Eo? he queried where Brint couldn’t hear his sudden trepidation, how worried that boy had suddenly become. How common are bone darts?
Perhaps common enough for our people to be given the name Ossa, Eoran replied into their phantasmic relay. That boy glanced aside, quickly back to the boy he adored. He was adamant in borrowed judder of Kasse’s nerves, the taste of his fear like an echo stolen into his own musculature. What’s going on? If something is amiss, speak up so we can make it through this.
“I think that girl from Biko is here,” Kasse remarked in turn, quiet but aloud. Pulling back from the call of his own interment laid next to and between the Bloodwright’s bones, he straightened. “So hurry the fuck up, Brint, cause I can’t handle her. Not today.”
“Is she too far?” Brint asked in a harsh whisper, pace quickening, steps growing fonder of the shadows cast beneath the watch of the unguarded moon. “You have two left.“
Even as those words left Brint’s mouth, a bullet perforated 18B’s dome of consciousness. Kasse jerked Eoran hard just as the round cut the air between the engineering sergeant and their CO, a scrambling mess of elbows and knees struggling for recovery in the dust. After the first, there was another that veered wide on a wolf howl of late night wind. Another that should’ve cut down Brint if Kasse didn’t catch it with a grimace.
“They’re all out of range,” the ghost shouted, distracted by the rippling echo of sniper after sniper. The boy was triangulating on limited resources. He was three-quarters closed, white eyed on his foothold sway. “There’s four—five shooting positions. Fucking run—”
The ghost himself, however, was delayed, overstimulated by the shock and awe of a full metal hornets nest.
Eoran would return the favor a moment later. His fist grabbed Kasse’s chest, collected a hand full of uniform and pulled that boy forward through a window whose frame had been completely obliterated. Things were looking pretty primitive in the streets of this outpost—it’d seen so much action that sharp angles were eroded into ragged lines bitten by crossfire, buildings were pockmarked with high-power scars.
Brint slid into a corner of their temporary hideaway, head ducked but not enough to give him some glimpse of the outside. Two more shots followed. One bit at the masonry of the windowsill, the other lodged itself into a wooden ladder on the opposite side of the room.
“Goddammit,” the lieutenant huffed, “These insurgents must have some underground fucking sharp-shooting camp that they all attend, fuckin’ Ossa Desert-Eagle-Scout-patch-having SOBs.”
An Ossan rebel shouted slurs from a rooftop, freeform hatred rolling from his tongue for the half-breed delinquent and his crude sculpture hanging mid-rise erect. Eoran flattened himself against a wall, out of range from the exterior, barely seen in the darkness.
“Not a lot of appreciation for art in these parts,” the younger boy whispered as he quietly condensed his load of documents and stuffed his pockets. Free of the burden, he adjusted his weapon and readied it across his lap.
“Can’t win ‘em all, I guess,” Brint frowned. “Kasse, can you tell what’s happening behind this building? I’m not keen on pot-shotting it out with these guys, so getting out of here is top priority.”
“Open spaces, the buildings are gutted out pretty good,” the waning ghost replied, colorless in his exhaustion. He was busy looking for anything he could wring calories out of, pale eyes gaunt as hospice, hollow and gored. He shoved the last quarter of his reserved energy bar into his mouth, then immediately began rummaging through packs, through pockets, hoping even a single piece of candy had been squirrelled away by accident. “Everything’s been cleared for those fucking snipers. Can’t believe I spent so much energy on melting those guns, what the fuck is wrong with me.”
The boy lamented his mismanaged resources even as he moved from his pockets to Eoran’s, patting his friend down for stray sweets. It would have been easier to just ask, maybe, but if they were going to die here, Kasse would be an idiot not to cop one last feel.
“I knew better,” he confided, wretched and sorry and, gods, so stupid. “I knew better, I knew better, I fucking knew better.”
18B wildly scanned their shelter, pausing when the chirping of rats broke his concentration, the skittering of insect legs amplified from under a broken sofa propped against the wall. Kasse went pale, eyes squeezing shut in absolute dismay. He was a thirty second super cut of the seven stages of grief, pale with nausea for what their survival might require of him tonight.
“Brint, please fucking please have food on you.”
Leaving his watch for a moment, Brint patted his chest, then his arms, then his thighs. “Pack of gum,” he replied, tossing it toward his weapons sergeant.
“It’s going to be okay, Kasse,” Eoran said, gentle voice clashing with a contortion of anger that knotted his brows and molded his lips into a firm line. “Let’s go find their kitchen, maybe there’s something left in there.”
“Don’t overextend yourself,” Brint added, “We can do this manually, it’s just going to be slower. Get yourself into that mindset. But we can’t afford to carry you if you can avoid it, so leave enough to keep you mobile.”
“Yeah, we were trained to handle this. Come on.” Creeping through the shadows, the younger sergeant was suddenly unsure if 18B had ever really done anything manually. Why would he? When one had the ability to edit the fabric of reality without detection, it made no sense to do anything any other way. He moved along the wall, past Brint—who he threw the dirtiest of looks at for dragging them out here without the rest of their team—and paused in the doorway of the next room. Looking down, Eoran’s shoe scooted a shard of wood ahead in front of him and sent it sailing across the floor. A shot attempted to catch it, but failed.
Kasse may have been trained to handle this, but he was trained to handle it with his utility running functions in the background. For that weapon of a boy, a disconnect from his utility was like losing an entire sense: Kasse was blind, deaf, anaptic,
otiose.
The ghost wasn’t entirely incapable, no, but he certainly didn’t feel whole. He, always so brash, so wild in the face of every threat, was suddenly diffident, hesitant at his best friend’s elbow. He said nothing. What could he say? Kasse was empty, useless without his utility, defeated without destruction riding shotgun in his veins.
Eoran turned his chin to Kasse, hoping for some valuable analysis on this sniper’s shooting competency. When he was met with silence, the younger boy sighed.
“Don’t fall apart on me. I need you here,” he said under his breath, hand reaching out to take the other boy’s and braid their fingers together.
“I’ll distract them while you two cross the room,” Brint murmured, already taking a long splinter from the destroyed window’s casing to fashion a primitive lure. “Be quick, okay?”
“Okay,” Eo replied.
“Ready?” Brint asked.
18C looked back to 18B. “…Ready,” he guessed.
“Mm,” 18B confirmed, listless and obedient.
“—Go!”
It happened in a flash—the top of the filthy watch cap that the rail-thin man made from wooden remnants was wearing became punched full of holes and the pair of boys were across the room. They left shards of moonlight in their wake; the swing door to the kitchen grumbled as its dry hinges were left to work out the rest of the pair’s rushing velocity in back and forth waves that eventually settled.
There was another window across the room. It faced toward an alley between buildings, penetrable, but only from an awkward view point. The sides of the window were dressed in a pair of curtains colored bright yellow and had gaily-colored vegetables arranged in a repeating pattern all over. A valance hung above the curtains and made Eoran certain that this was an old woman’s place before the war came calling. Printed carrots and tomatoes rustled in the two youths barging in, teasing possibilities of what the engineering sergeant hoped they would find.
Dropping Kasse’s hand, Eo was immediately on his knees, arms digging through cabinets.
That boy and his abandoned hand were obfuscated things, fogged, merely a shape suggesting his presence in Eoran’s obsidian eye, Kasse’s favorite mirror. Slowly, he came around to the imminent task, shocked back into battlefield action by the clattering of rickety composite cabinetry and the cagey shrieks of angry rodents.
Kasse tore into the gum Brint had sacrificed to his cause, shaking his head like it would alleviate the dysphoria. If anything, chewing something might distract him from the gnawing blind where his human vision ended and his quantum sight no longer began.
“I can’t see,” he confessed, plaintive but blank. He opened up a cabinet above where Eoran rummaged violently, slow and quiet in bleak perusal, action a weak diversion from the cataclysm exhuming a full blown panic attack from his estuate chest. “This isn’t the world I know. I don’t know this place. “
Eoran glanced up at his lover, submerging himself to the shoulder in the cabinet he was raiding. “If I give you my feelings and sensations when we overlap, do you think I could give you my energy? You can have everything, it’s more useful for you…”
Kasse turned, pulling himself up until he was seated on the weathered countertop, yellowing white veneer peeling up in bubbles from endless cycles of moisture and heat. “I don’t know,” he replied, his fingers resting gently on the bones of his lover’s wrist, the anchor he left along the cabinet to keep from sinking into that deep dive. “We can try. If it doesn’t work, though, Eo, I’m really done. I’m a liability if I can’t see. I’ll fuck this all up.”
Retracting his hand from the depths of that empty repository, the youngest Toriet rose from his knees and situated himself between Kasse’s legs.
“It’s too risky, then,” he said, open palm tender atop that boy’s thigh. “I’m going to rip up this kitchen. You should rest. Try to relax, okay?”
18B only recognized Eoran’s gravity and fuck he fell into orbit each and every time.
“I mean…” Kasse was soft, unwilling to let Eoran go. “You’re already…”
Soft as daybreak, harsh as sunset, he caught Eoran’s mouth on an upswing. He tapped into his lover with the tiniest pricking of his finger in the shade of his lover’s jawline. Circulating together, they meandered in unison along the arterial crossroads of their co-habitated bloodlines, nervous and alight with their instinctive response to grind.
here,
I wish
you could
have me here.
Thigh soon became waist, one hand soon became two. Eoran’s fingers caught in the loops at Kasse’s waistline, where belt adhered breeches to body, and pulled his lover’s hips closer to him, split him more and more on the corporeal wedge of his own form. They were so close and yet there was always another gap to fill, an emptiness to usher away, a space between that should not be.
Well…
The bloodwright’s internality was a cacophonous nightmareland of noise and frustration unvoiced, held back and kept at bay but resilient and consumptive nevertheless. His undertones were full of error, fighting against a hopelessness the boy was so fucking desperate to stave.
then…
Eoran responded like energy was an exchange made only on the boundaries of their physicality. On the edge of disaster, he would pay pounds of flesh to give Kasse even just a sliver of his penetrative prescience back. He kissed that boy hard,
his passion to violate
his worship so violent.
fuck Brint. He’s not going
to cross that window. Too
slow. He can fucking wait
and think about how badly
he fucked up here.
Kasse collided rough into the cupboard door, forced back by Eoran’s raucous disregard, his kiss that bit like second hand rage. He, with his urban legend fingers spurred by impact and infamy. He, quick as a mainline jolt with Eo the IV push—he was taking apart that belt buckle with such blind precision that he must have been running drills on that fly for fucking months.
there was only
here this now
a violent predisposition
contrary to survival, yet
vital for their continued
possessing.
kasse was left wrapped round the keening of his stuttering, his nothings,
aloft
a loss
so lost
at last
are we really doing this?
that boy caught blind rang clear as daylight
illuminating every depraved altar they kept
for each other in the body they made their
bed in, spit in his hand to encourage the
poor decision his lover would now either
confirm or deny.
You’re already against me.
Is it too late to go back?
What is our point of no return?
We’ve passed so many tonight, is it
worth it to blow past another?
Eoran leveled his eyes on Kasse
obsidian dark, ophidian crisp.
It’s starting to hit me. All these things.
Worries. I may never again see you
soaked in sun. We might not make
it that far. So… What am I to do?
Am I to show you how much I love
you now, or take a chance on later?
Will our goodbye be garbled and full
of blood? Will we get a goodbye at all?
18C’s fingers gripped the wrist of his lover, gave pause to their ministrations to be for the grimmest shades of reality.
When someone feels like they are on the verge of death, shouldn’t they prepare to leave this world?
This is my will. My love for you is the only testament I have.
If you want to be had, Kasse, then let me fucking take.
Eoran’s tongue traced the line of his lips in a crude display. His nonchalance might have made it seem like a motion unconscious, but that flagitious wretch was very much full of intent.
Do we need goodbye?
If I die at your side, don’t we walk down together?
If you die within me, aren’t we technically one?
If we go, do I finally get to hold you
when we go to sleep?
Kasse was noiseless save the comorbid shudder of grief lapping his lust, motionless without the daunting task of second hand breathing, his sorrow passing so pristine along every marred pathway, through every shuttered door. Refusing death today, he still knew this uncertain mourning. Even though he knew the path they would walk back to rendezvous, even if he could see it clearly now with his sight augmented by Eoran’s vigor, he still felt his questions like they were imperative to this moment and no other.
“Yes, Eo.” He gave his permission aloud, soft as down in the silence between their faltering pulses. He was always seeking their singular melody with the hi-hat cadence of sniper fire biting broken rhythms into smoldering brick.
If I’m your legacy, then testify—
work another couplet into this chronicle you’ve kept.
If I’m your last will and testament, then lay me out, please:
write me down.
Eoran was so convinced of their terminus that Kasse couldn’t help feeling the fear curl through himself too, this opiate infection of his better sense despite the slow refabrication of his quantum knowledge. His map of theoretical futures slowly spread venous and arterial before him, but still he clung with that separation anxiety hard coded into his kiss, worn alongside his fear that death would make them forget, strike their tandem record from existence.
“Take,” he hushed, with his grey eyes low, lids half mast in slow recovery. The ghost paused his lover’s lewd route round his mouth, caught him with his own tongue the interloper, coerced a standstill where there was so little time to be still at all.
I want to see how you love me at the end of the world.