Eoran, again, woke up alone.
He rose in the darkness of the early morning and walked to the window on the back wall of him and his fellow soldiers’ apartment-barrack. Already half open, as the four of them long ago decided that they would leave it cracked to welcome in the briskness of Ossa’s overnight air, Eoran wedged his head and partial torso out and took a deep breath. He was right on time—the headlights of a single humvee returning from the field rattled between a low collection of dark buildings, a lone beacon in that sleepy city whose carcass wore Amstead like a parasite. He watched the truck’s familiar route: past the MP checkpoint and up Losi’s main avenue to the city center; same parking spot and same figures, a man who didn’t walk straight and a boy as thin as a whip. The diffused shutting of doors barely reached him. Eoran followed the pair as they disappeared inside, eyes narrowed in a scrutinizing glare. The engineer jumped when his reverie was broken by a whisper asking if he was alright—his head hit the window with a raucous thud and he slid himself back inside.
The black of the bloodwright’s eyes met the barely discernible green of Dev’s as he slid his legs into his trousers. Locke was nestled up around the intel sergeant in a bear hug arrangement of arms and legs. Silent, Eo shoved his feet into his boots. His paracord laces trailed carelessly behind as he walked out the door.
Over the last few days this had become the norm. Kasse was switched to working overtime with Brint alone and Eoran was left to his own devices. Eoran came to learn that when Kasse was taken into the desert, it would be nearly a full cycle of day before he would see his lover again. It happened like this every time: Kasse kissed him goodbye in the evening and wouldn’t greet him again until the evening following, when he was dismissed from whatever required him to be hidden away in the building meant mainly for brass. The rest of the squad seemed to take pity on the omitted Ossan, trying to pull him into one-off card games in their free time or piling on top of him to force him to watch the inanity of Ara Me Va on Brint’s stolen cellphone, however this only did so much. The boy didn’t want to watch television nor did he show his usual interest in games.
He spent his alone time mostly with Adrien. At first, Eoran tried to remain positive. He told himself that this was a one-off exercise that would end as quickly as it had begun. But the days felt like they were getting longer and Eoran felt like he was getting lonelier and in the face the other engineer’s relentless good will, he was becoming a bitter thing; a curmudgeon receding into the abyss of his own darkness.
Eoran fixed his shoes after almost tripping and falling down the set of stairs he descended. He ate his breakfast in silence and suffered through the rote motions of his daily tasks. When the sun ducked just behind the dome of Losi’s library and illuminated the sky in a dazzling spray of rays launched into the beyond like arrows, the navigator planted himself on the steps outside city hall, patient and quiet.
He didn’t have to wait long: Kasse, silhouette lean and slow in his exhaustion, was soon coming down city hall’s steps, stride long and head low.
Kasse had been so tied up in Brint’s single sighted search and destroy campaign that anytime he found himself home with Eoran, he still felt far away. He barely slept, barely ate, and when he did it was coerced by the lover it seemed he was slowly leaving behind.
What could he do? War machine boy so expertly employed, weapon heart only ever coming home to retool the haze of a memory that didn’t see in human sight,
only saw grids,
blips,
flatlines.
At the sound of footsteps, Eoran stood and turned. He stared up at the adjunct descending, face consumed with an expression that was equal parts soft and stern.
“We need to talk,” the bloodwright announced when they were nearer, hands resting limp at his side.
Frozen at the sight of his navigator so severe, the phantom stopped midway down the stairs, slow smile finding footing on a face more jackal than boy in these feral days.
“Hey,” he murmured slow, careful—like Eo was some wildcat liable to attack at the slightest provocation. “I was heading to the bunk. Why are you waiting here?”
Those dark circle eyes couldn’t have been more tired, but his heartbeat was jumping like the marathon had just begun.
“Did you not hear what I just said to you?” Eoran asked with a tilt of his head.
Kasse’s smile faltered. His charm was useless here.
“I heard you,” the boy said softly.
“Then you have your answer. Walk with me—” Eoran turned and began toward the base-city’s perimeter, the edge of civilization on the tongue-tip of Ossa’s mouth full of sand. “—Since I guess I’m forbidden from following you into those closed doors Brint’s been hiding you behind.”
“What?” Kasse was a follower now, head down as he traced the footprints Eoran left for him to collect. Except in those rare moments where he led Emrys Brint into the thick of human suffering, Kasse was without will, without direction, aimless thing led on a tether of impending destruction. “He’s not hiding me. I’m not hiding.”
“Then what is going on? What are you doing?” The engineer turned his head aside, pausing the moment it took for the other boy to catch up to him. Eoran thought the world of Kasse. He was frustrated and standoffish because that world had suddenly gone askew. It felt off from its usual orbit. “Whenever you have overtime with him, why can’t you come back to bed with me? Why aren’t you eating? Why are you so tired? Why do you look at him like that? Tell me the truth. I can take it, Kasse, I promise. You look like death. Tell me what’s going on.”
Kasse stared at the ground, lips pressed together. He wavered, outline like a mirage in Eoran’s direct sight, his peripheral suffering.
“Can we go somewhere?” His ask was meek, like he’d drop it with the slightest pushback. A tendril of hair fell into his face and he pushed it back, eyes darting back and forth across the sand. “I don’t want to do this here. Don’t make me do this here.”
“I…” Eoran let out a long sigh, breath overdrawn like he’d been holding it in this entire time even though he hadn’t. His hands flopped against his thighs, fruitless and dismayed, unsure if he was being put off or if the answers he sought were really so sensitive. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Eo,” he said with the sound of heartbreak, grabbing his lover’s hand. He brought his beautiful boy’s knuckles to his lips, begging forgiveness with his red ruined eyes.
Kasse had thought of this moment in passing. Thought he’d be able to withstand questioning, thought he’d be smoother under pressure, under the vanta spotlight of Eoran’s blackhole gaze. Instead it’d taken a handful of words to shake his foundation asunder, a single look to render him absolutely helpless, ready to sing his mockingbird secrets long and loud. “Take me somewhere. Anywhere. Please. I think I’m really fucked, Eo. I fucked up. I’m fucked.”
Eoran switched their grasps, clutched Kasse’s wrist and pulled him along, not listening to the boy’s cascading preamble. The younger boy only wanted facts; he craved concrete truths so he could understand the foundations of the mountain he was trying to climb. He initially began leading Kasse to the quiet of the base’s northwest corner, where soldiers often gathered to get away from the constant barrage of noise between buildings, but since it was a rather long walk, Eoran easily changed his mind. Instead, he guided his lover through the dark doorway of what used to be a corner store attached to the ground floor of an apartment building that had yet to be refitted for housing soldiers. A red sign reading EXIT in Ossan lit up a back stairwell. Dust collected upon countertops graffitied with lewd curses from erstwhile intruders.
He spun Kasse around and again met his eyes, searing carmine in his infinite black, anxious nails clinging to shoulders.
“Tell me,” Eoran demanded.
“I’m…”
The ghost glitched in Eoran’s hands. How he wished he could avoid that drillbit gaze, that boy who always knew where best to bore through his exoskeleton to get at his velvet gore.
He stuttered, hemmed. Choked.
“I’m doing Glow,” he finally spat, short and violent and spoken too quick. He slowed the tape, rewound himself, focused on his syllables. “I’m addicted to Glow.”
“W-what?” Eoran was taken aback; figuratively, literally. He leaned away from his lover like he couldn’t see and he didn’t understand. Maybe the words didn’t register, maybe that wasn’t what he was expecting to hear. Maybe, deep down in the moil of his knotty guts, Eoran instantaneously knew that this was the worst case scenario and he was trying to fake the truth out by feigning confusion.
“What do you mean you’re ‘addicted to glow’? Since when?” He looked aside at the bleak remnants of the shop, tracing the figures of boxed goods expired next to soda cans turned hot and seeing none of them. “So Brint found out and he’s making you get help for it? That’s why I can’t see you? That’s why you’re out all night? It’s not target practice, it’s rehab?”
“No, Eo…” Kasse trailed, eyes welling up with his immediate regrets. His boyfriend’s dismay was like a knife; the way he came back so wrong when he filled in the blanks. “That’s not where I go at night.”
“So… he’s in on it?” The opposite then. Eoran was a little more crushed, a little more betrayed.
Kasse fell. He was stuck staring the repercussions of Brint’s power grab in the face. Fuck, how he hungered for the strength that trailed on the heels of sickness. He was ashamed that he was starving now, powerless in Eoran’s polygraph hold.
“He… yeah. But it was just to… to push back the resistance lines, to clear resurgence.”
The justification for his extracurriculars felt grainy in his mouth. He bowed his head. He was latched onto Eoran’s collarbones, eyes tracing the lines of his arteries beneath the skin. All he wanted was the comfort of Eoran’s rage but who was he to ask for such a response, to beg any response, when his confessions were so egregious, so deeply wounding to everything they’d come back to work toward.
“I thought… if I did this thing, if I did what I was told, maybe we could leave sooner. I didn’t think it would feel like this, that it would happen so fast, that I would need it so much.” He swallowed dryly, closing his eyes. “I didn’t think I’d be like this—gone until the next hit. Eo, I’m sorry.”
“You thought getting hooked on drugs would make it easier to leave? You thought that bending before the insurmountable power of a system built to crush you would open a door to freedom for us? Are you fucking insane? How the fuck were you planning on leaving, in a body bag?” Eoran took his hands away from Kasse’s shoulders. He walked a handful of steps backward, away, detritus moved by breath, an interloper needed no longer, a discarded wrapper rolling by. In this recession, the engineer was bolder—expressive thing always wore his heart on his sleeve, open and ready to be pierced by the blade of another dagger. “How did this happen? He told you to take it or you chose to take it?”
“Both.”
Kasse sagged back until he hit a counter, a shelf. He didn’t know and he didn’t care: all he knew was that Eoran’s support had left him and he was now adrift. He clung to the edge with his eyes closed, watching his mapmaker’s angry rhythm in electric dysphony.
“He told me to. The first time, he told me. I left after I took it and came to you.” He swallowed, brow knit. “Then I went back.”
“You lied to me,” Eo said, soft even in the internalized screaming of his growing fury. He paced back and forth, a wounded animal lungshot and fighting against the darkness closing in, the growing night and his tunnel sight. “You said you didn’t know what made you sick but you were lying to me. What have I done to make you distrust me like this? What did I do to push you away into the arms of another? Why would you let him do this to you? Why can’t you stand up for yourself? Why the fuck can’t you ever tell him no? What the fuck is he to you? Why does he mean more to you than I do?”
Kasse chewed his lip in the face of Eoran’s wall before he crossed his arms, fretting in his shame, his knowledge that he was not above the honesty manifesting in his low blows.
Of course Eo wanted the truth:
he deserved the truth.
“You made me come back,” the boy confessed into the stark ether staked through the heart between them. “I love you, and I don’t resent you—but you made me come back and now I’m doing what I have to do because he fucking knows.”
“Don’t blame this on me.” The bloodwright turned on his heels, a sharp ricochet through the ambiance of scarlet, steps frozen in a dire betrayal of movement. “You’re blaming this on me like your poor fucking decision to please a man—who looks at you, by the way, like you’re the latest and greatest version of a weapon he can wield wildly and discharge to his heart’s fucking contentment—is a bastard side effect of the love you have for me. Fuck you. Fuck you for insinuating that you got addicted to drugs because you love me.”
“It’s what I am,” Kasse replied, exhausted. “He looks at me that way ’cause that’s all I am.”
Every step they’d taken forward, he retraced in reverse until he was back at the start: a boy shielding himself in transactions because it was the only trick he knew to survive.
He laughed, half sneered, self-defeating thing ready to let Eoran save himself from the sabotage. “But hey: at least I’m not fucking him, right?”
“I wish you were, Kasse. More than anything, I wish that’s what this was.” Tears rolled down his cheeks, reminiscent of a springtime rainstorm that would never come. It wasn’t the sharpness in his lovers words that did the real damage—it was the fact that Eoran now knew he was not enough, that their past was empty, the future black, and here stood he, in the tempest of a perdition wedged between.
The younger boy turned and walked to the door.
“Eo—Eo stop.” Kasse caved to his heart, the singularity collapsing in the apex of his chest. Without Eo, what was he? Without drugs, Kasse was simply Kasse. Without Brint, he was a boy who existed independent of a conflict that had him blood drenched to the waist. But without Eo?
Even Kasse knew: without Eoran, he was lost.
He assaulted the boy making his escape, wrapped him up in his arms and begged him to stay.
“Eo, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” he choked between his lover’s shoulder blades. “Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me. I told you the truth—please don’t go.”
The snagged engineer shifted. He faced the boy in full and wrapped those forlorn cheeks with his own hands.
“I’m not leaving you. Not like that.” Eoran planted a kiss on his boy’s forehead. For as hopeless and defeated as he was, in the midst of his immense hurt still spilling, Kasse Sejan remained everything to Eoran Toriet. “But I do need to go start trying to come up with solutions to fix this while I still sorta have you, so you should let me go do that and get some rest in the meantime.”
“No, I need you here.” Kasse ceded no ground, only held tighter when faced with isolation. “Whatever you need to do, do it in the morning. Do it when we’re back in bed together, where you can keep your eye on me, where you can see how good I stay.” He kissed his lifeline just left of center, harlot suffering masquerading as the doleful, the chaste.
“I’m afraid of where I’ll go when you’re gone. Don’t let me go on alone. Please, don’t let me go alone.”
Kasse knew himself, knew the void gnawing at his guts, had stared straight into the dark for the better part of two weeks. If Eo left him alone, he’d be knocking at Brint’s door begging, fucking begging, to be deployed.
“You only want to be around me when your master isn’t calling your name.” Chin tilted in a gentle incline, Eoran spoke onto the bend of Kasse’s lips, words warm beneath the faintest brush of skin against skin. “So… I’m expected to follow your schedule now? You’re fine letting me be alone. You leave me alone quite frequently now, Kasse. I don’t want to see how good you stay. I don’t want to see any of the fucking tricks that piece of shit taught you.”
“Make me forget.” Kasse pressed forward, kissed his apologies to lips he insisted on parting. He spoke best in osmosis, understood touch more than word,
apologized best with his worship.
“Restart me, reset my head,” he mewled, always a beggar in Eoran’s thrall. He ran his fingers through his lover’s hair, drew his gaunt form close, all ribs and angles, straight lines and bone. “I won’t do it again. I swear: I’ll detox, I’ll quit—and then when I’m solid, we can go. We can go, just… leave this behind. You said you’d go if I wanted. You said we could go.”
“Let’s go.” Eoran tore his head away from the precipice of that kiss, swooning and dizzy-like, as though that very simple action was made of a minor miracle. He looked down his nose at Kasse, strict lips a line. His hands came to rest, again, on the boy’s shoulders, this time to urge him a few inches away. “Let’s go then. Why wait? We can leave right now. Pack a bag and be miles away from here by the time the sun is just starting to think about rising. We know this desert better than anyone, and you can detox without fear of failure because I won’t have any glow, because I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Eoran smoothed down his lover’s arms, fingers soon entwined. “Why wait? Leave with me now.”
“Yes,” Kasse replied without thinking, without pause. All he’d ever wanted was under that black sky reflecting off the red clay sand. The military clouded his want; Brint warped his desires. He all but crumbled against Eoran’s chest, relief rolling down his cheeks at the thought of freedom absolute at Eoran’s side. “Always, yes.”