“Varakaiso,” said a trembling yelp, a plea from the man kneeling in the shrapnel littered roof of Eoran’s crumbling building. In Port Haven, Ossans were characterized by a near toxic level of bravado, but this man before 18B was cowering, face wet in the wake of the impossible. “Sirai, Varakaiso—“
“He’s saying Va-something, I think he wants your Toriet magic,” Kasse hummed grimly to Eoran, gun locked on his target’s forehead. The city-block was blotted out, darkened by 18B’s weaponized pulse. The naked-bulb moon hung low and bright in the sky, providing their scene a pale blanket that dressed Kasse head to toe in shadow, uniform blackened by the night. AC units lined the warshocked roof, but they were decoys, cover for a cache of weapons waiting to be split and sent on their way to small villages across the Ossan badlands, little pockets of resistance in hostile territory.
“Varakaiso—”
“What’s Varakaiso?” 18B asked 18C, too impatient and curious to wait for the other soldier’s full attention.
“He’s not asking for me, he’s addressing you,” Eoran said, stepping to Kasse’s side to look down upon the man. He barked his commands at that blithering mess before them. “Hamaeisoda! Amsteadhamadate a dashiani!” Say it to his face. Speak in Amstead right now and you won’t get shot.
The man’s eyes widened, refreshed in a new understanding of the Varaket framework he beheld. A Toriet priest guiding Varonian’s ghost—
to die here was intended.
“Toriet reigopros’orinta,” he said to Eoran, suddenly so calm when he angled his face up to Kasse, hands held palms up to his side. “Antevalere raetorinta, varakaisoya—sirai, you, varakaiso, take my bones-meat-blood to mercy-altar-Orin. I will go, take me varakaiso, I will go.”
Kasse’s brow twitched upward. “Uh. What.” His gaze flicked over to 18C, confusion deepening the furrow between his brows. Hadn’t this guy just been pissing himself not thirty seconds ago?
Eoran ran a hand down his face, solidifying clay particulate dusted upon his skin into an enduring smear across his cheek. How could this stranger do this to him? How could he remind that boy of all the times he watched his brother and father assist the ill in the streets of Holm with their very blood while he stood here, in the open air of Ossa, decked head to toe in his conqueror’s uniform stained with the blood of his people? The Toriet boy’s shoulders slumped. His lips parted, split between dismay and disgust.
“He’s confused about what is actually happening here,” Eoran said after a moment, bringing his eyes to Kasse, “But he’s ready to die.” Apparently unwilling to further entertain the doomed man’s fantasy, the boy then moved away entirely, back turned, steps returning him to the piles of assault-style detritus this former stronghold had collected.
18B frowned at his lover’s reticence, following Eo’s retreat since their target had all but surrendered.
“What is he calling me,” Kasse asked again, giving subtle chase in his minimalist shift toward 18C’s position. “Don’t do that shit—don’t shake my question, fucking walk away and think I’ll forget, c’mon, Eo.”
Already, the Ossan on his knees sensed the ghost’s attention slipping away, clay smeared hands reaching out to grab at the coarse weave of Kasse’s fatigues, leaving handprints on the coyote fabric of his Amstead issued boots.
“Varakaiso, stop, end my journey-going-gone,” he begged, prostrate. The freedom fighter would evidently not be denied. “You will take, you must take—”
“I don’t think you’ll forget, Kasse,” 18C glanced back, then stopped and turned to the other boy in full when he noticed the chase. “I just sometimes need a minute to figure out my own shit. Okay?” Without giving pause for a response, perhaps without even expecting one, Eoran’s pitch eyes fell to the man at his lover’s legs. In a simultaneous motion, he jerked Kasse toward him and kicked at those fingers reaching for his uniform, the hands that sought to grasp that to which coalescence barely applied.
“Don’t fucking touch him!” He hissed at that acolyte on the ledge of an eternal epiphany. After the scolding, he looked to Kasse again. “He’s calling you Varonian’s ghost… that’s literally what he’s saying, but he’s addressing me like I have my father’s title, like I’m a priest and the implication there is that you’re my… abettor, my accessory. Like we’re just going around conducting Varaket’s grim work, clergyman and his cut-throat.”
“Is he wrong though?” Kasse asked, caught in Eoran’s grasp like possession. In pursuit of some private fragment, some brief silence, one solitary moment of stillness he could collect his thoughts into, he finally obliged the target’s request with a single bullet to the head. He turned back to 18C, pale rider ever and always cothe to his lover’s apocalypse calling.
18B was gentle in the quietus, adrenaline aftermath vibrating in his veins. His hand smoothed up the navigator’s chest—he traced button to button to blood smeared name tape, brackish grey eyes low through the whole journey.
“I’ll do your grim work,” he promised softly. “Till we’re free and clear, I’ll cut every throat necessary. If you command me, I’ll abide. Whatever I have to do, Eo, I will do.” The ghost smirked, wry beneath his weakened armor, his compromised tornado aura waning in the moonlight. “In a way, I kinda like it. Someone’s openly acknowledging that we only go together, never apart.”
“But not like that,” Eo replied headstrong and resolute and defiant in his surety of himself. “That’s not who I am and it’s not what I’m out here to do. It’s not anyone’s grim work but the government of Amstead. I’m not anyone but myself. My family helps people. My brother and my father spill their own blood to cure the illnesses of people they don’t know. I don’t want to slander that by masquerading as a rogue sect out to usher these fucking assholes off to whatever dumb afterlife they believe in. They’re only penitent after they’ve seen that they’ll never have the upper hand around you, anyway. Otherwise they’d keep shooting at us.”
The engineering sergeant turned his eyes down and pulled Kasse back with him again. This time it was to outrun a persistent trail of blood coming for their boots.
“Most of all, I’m not here to order you around. I’m not better or worse than you. I don’t want a hint of that sort of shit between us because… what if you start to believe it? What if I start to believe it? No. No fucking way. We’re together as equals.”
“We’re equals, yeah, but someday you’ll have to make the call, you’ll have to decide for us,” Kasse said as he tilted his head, fidgeting with Eoran’s collar between thumb and forefinger. He found some small bit of grisly amusement in his partner’s care in skirting the widening void of the ghost’s mercy killing—
as though there wasn’t already blood dried into the treads of that mordant boy’s boots.
“Someday you’ll see something I won’t see and there’ll be no time for please, no time for requests—it’s not like when we’re together where there’s ask and there’s beg.” Kasse pressed his nose to Eoran’s cheekbone, shifted to utter his breathless words to the clandestine spiral of his lover’s ear. “Besides: it’s kinda hot when you tell me what to do.”
“The implication isn’t the same,” Eoran whispered into the contours of Kasse’s neck. “Necessary decisions aren’t equivalent to frivolous orders. If it turns you on to be told what to do then I can tell you what to do, but the sheets are not the streets. Even if they look similar, the battlefield is different than whatever nonexistent bed we make love in.”
That lovesick boy, so weak-kneed by his friend’s proximity, could have said it differently. He chose not to.
Quickly distracted by the sound of footsteps scaling an elderly iron skeleton, Eoran jerked his chin aside.
“What the fuck are you two doing up here?” Brint poked his head up over the edge of the building. “I found a shit-ton of documents that appear to spell out where this cache of shit was headed. I need my fucking gunny wrecking all these fucking guns and I need my fucking navigator plotting a fucking course. Move!”
“Fuck man, tryna makeout with Samantha up here,” Kasse shouted back to their CO, purposeful, pallid eyes libertine lingering on Eoran like a traipse. He took a couple steps back toward their elder’s voice, taking his lover by the elbow instead of the hand. He pulled both their bodies into a trot, his plain sight obscuring of their activities almost enough to quiet his wuthering mind.
Their target had exposed a dangerous vulnerability: Kasse’s desire to be seen,
to be known,
understood
as Eoran’s
alone.
Just beneath the skin, he confessed—
I’d be okay if I was only ever construed in terms of you.
Eoran’s irritated expression fed into their farce. From an external perspective, it was entirely obvious to their whole squad that 18C loathed being addressed by the nickname their med sergeant had given him. Below the surface, however, he was hardly mad.
My prism will only mangle your radiance.
Maybe I should just be happy that your starlight is focused on me.
I hope we get to be alone later. I miss you already.
“I can map in the truck if the stack is manageable enough to take with us,” Eoran said to their CO.
“Yeah, two floors down. It’s not a massive haul. We’ll grab and go,” Brint replied, descending down the building again. “Sejan, is it too much effort to fuse all these weapons together?”
“Do I get to take a nap in the truck?” Already the weapons sergeant was unwrapping his next energy bar, looking at it with some true disappointment. Since the group had been relying more heavily on his utility, he’d been consuming more and more of the power bars until the act of eating them was more taxing than the tasks he ate them to accomplish.
He frowned as he took a bite, looking at the stacks, thinking of another way to accomplish the task at hand.
“I mean, do you want to form them into a chair first?” the boy teased, arid in delivery. “Make you an Assault Weapon Throne?”
“I honestly don’t give a shit what shape you make with them. Make them into a giant middle finger, do big letters, express yourself to your heart’s content. As long as they’re no longer able to be used, I’ll be happy,” Brint’s voice faded as he moved farther and farther away. “And yeah you can nap in the truck, but if I catch you with your pants off, I’m going to kick your ass so hard it’ll look like you shit yourself in a boot-tread pattern. We leave in twenty, meet us on the street.”
Eoran snickered and followed behind their lieutenant, disappearing into the darkness of an interior that no longer knew electricity.
“It’s no fun if no one’s here to see it,” Kasse groaned, looking down the cleverly disguised weapon caches all lined up in a row. What could he do?
Orders were orders—and as long as the job got done…
18B grinned, getting down to work.
×××
Exactly twenty minutes later, Kasse miraculously appeared at Eoran’s side, winded from his race down five stories. Hands on his knees, 18B caught his breath: he’d been about 80% sure Brint would have actually left him if he’d been late.
“Okay—” he wheezed, “Oka-a-a-a-ay, shit’s… shit’s done, fuck—we should—we should go.”
Eoran shifted his arms full of papers to allow his limbs some freedom. He fetched his canteen from its sling at his hip and offered it to the winded boy. Brint, meanwhile, was already heading back to their convoy tucked away in the distance, beyond the sinusoidal roll of sprawling dunes.
“Good job, Seja—“ Stepping into the shaft of a long shadow not previously there, Brint paused like he was touched by the first tinglings of an omen. Something was wrong, different. His head turned from the ground to the sky, the dirt-swept street to the sand-slathered brick of a building stretching into the night…
And that was when he saw it.
His weapons sergeant had welded a giant phallus from all those munitions.
Holy fuck, the lieutenant mouthed, voice stolen by his surprise. In a way, it was fitting. Guns were always ejaculating bullets, this fusion of metal and miscreancy was a giant emphasis on a long-existing point, but Brint genuinely didn’t know that Kasse had such creativity about him. Brint had never before known the depths of his favorite sergeant’s sheer determination.
“I’m… really fucking impressed.” The older man’s eyes fell to his pair of sergeants. “Good shape, nice curve—god how the fuck did you manage such detail?! It’s fucking guns.”
The glowing praise had Eoran stepping forward and canting his head up. His gaze grew wide, mouth agape.
Kasse loved that face Eoran made: awestruck by cock, every single time. He couldn’t say he wasn’t entertained by Brint’s focused inspection of the details either.
The boy rubbed the back of his head, a modest craftsman toeing at the dirt.
“You said I could take a nap,” 18B slurred, clearly exhausted by the priapic effort his grand show of immaturity had required. That he was so dedicated in his pursuit of such an irreverent display wasn’t mere impulse, or lack of impulse control for that matter—invariably, a giant gun dick in the sky would find its way to Pasquale—Lia—alerting his favorite internet troll and best friend that he was alive and well and obviously still thinking about dick. “Figured I should say thanks with a big veiny assault weapon, since you won’t let me take my fuckin’ pants off.”
“All of my boys are so polite,” Brint said with a shake of his head, lopsided grin creasing his cheeks, “Asking permission, following orders, saying thank you… what a lucky CO I am to have such a respectable passel of little shitheads.” Back on his way with his uneven gait, Brint glanced back to Kasse.
“Got anything left in there?” He asked. “Keep a feeler out for signs of life. I wouldn’t put it past reinforcements to arrive as daylight approaches. Toriet, on your toes too.”
“Roger,” 18C replied, falling in step behind the older man.
“Whole block is still dark,” Kasse replied. “Four moves left before you’re carrying me to rendezvous.”
On the outer limits of his quantum vision, the world rippled just slightly. He could feel the wake of movement brush against his electric perimeter, adjunct filaments all solar flare raised by EMF instinct on the back of his heliotropic neck.
Two men, on the ground, creeping slow to intercept, likely at the next intersection. A small female, crouched, watching on a rooftop too far for him to reach. Not with his reserves so lacking. She didn’t move but held three sharpened sticks in her hands. Or were they shards? They seemed organic but broken. Splintered wood, maybe, glass, or—
bone.
It was bone.
Grabbing at Eoran’s shoulder for support, he threw his mind into the breach, reached through the distance with a violence elegant as string theory, vengeful ghost lashing out across a vigilant livewire. He broke two hearts on a cry and a clutch and a clatter ’round the bend, dragging to keep step. The boy sank into his friend’s scapula, announcing:
“Two, now.”
Eo? he queried where Brint couldn’t hear his sudden trepidation, how worried that boy had suddenly become. How common are bone darts?