“You came looking,” the boy repeated in shock. “You came looking—”
Kasse faltered atop his CO, quaking tremor like surrender, the inevitable conclusion of his and Eo’s decision having come to a final pass. No more discussions on absconding North, no more returning to the wild, no more choices: there was just their squad who’d risked life and limb to recover them and, beyond them, an Amsteadean machine poised to rip the pair apart.
Suddenly Kasse’s knife was impaled in the sand and the ghost collapsed into Brint’s chest. He shook like he should have been weeping but no tears came: he just buried his face in Brint’s shoulder, gaunt frame arched over the rifle lodged between them.
Locke skidded down the incline, all over Eo’s now prone body. “Shit, shit, shit—Eo! Hey, Eo, hey buddy,” the med sergeant said, gentle giant always so sincere. He had a soft bedside manner that belied his size, even as he squinted up at Dev. “Did you really have to kick him? Fuck LaVaughn, don’t you think I didn’t see it—”
Already, Locke was working the knife out of his friend’s hand. “Did he get you, Adrien?” Tossing the rusty edged knife a few feet away from Dev’s boots, the med sergeant tried to help that thinned down Ossan boy to his feet.
“Yeah,” Adrien groaned. He’d all but gone limp in Dev’s arms, near death adrenaline fading just as quick as it had come. “I’m bleeding. Not bad, though. Take care of Toriet first.”
Still he remembered that gaze: black to blue with a taste like venom, rattlesnake defiant and so fucking beautiful when he’d struck out with that knife in his backhand—
Adrien blushed, ears red when he fell silent, eyes cast down to examine his bleeding hands.
Dev put Adrien down—carefully, since he’d already gotten in trouble for mishandling one engineer—and pulled a spare 2×2 disinfectant pad from a pocket on his chest. He handed it over, a small offering to stave infection until Locke could properly examine and refresh his immunization record.
“I’m sorry,” Eoran huffed against his ODA’s medical sergeant, grasping the man’s uniform as he found his footing. His weakness was exacerbated by exhaustion. He’d used up a lot of energy in the chaotic frenzy of his attacks. “I saw through him to the sky. I’m sorry.”
As apologies echoed throughout the divot of a shallow hillock, Brint was quiet. He relaxed his neck and breathed a sigh of relief.
The older man lifted a hand and laid it unmoving atop the protrusion of the starving weapons sergeant’s shoulder blades. He looked up into the endless sky and its waning spray of stars, blending into a sea of cerulean and wisp-foam condensation scrolling lazily by. He didn’t know what it was like to be a parent, he only knew the stringency of wrangling his collection of quick-witted hooligans, but in that quiet moment, Brint wondered if this rush of solace was fueled by the fumes of a fraternal love or something more paternal. He was fond of all of his men, and yet none more so than that grey-eyed ghost from Port Haven’s broken streets. Brint steadied his breath and his frenetic heart on an overdrawn exhale.
Kasse no longer needed his strength, his iron will. He was a desert sharpened mongrel bite, more calculated wolf now than the beaten stray that lashed out impetuous and confused the first time Brint had offered him the back of his hand way back in Biko. With the touch at his shoulderblade, the boy relented further, gave way. Brint’s affection, each one of his fingertips was two hundred pounds of weight that crushed the resistance out of his marrow,
made him happy they’d returned despite his whorl of fears.
There was nothing that made that boy more loyal than being sprawled in the middle of a crumbling desert road over the body of the CO who’d cared enough to hunt him down himself.
“I’m sorry I tried to murder you,” Kasse wheezed, pulling the rags from his face as he rolled off the other man, laying beside him in some mix of pain and relief and grief and elation. It was too much to process.
He shut his eyes to the impending morning.
Adrien wiped at his hands with the square of antiseptic he’d been offered—the gesture was appreciated, but a simple 2×2 square was woefully unprepared for the aftermath of Eoran’s knifing. Instead, Adrien rounded back to help Locke with Eoran, pulling the Ossan boy’s arm over his shoulder like he hadn’t just been the victim of a frantic desert stabbing.
“Hey—hey Eo,” the blue eyed bomber said with a pale grin, forced to calm despite the hypoxemic syncope still shrieking in his chest. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Okay,” Eoran simply acknowledged, head tilting up toward the silhouette of the stolen vehicle where he’d left Kasse behind.
Without a second thought, Eo unwound himself from that bleeding boy’s hold, reclaiming his arm to press an open palm to the bruise that started to color his face and reclaiming his legs and weight to gracelessly march himself back up the shallow rise of sand mussed with the scratchings of a former fight.
Dev watched the Ossan boy stumble, then looked to Locke and lifted both of his hands in defeat.
Adrien simply watched in the wounding hold of his silence absolute, eyes falling to the tracks Eoran left in the sand.
Brint huffed a short laugh. “Don’t worry about it. Can you fix the guns though? We kind of need those to get back to bas—”
“Are you guys okay?” Eoran interrupted, a shadow hanging over the adjunct and their CO.
“Yeah, yeah—Brint’s okay, I didn’t stab him,” Kasse offered without rising, staring up into the paling sky. Brint’s hand remained trapped where it lay beneath the adjunct’s sharpened shoulder blades, his own weapon hands left loose across his own midsection, resting and careless. He had an elbow propped on Brint’s ribs, leftover from his prior roll off the older man’s frame. Finally, Kasse looked at his navigator. “Are y—Eo, your face—” Bolting upright, the boy had to steady himself, swooning from a vertical that came too soon. “Oh, shit…”
“It’s fine, I think I cut him worse than he hit me.” Eo reached out to offer Kasse some support, hands leveling his shoulders before he took them away.
“Cut? … Cut?!” Brint jumped up, regular meals benefitting his swift recovery. He stomped around the front of the truck, meeting the remainder of his squad once they’d trekked back to him. “Does St. Croix need medical attention? I can’t keep fucking losing engineers like this.”
Kasse was unrelenting, even in a weakened state. He recaptured those hands as they pulled away, drug Eoran close enough to wrap up in his arms and lure into the grave he returned to lay in, close enough to drag down into his sand trap sprawl, kiss gracing the bloom spreading under the incoming swell of his wound. Half of him didn’t care who saw—the other half knew the rest of their squad was distracted.
All Kasse wanted was to pass out in the dirt with Eoran beside him—
that would be enough.
Fuck, that would always be enough.
Eoran’s shins would never be clean, he would never let his knees recover from being so scuffed. The only place the bloodwright would ever be able to relax was at Kasse’s side—he curled up there again and again, a ball of tension slowly unwinding, delighted in that boy’s arms like they were the only home meant to hold him. The sun-kissed ground was oddly comfortable this time around—maybe it was because he knew, at least for this passing moment, that he didn’t have to worry. Around them, the world was raging on, sick and repulsive, but all Eoran listened for was the hypnotic thunder of Kasse’s voltaic heart and it made him smile into the comfort of their kiss.
Helped back onto the road, the new engineer was soon swatting at Brint’s inspection. He was trying to knock a helicopter parent off their flight path, given up to his CO’s scrutiny by Locke, who didn’t really want to stick around to protect him, lest Brint make him shoulder more of the responsibility for keeping him in one piece.
“I’m fine…” Adrien trailed as he caught sight of his two squadmates laid out in the dirt, face to face, interlaced fingers telltale. He quickly averted his eyes like he’d been doing something wrong, like he was the salacious one for even glancing that way. “Probably just need a tetanus shot, yanno?”
“Okay,” Brint replied, relenting only slightly.
“We should get on the road,” Dev announced, suddenly stern, like his voice was a single shot warning left hanging in the air as a signal for that recaptured pair to cease their shenanigans. The intelligence sergeant nudged Locke then, a motion to follow behind the back of their CO, toward that humvee that would be a little more cramped now. He stepped past Eoran, who rolled onto his back and sought the daylight of that boy he’d tried to murder with his night.
For a silent moment, emotion unseen on the Ossan boy’s face, Eoran wondered if Brint had acquired another favorite, he wondered where he fit on the Lieutenant’s ladder of importance. He pondered if Kasse would pick up on this extra care the new sergeant was given and how it would affect the adjunct, the bloodwright, the squad as a whole. He watched Locke pass through his periphery and decided that he couldn’t wait to catch up on Ara Me Va.
“What the fuck are you two doing? Get up!” Brint turned on the laid out set. “Come on, I have some crackers in the car you can chew on.”
“Too weak, can’t get up,” Kasse complained. Part of his statement was fact, but it was mostly exaggerated: he had, after all, almost succeeded in murdering his CO. He whined more than he needed to, like it would net him more food when they returned to base.
“Oooh, Locke gon’ get some cuddles in, Cassandra,” the med sergeant announced as he plodded toward the waif of a boy, now scuttling back and away from the impending bearhug. “C’mon baby, I’ll carry you home~”
“—aaaAAAH,” Kasse protested as he was hoisted up onto the other man’s shoulder. “Nooooo—”
“I’mma treat you so right, girl,” Locke promised, carting his struggling bundle of Kasse toward Brint. “I’ll be back for you too, Samantha—can’t let my best girl walk to the car, no—”
“NO!” Eoran shouted, pushing himself up with a shock of energy summoned purely from fear—fear that he would be subject to the same fate as his lover, thrown around like a sack of potatoes, cuddled nearly to death. He quickly ducked into the broken truck’s cab to grab the small pack he managed to maintain since leaving the mountain, then trotted ahead to catch up with Dev. The intelligence sergeant slung an arm around the boy’s shoulder, half joyous reunion, half apology for earlier kicking him.
Brint took up the group’s back end, nodding for Adrien to come along.
Locke tossed Kasse into the back, long limbed sprawl scrambling on the raised platform until Kasse decided that, with how cramped their vehicle was about to get, perhaps the back was best place for him. He fell still with his hands folded into a makeshift pillow behind his head.
When all those boys had finally piled in, safe and sound and accounted for after so much searching, Locke pulled himself into the driver’s seat with a great heave, the Humvee rocking under his weight.
Lips pressed together, Adrien fumbled with a pocket, quiet next to the recovered Toriet boy. While Brint promised crackers, Adrien silently rolled a hexagonal tube of chocolate candies in his hand before he looked up, offering them to the Ossan boy who’d cut him up so well.
Eoran mutely looked to the side after he settled in, shoulders slumped against the window. He took the candies, but then he also took the other engineer’s offering hand. The limb was twisted around in his nimble grasp as though the navigator was scrutinizing his vicious handiwork, lips wilting into the shape of a frown while their vehicle rumbled forward.
“Thank you,” he offered in a voice barely shared, a recollection of manners molding his demure form. “I’m sorry for attacking you. When you looked at me all I saw was the clarity of atmosphere and I wanted to slice your flesh away from it. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“I’m Adrien,” the blue-eyed boy replied, unconditional. He dropped his eyes to Eoran’s examination of his bleeding hands, hiding every wince behind a smirk more concerned about that black-eyed wildling they’d recovered from the sunrise, pulled with a fight from the landscape’s morning teeth. “Don’t apologize—I’m just glad you’re safe.”
Kasse, on the other hand, had grown bored of his isolation. Cigarette already between his teeth, the boy was hanging over the back of Brint’s seat to investigate the prospect of food, quite intent on mugging the older man for every morsel he might have hidden on his person.
Brint, however, was bereft his usual buffet of delicacies tucked away for his favorite wright’s consumption. He leaned forward and reached into a side compartment of the truck’s door, then handed back a package of crackers and spread cheese. “Don’t eat them too fast,” he warned.
“Are you always this nice?” Eoran asked nearby, tilt of his head bringing his scrutiny to Adrien’s face. “Nice enough to forego apologies despite the fact that I wounded you multiple times with a knife slathered in rust and other peoples’ blood? You really don’t want an apology for that?”
“I don’t know—do you want an apology for that full body punch to the face I gave you?” Adrien squinted forward when he asked the question, halfway between confirming that Locke was headed in the right direction and committing Eoran’s sacrificial silver voice to memory. “I’ll trade you.”
His nose scrunched at the smell of cigarette smoke, but Adrien said nothing.
“Seriously, no candy? No energy bars?” Kasse’s perusal of Brint’s personal space deepened, almost falling over the back of the seat when Locke hit a particularly deep hole in the road. Quickly salvaging his cigarette, the boy began to pull Brint’s personal effects from seemingly nowhere, dropping a handful of bullets back into his CO’s lap as quickly as he found them. He palmed a lean billfold and tossed it over to Eoran (it was decided early in their friendship that he was one who held onto the money) before he briefly observed Brint’s mugshot looking portrait on a short stack of ID cards. Finally, Kasse snatched up the older man’s field notebook from a pocket on his bum leg.
He was quick to retreat where Brint couldn’t catch him quite so easily, laying flat on his back as he flipped open the notebook and skimmed the green-eyed man’s handwritten notes, watched them go from the meticulous order Brint so often succeeded in projecting to the hasty cramping of Eoran and his’ time lost to the red wastes.
“Hm—” he offered, thoughtful as he looked at the book sideways. “You were headed close to where we staked out.”
Eoran rifled through the meager collection of bills, pulling them from the leather wallet and tucking the stack into a pocket on his dirt-smeared arm. The empty shell was flung back to the older man, a projectile darting in front of the engineer occupying the space between them. He glanced at the new boy like he did want an apology, bones aching beneath his shadowed skin, but maybe the time for them had already passed. Eo turned and leaned over the back of his seat, holding out the chocolates for Kasse. Each acquired treasure was obviously a commodity shared between them.
“That was Adrien’s plan. We might’ve found you sooner if I listened to him.” Brint laid the wallet flat in his lap, unconcerned with the missing currency. He knew Eoran would only use it to buy various sundries for him and Kasse, and since Brint was at a higher pay grade than any of them, he would always get more money. “St. Croix has been a real asset to this unit—he speaks Ossan really well, thinks outside the box with his explosives. I think you two will get along really well, Sejan.”
Kasse laughed, trespassing Eoran’s hand longer than necessary for a quick tradeoff. He popped open the top, taking half the candies inside before he dropped it back over the seat, settling into reading the new book he’d just discovered.
“Fix your own guns,” the adjunct said now that he’d fleeced the backseat crew for food. “I just fucked up your ammo.”
He did, however, take the time to glance to the side, that mixed blood boy watched their new teammate despite his deep-boned exhaustion. His facade of energy shimmered as he pulled his cigarette from between his lips.
“…Thanks, St. Croix.” His words were simple, unguarded. He didn’t have the energy to question whether this guy was worth the knowledge he most definitely had now—between his presence here with all the people who knew, watching them ghost under the truck, his fucked up rifle, Brint’s insistence that he be the one who fix the lot of compromised weapons. Maybe Kasse’s acceptance of his status as common knowledge in these spaces semi-safe was a danger, but perhaps it wasn’t as important anymore.
He had brought Eoran halfway home, and their family, this section of their squad, had collected them to make sure they made it the rest of the way.
Adrien rubbed the back of his head, caught in the middle of all those sharpened eyes. He hated being at those crossroads, so he simply looked at his knees, teeth locked. “Yeah—yeah, of course. And uh. Sorry. About your face.” Those blue eyes flit back to Eoran at the tail end of his words, a river bank reinforcement of the apology he offered.
“It’s okay, I deserved it.” Digits wrapped around the tube of chocolates, Eoran leaned back in his seat once more. He looked out the window to the swell of sunshine and watched the Ossan landscape pass them by in sweeping, gentle repetition. As everyone quieted down, Eoran allowed himself to be lulled not only by the vehicle’s diesel purring at his back, but the schedule he’d become accustomed to in which the day was for sleeping and the night was for creeping.
In a few hours he would sit with his squad and have a hot meal. In a few days they would see civilization, and again, he would drink from its orderly hand.