the metal with an uninspired thump.
“Can you drive? I want to compare maps; see if their cross-section is any larger.” Eoran was already at the passenger’s side door, impatiently yanking on the locked handle.
Kasse didn’t answer, as he hadn’t immediately returned to the vehicle. Instead, he’d chosen to drag the driver to the base of the cliff face that they’d initially spotted the convoy from, dragging him behind a rock that rose over the sand. Subsequently, he returned to his own evidence, observing the wind’s obfuscation of his handiwork and found its progress lacking. He dropped down to his knees and began to bury the dead.
Just in case someone traveled this road later,
just in case they ran out of gas
or supplies or the truck broke down
or what if
or when they
or if anything—
no
fuck
if only
Kasse was so lost in thought that he barely registered Eoran’s words from his lingering position by the vehicle—but he felt the other soldier in waves, in tones: his impatience to return, his singular focus, his need overtaking his want. Or was it the other way? Kasse didn’t really know, didn’t really think it was his place to say.
All he could do was swallow a mouthful of grit and relent.
“Y-yeah,” he called back, on his knees with his sand clotted hands powerless in his lap. “I’ll drive. Just… gimme a minute.”
Eoran’s grip fell slack on the door’s handle. His body grew still, quiet; he stepped away to peer down the length of the lonely supply vehicle.
Mutely, he watched his lover crouched in some secret invocation, unsure if he was partaking in mourning for the past, present, future, or all iterations of his collected clock. On the edge of their apostasy, their isolation shunned, Eoran wondered if it made him an unkind person to have no interest in covering the dead or paying them any respect for his part played in hastening their post-life journey. It probably did. His family, for all their tithing to Varonian, would likely be very disappointed in him for his lack of consideration.
The engineering sergeant stood unmoving, then began walking toward Kasse.
“Are you ok?” He asked, soft enough to be misleadingly melancholic.
“I’m fine,” the weapons sergeant said too quick, too sharp. He had to dull the edge of his voice before he cut himself too deep, cut Eo to stitches. Opening the top of the box in his hands, the boy slowly unpacked the lighter nestled a bit too tight against the crowded cigarettes. He pulled one of the cigarettes out and arranged the pack in front of him as he watched the dunes shift under the midnight sky.
If his hands trembled, it was just the cold, just hunger—not fear or uncertainty or sadness.
Just exhaustion.
Just relief.
Just a nervous need for a stimulant he thought he’d left behind.
“I’m just trying to say goodbye. I’m not so great at it.” Kasse bowed his head and lit the cigarette between his lips. “I’m good, though. We can go.”
Eoran turned back to the truck, shoulders heavy with guilt, frame wilting beneath a weight unseen. Words curdled at the back of his throat, a mixture of sentiments that he knew would not make any of this any better for either of them. No matter how much he wanted to apologize,
or express an inept gratitude,
or tell Kasse that he loved him,
Eoran knew that ‘I love you’ wouldn’t fix this
because ‘I love you’ was what had brought it about.
He didn’t know what to say, so he abstained from offering any words at all. Eoran struggled with positivity; he wrestled with maintaining any sort of optimism that would ease the burden he felt—not so much that they were heading back into the overbearing constraints of their broken society (though still worrisome, to be sure), but that he was crushing the boy he adored in the process.
And yet, what else was Eoran to do? Grief had his impossible choice surrounded on all sides.
Soon enough, Eoran’s door clicked open and the truck shifted as Kasse hopped into the driver’s side.
There was nothing left to say. All Kasse’s goodbyes had been left, all his I love you’s reverberated in the negative space left by his actions. The ghost’s promises kicked the parking lock off, weighed his foot down on the brake, threw the truck into drive. All his self control smiled for Eo, cigarette between his teeth.
“Come on, Eo. We just gotta finish our tour and then it’s just us again. Whatever we wanna do, wherever we wanna go. I can do it. We can do it.”
When Eoran’s black eyes met Kasse, they were sad but trying to recover, uncertain but willing to buy into any splinter of hope he was offered.
“Promise that you won’t resent me,” his voice suddenly demanded above the bumbling of sand-choked pistons and crumbling belts wrapped tight around the kinetics of aged mechanics. “No matter what happens, swear to me that you won’t hold it against me if it all goes wrong.”
Eo knew that he was asking for something preposterous. That did not alter the course of his desire. Right now, he needed to hear this.
Gods, what an impossible thing to ask.
“If going back is what it takes to keep you happy and mine, then it’s the only thing I want to do,” Kasse said, reaching out to take Eo’s hand. “I’ll forget everything I’ve ever known before I learn how to resent you, Eo. I love you.”
Eoran nodded. Quiet. Calm.
“… Thanks,” he said after a moment, reclaiming his hand to busy himself with navigational tasks, light of his torch illuminating the cabin of the truck in a dull cramoisy glow. His directive came after a moment of comparison measured in pale inaccuracies with the length of his pinky finger. “Straight. Fork in about twenty—er, thirty?—miles. When we get closer to civilization I’ll try the radio. See if we can pick up one of our channels.”
“I’m going to eat so much dumb processed bullshit when we get back.” Kasse rolled his window down and took a hefty drag of nicotine, blowing the smoke back out to the desert. Slowly, he let off the brake, letting the truck idly lumber into motion before he pushed the gas, eased them up to a decent enough pace on that deserted road. “Can you get some water? I thought I saw a case behind your seat.”
This wasn’t completely unlike their old patrols, their old cycles—alone in the desert, on foot or in some beat up truck, scanning the horizon for signs of life. Falling back in line so easily was almost a comfort. Took the edge off. Served as a reminder that the older boy could make it through.
Just another couple of years.
Then they could begin.
They could
just be.
“Commissary better watch out, I’m comin’ for them hot chips.”
“Uh-huh. You’re going to make yourself sick.” It was less of an affectionate warning and more like a statement of fact. Eoran knew that tone of his lover very well; the all or nothing contained therein, the way he imagined the gasconade amplifying the force of Kasse’s will like an impending tragedy every time. With a shake of his head, the engineering sergeant turned and draped himself over the back of the front seat’s bench, fingers digging through the detritus of the dispatched supply squad.
He returned quickly. Water placed in the space between them.
“Everyone’s going to be so shocked to see us. It feels like it’s been forever. I wonder what’s changed…” Eo let his empty pensiveness trail as he laid his head on the seatback for a few moments. There was no point in expending any energy on wondering when the pair of soldiers would find out, in fact, soon enough.