“Yeah, man,” Kasse Sejan said cooly, smirking when he foisted over a cigarette. He was leaning into the counter of Losi’s armory desk to chat with the attendant whose nametape read BERGEN. In his time back on base, that wily boy had accumulated two or three cartons worth of various flip-top packs in welcome home gifts, wrapped in cello and fresh—far superior to the expired soft packs more commonly available this far out into Ossan territory. “You don’t hold it against me, right? I was so stressed when we were shipping out.”
“Naw, it’s good,” Bergen replied, picking up the cigarette and tucking it behind his ear, half concealed by locks of auburn hair. “Just crazy meeting up again, I mean that was like three years ago—haven’t really seen anyone we got shipped out with, especially not since I got stationed here in Losi.” He grinned before he looked down at his clipboard, evaluating Sejan’s requisition. “Man y’all’s ammo expenditures are pretty spare for what you get done, but shit your engi’s are busy.”
Kasse laughed, bright and genuine, head dipping down as he looked sidelong toward Eoran, off examining some of the locked cages just down the short hall leading off toward more restricted zones. He loved watching Eoran set fuses. He loved watching Eoran lay explosives.
He loved watching Eoran.
“Ha, yea—we run a lot of decoy explosions when we’re clearing zones. I guess the new guy’s really into improvised bombs so he’s looking for a pretty good supply of P4, but you know that. Toriet runs through our supply like water. Preparation’s been our best tactic—kept us alive in some pretty angry fuckin’ anthills.” Kasse hummed, dropping back to business with a sigh. “Brint wants a full restock but I wanna put in for a little extra ammo if you got it—we’ve conserved pretty good but anticipating some firefights. Gonna need a few M107s, I’d like four of ’em but two will get us through if you’re strapped, and our XM25’s could use some love if you could trade me out? We’ve got six that’ve seen better days, I’ll get ’em dropped in the morning, and uh…” Kasse leaned in, clearing his throat. “…Got any reconnaissance UAVs? Dev will actually literally shit his pants if I wrangle him a drone, and he’s so fucking serious, Cole, this boy is so uptight. I wanna see him shit his pants so fucking bad.”
“HOLY FUCK IS THIS A CANNON?” Eoran’s interjection echoed in the hollow airspace of the armory, adding an exclamation to the tail end of the scam Kasse was trying to run. He stood in front of a cage over-lit with a bright, bare bulb, door locked with thick silver chain link and a complicated padlock. When surprised, that black-haired boy was so full of life, exuberant and electric in his boundless awe. His body was pressed flush to the metal separating him from rampant destruction made idle, fingers entangled in large loops of interwoven wire.
Before him were the remnants of a gatling-style autocannon, pieces of what once was–wreckage maybe, spare parts perhaps, something in the process of being rebuilt, weather permitting. It was a massive pile of machinery typically only seen tucked beneath the pointed nose of air support. But now it was here, and Eoran’s active mind was already mid-way through the calculations necessary to attach it to the front of one of their squad’s trucks.
“That just got recovered from a crash site a few days ago—plane got fucked up, man, just sheet metal and rivets blown out everywhere, all to bits. Not a piece, I shit you not, bigger than my hand, but the weapon came out of it pretty okay, I’d say…” Bergen leaned over to peek around the corner to see where Eoran was lingering even though he knew the exact piece of equipment he fixated on. “I’ve had no less than ten requisitions requesting that thing and not one of them had plans to put it on a plane.” Looking up at the clock, he paced back toward Kasse. It was an hour before the cage locked up and Cole seemed in high spirits about it.
“Wait here, I’ll get you a photo-copy of the paperwork.” Leaning forward over the desk, the other soldier added: “…And I’ll see what I can do about the UAV.”
Once Bergen left, Kasse was immediately wandering over to Eoran’s side. Eoran was always polar, magnetic. Kasse was helpless to his pull, so unaware that he was nothing but a simple steel bearing slowly gravitating toward the other boy’s event horizon, the dent he left in space and time.
He didn’t touch Eoran—there were cameras all over, after all. Instead, Kasse stood gracefully behind and to the side, posture straight and hands in his pockets: like he was a good boy just minding his own business.
“…I bet there’s lots of cool shit in the bunker past the barricade.”
Summoned by the nearness in Kasse’s voice, Eoran turned around and pressed his back against the cage. He looked down to the adjunct’s hands, then smiled and met his eyes. The bloodwright tilted his head, cautiously coy, a farce of flirtatious ponderings shifting his shoulders gently upward, like the subtle changes in his movement were an ever escalating series of unspoken dares Kasse was just supposed to naturally understand. The way he comported himself was meant to punctuate his meaningless contemplations. Eoran was speaking two languages here—his disposition was one of everlasting invitation.
“Yeah, probably,” The engineer replied, tongue full of tease in his sing-song syllables. “I like your kid in a candy store stance.”
Kasse let a deep breath escape his mouth slow, metered his lung’s exeunt. Eoran left him adrift without oxygen—it wouldn’t due to succumb so soon.
“Mmhmm, cause it’s the merch I’m tryna not touch.”
“You’re so cute when you act like you know what manners are.” Fondness, again, bent Eo’s lips and he pushed away from the fencing he leaned upon. His bootheels softly tapped on the shoddily-poured concrete of the armory as he started to walk back to Bergen’s abandoned station. “What are you waiting for? Do we have to heft all this stuff back to Brint?”
“He’s getting a copy of the requisition made,” Kasse replied in that quiet threat he called a voice, inspecting the ceiling for the telltale red blip of proxy observation. Looking away, he was unreadable. Half of that boy was so often elsewhere when Eoran wasn’t directly engaging him it was amazing that Kasse noticed anything at all.
With a little flinch twitching the inner corner of Kasse’s eye, the camera feed stuttered and went dark. The dated security system dropped the file entirely from its digital catalogue, soon followed by another, and another, and another from cameras scattered through the armory’s more locked down zones.
“After, though.” He was sly, he was sidelong, side-longing.
“After—“ Eoran glanced back, nimble fingers trailing along the wire-bound walls lining the hallway he tread, harp string hymnal dampened by their drab surroundings. His lightless eyes lingered on a shoulder mounted rpg leaning up against a back wall, gingerly tucked past piles of decommissioned rifles, sand-swamped and bent every which way. “We get some free time?”
“After he gives me the paperwork,” 18B clarified, ever lingering on the sequence of spaces his 18C occupied. His lover’s matter was an abstract he saw in a vision multiplexed, his echolocal awareness always draped in the beauty he observed with his ashen eye.
Without an announcement of his intentions, Kasse took a brisk step forward and shoved Eo straight through the chainlink, hands coming to rest hooked into the intersecting Xs now separating their forms.
“Through the door, right there—it’s open.” Kasse scrunched his nose, mischievous grin wide in his urging toward more dangerous play, so willing to encourage Eoran’s exploration of the weapon lined vault. “I’ll meet you inside. Hurry.”
Deftly catching his momentum, the stumbling engineer stopped just short of tripping over a long gun left in haphazard parts in the middle of that cage’s floor. Eoran looked back to Kasse, heart stuttering in his throat from a wave of surprise slowly ebbing, then stepped over the mess.
“Don’t make me wait long, okay?” The door’s handle made little sound as it turned, silver glimmer clasped by skin. Eoran ducked into the darkness leaking from the door, sharp black streak soon snuffed by the latch re-clicking and the silence left in his disappearance.
“Sejan?” Bergen called out almost as soon as that door clicked closed, coming out from behind the desk. He eased when he saw his query, taking long strides to cross the armory’s foyer. “Where’d Toriet go to?”
Turning, Kasse grinned, still leaning into the chainlink. “He got hungry.” He was a boldfaced lie but after so many years, he always managed to make it taste like the truth. Crossing to meet the other soldier, he was disarming when he took the papers in hand, scanning over them with his head slightly bowed.
“Must’ve been dire,” Bergen replied with a laugh. “He disappeared real quick.”
“Yeah.” Kasse laughed in turn. “Dire.”
×××
Eoran clicked his flashlight on in the dim light of the restricted area. There was a window in the back, long and lean, cut through concrete nearer to the ceiling than the floor like a relic of a mid-century long out of style. That anteroom was relatively small and meticulously organized compared to the compartment before it. Iron bars supported weapons rarely seen in the field, curiosities built for missions meant to entirely undermine and overwhelm enemy forces, with audio assault-style and strange throwbacks to clandestine spy games littering the spaces in between the more traditional bullet & bleed types of offense. Gewgaws and canisters of gasses lined shelves collecting dust, and the bloodwright’s black sight traced over that strange topography. Tried as he might, the boy was unable to imagine a scenario outside of impatience that would summon the necessity to breach pre-established conventions preventing unnecessary cruelty in war enough to see these things at work.
He turned his head. Amstead would win this drawn out skirmish; it occurred to Eoran that maybe his masters up the chain of command were out here just to have a little fun at Ossa’s expense. He frowned. Did science know what it had done? Man was smartest when he was trying to destroy himself.
Eoran walked the abbreviated perimeter awhile, waiting for Kasse’s promised rendezvous. Pausing near an exterior wall, the engineer’s gaze traced the extended barrel of a retired sniper rifle. It looked out of place amongst the rest of the strange collection—maybe some sentimental colonel was keeping it safe for the time being by squirreling it away behind lock and key, who knew.
Eoran’s first mistake was lingering along an external wall.
There was no sound in that predominantly soundproofed chamber, thick walled cement reinforced by iron rebar gridded along the exterior. Silent around sound of Eoran’s quiet breath, it was almost peaceful save the ever present taste of gunpowder and the residue of oil lingering thick in the air.
In the quietus, the dust danced in the beams of light that dared trespass—until a shadow shape flit through, disturbing the slow entropy of twisting descent.
Without warning, Eoran was snatched nearly off his feet from behind, foreign arms wrapping about the Ossan boy’s now overtaken chest.
Immediately struggling against his captor, Eoran dipped his head forward then threw it forcefully back with the hope that his strike would land. He was silent and efficient. His legs were guileful, twisting in his offset balance, wrenching themselves between those that tried to steal him.
His head didn’t connect, trajectory used against him to take him to the floor. His attacker was seeking high ground, twisting around his form and following him down, legs wrapped about legs in a hard push to the concrete.
“Shh, shh—” Kasse hushed his lover with a full faced grin that narrowed his eyes with laugh lines, with glee at his lover’s struggle so automatic when he dropped down, split across his waist. His words were all subterranean, beautiful in their calm despite his stifled laughter. “I got you, Eo, I got you—”
“Asshole. It’s easy to get someone when walls don’t matter, huh.” While Eoran’s words were a hiss, his eyes were soft. His blood was still rushing through his veins at an accelerated pace, spur of the moment adrenaline lingering in that slow to fade hyper-focus sharpening his upward watch. Eyes stationary on the boy’s face, Eo poked a finger into Kasse’s stomach, re-catching his breath on a sigh. “That’s fine, be proud of yourself. I’ll pay you back.”
Immediately the haunting who controlled the upper hand interrupted all that dim airspace and dipped down, hands wrapped up in his lover’s lapel like a threat. He breathed a new muted life into his boy’s snake tongued complaints with mouth to mouth force. He was a spiral of wants that had circled the building, lap by lap, thinking of how he’d take his vigilant partner by surprise.
In the end, a ghost was always good for a jump scare.
How he risked everything to take Eo to the ground of a private moment, break-and-enter boy always hungry for solitude.
Eoran rose to meet his lover in an assurgent lean, always willing to offer up the void of himself to that predator on the loose, to court his every injury in the subtle squirming of his thighs. His forearms sought purchase on the grey slab beneath him to facilitate some movement. He wasn’t asking for much—just enough to properly welcome that boy back where he belonged.
Eoran’s kiss always kept an upswing of apocalypse. They could have been apart for only seconds and the bloodwright would respond like it had been a lifetime, reset and renewed, yesterday shrouded and tomorrow dead. He was immediate and demanding, single focus, prepossessed.
“I should have rethought my approach,” Kasse confided, pulling away just enough to play a cruel game of keepaway, painfully conscious of any attempt to close their minimal gap. “I should have tried to see your face—I wanted to see your face.”
“Ughhhh.” Lips slack in an indignant turn, Eoran shoved that boy off by the shoulder. He was skilled at forging authenticity, he was comfortable in contrapositives. “Gods, why are you like this?”
Kasse laughed quietly, a sound that echoed warm and close to his chest. He allowed himself to be pushed away but always returned, counterpoint boy starving for external force to power his mischief’s taunting sway, always ready to bow to gravity and come right back—
always, Kasse came right back.
“Didn’t get raised right,” he replied, still coy in his debilitating tease, hand flat to Eoran’s chest when he leaned back in. “No one to teach me my manners.”
“Hmm.” The disappointed hum only served to stall. Eoran refused him again, chin tilted away, eyes shifted to match the angle of his off-kilter admonishment. He searched the nearby shadows for avenues of elusion, prey-vision making frantic record of how little of an advantage he had…
and then he struck. Hard and fast—body twisting in a sudden explosion of force.
Eoran used the culmination of his weight to hurtle Kasse aside. He was wild and loose, foal-limbs thrashing about as he scrambled for retreat. His fingertips scraped at concrete, boots a chaotic stumble in the boy’s mad dash for higher ground in their darkness over-trapped with death.
“Fuck—”
Pit viper quick, Kasse lashed out and caught that impala ankle yanking his fleeing prey back so hard that elbows and knees all fell through, a collapsible sprawl of limbs scrabbling across the unfinished slab.
A snap,
a thrash,
a growling
long-suffering
fuck you in the shape
of a boy who refused to be denied.
Kasse was forward and back, drug his lover as he drug himself until they were once more united in a struggling tangle of rough housed bones and adder coil, writhing for an upperhand that would always be short lived.
“Hn—” Went his underdog whine, struggling to escape from between his clenched teeth. Wiggling to be face up once more, Eoran was a fight that had no flight, flailing hand colliding with Kasse’s jaw and pushing against it to rebut that which was inevitable. He was scuffed and scraped, and yet this was barely noticeable from the rest of the wear on his uniform—the engineer’s chin wore the brunt of his damage, hashed in red between thin lines of broken skin. Eoran used to be such a peaceful person. His youth had taught him that honey always yielded more flies than vinegar. The world changed him.
The desert peeled away his velvet exterior,
the mountain sucked the sugar from his bones
and spat out a vicious ingrate in its place.
Eoran slid his hips along the inside of Kasse’s thighs, grappling with that boy become beast.
In the throes of conflict, Kasse was notorious. He was known to lose track of his strength with an eye trained only on objectives, to raze all things when he had his sight dead set on his wounded chase. Knee like a barricade between Eoran’s twisting legs, the ghost was a conqueror: he had one hand on his beating heart’s throat, slamming him flush to the ground; he had the other tearing past all obstacles on a path that promised to destroy all opposition, slipping past a waistband rendered slack for his convenience.
His hands were cold against Eoran’s blushing heat, wrapped tight to coax his riot to calm.
“Shh, shh—” he hushed his lover once again, stringent and unforgiving, more cruel, more cunning than before. He had a fox’s mouth now, full of teeth and travesties and an intention to maim. “—I got you, Eo, I got you.”