004. past every lock and key

Amstead’s army pressed ever onward across the Ossan landscape. A mountain range loomed to the north, breaking the horizon in a blend of reds and blues, hazy but nevertheless hungry—a hateful challenge always threatening, a topographical tear along the lacquertops of desk-tethered generals overseeing the arrangement of their ground forces. In the vast plateau before that change in elevation, towns and villages lay scattered. These hideaways were known to harbor insurgents masquerading as humble civilians; full of first time mothers claiming boys who, by traditional approximation, were not even close to being related. Any house became a safe house for Ossa’s guerilla rebellion, so Amstead saw fit to discourage such an effort with artillery. Gifts rained from the skies. First in propagandic flyers from unarmed single engine props, then in a flurry of shelling accented with the rapid chittering of cannon fire from low-altitude death dealers. The invading forces left the red clay plastered and pockmarked, then she sent in her clean-up crews.

A small convoy of canvas-wrapped trucks ambled across the uneven desert terrain carrying the most dispensable of what the foreign army had to offer: infantrymen. A squad of twelve was split among three vehicles and given a direction—south, northeast, northwest—where each would take a pair of three man fireteams to their location except for northwest, who were tasked to go it alone. PFCs Kasse Sejan and Eoran Toriet were assigned to that third vehicle. Their team leader was huddled near the cab, hand over an ear as he shouted a string of jargon confirming their orders into the mouthpiece of his radio.

Between the yelling and the loud chugging of the diesel engine that moved them, Eoran glanced sidelong to Kasse. His nerves betrayed him in the frantic shifting of his eyes, the way they flitted back and forth, the way he clutched his weapon’s stock with white-knuckled fingers. As the truck slid to a sudden halt, his shoulder was forced to collide with his friends’. Eoran apologized but the noise surrounding them stole his sound from the shape of his mouth.

They were dropped at the crumbling perimeter of Biko township and told to work their way inward to clear what was left of the rebel stronghold that planted its roots there. Before the war, Biko was a thriving place, a town that was quickly outgrowing its meager boundaries, huts and homesteads upgraded and partially replaced with mid-rise apartment complexes whose arguable affordability made them only half-inhabited—and then mostly by out-of-towners who saw fit to have a place to stay as a midway point between the sizable city of Lasandet and Amstead’s ever encroaching border. A fresh barrage of air support reduced a majority of the buildings to rubble earlier that day, but crumbling facades proved to be valuable hideaways for shadow-stalking rebels. Despite Amstead’s best efforts to nip hostile activity in the bud, Biko remained resilient, even in its death throes.

“I gotta tell you kids,” their CO said, moving to sit before his pair of subordinates. “It was a real fight to get assigned with you two. The whole squad thinks you’re like, lucky charms or some shit.” He was in his late twenties and his voice possessed a natural grit to it, exacerbated by the dry air of the desert. He had dark hair like the younger boys he was speaking to but his features were pale and wide, mismatched against the subtle differences in their skin tone and eye shape and understanding of what this war was even about. His age and rank painted him as a career soldier; the man had apparently been at war for some time now, re-upping and upping and upping. Maybe he was addicted to the thrill of the fight, or maybe he just didn’t have much to go back home to. A nametape across his chest read BRINT in thick black letters, near a trio of chevrons monogrammed to a patch velcroed to the center of his uniform.

“So listen,” Sergeant Brint continued, leaning in, forearms resting on his spread knees, “I know it sucks that we got the short end of the stick and are the only team approaching from the west, but if we’re smart about this, we can do it and get it done better than Alpha and Beta positions combined, ok? Command seems to think that there won’t be much left to clean up here but they’re back home watching this shit on a wall of screens like it’s a movie. What we’re gonna do is stay close and move under as much cover as possible. Slow and steady. Watch your backs. Watch my back and I’ll watch yours. I want so much back watching happening that it’s unclear if you’re trying to see a laser sight or checking out my ass. Understood? Good. Safeties off. Let’s move out.”

Kasse and Eo, since their first meeting on the deployment craft, were inseparable. Fast friends now best, Kasse squeezed Eoran’s shoulder like he was building the other boy up before a dare, more at home on their first platform training jump than it was here in Amstead’s active conflict that made murderers of them both. 

“You look so nervous,” the street rat said, sly grin wide around his boyish laugh. Kasse tugged the other PFC to standing as he checked over his shoulder for the sergeant—and sure he was out of earshot, the boy continued, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. “Just watch that ass, keep it close keep it tight—orders from the top, Toriet.” 

For all of Eo’s pale nerves in combat, Kasse matched him in boisterous swagger, so cavalier when the threat of death was involved that it seemed like he had no real concept of his own mortality. In actuality, Kasse’s middle-fingers-up grandstanding was less due to ignorance and more related to a lack of solid tethers to the world he’d be leaving behind because really,

what was there to lose?

Kasse’s eyes lingered on Brint overlong, a little too studious. They connected in transport, permission to speak freely yielding jokes and banter to break the dread quiet of impending violence. Kasse warmed to their CO quickly, keeping a minor focus on the sergeant even as he spoke plainly to his best friend, an earnest reassurance for the Toriet boy’s justified fear. “It’s just business as usual, right? We’ll be back to base in no time, Eo, don’t look so serious.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Eoran swallowed hard. He knew that the nerves were a detriment, that they hindered the automation that was drilled into them during basic training, however the humanity in that young thing was hard to set aside. His prelude to every battlefield was visceral, struck through him to the bone—that was normal though, it always did. Every time. This was just how the Toriet boy was made. The relative security of his upbringing was courtesy of watchful parents and an older brother. Up until very recently, that gregarious boy was fearful only for things that were fixable with the fluttering of his eyelashes, but it certainly was impossible to deter a bullet with a pretty face. Velocity didn’t give a shit about looks.

“I’m ready,” Eoran’s lidded eyes turned away from his friend, focusing down on the SCAR in his hands, thumb clicking the safety from on to three round burst. Back up to Kasse, then: “We gotta go or we’re going to be down an ass. Come on…!” 

There it was: a smile. Coaxed by the kindness of his friend, business as usual. Eoran turned and the expression ebbed into a grimace. How fucked up was it to smile before going shooting? Was that the correct response? Maybe it didn’t matter. At least he was feeling something other than nervous now.

Radio static was the last noise they heard before the grieving breaths of the desert. Brint squelched his radio and moved them forward, the plopping of boots replaced with shuffling cloth and coarse grit crushed beneath the careful placement of six legs. He took them to a wall blasted into a serrated edge, a courtyard nevermore poorly surrounding the skeletal timbers of a house no longer.

Flat palm up signaled to pause. A pair of intense green eyes watched through a gouge in clay-stained concrete.

The silence was chilling for how recently alive the town felt. Billowing tufts of dust and smoke from the barrage earlier that day were still being swept up by the push of the afternoon, covering the landscape like it were an inverse of the sky. The fog was a weather pattern all its own, made from particulate that likely shouldn’t be inhaled. A tumbleweed of bright pink insulation bounced by and Brint shifted like he expected it to be wearing a suicide vest. His trigger finger relaxed as it kept moving.

Clear. Onward.

A structure stood down the road that looked to be an apartment complex whose exterior had been shorn off and collapsed in a slide and now rested at the foot of the building in a mess of rubble and broken lawn chairs. Sun and shadow played betwixt the remnants of twisted clothing racks whose sheets had resigned themselves to their concrete captivity. The sergeant turned back to his boys, fingers continuing their arcane motions in the air.

1, 2, 3: Brint, Toriet, Sejan.
A sweep forward: Ahead —> to the complex.
Single finger, elevated: Single file.
A pair of fingers to his eyes, their eyes: Watch me. Watch you. And you.
Fist: Ready————and
Knife hand, swept forward twice: Move.

As Brint began to move out, Kasse turned to Eo for one more moment of levity—mouthing THAT ASS and serving an exaggerated chef’s kiss. 

The friends, in their year or so of bonding, spent a great deal of time talking about all things in all manner of depth: their vitally different upbringings (or lack thereof), their backgrounds known and speculative, foods they missed, places they wanted to go, things they planned on doing when they got out, music, sights and sounds, films—anything.

But never once did the boys discuss their love lives, sexual histories, orientation—and though they lived in a world where being gay wasn’t an offense to be persecuted, feelings were still something Kasse knew complicated friendships, destroyed camaraderie,

and fuck if he was going to complicate the only friend he had.

The jokes delivered as they moved out may have been innocent jabs or a fleeting Freudian confession to preference—perhaps both. Kasse didn’t think too hard about it. So long as his all-inclusive preferences didn’t fuck up his one relationship in this parched hellscape with a bunch of drama, Kasse could deal with just friends. He kept a close guard on where his fondness for Eo fell, kept his behavior toward his friend in rigid check.

Brint, however, was different. Brint wasn’t his friend. Not even a regular member of his squad and he seemed cool enough that a playful hint toward fraternizing would be accepted or rescinded without a write up. That seemed to make expressing an interest okay.

So after a brisk shuffle across open terrain, vigilantly checking the tops of structures for snipers with both scope and his still-secret utility, Kasse risked being too close to their CO, shoulder grazing and lingering against the sergeant’s back when they came to rest at their landing point.

A cloud quickly passed before the sinking westward sun. Its aftermath was a spotlight too large to see the circumference of, an intense glare reducing the robust depth of the world into simple, sharp-edged shapes.

Brint was peering around the side of the building beneath an awning that used to be patio, when his hand blindly reached back to pat Kasse’s leg and squeeze his knee. The older man’s field experience honed him into somewhat of an ideal team leader: not only did Brint always know exactly how he wanted to approach a skirmish, he was good at praising his men for the thankless duty they’d been tasked with.

But was that what that was?

Caught in the radiance of the outbound afternoon, Eoran’s eyes flashed Kasse a look. It was a confusing thing, harsh—vacillating somewhere between the sentiments ‘get fucking serious’ and ‘get the fuck over here’—but gentle in its retreat. Perhaps an apology for overstepping his boundaries, or perhaps a resurgence of nerves, or perhaps a mild measure of longing.

Was that what that was? Longing. For what? To get this over with? To go back to base? Or something different—something else?

Eoran wasn’t sure of himself either, but his face had its ways of tattling on him. It threatened his deepest secrets in ways he may not have even thought to attempt hiding. Only in a very particular light was a peculiar trait of that boy revealed: his eyes didn’t match. The blacks were somewhat off, like they were paint mixed by a single manufacturer but with subtle variances in formula yielding batches that differed in chroma. The young PFC looked beyond his friend.

Brint was on the move again and the Toriet boy jumped up to follow close behind with an uncharacteristic eagerness.

The road before them stretched long and since the area was cleared, the sergeant thought to chance it with a longer sprint between points of cover. If the enemy was not yet enticed with their movement enough to take some pot shots and reveal their locations, then this effort might help in drawing them out. Boots scampered across roads half-paved. They made it to a clearing encircled by the remnants of a neighborhood. The atmosphere seized up—

And then they heard it. The sound. All encompassing. Oppressive and overwhelming, like resurfacing from a deep dive to the teeming of life, a bubble popped, a crack in their soundscape through which bled the calamity of a million little explosions of gunpowder. They were surrounded by popping and whinging, grazing. Metal on metal, metal on rock, metal on sand.

Metal on meat.

Of fucking course, the mongrel boy’s mind screeched as he found three separate platforms in close proximity and dropped the gunmen through floors that were no longer floors by his utility’s command. The echo of the sergeant’s touch burned up his leg like acid, commingling with the confused smattering of misinterpretations he read on Eoran’s face. Was he mad at him for fucking around before the firefight? Was he into Brint? Was that what that was?

“Of fucking course—” he repeated through gritted teeth as he picked up speed, ducking himself under Brint’s arm and bearing the burden of his weight. They didn’t have time for their grazed CO to respond to his fleshwound and he snagged Eoran by the belt loop and gave him a sharp tug, eyes connecting in something like an apology before he dragged the other PFC into an imbalance that could only be corrected by falling into a run.

“Don’t return, don’t return fire—” Kasse was barking orders, stressed, overcompensating. Was he taking control so aggressively because he hadn’t seen or because he hadn’t realized? Had he been so quick to pick up Brint’s slack because he wanted to be close to his touch again or because he was gifted with an eagle eye view of their bigger picture? Was that what this was? “—move move move—”

As the remnants of the disabled snipers’ bullet sprays hit the sand when they surely should have struck true, Kasse tumbled into a claustrophobic alleyway between two hollowed out storefronts, dropping Brint to the ground and clearing their immediate vicinity before he returned to the sergeant and his best friend. He pulled up his shirt to tear a strip from his undershirt, visually assessing the wound on their superior’s arm. 

Rifle thrown across his back in a brisk adjustment of its sling, Eoran was on his knees, puffs of rusty dust billowing into the shade of the alleyway with the played out gust of their hurried movements. His hands tightly gripped the sergeant’s arm, just above the seeping wound, in a makeshift tourniquet until Kasse was ready with the cloth. The camouflage of Brint’s uniform began to turn a shade of red unlike any other.

A gruff voice screamed after the trio’s slapdash retreat. A rebel, native, location given away mostly by the glinting of some silver draped around his neck. A dog tag maybe. A charm, more likely. The slurs were shouted from an elevated platform. Surviving the air assault had apparently turned the loud man brazen.

“Suekkaejasin, Varoniakarang!” He spat the curses into the air. “Mongikinakoro da yagosesa? Yaheodoro yayeva n yakarangaene?!” Traitors of blood, brothers of Death! You would sell your bodies to your oppressors? You would let them turn your gift on your brothers?

Eoran’s eyebrows furrowed, shock of the word confined to wide witness of his briefly wandering stare. Gift. Was he being called out for what he was? He couldn’t affect people like that, it wasn’t how he worked.

“What the fuck is that guy yelling about?” Brint grumbled in his pain, back against the wall, sightline directed to the mouth of their narrow passage. For how quickly the situation deteriorated, he remained calm. Calm was key. Panic killed.

“He said we’re traitors,” Eoran quickly snapped, eyes returning to Brint, then to Kasse. “Uh—you know, to our people. Like we’re betraying our blood by being here.”

Mouth a tight line, Kasse knew exactly who the man was yelling at. The freedom fighter was a blip on his quantum radar, a short scream escaping the rooftop the man had been shouting from before there was only silence. 

“Another team must be nearby,” the streetrat noted plainly, monotone as he adjusted Eoran’s hand to place pressure on Brint’s brachial artery. He focused on the sergeant then, ripping the CO’s sleeve above the wound and tying off the makeshift tourniquet. 

“Could have been worse, right?” He was a little sheepish, maybe a little shy. He offered the superior officer a tilted grin before he dared take up Eoran’s glare. Kasse didn’t speak Ossan fluently, but he sure as fuck knew what yayeva meant.

He lingered in his friend’s blackwater stare, the both of them existing as two independently functioning tangles of muddled emotion all amok and bereaved and hungry and fearful. The older boy tried to interpret what he saw there and found himself insufficient, lacking any hope in translating his friend’s words left unspoken. 

Kasse only knew that Eoran wanted something—and if he wanted someone it had to be Brint.

Was that what that was? Want?

That had to be it.

“I’m sorry, sergeant,” Kasse said softly as he dressed the wound, ripping his grey eyes away from Eoran’s captivity. “I should have seen them, heard them. I didn’t watch close enough—”

“Don’t let it get to your heads,” Brint replied, “Not that fuckin’ guy or any of these guys out here. Yeah, we stepped into an ant pile and now they’re all riled up, but look, we got through all that shit-slinging with only a shot to the arm. And no suppressive fire needed! Damn, this must be what LTs meant when they said you two were lucky.” When the green of Brint’s eyes turned on Kasse, they were gentle. He was the type of man to obscure himself beneath crude joshing, but authenticity always seemed to emphasize banter in these scenarios, hearts frenzied before a dubious future, seconds dawdling in a prolonged torment of time. “Save your apologies for the lid of my casket, Sejan. Until then? This is nothing.”

Eoran withdrew to take up a watch position while Kasse was rendering first aid. His rifle was righted and ready, directed to the end of the alleyway nearest to them as his gaze darted from point to point all around him, scanning not so much for human-like figures as he was for the movement of them.

“Toriet. How does it look?” Brint continued on a breath, pained from the manipulation of his wound.

“Clear—” Eoran answered, “—Ish. If they’re still there, then they’ve gone back into hiding. No movement spotted.”

“Alright,” Brint said. “There were a lot of them and they couldn’t have gone far. Three against who-the-fuck-knows-how-many means I doubt they’ve run off, so we’re going to start sweeping these buildings. We have to move before they have a chance to gang up on us. Ready?” The sergeant pushed himself up from the ground, maneuvering the weight of his body with his legs and good arm.

“Mm, lucky,” Kasse murmured, helping the sergeant to his feet, eyes up. Distant focus coloured the young soldier’s gaze in darkened tones, already aware of what became of the snipers. Once Brint was on his feet, Kasse wiped the CO’s blood off on his pants, digging into his pocket to retrieve one of the field ration energy bars he obsessively collected from the other recruits in their squad. Everyone else seemed to find them vile, but the lanky hoodlum seemed willing to trade nearly anything for them, even if that sort of bargaining was mostly unnecessary. More often than not, the other PFCs were throwing the prepackaged ultra-dense cardboard bars out. 

Shoving half a bar in his face, he quickly wrapped the remainder and shoved it back in his pocket scanning the rooftops as he chewed.

“Ready, sir.” Kasse was already heading down the alley, checking the back doors he found there. Both locked. “Let me go around on my own, sir. I’ll find another way in—open it from the inside.”

It was no secret that Kasse Sejan joined the military on a B&E—the boy was strangely adept at finding his way into places kept off limits, weaseling his way past any and every lock and key. 

Brint nodded his agreement. It wasn’t ideal, but they were the disadvantaged team, so they had to make do with the situation they’d been given. “Alright, Seja—”

“What?!” Eoran spun around, mouth agape. “You can’t send him alone. I can cover him! Let me cover him!” There was pleading in the boy’s expression, double-crossed by his tone. His voice scarcely warbled in a pitch tottering near the cliff edge of an octave reserved for bereavement. With one of them injured, the possibility of a tangible loss was all the more palpable and anxiety welled beneath Eoran’s skin.

“Kasse—” He looked to his friend again, eyes a lengthy checklist of emotion. Devotion. Concern. An eerie shade of suspicion. He begged through the abstruse well-dark depth of his focus. The last line of that list read: don’t leave me.

That was what that was.

“He’s quick,” Brint argued for Kasse’s case, “If he can find a better entrance than us going through all that mess again, then we’ll be better off. Besides, it’s easier for one pair of boots to sneak than it is for two. Move, Sejan.”

Nodding affirmation of his orders, collapsing star intensity, that boy who offered himself as the sacrifice didn’t linger long with the sergeant even if his illegibly intentioned up-and-down trespassed Brint one more time—even though this wasn’t a goodbye. Perhaps Kasse Sejan was overconfident in his ability to stay alive, but more pertinent really was his lack of choice.

How could this go any other way? What other option was there?

Kasse couldn’t catch every bullet. That much was obvious, painted in the oxidizing blood stripes running dry up his leg. He couldn’t risk discovery. Couldn’t risk distraction. Couldn’t stop thinking about…

What even was this?

When he approached Eoran, the boy put on that easy grin that broke the condescending severity his sullen face naturally assumed, offered his friend that reassuring smile of his, dressing his face in the boyishly handsome shades that Eoran always seemed to trust. He took his friend’s arm and squeezed, leaning in. “I’ll be back before you know it. I’m just going around the corner, okay?”

Eoran felt a weakness in himself and bristled. His gaze fell to the ground, mortified by his outburst but thankful their superior was tired enough from his injury to not immediately discipline him for it. It was hot, even in the shade. Amstead’s army uniform was heavy, the gear attached to it was a burden, the clothes underneath his sand-streaked shell clung to his skin in a slick of sweat. His cheeks felt flushed. Gods, was the desert always so hot?

Eoran acquiesced to Kasse’s comfort for the second time that day. He wasn’t necessarily happy about it, nor did he really take it to heart, but he heard the words and acknowledged them; saw that smile and bent his will before it. Watching the other boy’s feet, Eoran simply nodded.

“Look at me.” Kasse’s demand was achromatic, a subdued urgency only vibrant in the hazy heat between them. His grip tightened—perhaps the boy wasn’t so removed from his mortality after all. “Say something. Tell me you’ll see me in a minute. Just say something.”

When Eoran’s mouth opened, an exhale filled the space that was meant for words. He stumbled in a soundless blink, then returned up to his friend. Their separations were small degrees—Eoran was a little shorter, softer, younger. “Be careful. Hurry back. If you get into trouble call out and I’ll come running—”

“Ahem,” Brint coughed into the top of a balled fist.

“Go,” Eo concluded.

Kasse nodded to Eoran as his hand moved to pat his shoulder, to rest passively in the solid reality of his best friend’s presence for just a moment more. He turned back to Brint with a shitty careless smirk dancing so crooked and light on his sharply marked face, denying the significance of the prior moment to all observers. “Morale, sir. Gotta keep that morale up, you know.” 

With a half-assed cheesy salute, that vandal of a boy disappeared around the corner without another sound. The pair left behind settled into their watch.