#dnadbnbweek | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hankwritten · 2 years

Text

Timebent

For Boots n Bombs week 2022 Day 3 - Seasonal/Time/Change

There was blood under his nails and on his boots and in his mouth, but none of it had mattered in the end. One of his teammates had elbowed him inside and there he had stayed, in the lower reaches of the base as he stared down at balled fists until someone on the stair above turned off the light. They didn’t notice he was down there. He didn’t attempt to rectify that.

Instead, he gritted his teeth at bloodstains that weren’t there. All that. All that to be beaten by some English sissy who couldn’t hold his drink, who said lies as easily as he moved fingers down a bottle’s neck. Who would promise anything: that RED or BLU uniforms didn’t truly mean anything, that the two of them were above it all. Hah.

Soldier had danced along to his tune. Had revealed things to him things that-

Well. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered when the one thing he still had, the thing that could help him whisper still got it, was being A Soldier. A Soldier who didn’t lose, or at least went to his death screaming a battle cry, glorious in his doom. But this farce, this fucking thing She had arranged wouldn’t even give him that. He’d lost, and he was still standing.

He closed his eyes in the soundless cool of the based and wished by anything that he was dead-

And he opened them to his bedroom ceiling.

The familiar spiderweb of cracks oozed from the single ceiling fixture, identifiable even the grayest morning light. Soldier knew without checking it was 5am. It was always 5am when he woke; it was the one thing he could trust, perhaps the only thing he could trust from his fluxing diorama of a mind. He blinked away the sand gumming his eyes. He sat. After a moment, he swung his legs out of bed and went to take a shower.

You must understand something about the Soldier. When a man who’s had his sanity questioned again and again, by himself and by others, hounded always by the worry—fear, accusation—that nothing he says is fact, it dulls one's enthusiasm to question. It is simply not worth it to acknowledge when reality is wrong, to press further when he knows something is not right. It was why he didn’t bother even that first time when that TV-man came around—and that man was back again, Soldier falling behind the sofa with his shotgun raised, the same demands pouring from his mouth because he said them the first time and they seem just as appropriate now—because although he wanted there something to be wrong with the RED’s voice, he knew he was deluding himself. So do not judge him too harshly for this. There was no fog in his mind, no vague sense of déjà vu that kept him from realizing the facts. He simply discovered he’d done this all before, assumed he was going insane, and thought nothing more of it.

He just wished that going through it wouldn’t hurt so much the second time.

They delivered his new weapons to BLU base, eager and waiting for him like a litter of puppies impatient for their master to be home. He shouldered the new rocket launcher, testing its weight. A little heavier near the front—odd, but he’d get used to it.

He had before.

The screeching open of the grates played out like he expected, and because he was expecting the sight of Demo to stab him like a knife to the gut he should have been prepared for it. He wasn’t. He worked himself up, assuring himself he didn’t care, that this was payback and nothing more, but as soon as the Demoman’s figure stepped seething out into the sunlight his heart proceeded to disintegrate. Demo caught sight of him. That eye narrowed, and he once again screamed something Soldier couldn’t parse.

The new rocket launcher bucked in his arms, but the trajectory was for a man running at normal speed, not this unnatural charge Demo somehow managed to master overnight. The RED easily avoided the rocket, and immediately Soldier’s life was in danger.

He managed to dodge out of the way only barely, the brutal spike of the shield imbedding itself in the wood where a Soldier-shaped puff of dust was still lingering. This dance again, it seemed. Demo’s head whipped sideways, tracking Soldier’s leap, and his upper lip curled in a snarl.

They went to their mêlée weapons with little grace but blinding, limb-rendering passion. Was this how they’d been before this assignment? Soldier could barely remember it. It was like a dream those nights, how laughter could feel like explosions and arms over the shoulder was an adrenaline spike straight to the veins. Now was the encore, the steps again, and Soldier, smashed aside an oncoming strike so hard it made sparks fly.

Demo drew back, winding up the sword for a downward swing-

He’s going to try to feint.

The memory came on so quickly, so powerfully, Soldier had no choice but to obey. He didn’t react to the overhead, instead dodging to his left as the sword suddenly appeared where he’d been a moment before. No time wasted, the crooked angle of his pickaxe made short work of Demo’s wrist, disarming him in an instant. Another spin, and its diamond-point embedded itself in the RED’s gut.

Demo’s face was a flicker of confusion as though he, too, was expecting that to play out the same as before. As suddenly as he had appeared in Soldier’s sphere, he slumped, and the weight of the other man nearly took Soldier to his knees.

He ended up with an arm full of scot, and then there was no nearly about it. That damn sword had gotten him on the leg, and he was forced to breath through his mouth due to the friendly hello of a broken nose. Demo’s neck rolled back over Soldier’s forearm, looking blankly at the sky.

Soldier shared the corpse’s incredulity. It was real. He knew things before they would happen. The week of mire and misery was playing again.

He’d been given another chance.

“You,” he told the betrayer, heartbreaker, ex-friend resting in his arms. “You stand no chance maggot. This time. This time victory is mine.”

Tick, tick.

Soldier launched so furiously back into the War, you might never have known he was gone. For most people that was the case, but Soldier knew better now. He would not simply repeat the motions oh no, he would strategize, he would improve upon all he learned from his time fighting tooth and nail against the worst kind of enemy.

And it worked. For a time. It always only works for a time.

Because although Soldier was living the War again those around him were not. They began to adapt, and change, most importantly those tactics of the Demoman with whom Soldier was so bitterly embroiled swung to the insidious. He first noticed when—on the second day after he had tore through his detested like he was so much meaty tissue paper—he sat, preparing an ambush. He knew Demo was coming this way, taking his favored flank route around the barely-a-building that lounged up this stretch of Dustbowl. But. It was taking rather long. Too long. Something worried had just settled in his mind when two stickies pattered cheerfully against his back.

Soldier materialized at respawn in panic.

“You uh…alright there pally?” Scout asked him. He nearly bowled the younger man over as he raced past.

It hadn’t been strange to get the post-respawn anxieties, but that had been years ago, years of fighting and anti-nausea pills and knowing where you stand. Like this time. When Soldier he had thought there was all there was to know and the eons of time were stretched before him like a tapestry where he could pull every thread. Clearly, there was much to learn.

The end of the week came and went, same conclusion of inevitability. The gulf between scores was narrower, but still. It didn’t matter how close to success you came—not when these were the stakes.

Soldier woke at 5am Monday morning. It didn’t surprise him. Some other man might worry if it was a one time shot, that this improbable warping of the forces of nature wouldn’t bend for him a second time, but Soldier didn’t waste the energy. Either it would or it wouldn’t, and when he opened his eyes to a view full of spiderweb, he knew it was the former.

At noon the TV man came by. This time Soldier nodded along patiently. He’d always known Demo would twist the knife in the end, and always would. That’s what happens when you hand people knives. They twist.

Tuesday 7am, and he began to perfect his art. Yes he’d won a few matches the last time around, but shakily, by luck and improvisation. He would start memorizing the patterns, seeing the strings. Demo came at him to spill the day’s first blood, saying something Soldier still couldn’t hear, but this time he knew exactly what to do. Maybe he couldn’t trust his mind much but this he would make it do.

Wednesday was better. He was beginning to understand the Demoman, how he reacted when he lost, when he won. Soldier was starting to wonder if he knew him in ways that would be impossible under normal circumstances; the way he moved, how he ticked. Each muscle moving under his skin when he swung that blade. Few could study another individual so fully. Not to this extent.

Obsession was fine. It was what he needed right now.

He still lost that week. But the margin was closing, and he had all the time in the world.

Monday. Wake up. Shower. Conflict of interest. As long as he agreed right off the bat, they wouldn’t even bother showing him the video. He preferred it that way.

He killed Demo thirteen times in a single day.

On Friday, he won.

Despite shreds of time littered at his feet, this seemed the most unbelievable thing. Now it was Demo who was forced to turn, tail between his legs, Soldier’s teammates jeering as he left. The man with the TV was there for the commencement. Or maybe it was a different man, who’s to say? “Congratulations,” his woman said. “You have avoided disappointing me. Your reward is waiting for you on base.”

They were shoes. Just shoes. A couple of boots that were—yes—sturdy and American-made, but they were just shoes. He pried open the Mann Co. crate with a crowbar and just stood there staring at them, long after the rest of BLU had tottered into their cars and gone home, long after he stopped feeling his fingers. Whoever had been last out had forgotten to close the front door you see, so it had grown quite cold. Whoever it was probably thought Soldier would lock up when he left.

If he left.

He never did.

By the last stroke of midnight, he could no longer feel any of his extremities, except where he’d been slowly pushing his thumb into a large splinter of wood, feeling the rightness in the way blood welled at the end of it.

Night snapped away and Soldier snapped up in bed. Something strangled, panicked, escaped his voicebox that might have been ‘no’ but that was giving him quite a lot of credit. He scrambled to his feet, kicking away what would have been sheets if the Soldier wasn’t so committed to sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor. He checked his footlocker: nothing. Not under the dresser, not in the small pile of clothes that was really more of the functional dresser than his actual one.

He had hoped. Truly hoped that if he could find the Gunboats, that would break the spell. It would prove that his sudden lapse in memory was just one of his usual gaps, and he had gone home that night and tucked his prize safely away. But then the knock came, and the vile insults from the TV, and the static that always followed.

He hadn’t escaped.

Well, maybe he should just try harder.

Every day he woke and every day his score grew larger. More and more, win after win, opening the crate with the Gunboats and staring down at him, praying this would be the time. What more could She want from him? What more could he give? He achieved success and still she would not let him escape.

There was a strange satisfaction in tormenting the Demoman. If this was Soldier’s hell, why couldn’t it be his too. It was his fault after all, his fault hIS FAULT-

“Jane. Jane please-”

You could always wring a new reaction out of him. It was of the few pleasures Soldier had left, trying to poke there, prod there, see something new. If Soldier only used his stock, what then? If he dodged all battle, would it drive the RED crazy?

“Stop, would you just-”

The only thing of interest. The only thing Soldier cared about anymore, only thing he cared to understand-

“JANE.”

Soldier ground to a halt. He’d been walking forward in a daze, step by menacing step, his broken arm hanging limply to his side while the other hand clutched his pickaxe. There was a trail of blood down the alley behind him.

In front was a Demoman far worse off than he was. His eye was swollen and purple around the edges, bruises stretching his face until it was all the consistency of pounded meat. He sat awkwardly, back pressed against the wall, his leg tucked under him in a way it definitely wasn’t supposed to bend. He was crying.

“Jesus Jane…why. Why all of this?”

Soldier woozily looked around. He barely remembered hunting the injured Demo into this corner of the map. These days were so filled with violence they blended, static noise and a face always watching.

Demo curled further into himself. “…Oh Jesus. I know why. I deserve this don’t I? Earned it. Devil’s deal and you earn yourself hell. I’m sorry, God I’m sorry. Jane I…”

Demo…Demo was talking to him. Never, in all the-

Months was it now? Sweet Lady Liberty.

-Soldier had been running this course had he been able to accomplish that before. And suddenly, every synapse in his body screaming for it at once, he needed Demo’s words like he needed air to breathe.

But with just as much certainty, he realized was terrified to hear it. All he’d had to do to get a word from his best friend was torture him, over and over, until he had begged Soldier to stop. Wasn’t that funny? Just plain hilarious.

Soldier turned and ran.

He waited out the rest of that night away from chokepoints and sunlight. Battle still found him, but thankfully never the Demoman, never the one person Soldier would regret. This lost opportunity for points hardly mattered however; no, Soldier’s count was too far-gone for that. The Administrator presented him with another pair of Gunboats. He stared at them. This needed to work this time, he knew, he knew he hadn’t done as well but please, please he needed out-

Spiderwebs in his eyes. He closed them. They were wet and burning hot at the corners.

That day when the knocking came he ignored it. He hid like he’d hid on that last day, shirking from a Soldier’s duty out of fear, out of cowardice. Oh, how regret could destroy a man. How baring your heart to the one person who was worth it all could weaken even the proudest of Americans. Make him hate the battle he should go gladly marching into.

He wouldn’t do it. He’d ripped the door open to stop the incessant knocking, and told her straight to her face he’d play no more of her games.

Three hours later, a bag over his head and his hands bound behind him, she had him shot out at the nearest gravel pit.

Well. That could have gone better.

The next Monday he did the smart thing and left immediately, planning to run for the wilds with nothing but his shotgun, the clothes on his back, and several cans of rations. He realized this did not include a can-opener about an hour walk into the range outside of Thunder Mountain, but it was too late to head back now. He wondered what would happen if he starved out here. After all, he’d already proven he couldn’t die, respawn or no.

Maybe that’s how she’d gotten all this up and running? Some sort of new respawn that instead of popping out a new you upon death, simply…rewound to a point where you were no longer dead.

These existential questions only vaguely played in the background of Soldier’s mind as he kept walking, fading into a fatigue that was more than just hunger. His mind was worn thin, and as he stood on a peak he hadn’t even realized he was ascending, he wondered when the last time was that he just…breathed. Filling his lungs with mountain air.

He missed being alive.

So he stopped walking after that. He laid down, and he hid, and he hoped that whatever grip her magic not-respawn had on him, it had some sort of range.

When he woke up the next morning, it was Monday.

Soldier got up. He showered. He ate breakfast out of a can and considered shaving; there wouldn’t be much of a point, it’d always be that exact same level of scruff whether he did anything or not. He decided it was the principal of the thing, and picked up his razor.

At noon he nodded along to everything the Administrator said. On Tuesday, he went to work at BLU. He stood as he often did, Direct Hit on his shoulder, feet working anticipation into the hard dirt, waiting for the door to open and for Demo to come blinking out into the sunlight.

It opened and he did, his hand raised to block out the unrelenting shine of the desert and give him the chance to spy his prey. He did. And, for some odd reason, for the very first time, Soldier was close enough this time the battle cry as Demo came screaming in.

“Lord forgive me!”

He ran upward, deadly shield spike pointed forward, but Soldier didn’t dodge away. He met the blow head on, maneuvering just enough space that he wouldn’t be impaled. Their heads so close together, he asked, “why?”

The dark ferocity under Demo’s muscles choked to a halt.

“Why?” Soldier repeated. “Why all of this? Why did you do this to me Tav?”

Because it wasn’t the Administrator haunting him, was it?

The muscles in Soldier’s arms seized; refined in tactics and the threads of the world he might possess, but any training he put his body through was wiped away at the end of the week. Where the mind grew the flesh faltered. The spike lurched forward into Soldier’s gut.

Surprise blinked over Demo’s face, just like when Soldier had figured out how to disarm him for the first time. Now it was Soldier’s turn to slump into his arms.

“Jane, wait, I didn’t mean-”

The gray at the edge of his vision came on fast. He wasn’t sure if the ‘I’m sorry’ he heard was imagined or not.

He could not lose, he could not win, nothing satisfied these unseen rules. But he couldn’t hide either. Things had to play out, here in the badlands under sweat and duress. They met, again and again, but Soldier could feel how different it was, that neither of their hearts were in it. Days where they might kill each other, days when they might not. The week stretched on, and Soldier played his part.

“You…you are alright though, right lad?” Demo whispered once near the waning days, after declaring rather unconvincingly he had bested the Soldier once again.

The words reached Soldier’s ears and he stirred, blinking through oncoming death like it was the headlights of a train. A hand brushed his neck as the war grew further away.

That night, they met for the first time in centuries.

It felt that way to Soldier, though for Demo he knew it must have only been a few days. They hadn’t planned, they hadn’t conspired. They simply showed up, clambered up the grain elevator next to the point, and sat there.

“We did something like this once,” Soldier noted. “During that gravel tour we went on. We snuck away, and climbed up one of those big drills in the pits.”

Demo said nothing.

They sat there, swinging their legs over the edge. The moon was rising. Soldier said, “we are very good at torturing each other.”

“That’s what happens when you give your heart away,” Demo said softly, looking at his boots against the redwashed ground below. “There’s this big hole in your side where it popped outta, and there’s nothing stopping them from ramming it right back in. Hurts a lot more on reentry.”

“Won’t argue that.”

“I never meant to-” Demo looked over sharply. “We have to go through with this now, you know that right?”

“Better than you do, maggot.” Soldier wanted to sneer, but just the fact that Demo was looking at him again was almost more than he could bear. “But…I fucked this up first. I thought I was going crazy but I knew it wasn’t you.”

That caught Demo up short. And why wouldn’t it? He hadn’t lived the lives Soldier had, hadn’t had time to come to those realizations. But, even after all the time he’d had to think, Soldier still couldn’t figure one thing.

“Why?” he asked again. “Why are you holding up your end of this?”

“I…” Demo glanced away. Goddamn shame, enough that he wouldn’t tell Soldier when he needed to know it most. “Please, let’s just forget it. We go back. We have this.”

He reached out, trailing fingers on the back of Soldier’s neck. Soldier stiffened.

“Let’s just be alright,” he pleaded. Then he pulled Soldier’s head toward him, resting it there on his shoulder.

The moon rose higher.

“Alright,” Soldier said.

Midnight ticked over, and Soldier woke up screaming.

It was almost a quaint little repeat of his first ever Monday. He smashed every item in his home, just like he had when he’d heard ‘civilian’ that fist time, tearing at the drywall until the meth addict downstairs banged on the ceiling and told him to shut up. He fell to his knees in the middle of the destruction and hollered anguish until his throat was raw.

No, no this wouldn’t be taken from him. He balled his fists and stared at the knot of wood closest to his nose, a dark brown dot in an otherwise swirling abyss. The grains moved around it, parting, but never moving it from where it was.

Soldier stood. He would not give in. A Soldier went to his deafeat screaming bloody murder.

He knew where the mansion was, though he’d only ever been there once. The place was just as massive as he remembered, odd and ends of architecture that held no appeal to anyone but a demolitions man; an occupation dedicated to the art of collapsing. He wandered closer getting hit in the shins with the automatic sprinklers, feeling oddly ambivalent about water in the desert.

The fountain though. That was the sort of thing that drew you in.

He heard Pauling before he saw her, ducking behind Odin’s looming form as he blotted out the rising sun. Purple—she was like the Administrator, their lies and nothing more. He heard only the tail end of her offer, but he got the picture.

He made sure her little purple scooter was well beyond the limits of the property’s fense before making himself known. “Really? All for a damn bribe?”

Demo, who’d been holding out the Eyelander for glorious inspection, whipped around at the sound of Soldier’s voice. He drew the hilt closer to his chest, blade still pointed up, like he’d been caught sneaking a sweet treat he wasn’t supposed to have.

Behind his eye, his mind was doing obvious flips, trying to make sense of the Soldier’s appearance. “You- I-” The eye narrowed. “So. You hear to do the job you backstabber?”

“That was all a crock of bull and you know it, DeGroot,” Soldier said without venom. He put his hands in his coat pockets. “Don’t sell the shit back to the man you bought it from.”

Again Demo’s expression danced around, trying to find an appropriate reaction, opening his mouth several times before ultimately glancing away. That shame again. Oh Tav.

“I need this,” he said. “It’s not just a bribe. It’s about honor.”

“Wrong again maggot!” Soldier began to walk toward him. “It isn’t about the sword. It wasn’t about the contract. It was about believing what they said when they handed it to you. You were the one who taught me RED and BLU don’t mean crap. You were the one who wanted to be above it all. So act like it.”

“It’s not that easy-” Demo backpedaled.

Soldier lunged at him. Demo held the sword in front of him, but his eye was squeezed shut, head turned away. Soldier batted the blade aside with ease and grabbed Demo by the front of his shirt.

“AM I YOUR ENEMY TAVISH?”

Demo blinked his eye open. “I- I-”

“It’s a simple question. Am I your enemy? I don’t give a damn if you take the sword, I don’t give a damn if you kill me for the next week or not. They don’t win unless you decide they do.”

The sword point lowers, slowly at first, then drops to the lawn altogether. “No…no Janey. You’re not my enemy. You…Never.”

The hand, full of red fabric that’d looked so different when covered with this man’s blood instead of twisted in his shirt, loosened. It climbed higher holding Demo behind the neck. “Good. And don’t you forget it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still have a home invasion to deter.”

He left, back across the lawn, starting the next long trek back to his house. But the journey would be worth it. He filled his lungs, then let it all go.

Days later, a phone rang in the DeGroot mansion.

“Hello?” Demo said with a slowly mounting frustration only impeded by the sheer sleepiness around it.

“Tavish.” Soldier’s voice sounded in awe, like he could barely believe it. “Tavish, it’s 1am.”

“Aye? And is that time significant aside from the fact that I was sleeping through it?”

There was a long pause. A smile on the other side of the line. “No, I guess not. Are you sleeping right now?”

“Obviously not. I’m answering phone calls from my barmy best mate is what I’m doing.”

“Oh.” A slightly shorter pause. “Do you want to talk about your day?”

“You were at my day lad, we spent the whole time fighting each other. Kicking my arse too. Still don’t know how you always manage to be two steps ahead of me.”

“Army man’s secret.” Soldier scratched his chin. “I uh…got some boots. As my prize for winning the War.”

“Ah. That’s nice.” For a moment, there was a line between them made up of more than a pair of curling phone cords. If you were to ask either of them, though, they wouldn’t be able to say what. “Do you…want to tell me about them?”

Soldier did. With glee, he launched into an explanation of splash damage and explosive thrust, and neither he nor Demo stopped grinning for the rest of the night.

#dnadbnbweek #demosolly #tf2 fanfiction

16 notes · View notes

hankwritten · 2 years

Text

The Scarlet Prince

For Boots n Bombs week 2022 Day 6 - Star Crossed/Team Colors/Long Distance

The drapes parted with groaning rings, having done their job so diligently that when they were finally parted from the chamber’s windows it plunged the entire tower into day.

“Up,” Marcel demanded, arms spread, the act of throwing apart Jane’s only protection against the wretched day now emblazoned across the General’s retinas as an ugly silhouette.

Jane pulled one of those useless pillows with buttons in it over his head. “You are a dead man.”

“And we’re both late men, but I will not allow you to make us any later. Now get dressed; unlike the latest dozen or so assemblies I have pretended not to notice your absence, this one is actually important.”

Jane didn’t try to guess how the Spymaster had gotten into his room. Probably picked the lock, bribed a servant for the key or, hell, turned to smoke and slid under the jam for all Jane knew. Bastard was slippery like that. Instead of bothering himself with it, Jane tried to go back to the dream.

It had been so tangible, remembered grass and a place where a jut of land bulged out into a great rushing river. The earth ended in a sudden bank of red clay, dipping down into the water’s edge, and Jane’s hands picked up fistfuls of it, watching the edocha squelch through his fingers. A castle rose from the mud. They’d been building it, a place where they’d rule together, moats of pebbles and grass as flying-flags, promises that’d it all be theirs…

“Do you remember the bank with the red dirt?” Jane asked, swinging his legs off the side of the bed and interrupting whatever meeting-shmeeting stuff Marcel had been rambling about.

The Spymaster cut him a glare. “Is that some military jargon I’m supposed to be aware of?”

“I remembered something.” Jane got to his feet. Marcel had already hung his parade uniform on the outside of his wardrobe. It was white mostly, a tassel on the shoulder and a dozen buttons to pin the left breast in place. Simple. Even for cermony’s sake, Jane was practical. “When we were kids, we used to go to the river. It was as far as we were allowed to go.”

Even going to a simple assembly, Marcel was decked out in his finest wear; the rounded half cloak, the cavalier hat with its ostrich feather. “I did not know you as a child, Jane,�� he waved away with impatience.

It felt like he’d heard that before, been told that before, but as Jane looked at the uniform in his hands—thick, calloused, adult hands—he kept trying to push the dream through his ears and back into his head. “We built this castle, and we said we’d-”

“You’re thinking of someone else.”

This time it was harsh, and Jane looked over his shoulder just in time to see Marcel flinching with something that might have been regret. Whatever it was, it was over quickly.

“I swear,” he said, sinking back into his usual state of irate aloofness. “I do not understand what goes on in that head of yours.”

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. Sun Tzu said that.”

Marcel sighed. “Did he say anything about being punctual to a meeting of the king's highest ranked advisors?”

“The value of time, that is of being a little ahead of your opponent, often provides greater advantage than superior numbers or greater resources.”

“Wonderful. With this den of vipers, we’re going to need every advantage we can get. Get dressed and come along.”

Jame grumbled, feeling he’d been handily outplayed. He grabbed his steel helm, rounded on each side until the brim came to a point, its only dormant a blue plume to match Marcel’s, and followed him out the door.

There was a small spot of drool on the table when Tavish finally lifted his head, next to a larger spot of wormwood extract that was slowly expanding. Bother. That could have been bad. Tavish shook himself, wiped up the chemical spill, and reminded himself that a careless alchemist was a dead alchemist.

Yet somehow even with his penchant for the inebriated lifestyle he always managed to avoid that particular fate. Lucky him.

The lab had no windows in order to protect the delicate composition of the photosensitive ingredients, but poking his head into the entryway revealed that it was well past noon, and Tavish groaned the groan of a man in Big Trouble. His lady mother would be in a fit, and the cowardly part of him wanted to close the door, go back to synthesizing some gunpowder, and let another day evaporate before him. He might have just, if he didn’t know his Mum, and knew that if he kept at this for much longer she’d send her servants crawling over the whole castle. If they did that, sooner or later they’d find the lab that’d supposedly been locked up since Da died. Sighing, he tidied up the remains of his project, and went to go do some damage control.

“Tavish Finnegan DeGroot-”

It was too early for this. Early for him anyway, though when he found Mum it was clear she’d been up for hours, tersely informing him that she didn’t plan their breakfasts together for idle chitchat. Nor their lunches. Nor the dozen other meetings and tailor fittings she managed to cram into the scant few hours he was actually awake per day, to the point where he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had a moment to himself that he hadn’t carved out through guile.

“I’m sorry Mum,” he said, trying to cut her off before she worked herself into another heart complication. “I slept through the morning.”

“I had Erwina check your rooms and she couldn’t find hide nor hair!”

“Aye, I was…in the gardens.”

He was banking on the fact that Mum wouldn’t have thought to send Erwina there of all places, and the lie could go unchallenged. Based on the twitch in her jaw, that seemed to be the case. A gamble not without losses though. His only other place of solitude. He’d have to be more careful when sneaking there for clandestine swordplay in the future.

“Bah,” she said, facing the outer curve of the sun-drenched balcony, knowing by the way the wind touched over her face. “Here he is this son of mine, drinking plum wine and sleeping in rosebushes, not a care in his head for the running of a kingdom.”

“I don’t run the kingdom,” Tavish pointed out.

“You will. If you’d come to breakfast, you’d know Redmond declared you his heir last night.”

It shouldn’t have been surprising. And it wouldn’t have, to anyone else—to anyone who hadn’t been holding hope like a shield, as though if he just kept his attitude positive enough then suddenly the oncoming blade of fate would simply glance off and land on someone else.

He swallowed. “It’s…his health has gotten that bad?”

“Ach, where have you been lad? I swear, head up in the clouds. You didn’t always used to be like this.”

The memory came back sharp and stinging, not because he hadn’t thought about it recently, but because he was used to it being a silent scream inside his own head. Mum caught him off guard, telling him it was a real thing that the whole kingdom had lived through, not a nightmare of his own making. Every Scarlet had shook during that surprise attack on the eastern plains, when a swarm of Cerulean knights had renewed the war in earnest, bowing to treachery and making sure no family hadn’t experienced at least some loss that day. It was the day he’d lost his father, the day he’d last seen-

“I dragged the tailor back by his ear,” Mum’s words shot through his thoughts. “He’s rescheduled for later this evening.”

“What do I need a tailor for?” Tavish said, still reeling, trying not to show his head was more in the clouds than even she thought.

“Because the Grand Ball is coming up, and it’s our best chance to find you a wife. We need that settled before Redmond kicks it.”

The acrid taste in his mouth renewed sevenfold. His hands tightened on the banister. “I’m already betrothed.”

“Blood and spite Tavish, it’s been thirty-two years, you’re not bloody betrothed anymore. Now, like I was saying, these measurements should get you in at least a few outfits befitting a crown prince…”

Tavish stood there as his mother spoke, staring at the sweeping bend in the Hale River as it wound silver through the plains, trying not to let bile rise in his throat.

“Where’s Blutarch?” Jane demanded, ignoring Marcel’s ‘you’re embarrassing me’ sigh behind him.

The stranger smiled congenially. “His Majesty’s indisposed. I’ve been helping with his latest batch of illness, and he asked me to step in for him this time around.”

Jane folded his arms. It was an arm-folding sort of morning. Awaking anywhere but his old and battered war tent could set it off—no bruises from the previous day’s battle, no fight to come that would put him in a better mood—and they were happening more frequently these days. Months now of a goose-feather bed in the castle, instead of the hard packed earth that could lull him to sleep as if it were his own mother. It was enough to drive a General crazy.

“Ludwig helps Blutarch with the not-dying machine,” Jane said.

“Ludwig’s been abroad for a while now, partner.”

A side eye cast to the physician’s chair showed it empty. It was a mix of black magic and ‘science’ that kept His Powerful and Glorious Majesty alive (neither of which Jane trusted), and although he didn’t like (or again, trust) the madman who kept it all spinning, he was at least a known constant. This stranger, this man who’d come to the meeting in place of the king as the rest of Blutarch’s ministers settled around the grand oak table, he itched something at the back of Jane’s mind. Like the others. A rot that had seeped into his fellow Ceruleans, the sloth to lie down while past (slights) were forgotten.

“D’ya mind if we start the meeting?”

Jane did mind. He minded very much until he could get a full military-grade integration for this stumpy little man, with his shiny hand made of gold that swirled with impossible gears that any sane person could tell you was bad news. But he could feel Marcel’s glare on the back of his neck, and decided it would be best to take a seat. There’d always be later.

That’s what he thought at least, until Dell—that was his name, after being reminded for the fourth time, damn hippies naming their children after water features—started spewing treason. Jane wouldn’t let that stand, not without a word in edgewise.

“We will not be attending this disgrace to the concept of ‘party’!” Jane slammed his open palm on the table. “We will not even entertain the notion! We will not entertain their entertainment!”

“It is not merely a party.” Even with his head rolled against the back of his chair, Marcel’s ever-present mask could not be seen beneath. “It is a celebration of our achievements.”

“Our achievement of rolling over on our backs for the first time in over a hundred years. Grab the confetti poppers and party hats boys, we have successfully groveled our way to licking Scarlet bootleather.” Jane stood, pointing at each of the men around the table, the traitors who had brokered this ‘peace’ while Jane had been out on the front lines, fighting for their freedom. More chairs were empty since he’d last fully sat on the council, more than just Ludwig. “I am aware exactly what kind of celebration this is, and that is why I am telling you it’s all crap.”

“What were we bloody supposed to do?” Mundy growled. “You were chewing up pikers faster than we could send ‘em. It wasn’t sunstainable.”

“I’ll show you sustainable, you reverse-flushing kangaroo-humping son of a-”

“Enough.” Marcel’s hand reached up and dragged Jane’s shoulder, which he allowed with a snarl. “The decision was made. We can not show weakness now, and failing to attend would reveal the divisions I’m sure we’d all rather keep to ourselves. Jane and I will attend the masquerade.”

Jane noted his careful phrasing, and hated to admit he was right. The only thing worse than being seen as conciliatory would be being seen as divided—that would certainly invite the sort of attack Jane knew he couldn’t fight.

“We need this to work out, General,” that overly-cheery voice of Dell’s prompted again. “Hell, we’ve been fighting on and off for the last century-”

“Rather it be on-”

“-and we’re tired,” Dell finished. “Folks want to go home. Recover.”

“Those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords,” Jane muttered darkly. “Sun Tzu said that. His last words. They were never able to take him from his battlefield.”

No one paid him any mind. The decision had been made, after all. Without him, like so many decisions these days.

Marcel trailed him as he left the meeting. Jane shot the assassin a glare. “Why didn’t you tell me we were being sent on a mission?”

“I tried. Repeatedly. You dodge meetings the way the wind dodges arrows.”

“I hate those things.”

“Meetings or the wind?”

“Meetings.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Who does that egghead think he is, anyway? Taking over Ludwig’s spot…he could be poisoning the king for all we know!”

“I severely doubt that.” Marcel breathed smoke out his nose. He often did that, even without pipe in hand, though only when it was just he and Jane. “Though, his ascendancy to Blutarch’s side was…quick. Keep an eye on him.”

“Hard to keep an eye when we’re halfway across the continent.”

Jane reached his destination, the thick oaken door where the castle’s highest tower connected to the rest of the palace. He began to beat his fist against it rhythmically.

“What are we doing here?” Marcel asked of this display.

“If we’re leaving the country I need to talk to Merasmus. There will be battle, mark my words, and we’ll want his strongest potions.”

“Merasmus is also abroad, remember? He has been for the past month.”

“What? Ridiculous! That sopping old woman never leaves his tower.” Jane renewed his attack on the door with vigor. “MERASMUS! OPEN UP! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE YOU USELESS PISS WIZARD!”

Marcel was able to refill his pipe three times before Jane finally grew bored of this activity. The door was locked—which wasn’t strange—but a faint odor of brimstone was coming the seams—which was. When he pressed his ear against it he could have sworn he heard faint giggling, but could ascertain no more.

“Things really are changing around here,” he said softly to the door.

“Indeed. Which is why I think it best if we were not within the castle’s walls in the coming weeks.”

Jane frowned.

“Do not pout at me.”

“I am not pouting! If I am not needed turning Scarlet maggots into itty bitty chunks, the least I can do is stay here. Close to Blutarch. Protecting him or whatever.”

“Come now amigo,” Marcel said. “Surely there are better things out there than running around this same castle day in and day out.”

Jane folded his arms. “The BEST things in life are the PEOPLE you love, the PLACES you have been, and the MEMORIES you have made.”

“…”

“Sun Tzu said that-”

“-He did not.”

“Fine,” Jane spat. “Lets go pack for this cheese-faced party. The sooner we leave, the sooner we get back.”

***

The masquerade was in full swing, and Tavish hated every minute of it.

From the crystal champagne flutes, to the toasts of their victory, pats on the back as everyone rubbernecked and sniffed their own farts. It made him sick, which he tried to wash down several goblets of mead, then tried even harder as his mother chewed out his ‘churlish behavior’.

When he’d finally ducked night’s neverending string of suitable brides, he was very much ready to thumb the eye of the king, his mother, and the scarlet aristocracy as well.

Step one: ruffle some feathers.

He spied the Cerulean General through the thick fog of partygoers, red and blue alike, with other foreign dignitaries thrown in the mix, all openly curious if this rumored truce would pan out. The flowing gowns and capes of Ambery fashions clogged the pathways, surpassed in ostentatiousness only by the gemstones protruding from every Chartreuse belt. Even a few austere delegates from Graystan were in attendance; each one Tavish glimpsed looking uniquely uncomfortable, as though the mere concept of ‘party’ was foreign to them. But this General…he could have given the Grays a run for their money with how oddly he stuck out, his metal helm glistening hawkishly among the bows and frills. A black sheep if Tavish ever saw one. A preceded reputation, to the point that there’s a good several feet of space around him, even in a Grand Ball packed like sardines. Tavish wouldn’t have known him except by that distincive helm—it was said that he lead every battled from the front lines, a terror and a death sentence if you ever had the misfortune to meet him face-to-face. Tavish had obsessed over the man when he was younger, back when he still had fantasies about being allowed to fight in the war. Those had, at first, been cautiously dissuaded. Then they were dashed more firmly on a day that still left a flare of shame when he recalled it; being sixteen running to the very edges of the grounds, rubbing hot tears as he hid in the old wooden fort made of twigs. He managed to escape for a day in total before he was found, and the fort knocked down for good. He spent the whole time swearing he could still hear laughter in the breeze, the shadows of children he no longer knew darting between every trunk.

The sole heir to the House of DeGroot could not be wasted in battle, after all. Couldn’t be lost to a careless alchemy accident either, like the ones that had pruned so many other extraneous branches of the family tree. No, he was to be tucked safely away—even more so Da could no longer protest the treatment—and wait until it was his time to be used as a pawn to advance his family’s position.

That hadn’t kept him from stolen nights in his father’s old lab though, or days training with the ancient blade that under no circumstances could Mum find out he had.

He no longer felt the resentment toward the General that he had in his youth. It hadn’t been the same one who’d led the raid that’d killed Da, after all, who’d cost Tavish one father and one best friend on that blistering summer’s day. That was years before the current General’s time and, if the rumors were true, he’d supposedly killed his predecessor in a duel. Such things didn’t fly in Scarland, but Ceruleans were savages through and through. What better way than to ruffle his countrymen than by chatting one up?

“I’d stay away from servers if I were you,” Tavish greeted with one elbow on the nearest raised plant pot and discarding when the General jumped at his sudden appearance. “One of the wine bowls has a crack in it, and they’re desperate enough to do something barmy.”

“What? Who are you? Where did you come from? What do punch bowls have to do with anything?” The General barked off each question in rapid succession.

Tavish shrugged nonchalantly. “Just keep a hand on that helm of yours. It’d make a perfect replacement.”

Although the edge of silver concealed much of what the mask did not, Tavish could just see a set of eyes narrow within its shadow. “You’re mocking me.”

“Nothing of the sort!” Tavish grinned.

Instead of replying, those eyes glanced away, distinctly falling on the good six feet of distance the crowd had allotted him. It was as though he were poison, was an affront to their very sensibilities. He seemed perfectly willing to let Tavish return to that category.

“Er, well maybe a little,” Tavish coughed quickly, having already scuttled what he thought was going to be a smooth opening. “Sorry, thought that might get a laugh.”

“For you maybe. When your country’s favorite form of entertainment is pelting the stocks with tomatoes, what you consider a ‘joke’ is of no interest to me.”

Tavish flinched. Bit more honesty than he was used to. That, and he wasn’t expecting the enemy General to be so…sharp. “No, really, I didn’t mean anything by it. Let me try again, aye? My name’s Tavish, and nothing’d make me happier than if you were having a better time than you look like you’re having.”

If there was any recognition to Tavish’s name, the General betrayed none of it. He eyed Tavish again, reevaluating, then cautiously said, “Doe.”

“Ray, a drop of golden sun?”

“What?”

“Er, sorry, ‘nother bad joke.”

It was hard to keep his composure, the General so different from what Tavish had imagined. He was younger for one, and—though it was difficult to tell for sure—he was actually rather handsome where the mask couldn’t obscure it.

“Why are you bothering me, Scarlet?”

“If I’m really bothering you, I can go.”

“Just answer the damn question.”

Tavish eyed over the helm again, the blue plume stuck in its top, the way it had been cleaned again and again, no doubt to free it from the blood sprayed in battle. “You killed the last Cerulean General, didn’t you? In a duel?”

Doe stilled. “So they tell me.”

“What does that mean? You don’t know?”

Doe’s eyes grew stormy again, though this time they looked past Tavish and into the bobbing heads beyond. “I am reasonably confident that is what happened.”

“Ah, then good,” Tavish nodded. “He killed my Da, you know.”

“Half the people in this room have killed someone’s relation on the other half. Me included, sonny. This is where the whole farce shows its cracks, where everyone has to stand and face war and what she brings, look into your enemies eyes and understand that you are past the point of forgiveness.”

“You don’t believe in the truce?”

Doe threw back his head and laughed, that sound Tavish had aimed so high for to begin with. When he again lowered his chin, he was grinning.

“Look at me, son.” He spread his arms. “I am every man this truce was meant to destroy.” Still he smiled, the words dripping with viciousness. “You kill a lot of Ceruleans, Tavish?”

This was not a man who would care about tact, about smooth introductions and polite assurances. “I wanted to, when I was younger.” Honesty is what would matter. “But I was never allowed.”

“Heh, better for us.”

“…I still trained though,” Tavish added, a secret so guarded and yet he found it slipping out to this stranger who gleamed like a drop of silver sun.

Doe’s interest was immediate, a prick of the breath, a dilation in the pupils that set Tavish’s own pulse quickening. “What kind of formations?”

“Claymore.”

“Mmm. Good for standing behind the pikemen. Useless if cavalry get through, but necessary for meeting the other side’s heavy infantry. Ends in a lot of single combat, sword to sword. The purest form of war.”

There was something beyond reverence in his voice. Craving maybe.

“You’ve dueled using two-handers then?” Tavish asked, his mouth dry, standing closer than he had been before.

“I have mastered every weapon under the sun, son. Could kick your ass with each and every one.”

Tavish leaned in, his own mask of black lacquer concealing his missing eye, shielding him from the rest of the room until only Doe was in his vision.

He whispered, “I’ll take that challenge, laddie.”

If there had been hesitation, just a hint of it, Tavish would have retreated in on himself for fear of an inter-kingdom crisis. But to Doe’s credit, there wasn’t a whiff. “When and where, cupcake?” His smile was full of teeth.

“There’s no one in the garden this time o’ night. Too busy dancing.”

“Show’s they don’t know how to have real fun.”

They were down on the grounds before the hour was out. The hedge mazes clawed at the sky, but Tavish knew the paths well enough to find a spot of manicured gravel that would not begrudge them a moment of heavy foot traffic.

Tavish drew the Eyelander. It was meant to be a ceremonial sword that was slung across his fancy dress uniform, but what his mother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.The tailor had been precise and painfully traditional: with the sword came a black cape to ‘conceal’, and a matching knee-length kilt. The rest was far too many gold-patterned sashes for Tavish’s taste, and a broach of red iron since Endless Voice forbid they ever forgo national pride for a moment.

Doe idly examined the claymore Tavish had presented him with. It was Tavish’s spare, tucked in the concealed chest under the hedges, as it wasn’t hard to hide weapons out here in the gardens. The claymore now glittered in the moonlight as Doe held it aloft, its edges kept well honed by Tavish’s hand.

Lineage and legend had passed the Eyelander down from hand to hand until it had reached Tavish’s calloused ones. Supposedly it had powers untold, but the only magic Tavish had been able to wrestle from the blasted thing was a supernaturally sharp edge that never seemed to need sharpening. Now, as the most deadly man in the Cerulean army leveled his sword at Tavish’s chest, he almost wished he had something better in his back pocket. He nudged the thought away. He hadn’t goaded the man just for a practice bout; and indeed, there were no protectors on either of their blades. This was as real as they came.

Doe cocked his head. “Savor what you can. Sweetness in victory, Scarlet.”

“As to you, Cerulean.”

The General pounced.

Tavish brought up his blade, and the resounding clang dove straight through his arms and into his soul. His stance had expected it but his ears had not, and as one foot made a half circle in the gravel to bring ‘round his own sword, he could barely process how loud it was. Beating against stolen training dummies could never prepare him for the raw force of meeting steel swung in direct opposition, parallel angles of pure force.

It also couldn’t prepare him for a partner.

Doe had barely completed his first strike before he was sliding off Tavish’s parry, swinging again with sword’s full force. He’d run the formations again and again, watching the training yard and replicating them later here in privacy, but as he was forced into a full step sideways he realized he’d never be able to match experience. The resentment he’d thought he’d let go of reared again, hissing at the base of his skull in abject jealousy. He’d been kept from this. He’d been kept from facing men like this.

And what a man he was. There was a raw physicality to it, their dance that was so different from those happening in the palace above. The air was cool, but Doe took a step back, throwing off his jacket while barely touching the buttons. The doublet underneath was sky blue, almost silvery, clinging to his skin as sweat built on them both.

The numbness in his arms would have been welcome in his throat, where Tavish’s breath suddenly caught.

The reprieve was brief. Again Doe came at him, and already their positions had reversed entirely, ending on the exact opposite sides of their makeshift arena. It went on like that, egregiously long, Tavish’s stamina waning as sweat poured down the back of his neck and into the horrid mess of finery and sashes his mother had spent so long having him stuffed in. The pompous excuse for a kilt restricted his movements, his stances horrid, his defense barely held in check. They fought not like knights with armor to take a glancing blow, nor like trainees who knew a blow would be painful but not mortal; they were their own brand of whirlwind. Something else entirely. To win was not the goal, no high ground, no dirty tricks. Even as Tavish thought it, he felt the disarm coming in slow motion, and could do nothing to stop it.

They were within each other’s effective range, testing their strength with their noses inches apart, when Doe’s hilt came down on his wrists. The Eyelander went spinning, flecks of gray in its wake, and Doe took the opportunity of Tavish’s smarting arms to elbow him in the stomach. Tavish staggered to his knees.

Doe took a step back, and Tavish felt something cold and metal under his chin. It was no debate to let it be lifted and meet eyes with the victor.

“Not bad for a maggot who’s never seen the glory of war,” the General panted.

Tavish could barely feel his fingers, still humming with the vibrations of steel. Panic swelled as he suddenly realized how thoroughly his life was in the other man’s hands; there was no one who had known where they had gone, no one to assume he’d done something so stupid as to fight the commander of the Curealan army in a duel to the death. It would be so easy to spill his blood across the garden’s earth.

He shivered when the blade moved upwards, but all it did was slip into his blind spot. With a flick, Doe flipped the mask off his face.

The sword lowered. “Almost wish you were on our side. Could have done something amazing with you.”

A line on his cheek stung, and Tavish raised his hand to feel blood welling warm between his fingers. That was all. Doe was exhausted too, and that dulled the shame a bit as his words sunk in. A high compliment. Maybe the highest Tavish had ever received.

The hand that helped him up drew him in close before he was fully on his feet, bringing them nose to nose again, chest to chest, the afterfight gasps for breath falling so close to one another. That smile was so close to him now, the manic one Doe had never lost through the entire battle, but there was a hunger in them too.

“I hate all this damn ceremony,” Doe admitted, whispered close, though there was no one there but the two of them. “The masks, the pageantry. You should know your enemy’s face.”

“That so?” Tavish’s heart was thrummed from more than just the battle.

The eyes behind the mask dared him.

He reached up, and performed his duty likewise. His hand came away holding the small fabric thing, as his body moved to step in closer and bring their faces entirely together-

Only to find himself rearing back instead.

“Jane?” he gasped.

Those eyes, those beautifully familiar eyes that had never stopped haunting him, widened in shock.

“What? How did you-? I did not tell you my name.”

Endless Voice, how had he not recognized those eyes before? Yes they were different, aged and changed and more, but it was still Jane. After all these years…

“Jane,” the words came sputtering from his mouth without his consent. “Jane you’re alive, you- you don’t recognize me? I-it’s me, it’s Tav.”

Jane took a step back.

Tavish followed him forward. He’d thought about nothing but Jane for decades, not believing when everyone told him that his only friend was dead, killed in the invasion. The idea that Jane had been lost or captured was such a slim hope, yet still he’d done so, never believing Jane had ended a corpse at the bottom of the river.

But still, even he could never have imagined that Jane wouldn’t care about coming home.

Tavish kept advancing. “How could you not-? We- when we were kids we used to play down on the red banks, during the summer when we weren’t allowed near the wilds, and we built towers in the trees-”

Jane’s eyes snapped open wide. “No, no you do not get to be inside my dreams!”

“Dreams? I didn’t-”

“I, ahrg-” Jane clutched his head. “Stay away from me, Scarlet! I am warning you, I-”

He hissed another gasp of pain. Then, his backpedals turned into a full-blown sprint, and he tore away into the night.

“Jane! Jane wait-!” Tavish moved to run after him, but his foot caught on something, tripping over the Eyelander and sprawling face first into the gravel.

When he lifted his eye, Jane, the one person he’d been looking for so long, was once again gone.

“Marcel. We have to leave. Immediately.”

Marcel scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Do you know how long the line is for the dragon-roasted shrimp plates? Forty-five minutes. I am going to stand here and enjoy my seafood platter, do nothing else, and drink my wine even if the entire castle starts collapsing around me.” He paused, a shrimp halfway to his mouth. “Why are you so very…sweaty?”

“Marcel. Do you remember that thing. That uh, the one thing you said not to do?”

Marcel’s lips pursed in that way that had and always would mean Jane was about to be in very big trouble. “…‘Cause an international incident’.”

“Yes. That. I have done it. So we should leave now.”

Several seconds of dearth ticked by, at the end of which, the Spymaster released his most beleaguered sigh, and with excruciating slowness dumped his platter into a nearby plant. “I hate you Doe. Almost as much as I hate being right. Let us move.”

They fled the palace at a gallop, the midnight bell tolling behind them, Jane’s mind a mess of broken glass. How had that man known his dreams? More, more than just the dreams, he talked about spires in trees, things Jane hadn’t envisioned before, but the words of them sparked revolutions in him so rabid they made his head hurt. He unfocused his eyes, watching the back of Marcel’s courser as it kicked mud at a frenzied pace, and tried to stop the tidal wave of visions as they came flooding in.

When they finally allowed the horses rest—a day away from the capitol and still four days from the border—Jane stared at the fire, barely feeling his exhaustion. He had so many questions…could the visions that plagued him truly be memories? Normally he’d dismiss the thought out of hand—they were too strange, too nonsensical to have actually happened—but normally figments of his imagination didn’t jump out of parties claiming they knew him, so maybe normal could go to hell.

The logical thing to do was ask Marcel. They’d known each other longer than Jane’s memory stretched back, and he needed him to fill in details on a near constant basis whenever Jane was supposed to know a fact he did not. But something kept him back. What if he asked Marcel about the mystery man, and he knew nothing, proving something was far more wrong with Jane than either of them thought?

Or worse: what if he did know who that Scarlet was to Jane?

The questions chased circles around each other, and Jane sensed it wouldn’t be long until Marcel came back from checking their perimeter and finally tried to wring some answers out of him. Namely, the exact details that had put them on the run from the Scarlets. Jane still wasn’t sure what he was going to say to that.

The sound of a violent crash dangerously close to the clearing’s edge warned that that might be put off for a little while.

Jane raced toward the noise of a steadily increasing scuffle, drawing his blade and arriving on the scene just as it came to an abrupt halt. There, Marcel had their interloper pinned to the ground; a knee on his back, a blade to his throat as Marcel pulled him back by the head.

The name slipped out without Jane willing it. “Tavish?”

Tavish’s head jerked up, despite the knife beading a line of red against his skin. It was him, though he’d abandoned the mask and changed into a simple riding uniform. His eye, panicked a moment before, softened. Daring to hope.

Jane hadn’t meant to give him any, but saying the name felt right, felt familiar. He tried to tell himself it was only because he’d said it a few times during the duel, but it didn’t stop the feeling, that feeling that connections slid past his cranium like oysters being torn from their shell.

“Jane? Do you…?”

Again, Jane took a step back.

Marcel wouldn’t be so easily placated. He looked between Jane and the man he currently had pinned several times before saying, “Tavish? As in Tavish DeGroot?”

“Er,” Tavish said. “Which answer doesn’t get me slit?”

Marcel glared at Jane. “Please don’t tell me this is why we had to flee the Scarlet Palace in a whirlwind of disgrace.”

“Um,” Jane said. “This is not why we had to flee the Scarlet Palace in a whirlwind of disgrace?”

“That is just wonderful to hear. Then perhaps you can offer me an alternative explanation as to why the crown prince of Scarland is sneaking into our camp in the middle of the night??”

“I wasn’t sneaking!” Tavish protested. “Honest. I was just trying to talk to Jane, to…”

Marcel pulled his head back farther. “How did you find us?”

“This is the fastest road to Cerulea! Someone in the last town said they’d seen you passing through, and then I saw your fire…”

“Merde,” Marcel spat at Jane. “I told you we should not have stopped for supplies.”

“We may take it then that an army without its baggage train is lost; without provisions it is lost,” Jane said.

“If you say-”

“-Sun Tzu said that.”

“Shut up.” Marcel spun back to his interrogation. “How many are with you? Where are they? Do they know you’re here?”

Tavish opened his mouth. It was clear he had no answer, that his hope was slowly being replaced with panic, and those dark twisting things in Jane’s mind pulled aside just enough to recognize it.

“Marcel. Stop. He’s not…I don’t think he’s…”

He didn’t know what he was. He was an enemy. The enemy.

And yet.

Jane found himself creeping forward. He made a motion, but when Marcel hesitated instead of backing off, he locked eyes with his friend. The Spymaster said nothing, but slowly retracted himself, hovering just on the edges of the forest’s encroaching darkness.

The sinking sun cast everything into dull grays as Jane stepped forward and gently helped Tavish to his feet. For the second time in as many days. This was all together different before, the prince refusing to surrender room as he gripped Jane by both forearms, hauling himself upwards.

“I know.” Tavish swallowed thickly. “I know it was a long time ago. We were kids but I thought- I needed to be sure. This isn’t all just a dream, right?”

Jane laughed humorlessly. “Now there’s a choice of words.” He felt the fingers on his arms tighten. “How do you know me?”

“We were-” Tavish suddenly averted his eye in sheepishness. “Betrothed. I mean, we were just kids and all, so it was our families who put it all together…but we were still friends! And I never stopped hoping…”

Huh. That was…certainly something. Jane leveled an eyebrow over Tavish’s shoulder, to where Marcel was lurking. “That true?”

“How should I know?” Marcel waved his dagger impatiently, his hand clutched like he was still prepared to use it. “Yes, once you did tell me you were born in Scarland, but you have told me many things over the years. And yet, completely failed to mention you were once Scarlet nobility.”

Jane shook his head. Him? Scarlet? He’d always known patches of his past were rough…

Tavish looked equally distraught. “Why did you ask him? Why would he know?”

“I’ve always had…issues. With. Up here.” Jane freed a hand long enough to raise a finger and tap his temple. “Marcel helps.”

“So you…really don’t remember me, then,” Tavish finally arrived at, still not quite believing. A note of agony slipped in, that despair creeping back to his voice.

“Maybe. What happened exactly?”

“Cerulean attack. We were out, near the river like always, but somehow they got further into the riverlands without a single warning. Magic maybe. I took a blast when they started attacking.” He indicated his patched eye. “We scattered, like all the people in the farms, and we ran for the walls and I thought you were right behind me and…”

Tavish pressed his forehead to Jane’s chest.

“Endless Voice, I’m so sorry Janey.”

Jane wrapped his arms over Tavish’s back. He smelled like horse and road dust, and homes that didn’t exist. Jane leveled a look at Marcel.

The Spymaster stared back for a good four seconds before throwing up his hands in disgust. “Fine! We won’t kill him. But he absolutely cannot come back with us to Azure Bay with us.”

They decided to take him back to Azure Bay.

Well, Jane decided. Marcel—a man who Tavish had never heard of but with all the casual information Jane let slip he gleaned was some sort of bodyguard—tried very hard to undecide for him, which Jane ignored with an admirable stalwartness. It might have looked like Tavish feared the assassin, keeping himself so close to the other Cerulean at all times to avoid him, but honestly it was just because Tavish was scraping for Jane’s contact at every moment. His shoulder always hovered close to Jane’s as they sat on the ground for meals, almost afraid to touch, as though if he tried to make sure Jane was really there it would turn out he wasn’t.

“We cannot enter the country with Redmond’s heir tossed over the back of your horse,” Marcel whined. He did that a lot.

“I got me own horse,” Tavish put in helpfully.

“And even if he did not, there is no way we are sending him back to that commie country!” Jane poked the rabbit roasting over the fire with a stick. Tavish was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do that to a spit roast, but he was too busy watching Jane with open adoration to offer culinary commentary. “Have you heard what they were going to do to him there? They were going to make him get married when he did not want to get married!”

“How positively barbaric,” Marcel replied drily. “Truly we’ll have these human rights violations as soon as we get back to the capital.”

Jane nodded. “Glad we’re on the same page.”

Despite his pleading, appeals to reason, and several threats against Tavish’s personage, Marcel couldn’t get Jane to budge on the matter. Every day they grew further and further from New Ruby and it shocked Tavish how little that mattered to him. So much for patriotism. With Jane here and only his mother and the slowly constricting noose of Redmond’s inevitable demise behind him, the only true path was toward Cerulea.

“Thank you,” Tavish said that night, their bedrolls in the process of unfurling (Tavish hadn’t packed supplies in his rush to leave the palace, and Marcel had declared him ‘Doe’s problem’ so it was Jane’s tent he shared) on to hard earth below. “For standing up for me.”

Most of the conversations during their precarious journey had been like this. Tavish trying to and failing to find the words that would surmount the impossible hills of ground he wanted to cover, and in the end too busy being happy to care.

Jane stopped in the process of straightening out his boots. “We were friends. That is what friends do.”

“We were, aye. Do you really not remember any of it?”

“Not remember, no.” Jane frowned. “I dream, sometimes. But…there was always someone there, and I now know that someone was you.” He set down the boots so carefully, and fixed Tavish with his stare. “And when I met you again, I liked you then too. You were charming, daring, and proved not all Scarlets need their hands held to cross a puddle.”

“You sure about liking me? I sort o’ bungled the charming part…”

“You turned out to be noble at heart.”

He reached toward Tavish, brushing his thumb against that scratch still scabbed on Tavish’s cheek. Tavish froze, kneeled in front of him, both huddled so close inside the tent he could see every detail the years apart had left his friend. Wrinkles, the faint outlines of scars, and he searched hungrily over it all, just like he had when the mask had come down. He slung an arm behind Jane’s neck and dragged him closer.

“It was a crime to keep a warrior like you away from his sword,” Jane said stalwartly. “They have wronged you. If I had been there, I would never have let it happen.”

Tavish laughed. “Don’t blame yourself for that, lad. You were too busy being kidnapped by Ceruleans.”

“Still! It was a mistake we will rectify. I’ll get you a real fight DeGroot, mark my words!”

Jane’s mouth was smirking, mere inches away…

The scream of horses tore all other thoughts from Tavish’s mind. It ripped through the tent as assuredly as the sword that came strabbing through the canvas a moment later. It was their only warning, and as the shredded flaps of tent parted around them Tavish saw why: Marcel, their usually dependable barometer for danger had his hands raised in surrender, kneeling next to the horses as they stamped in panic. Another sword was pointed at his throat, assumedly so he wouldn’t sound the alarm, and he wore an expression of beleaguered unspurise.

Tavish, honed by years of living under threat of Cerulean invasion, didn’t register what was happening at first. His mind snapped to occupation, to blue uniforms that didn’t exist. Even as he and Jane were forced to kneel, no time to even get to get their weapons in their hands, he still recognize them for what they were.

It wasn’t until one of the bandits said, “you were right Lloyd! Just like on that them poster there!”

They were all leering at Tavish like he was their next meal ticket, and under the burden of that uniform attention he stupidly repeated, “poster?”

“Aye, this one right here!” said the closest one, waving a weather beaten piece of paper. “Ten thousand kröwns for the safe return of the prince, and five thousand a piece for each kidnappers’ head.”

Tavish paused. It was not productive to argue with the sketch of him presented on the wanted poster—his features were rather on the distinctive side. Instead he said, “well, at least she had the decency to offer more for me than she did for you lot.”

Marcel released an exhale whose length did not seem humanly possible, which he capped off with an embittered, “fuck.”

Jane, slightly to Tavish’s left, said nothing. He seethed in silence, glaring at their captors as they began to rummage through the camp, and Tavish realized if he didn’t do something, someone else would. Guilt played no small part in the need for action either. Here he’d brought trouble down upon the Ceruleans heads, just like Marcel said.

“Listen lads,” Tavish said, trying to look like he wasn’t addressing the sword waving dangerously toward him. “You’re obviously all good, noble Scarlets who’re doing their patriotic duty. Now that you’ve got those er…kidnappers all hedged in, why don’t you point those knives somewhere else?”

“Don’t think so mate,” the one pilfering the food supplies said. “In order to get that bounty, it’s really important you don’t go anywhere.”

“You won’t get any bounty if-”

Tavish was just about to pull the royal pillock card, when his prophecy about someone else taking drastic action came devastatingly true.

However, it wasn’t Jane who slipped from his extortionist’s grasp and jammed him in the neck with a dagger.

If Tavish hadn’t been watching he wouldn’t have believed it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marcel melt, his entire body turning to smoke, swirling backwards and appearing behind the bandit. He gurgled as he went down, Marcel flipping his knife and falling into a fencing stance.

“Shapeshifter!” one of the bandits hissed, as another rand forward with a roar.

Jane did not waste the distraction. He was up in an instant, dodging inside the range of his horrified guard, knocking him to the ground as, “oorah!” sprang from his lips. He used the tip of his boot to flip the fire’s poking stick into his hands, then promptly rammed it through the prone man’s eye.

The clearing they’d made camp in had devolved to blood and screaming so quickly, so vividly, Tavish was back on those red banks in an instant. He tried to stay present, to watch as Marcel dispatched another, to notice the next attacker approaching the assassin from behind. He opened his mouth to give warning. Nothing came out.

But it wasn’t a weapon this latest assailant struck Marcel with. It was something he’d pulled from his neck, an iron symbol on a chain, and with it he rammed his fist forward until the pendant clattered against Marcel’s back.

His skin parted around the pendant like it was water, and though Tavish had just heard the screams of dying men thrice in intimate detail, this one was the most horrifying of them all. Marcel spun, clumsily jamming his blade into the gut of the bandit, but when he fell Marcel made no move out of the way. The last Tavish saw of them was a hulking corpse pinning Marcel to the ground.

Yet when Tavish scrambled to his feet the only thing he could focus on was Jane.

The General had somehow gotten his sword in his hand, a feat Tavish couldn’t even fathom right now. He was locked in single combat with one of the last two bandits, and Tavish knew there were two because the second was swinging a greataxe at Jane’s back.

This time, the lack of logical thought going on in Tavish’s head was a blessing. There was no hesitation as he lunged forward and tackled the bigger man.

It was a miracle the axe didn’t get a hit on him. It was less of a miracle when they both went tumbling into the pit fire, though Tavish would take what he was given. He held the man’s face down into the flames until his hands blistered, and the screaming stopped.

When it was done, he scooted backwards, shaking, and muttered softly, “bloody hell.”

Jane had dispatched his deuling partner with a neat spear through the chest, flicking his blade free of blood before noticing. The prince sat on the ground, staring dumbly at the burning body, watching as the fire thanked him profusely for the fresh fuel.

He felt Jane’s hand squeeze his shoulder. “Well done, soldier.”

The pause for comfort was brief. Jane took one look around the camp and noticed where Marcel’s body was still trapped, and immediately his steely composure dissapeared. He rushed over and pushed away the bandit’s corpse.

“Marcel!” he grunted, trying to lift the man to a sitting position.

Man? Was that the right term for a shapeshifter? With all that had gone on, Tavish was only now starting to connect the dots.

Jane found the pendant amongst the gore. “Cold iron,” he muttered in disgust, and tossed it away. Immediately, Marcel stirred, opening his eyes feebly.

“Is he…is he going to be alright?” Tavish found himself asking.

Maybe that was a strange thing to do—worry about a fae, man’s most hated enemy—but for some reason the revelation didn’t bother Tavish as much as it probably should have. Marcel had probably saved all their lives and, well, he was Jane’s friend. That meant something now, when loyalties were more than red and blue.

“I think so,” Jane said. “I’ve only ever seen it happen once, but I am…reasonably confident it is temporary! Help me get him closer to the fire.”

Tavish helped. Their traveling pace was slower, and the tension releasing from Jane’s shoulders when they finally crossed the border into Cerulea was palpable. Exactly how bad of a situation they were in was unclear: it didn’t seem that Marcel and Jane’s identities were known to the general populace, but apparently ‘that damn toymaker’ would know at the very least. This Tavish gleaned from Jane and Marcel’s clipped conversations he was only occasionally allowed to overhear.

In a wild swing from the casual threats Marcel had made towards him during the first leg of their journey, he now spent their days crossing the plains of Scarland—the scent of salt grew stronger every day they drew closer to the sea, Tavish didn’t know how anyone could stand it—completely mum. A very obvious attempt to keep Tavish out of the loop, cutting off whatever he was saying whenever Tavish’s horse drew near.

Tavish finally breached that gulf of half a day’s ride away, the spire of architecturally improbable tower just visible on the horizon. “You’re feeding off him, aren’t you? That’s why he can’t remember anything.”

Marcel went stiff in his saddle. Tavish had waited until Jane’s draft had pulled ahead, swaying easily on the unpaved road. Their conversation was, effectively, private.

What little conversation there was. Marcel held up the silence uncompromisingly, like a blanket of protection, and Tavish had almost resigned himself to believing there would be no speaking to the fae, until he finally broke it with a, “yes, but it is not how you think.”

“And how do I think?”

“That stealing the thoughts of mortals is how I power my abilities. That is the faery story you tell in Scarland, is it not? But it is the opposite, really. His memories they….they do not allow me to change, but to stay unchanged, to find something grounded and hold on to that. Without him I would start to…slip. To whatever my own mind wandered to. It is why we do not ‘exist’ for very long.”

The sound of hoofbeats was the only sound for a while.

Finally, Tavish asked, “does he know?”

Gravely, Marcel looked over the waving wheat of farms along the road, the summer’s harvest waist high and growing. “Once. Once upon a time I made a deal with someone who was full of potential, but hounded by ghosts that held them back. It was beneficial to us both. Now of course he does not remember that promise, nor even being that person who has made such a promise, and I for my part have-” He came to a stop. “I have grown fond.”

“Ach if ever a fae creature was going to grow a soft spot for some barmy mortal, it would be for Jane. He has that effect.”

Marcel looked at him sideways. “You’re oddly chipper after having your worst assumptions about shapeshifters confirmed.”

“Well…you’re Jane’s.”

“His what?”

“Just…his. I guess I am too now. Or always was. Even when he was gone, he had enough of a hold on me to keep me yearning for thirty years.”

They lapsed. Into silence, into routine, into night as the sun began to sink into yellow waves in the west. Every moment there was something newly off about Marcel, but Tavish didn’t think much of it; he’d said what he’d wanted to say, and now his mind had only thoughts of the future, what they would do when they reached the city.

He didn’t look at the hands twisting in the reigns until Marcel said in rushed tones, “they are going to kill you as soon as we’re inside the palace walls.”

Tavish didn’t have time to reply, didn’t even have time for shock before Marcel hurried on.

“They very very badly need this peace. You reveal yourself, claim you’re eloping with the commander of Blutarch’s armies, it won’t matter how willingly you’ve gone—it will be just the pretense our kingdoms need to reignite the kindling.” He stared straight ahead, delivering each line with cold indifference. “Even your personal best case scenario has you being shipped back to New Ruby in a belated attempt at appeasement; but honestly the council would prefer it if you were killed off quietly and cleanly, before word escaped that you’d been seen in the city at all.”

“And you’re just telling me this now?” Tavish choked. “While we’re in sight of the city walls? And why didn’t you tell Jane this?”

“Don’t think I didn’t. It was the first argument I presented to him, and like always he brushed me off. Jane will and forever be convinced in his own inevitability; no amount of logic will persuade him he can’t handle something when he sets his mind to it.”

“…If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight,” Tavish echoed faintly, dread settling over him.

“To be honest, when it became apparent he would not ditch you, I resigned myself to entering the city anyway. Of course Jane would be upset about your death for a little while, but he’d get over it eventually.”

Tavish glowered.

“I…have revised my stance.” Marcel cleared his throat. “So now do you see? You must turn around. Forget you ever saw us. Avoid a war that will only spawn more ceaseless death.”

Tavish stared ahead. At Jane’s horse in the distance. At Jane’s home that had kept him safe when Scarland couldn’t.

“You told Jane all this?” he said eventually.

“As I mentioned, yes.”

“And he came to a different conclusion. He thinks this will help our kingdoms, not hurt them.”

“You can’t be serious,” Marcel glared. “Jane is—delusional is the kindest of the possible terms—and his judgment is blind to things like his own shortcomings and rational thought. You mustn’t follow him in there.”

“I trust him,” Tavish said, with a certainty that hadn’t hit him until he spoke the words. “With my life, if necessary.”

They entered the palace just as the last of the heaven’s eye dipped below the horizon. Marcel was still trying to convince him, his hushed words, in threats where he grew frustrated. Tavish kept his gaze to Jane’s back. Even as they walked up the great stone steps. Even when he heard the marching of many armored feet closing in behind them.

He saw the muscles in Jane’s jaw tense. Maybe he was expecting it too. He certainly didn’t seem surprised when he turned and saw the guards closing in on them.

They three drew their blades simultaneously, but it was almost funny how obviously ineffective that would be, how many the Cerulean numbers outmatched their own. A single second of consideration crossed Jane’s face, and Tavish watched it stretch an infinite number of heartbeats.

The General turned, standing shoulder to shoulder with Marcel as they faced the oncoming swarm. He looked over his shoulder and told Tavish, “run.”

And there was no way out but in.

His boots slammed against the marble floors of the Azure halls. Again the guilt of what he’d brought upon Jane welled within him, but the screeching pain in his lungs as he sprinted pushed it down. Jane and Marcel might be fine, and Tavish didn’t have that ‘might’. He had to keep running.

He sprinted up spiral staircases and down corridors, all the while swearing the march of footsteps behind him were growing louder. How long could two men against twenty buy him? A few seconds?

It wasn’t his imagination, they were gaining and he was slowing, there was nowhere in this bloody palace to hide. And then. There was a door.

It was innocuous, hanging open as if laughing at him, strange soot stains caressing the wall where the wood touched stone. And as soon as Tavish passed through it slammed shut behind him.

Jane sat in the dungeon cell, and he remembered.

Not much, but more than usual, more than making fake switches out of willow branches or wind on rushes that sounded like a thousand voices chattering. He remembered the unfamiliar, of wandering, of that impenetrable feeling of being hopelessly, perpetually, lost. The sort of lost only accessible in dreams—the kind where you turn your head to look where you’ve been and find that it’s already changed behind you.

He woke with the taste of missing teeth and fresh blood on his gums. That had been in the memory too, along with a broken hand and a new limp, but to his discomfort he found the tooth part was actually real.

Groaning, he rolled over in his spot of hay and spared a glance for Marcel. The other man was curled in a fetal position—they’d attached Seer’s Band to his wrist because of course they had. Bastards. Jane was definitely going to kill them when he got out of here. He’d pointed out to Marcel that in a pinch he could gnaw his own arm off, to which he had been told flatly ‘I am not going to do that’. Then, because Jane was a good friend, he offered to chew Marcel’s arm off for him, to which he was again told no.

He was about to say something, to check how badly the countercharm had progressed, he realized he hadn’t woken for nothing: there was the sound of footsteps approaching.

“What are you doing here, maggot?” he asked as Dell stepped in front of the slanted pattern of bars, the inventor flanked by two bodyguards.

“No doubt he is here to convince us it was certainly not he who sent the interception,” Marcel spoke, not moving from where he was curled. Awake then. Good. “The council went over his head of course. Really, he’s our ally in all of this.”

Dell, silhouetted markedly in orange the dungeon’s nearest light, only raised an eyebrow. “I’m certainly here to convince one of you of that. I think we all know you two aren’t both equally guilty for the incident we have on our hands.”

The silence hung. Jane felt the dry air scratch at him. Or maybe it was just the hay.

“We’d hate to lose the best Spymaster the country’s ever had,” Dell went on. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know.”

“You traitorous little scum!” Jane slammed his fist on the door. “I am going to rearrange that hand of yours until all you can do is shovel shit with it, because that’s exactly what you’re doing right now! You do not put that evil crap on him and then try to recruit him.”

One of the guards slammed a baton on the bars, forcing Jane to take a step back.

“I know you worked hard to get where you are,” Dell kept talking. The bastard, Jane was going to wring his toymaking neck- “And you did that by attaching yourself to someone important and rising through the ranks. No one else is going to give you that same offer. You really want to start all over again?”

“…Are you arriving at a point, laborer?” the ball of unmoving fae replied.

“My point is that I’d vouch for you. You’re pardoned for your involvement, the council runs on, and in return you tell me whenever you pick up something useful. Things go back to the way they were, minus one child abductor.” Dell leveled a stare at Jane.

“Once again, you are tragically misinformed.” Marcel exhaustedly waved a hand. “The prince is not a child, which you would have known if you hadn’t immediately tried to have us killed upon setting foot in our home.”

Dell’s brown furrowed. Maybe he really hadn’t known, and Jane was just starting to think Marcel might be able to talk their way out of this when the opportunity passed.

“Don’t matter. What matters is he,” Dell jerked his chin at Jane, “was willing to throw us all under the wheels, anything to get his pound of flesh. Look where being loyal to him got you. Don’t you want out?”

Marcel finally lifted his head.

It gave Jane a better look at his arm, which had withered to gray all the way up to the elbow. It seemed fundamentally wrong like that—that Marcel could be weakened, could be beaten for any significant length of time. It was why Jane said nothing when the fae rose.

Why, when Marcel approached the cell door and said, “fine,” Jane only took a step back.

Marcel didn’t look at him as the party left the dungeon. It was easier that way. Jane sat back down in his corner and remembered again.

Tavish tried the handle. He didn’t really expect it to open, but it was worth a shot.

The thing jiggled a little bit, but gave no more illusions about opening, snapping cheerfully back into place as soon as Tavish took his hand off it. The stream of soldiers had ceased a half an hour ago, but Tavish wasn’t going to risk it unless he was absolutely sure the manhunt had moved on.

He needn’t have bothered. It seemed he wasn’t going anywhere until the presence in this tower was done with him.

Because there was certainly a pretense—he’d suspected as much when he began to explore his environs for the foreseeable future. The endless stairs and relative narrowness of the rooms lead him to learn this construction had existed for ages, and the palace had sprung up around it, climbing higher even as the tower stretched exaggeratedly up into the sky. Childlike giggles echoed around him whenever he tried a door and found it locked, which was often, and he constantly felt eyes on the back of his neck. Eventually, he realized he’d wear himself to exhaustion trying to get to the upper floors, and headed back down to ground level.

There was a large, cushy chair with several evil looking tomes on the table next to it. He had himself a sit-down.

Another giggle came from beneath the stone floor.

“Hullo there?” he said, because he was Scarlet through and through, and the Scarlet peoples hadn’t survived for centuries by making unneeded enemies of the fae. “This er…your tower?”

A random window slammed closed.

“Oh. Just rooming for a bit then?”

The collection of shrunken heads dangling from the ceiling rattled ominously.

“Me too,” Tavish said conversationally, but the creature would say no more. He sighed. When fae were being bashful, there was one good way to get them to open up. He went and lit a candle.

Immediately, there was a person with him in the chamber where there hadn’t been before. They wore a wizards hat, but the brim cast an unnatural shadow, of which the only thing that could be seen beneath were a pair of coal-glow eyes.

Those eyes watched the candle with fascination, and the small, robed person crept closer. Tavish watched them watch the candle. “So. Now that we’re all…face to face. Is there a reason I’m locked in here?”

The fire spirit admired the flame for a moment, then cocked their head in Tavish’s direction. He heard the door click open.

“Oh. Well. That really all you needed me for? Because now that the door’s open I’d rather not be heading out if it’s all the same to you…I’m a bit of a wanted man.”

The spirit tapped a gloved finger to the unfathomable void where their chin would have been.

Suddenly they were walking away at a lively pace, back to those spires and spires of awful stairs. Since Tavish really wasn’t interested in stepping out into the beating heart of the enemy’s power, he followed. They didn’t quite reach the point of gross vertigo that Tavish had given up at, but he was still out of breath when the spirit finally stopped in front of the many wizardly locked doors. They turned the handle.

“Endless Voice…” Tavish swore.

It was an alchemy lab. Not the well loved and sprawling disaster of his family’s laboratory, but the sort of place where you could feel magic seeping into every crook. There were heating coils, burners, distillers, flasks, and dozens of things so ancient Tavish didn’t even have a name for them. He could see drawers bursting with alchemical ingredients.

And his hands twitched to make it all explode.

He turned to the spirit. “You wee devil. Do you know what we’re doing to me?”

“Huddah huh.”

“Oh, that and more love. When I’m done here, the whole bloody palace is going to be a smoking ruin.”

In eighteen hours, Tavish had slept for a total of forty-five minutes, eaten a slightly singed loaf of bread his new spirit friend had stolen for him, and systematically turned on every burner in the lab. He poured, and he measured, and even if he didn’t need it he kept the separators running because it kept his immortal companion of fire and destruction occupied. Despite the sleep deprivation, and the weeklong journey across the wilds he’d never been properly allowed to recover from, he’d never felt more alive.

When it was done, Tavish had three combustion grenades glowing on the table before him, and wanted nothing more than to lie down and nap for the next seven years. Instead he said, “any chance you could point me in the direction of the dungeons?”

The spirit waved vaguely toward the door, then tucked their hands back under their chin to watch the cortese boil.

Tavish grinned. “I’ll leave you to it then.”

They say that the DeGroots earned their titles and lands for their prowess on the battlefield. The Eyelander had its many stories, the invaders beheaded, the wars won on, supposedly, its powers alone. But the house had its own secrets. It was not their ferocity or their ruthlessness that gave the DeGroots their edge; it was the bloody bombs.

“Kablooie!”

The dungeon wall caved in, and Tavish was monumentally happy he hadn’t accidently brought the building down on Jane. He hadn’t had any way to give warning, so he’d mostly been relying on luck.

And he certainly did feel like the luckiest man alive when Jane held up his hand to see through the dust and sunlight streaming through the newly made dungeon entrance. “Tavish?” he coughed.

“None other!”

Jane staggered—either he’d taken damage while buying Tavish time to escape, or the collapse had actually bruised him a bit. Either way, he rushed into the cellar to help.

“You…you did not leave,” Jane said, amazed.

“I’m not going back. Never again.”

The arm not helping Jane by the elbow gently lifted his chin. Tavish held it there, savoring the seconds, then did something he should have done years ago and brought their mouths together.

The dust settled, the bells rang in the distance, and Tavish held him until he was sure he’d made his point.

When they parted, Jane’s eyes fluttered open in wonder. “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved,” he said, still barely believing. “Sun Tzu said that.”

A voice came from the cell door. “Did he also say that the best way to leave a prison is through the most obnoxious and ear-splitting way possible?”

Tavish jumped, wondering how someone had responded to the alarm so quickly, but when he looked deeper into the dungeon he saw only Marcel. Who was…standing on the outside of the cell?

“I suppose you will not be needing these, then,” the fae said, and held up a comically large ring of brass keys.

“Ah!” Tavish said in delight. “Good man.”

“…Good man,” Jane repeated softly.

“Alas,” Marcel continued. “I can still contribute something to your escape. There is a ship under the name of The Tyrant’s Helm down in the harbor, bound for Ambery. I suggest you’re both on it before nightfall.”

“You’re not coming?” Tavish asked, when it was clear Jane wouldn’t.

“No.” Marcel shared one final, mournful look with the General. “Everything he said was right, you know. There is one place in this world where I belong.”

“You can choose where that is,” Jane replied.

“And I have.”

Marcel smiled. It was feeble; even Tavish, who felt this conversation was going entirely past him, could see that.

The fae went on, “and I know you no longer need me.” He nodded to Tavish.

“That- that is not true!” Jane sputtered. “Not that I ever needed- I mean, you- Marcel you don’t have to stay with these maggots. You deserve better.”

“I truly do not. But you do.” Marcel spoke the last words to Tavish. “You’re free of me now. This is how it gets better.”

They stood, the bells still ringing, Jane still struggling to find the words. But maybe he saw the same thing in Marcel’s eyes that Tavish did: a choice, and whatever consequences that would be. Jane straightened and, standing atop what remained of the dungeon wall, gave Marcel a salute.

He saluted back.

With one arm around Jane’s shoulders, he guided him away, and the pair set off to catch their ship.

Jane followed him out of the debris on unsteady feet. He asked, “you think people like us will really fit in a place like Ambery?”

“Dunno. We don’t have to stay. Though I’ve still got two more combustion grenades on me, so wherever we end up, it won’t be boring.”

#dnadbnbweek #tf2 fanfiction #demosolly

13 notes · View notes

hankwritten · 2 years

Text

Ensorcelled

For Boots n Bombs week 2022 Day 2 - Animals/Nature/Magic

Soldier sits on the mansion’s living room couch. The Eyelander sits on the loveseat across from him, nestled comfortably on a blanket Mrs. DeGroot crocheted for them. Soldier narrows his eyes. The Eyelander doesn’t move.

Soldier says, “it is an obvious fact that we cannot go on like this. So obvious I will save us the trouble of even pointing it out!”

The Eyelander says nothing.

“You play hardball, maggot, I’ll give you that.” Soldier nods sagely. “But Tavish is more important than either of us, and it would hurt him too much to have to choose between his two Best Friends. One of us has to step down. I volunteer you, on the count of not being a human and instead just being a stupid sword.”

The Eyelander continues to sit because it is, as stated, a sword.

“The silent treatment will not work on me!” Soldier roars, getting to his feet. “I will simply fill in the words you’re not saying with even more of my words, so take that you damn hunk of metal! I have bested my own mother at the quiet game, both before and after she died, so if you think you can defeat me-”

“Oi! What’s all the shouting in here? Mum says you’re going to deflate the pastries if you keep it up.”

Soldier stops, looming over a stationary Eyelander who, by their nature, still looks completely unperturbed. Demo is standing in the kitchen doorway, an eyebrow raised, a dot of flower on his nose that somehow makes him look adorable rather than silly. Quashing his frustration, Soldier lowers his fist, knowing that shaking it about won’t go any better than the last dozen times he’s fallen into that trap.

“We were just…” he says, “having a spirited conversation.”

Demo blinks, noticing Eyelander for the first time. “Oh! Well that’s nice. Glad you lads are finally getting along.”

He pauses, in the gut-sinking way Soldier has come to recognize as when he’s listening to Eyelander through their spirit-bond.

“Ach, that’s just how he is when he’s being friendly,” Demo says to whatever Eyelander’s told him. “Now what do you say we go out while those bridies are cooking?” He lifts Eyelander up, retrieving its scabbard (also with its own Mrs. DeGroot made sheath-cozy) and slinging it onto his back.

“Uh,” Soldier swallows as Demo slides the sword in place. “What did they say?”

“Ach, nothing. Going on that you were being ‘weird’. But I know you, and I like your brand of weird.”

Something like that…well it puts a warmth from Soldier’s gut all the way to his toes, and he finds himself smiling. The moment of joy is dashed, however, as it always is when he remembers that that damn claymore is still there, listening in on every word. Sharing every moment that should be private between two men who are Best Friends.

Even as Soldier thinks it, Demo laughs quietly at something Eyelander says.

“What uh, what is it?” he asks, a pathetic attempt to be included.

“Oh nothin’, not even funny anyway,” Demo laughs, wiping a tear from his eye. “Anyway, let's get a move on then, aye? I can drive.”

It’s not fair , Soldier thinks as he gets in the passenger seat of Demo’s Pinto. Soldier was here first. He and Demo were sharing relationship-forging experiences and making lifelong-bonds well before he picked up that haunted sword, and now Soldier is just supposed to let this parasitic little ghost worm its way into their friendship? Sure there was that rough patch in the middle where they weren’t really friends but more-kinda-motral-enemies, but that was partly the Eyelander’s fault anyway! It shouldn’t matter how much bonding they and Demo have done, especially not when most of it was spent separating Soldier’s neck from his shoulders.

“Dessert?” Soldier asks when Demo calls for a stop at a churros stand. “Isn’t your mother making dessert back at the mansion?”

“Bridies are a savory pasty,” Demo explains. “Besides, Eyelander really only has one weakness. This is sort of the only time our spirit-line isn’t filled with constant bellyaching.”

“What’s it like?” The question slips out before Soldier can stop it. Does he actually want to know? “The…spirit-line.”

Demo stops, churro sugar and a dawning look of thoughtfulness on his face. “It’s like…eating for two. Wait no, nae like that. It’s like…you don’t know you want something, or how badly you need it, but when you actually take a bite it all connects . A glass of water when you haven’t realized you’re thirsty. Cracking your back and having everything moving right again. And it’s even better when we’re fighting; there’s a comfort there that not even the best training can give you. There’s someone else there in your arms, in your legs, gently nudging you along until you deflect a blow just right and everything sings.” Demo sighs in wonder. “It’s…Magic.”

“Oh,” Soldier says. “That’s nice.”

It’s hopeless, isn’t it? Soldier can’t but mope as they wander back to the car; he’s losing his best friend to a ghost, and there’s nothing he can do about it. If he had the opportunity of course he would do all those things for Demo, breathing his same air, sharing their lives together. Why does Demo prefer Eyelander so much? What does that sword have that Soldier doesn’t?

Right before they’re about to re-enter the mansion, Soldier freezes, realizing Demo’s already told him the answer.

Magic.

Merasmus’s skin care routine is thirty-seven steps, and thirty-seven steps exactly. It is the one thing he refuses to let his roommate ruin, and thus he has placed an innumerable number of wards around the bathroom, double and triple checking before finally allowing himself to relax. He has been soaking in the tub for eleven minutes, painting the sixth of his eight remaining toenails, when Soldier bursts through the locked door.

“Hi Merasmus Need To Borrow This Promise To Pay You Back!”

He says this as he rummages through Merasmus’s undersink cabinets, carelessly throwing aside his multitudes of Lush bath bombs (and a few regular bombs because the Bombinomicon is the worst ) before pulling out a magic kit Merasmus hasn’t seen in years.

“Goodbye Merasmus Love You See You Tonight!” And he’s off again.

“SOLDIER! YOU-” Mesasmus barely gets the words out before he slips while getting out of the tub. And because he is an old, old man, he falls and immediately breaks his neck.

Later, when his spirit is floating over the still-sudsy bathwater, he wonders how he’s going to get back into his body this time. And no one’s going to bother doing the last eleven steps on a corpse. This day can truly not get any worse.

“Alright, alright lad,” Demo chuckles. “Are you finally going to tell me what all the footer is about?”

“No maggot, I am going to show you. Sit!”

Demo puts his hands up and grins. It would send butterflies through Soldier’s stomach, but then he starts futzing around and setting up Eyelander on a second chair and all the relish goes out of it.

“ Attention privates,” Soldier tries vainly.

Demo stops fussing and puts his hands politely on his lap. His face is very obviously trying to contain a grin. “I see some fancy hats, some cards…you finally taking me up on my offer to teach you poker?”

“Neg-a-tory! I am about to unravel your minds with something far more daring than some commie game . Behold! Magic .” He sweeps his hand, displaying the various items he’s looted from Merasmus’s castle. From the pile he picks up a bouquet of flowers, and hands it to Demo. “For the handsome gentleman up front!”

The bemused expression tugging at Demo’s cheeks only widens, and he reaches out a hand. However, as soon as his fingers brush over Soldiers, the flowers—which are supposed to explode into confetti when Soldier says the magic words—instead explode into skeleton spiders.

Not like the exoskeletons of spiders, but tiny joints and bones in spider shapes, and they all go crawling down Demo’s arm.

“Aaaahrraaah!” he yelps as he goes falling backwards, thankfully caught by the sturdy loveseat.

“Uh! That is not meant to happen! Here let me-” He rushes for the deck of cards and thrusts them towards Demo’s face. “Pick one! Any one! Literally any one!”

“Jane I don’t-” Demo says, still shaking.

Which is probably for the best because every card in Soldier’s hand suddenly transforms into a large bat.

“GRRRNYAAAG!” Soldier hollers as the newly formed creatures flap in confusion around the living room’s ceiling. “What is WRONG with that wizard?”

“Wizard?” Demo raises a brow, one hand over his heart, trying to keep it from jumping out of his chest. “You didn’t go taking magic lessons from Merasmus, did you?”

“I had to Tavish! It was the only way I was ever going to learn! I know I- I’m trouble sometimes, and I can’t compete with a magic weapon that shares your innermost thoughts and makes you laugh and sings with two hearts beating as one-”

“ What? ”

“But just give me one more chance!” Soldier runs back behind his table, and shoves the battered old top hat until it’s sitting up straight. “Behold!”

He grabs the nearby wand, and gives it a tap.

Something furry appears over the top hat’s lip, and Soldier breaths a sigh of relief. The respite is short lived however; for it’s not ear s that are poking out of the hat, but an ear, absolutely massive in a way that in no conceivable way could extradite itself from the opening. It does. And then it is followed by a second ear, and then a head, and within seconds a three ton rabbit falls onto the carpet with a SLAM . It takes up nearly the whole living room, hind legs kicking over the TV, horrific teeth looking like they’d very much like to swallow down a baby elephant and then a refrigerator for dessert.

Demo stands, Soldier gapes, but before either of them can do anything the rabbit is off, bounding down the hall and displacing at least one priceless DeGroot heirloom tacked to the wall.

“Jane…” Demo starts.

Soldier drops onto the couch in defeat.

“Don’t even say it. I know. No wonder you…you like that sword better than me. You win.” This last statement he tells Eyelander, who has fallen slightly to the left due to all the abnormal leporidae activity. “I’ll go pack my things…”

“Jane you don’t even have things to pack.” Demo holds him lightly by the shoulders as he tries to move past. “C’mon, stop ‘n tell me what this is all about.”

All he wants is to go home. There, he’ll probably have his rank stripped for his monumental failure of command. “…I couldn’t keep going on like that. Competing for your attention. I figured this was the only way I could get one up on that stupid thing.”

“ That’s why you set a bunch of affronts to god loose in me home? Because you were jealous of Eyelander?”

Soldier droops. “Yes. I wanted to impress you.”

“And to do that you picked magic ? The thing that’s left me blind in one eye since the age of seven?”

“Oh.” Soldier thinks for a second. “Yeah I really didn’t think this one through.” He rubs his face. “I’m sorry Tav, for everything. It was just so hard hearing you talk about your incredible bond all the time and I…” Soldier lifts his head. “…I just want to be the one you care about.”

Demo’s expression, a mask of confusion, concern, and maybe a little bit of fear (that rabbit is still out there), softens until his brow knits together. He moves his hands from Soldier’s shoulders to the sides of his face. “Oh Janey…you never have to worry about that.”

“How couldn’t I?” Soldier says glumly. “I can never know you the way they do.”

“Because they’re my bloody sword you numpty.” But Demo’s smiling now. “And I don’t like you the way I like Eyelander.”

“You don’t like me?”

“That is not -” He grips Soldier’s face, and presses their lips together, “-what I said.”

The kiss, startlingly begun and startlingly over, elicits only one reaction from the Soldier. “… Oh .”

“I didn’t say anything because I didn’t realize you felt the same way.” Demo rubs the back of his neck, but grins while he does it. “Not that Eyelander didn’t tease me for acting like a lovestruck idiot.”

At the mention, Soldier stiffens. “You!” he points a finger at the claymore. “You have been playing me this whole time!”

There is a moment of thoughtful contemplation, a few nods from Demo, before he turns to Soldier and says, “Eyelander says ‘no shit’.”

And, as Soldier’s world is finally coming into a sharp new understanding, when all seems right and swords are trusty weapons and best friends are Best Friends, a hollering from the garden startles them all. It is the distinctive voice of Mrs. DeGroot, warning that so much as touching her rhubarb plants will result in an untimely demise. The threat is followed by the thwap of cane on fur.

Demo asks, “what say we go help Mum with your ill-advised foray into wizardry?”

“I resent that accusation! As if I would ever be caught dead in such hideous and pointed headwear!”

Demo laughs, grabs Eyelander, and the three of them head toward the garden to do battle with the world’s most confused hare.

#demosolly #tf2 fanfiction #dnadbnbweek

11 notes · View notes

hankwritten · 2 years

Text

Marabunta

For Boots n Bombs week 2022 Day 7 - Boots/Bombs/Free Space

The first time I went to the recruiting station, I was fifteen and they laughed me right out, leaving me to puff out my chest in compensation for my smarting pride on the long walk home. When I was sixteen, I had a beard, and those same men barely gave me a second glance as they handed me a clipboard and had me write down my medical history. Back then, I didn’t notice how tired the faces around me were, how desperation could sink into the skin through your pores until you could choose to ignore even the most obvious of things. At the time, all I thought about was being a hot shot, off to the mainland, off to prove myself a man.

How different, how much sharper, how much shorter a walk home can be when you’ve won where it counted. I smiled at a group of girls I knew, boasting as I passed, “you lassies are all in safe hands now, you’re welcome, and you’re welcome again.”

“What are you on about now DeGroot?” Alice MacAra said, but she wasn’t mean about it none. I liked Alice. I flashed my grin wider for her.

“Sapper DeGroot, reporting,” I said, giving a lazy salute.

A little crease sprung up between her eyes, but Leslie Burns said, “well look at you all a bluster! They cannae have believed you were eighteen. They would have turned you right out.”

“They did last time,” I admitted, but it was with a puffed humility, one where you know exactly what soil you’re standing on. “But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Leslie scoffed, but didn’t contradict me, her eyes running me up and down in a whole new light of sunspot glory. It affirmed. Everything I’d already known of course, in the way only the young can know that they’re so much more deserving of everything they’ve gotten. Deserving of respect, deserving of girlies’ attention, deserving of renown.

Lo that I’d looked at Maysie Cunningham, the third girl they had with them, staring off into space while Leslie asked me if I was going to be a pilot since any Scotsman worth his salt wanted to be a pilot when it all came down to it. If I were different, less cocksure, drunk on my own boyish confidence, I could have noticed how Maysie thumbed the white flower she kept pinned to the front of her shirt at all times. Her eyes drifting far off the conversation didn’t matter at the time, it wasn’t relevant the flower was for Gus Brown, who’d been doting on her before he’d been shipped out last month. I’d known Gus even. If I’d just looked at Maysie I could have seen what an idiot I was being, my future laid out like a tablecloth.

But that’d be a different story than this, wouldn’t it?

Instead I boasted, wished a bunch of fine looking girls farewell, and went home. Home, a little cottage away from things. Home, tucked far enough into the hills that the family profession wouldn’t disturb the neighbors.

It’s the family profession that’d left Da’s face the way it was, shrapnel long removed and one eye a deadened white. Not so long though that the other had started to catch up, though, that he still didn’t give it his best shot at things. He evenings at the kitchen table fiddling with wires and carefully measuring compounds as he squinted through the film, even as it all got away from him. He denied this with an unspoken yet unshakeable determination.

Home, where I witnessed that familiar picture as I passed through the kitchen door and flinched nonetheless. I hadn’t thought he saw me, so I spoke. “I signed up.”

“I know,” he replied, not looking up. At my surprise, he said, “you went this same time last year.”

“Ah.”

I stood. He sat, and tinkered, and didn’t grow frustrated when the things under his hands didn’t move the way he wanted anymore. The way they used to.

“I’m…going,” I said eventually. Amazing how everything a young man dreams up about himself evaporates when faced with silence from his father.

Eventually, he said, “she’ll be home in an hour.”

Ah. The and I’m not going to be the one to tell her as clear as a bell.

I nodded. I went out to the vast swath of meadow behind the house, where the hill was a gentle embrace of grass and wildflowers, inclined so mellowly that I wouldn’t breath heavy when I made the journey back up. The sides made a bowl like that, a perfect little scoop, as though Fachan had reached down and taken a handful of earth and thrown it aside. To the west, and meandering a bit more, there was a place I could think of as mine. Maybe there had been other youngins who had found it once upon a time, maybe in its long history it’d belonged to lovers and heartbreaks and the imagination of poets, but for me the carpet of bluebonnets on the sun-facing side would always belong to me and me alone. I sat, the inline greeting my back, dots of azure surrounding me in the cacophony of the wind. I waited.

When it comes to that first night spent crammed in the barest cover while the enemy rained hell’s own fires down upon you, no man preserves his boyish idolization of war.

Well, one man maybe, but this story isn’t about him. It is about me, and my months, years, centuries, I spent with a rifle clutched to my chest and my back soaked with mud. We were given orders. We followed. We marched. We shot men and had our own lads shot in return and each of us clung to a bit of normalcy like sitting around at night talking about back home wherever that was. I liked them well enough. It made things manageable. I spent so long scanning their faces, wondering which—if any—of them had made the same choices I had to get here, had taken those risks. Which of these were just boys, too small in their Das’ coats? I was truly alone when I decided none, not any of this lot.

By the end, when terrible nights made each of the faces staring across from me look infinitely young and infinitely terrified, I would decide it was all of them.

I wasn’t good with the rifle. I was passable, we all had to be passable, but I wasn’t one of the lads who could disassemble and assemble in under a minute. There was a comfort to mediocrity. Perfectly average. The only surprise I had in me was picking up a grenade that had rolled under our feet one day and chucking it back to hell and high heaven. They’d clapped me on the back, told me good job, because that’s what you do after your mate just killed a bunch of people as long as they’re people on the other side of the hill. I didn’t get what they were so impressed about. I supposed they’d never trained with dummy grenades when they were kids.

They were the good sort. I thought so. I couldn’t tell one commander from the next other than there was always someone saying go here shoot this, because it was always fine except when it wasn’t.

“Oi. Dylan, c’mon, we got to move.”

Dylan did not, in fact, move. I knew that, knew he wouldn’t be again, but that knowing part was buried deep within all the numb of my outsides that shielded against grime and flecks of blood. The left half of Dylan’s head wasn’t doing a good job of being an outside. I shook his shoulder a second time, because he was the only one I could see, the only one I hadn’t lost in the tumult.

It had been a joint effort, American and French forces converging with the royal army in an attack that had sounded vaguely like a good idea when it’d been explained to us. Now though. Now I couldn’t tell if it’d been a trap or something had gone…or what. May this was just what it was like to lose.

“Move,” I said again. The body jostled, slid sideways, and was still.

The sound of bombs dropping, then screeching, then tearing the landscape. It deafened me briefly, and it was enough to finally make me follow my own advice and move. I grabbed my rifle and ran, not sure where, not sure whose commands I should be following, desperately searching for anything that looked like a remaining chunk of army in the fields of grey brown grey. On hand held my helmet in place as I clumsily stumbled over mounds and into death traps, every trench threatening to break a leg and leave me there to die when the next strike came. The whirring of planes came again. I half tripped, half threw myself into what would only be called cover to a desperate man, and put my hands over my ears.

The boom faded. Panic wouldn’t describe me in that moment, more frayed nerves sparking like wires cut with a shoddy pair of scissors. Was I even running the right way? There was another body in this hole with me, and I shook it just like I’d shook Dylan.

“Please, please…”

I’d turned to begging, understanding I was the last man alive on the whole blighted plot of damnation, going through the motions even as I felt myself shutting. Which is why it scared me shitless when this body gasped and its eyes shot wide open.

“Christ,” I yelped, falling backwards.

The not-quite-dead man jolted to his feet, even as bullets were whizzing mere inches over our trench. The collapsible shovel that had been forgotten in his unconscious grip now flipped open, shaping his stance to that of violence as he whirled on his surroundings.

He noticed me, flat on my arse, looking up in partial horror as the man in a dilapidated American military uniform stood silhouetted against an orange-and-charcoal sky. He pointed his shovel at me. “You. Private! Report!”

Even shouting, his voice barely made it through the ringing in my ears. “Everyone is- W-we need to get out of here,” I managed to stammer. And go where? that statement begged, but my mind was still only half on and I sputtered, “fucking hell I thought you were dead.”

“I was not! I was. Resting my eyes.”

A line of blood ran out of his ear down his neck.

Still, he only took half a second to assess the surrounding carnage before flipping his head to the west. “A total and complete disaster of an assault. Hm. Well, not time to waste. Let’s march, private.”

It wasn’t the way I had been going, but. Fuck it.

I was terrified. I was lost, had lost, had familiar faces around me one second and the next I didn’t. I was shaky hands on a rifle I barely knew how to use, and I was the sound of silence right before something terrible was about to happen. But, most of all, I was still a boy, and in that moment the one thing I needed most was a path to follow.

He screamed, “charge!” as he flung himself over the side of the trench.

And like that, I was sucked into his gravitation.

“Down!” I yelled, grabbing Jane by the front of the uniform and bringing us both to the safety of mother earth.

It’d been days since I’d found this one man in a sea of madness. Or maybe weeks. Sometimes it was like he’d always been there, or maybe he wasn’t there at all, even now. Jane…Jane didn’t feel entirely real. From the way he spoke to the way death and consequences simply shaped themselves around him, he was more like a hallucinogenic amalgamation of hyperbolized ideals of soldier-hood than an actual person. Some days I wondered if I’d made him up, just to cope with being stranded so many miles into enemy territory. Other days I thought well why not? and went to sleep uncaring.

Jane heeded my advice only briefly. Timing was a thing that had been drilled into me by necessity, along with her sisters caution and reverence. You forget any one of the three when handling The Bomb and you don’t live to make that mistake again, so years of honed instincts told me to brace in the dried dirt for a possible secondary wave of shrapnel. Jane cared for none of that. As soon as my grenade had detonated, he popped his head over our cover, slipping his binoculars over his eyes.

“Oorah! Nothing but a crater. Well done, son.”

Jane—with his young man’s voice and still broadening shoulder—was barely older than me, and certainly not by enough to be calling me son. I never pressed it, though. In that voice was something else, something you don’t mistake for a lad’s false confidence. Something I rarely even heard from men three times his age; conviction. Conviction that made you believe things would be right as long as you kept marching on.

I slumped against our cover, pulling my pack protectively over myself. Here DeGroot, you’re the expert at ‘em, you hold onto the ‘nades. How long ago had they said that? Shoved off the weight, but also the expectation that I was somehow more equipped than they were, that I’d get them the supplies when needed? I’d been carrying around the bomb bag ever since that day at the field. It weighed on more than just my spinal column.

“We…we should set up a few more,” I mumbled. “As traps. If we’re staying here for the night. I could rig up something like a tripwire that’ll pull all the pins at once…”

My exhausted mind was fizzling with possibilities, falling back into old habits as I mulled over the most efficient way to blow a man up. It was all explosive radiuses and walking speeds and whether that patrol had seen us the other day-

Jane hesitated, then sat down beside me. A hand found itself on my shoulder. “I mean it, private. Good work. You’ve done enough for today.”

“Enough,” I scoffed. Like anything would ever be enough.

As unreal as Jane already was, he still found ways to surprise me sometimes. His name, for one, but I was half sure that wasn’t even his real one with the way his gaze had shifted when I’d finally pried it out of him. I’d told him mine too, but he seemed to have forgotten soon after. He did a lot of forgetting. That might have been concerning if I wasn’t so bloody tired.

Other than his name, the man was a mystery. Affection and bouts of clarity were scarce. The hand on my shoulder could have made me follow his advice of slipp just with the comfort of its rarity.

“How much further?” I asked.

“Few days,” Jane said noncommittally.

“And then? You still haven’t told me where we’re going. Are we going to find your company? And I still need to get back to…” Somewhere. Assuming we weren’t the last allied forces in the world, isolated from communications and orders.

Jane glanced away. “I can’t tell you where we’re going.”

“Why the bloody hell not?”

“Because it’s a…secret.”

For the first time in a long while, I perked up, the fog lifting slightly. “A secret?”

“I am…on a covert mission.” Jane gained more confidence as he spoke. “To. Kill Hitler.”

“Really?”

The haze of exhaustion that had been following me since I’d met Jane—hell, even before that—lifted ever so slightly. I found myself getting excited. Every boy dreams about daring missions and heroic single acts that save the day; you wouldn’t admit it to your mates, but you dreamed it all the same.

Jane nodded, as though confirming it for himself. “Yes. That is why I can’t tell you about what I am doing or where I am going, and why no one else knows where I am, and also why I am out here alone. Secret and very legitimate mission.”

“You’re not out here all alone anymore,” I said, knocking my boot against his.

He opened his mouth. I didn’t know what I was expecting—not that he’d invite me to his Special Forces operation or anything, or that I could do anymore than what I was already doing following him around like a lost puppy. But it was enough to just be a part of it. To be more than another pair of boots on the ground. And Jane…there was something to his presence. It was a force so strong I’d forget I was taller than him sometimes, to turn to the side and see he'd been looming in my mind when I wasn’t looking. His features were strong and jagged, and his eyes were the sort of clear-water blue you saw only in paintings. The few times he’d taken off the helmet, the sight of them had pinned me by my throat and taken my soul right there.

Jane closed his mouth. He said, “rest up. We’ll move in a few hours.”

More plans, more worries about who might be creeping up on us, but I forced myself to put those back on the top shelf. Instead, I said, “you need sleep too, mate.”

“Me? I just took a nap three days ago! It was very refreshing.”

I sighed, found my head dropping against his shoulder in exhaustion, and didn’t bother to move it.

It’d seemed so close.

Those days, those horrid, final days held no clue to their innards. It was more trudging, a bit more killing—

(Jane was good at killing. It’d be minimizing to say I didn’t enjoy the mechanics of the family trade, but the killing itself…there were things I learned from Jane that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. I came to love his art, and the way he loved his art too.)

—and then the impossible. A collection of friendly forces, camped, entrenched, safe. Jane scanned them through his binoculars over and over again at my insistence, not daring to believe they were real after the horror we had found ourselves in. But there they were. Within reach.

“Fuck,” I said, slumping over my knees. “Don’t think I’ve ever been happy to see the union jack.”

We were just picking each other’s brains on how to approach without them thinking we were charging enemies, when the bombs started to drop.

Like cirein-croin stalking an innocent sea-maid, the attackers were drawn in by the bountiful target, the once empty plain screaming with engines in a matter of seconds. We were nothing in it all. A drop. But suddenly we were back in that hell from months again, and I found I couldn’t hear myself screaming. Jane dug us a trench. Maybe. The prey part of my brain shouted hide hide hide so loud I could barely hear myself think let alone what my companion was doing. Within minutes Jane had excavated one of the old holes that had once been this battleground’s pride and joy, tossing aside the dirt that had fallen in with the seasons as he kept one eye on the sky. He grabbed my arm and dragged us both under. An impact shook the earth so close I swore it had struck right where we’d been standing a moment ago.

We crammed ourselves in the shadow of an earth-wound made by tearing metal fingers, and plugged our ears.

“Hey, keep it together son.”

I hadn’t realized I was addled until Jane put a hand on my shoulder and kept me from rocking back and forth on the muddy excuse for a floor. My breaths came out in gasps, and it was so much worse than that attack when I had first met him, because then I hadn’t been trapped, hadn’t been boxed in just waiting waiting for the one strike that would eventually find us.

“We do not give in!” he kept saying. “America needs you strong; to give in is to hand the enemy their first step to victory, and we are not in the business of handing out steps! What are we, some sort of ladder company?”

I didn’t correct for what would have been the dozenth time. Instead the panic took hold of me entirely and I said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t keep going I-”

“That is deserter talk private! Just remember the respect your country will honor you with when you go out in a fiery blaze, taking every man in a thirty mile radius with you! Think only of our noble, gruesome demise, and how it will inspire a generation to-!”

“I don’t want to be an inspiration!” I all but screamed over the noise. “Fuck, fuck, I don’t want to bloody die.”

I thought of blue flowers and Mum at her knitting and Da quietly fixing something in his workshop and a small seaside town where nothing ever happened but also nothing ever happened. To give that all up because of something so stupid as thinking lassies would love a man in uniform, that I’d somehow be a man when I got home. I’d be nothing when I went back. I wouldn’t come back at all, and if I did I’d be shrunken, broken. All because I didn't want to be someone who sat it out while the older boys went off to war.

Older boys. Because that’s all we were, boys. That’s all I was at that moment. I grabbed the front of Jane’s uniform, forcing him to look me in the eyes. “You think it’s going to matter?” I demanded of him. “If we die? Here? No one’s going to write a bloody song about us, we’ll just be another casualty report, another empty coffin gone home.”

First that I’d ever seen, for the first time in his life maybe, Jane flinched. Flinched in the face of it all. He turned his head but I kept holding him, to meet those eyes that could cut like ice.

“If we die there’s no mission, it means nothing we-”

The air exploded overhead. My fists curled tighter reflexively, pulling us together, and we stayed there as the heat and the bombs rained down. A scalding, burning sort of heat, that could no more describe temperature than the way my face found warmth in the skin of his neck. Cracks forming in an ancient gas vent, he broke, and his hands gripped the back of my uniform and held on for wasted life.

“We need to go,” Jane said in the first gap in the bombs.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want him to be right, that this was our one sole shot to make it across the wasteland. Just wanted to curl into the dirt and let myself calcify until the sun swallowed the world.

“Now.”

The silence was deafening. He put a hand on my shoulder. I urged myself to stand.

We were halfway across when hell came home again. The distance left was meaningless, as there was no way back now, only forward, and I wrapped shock around my mind like a protective blanket. Just keep moving. Just keep staring at Jane’s back.

A story ends when a bomb drops too close.

To the left of me, the ground was liquefied, and as I went flying in more pain than I’d ever felt, all I could wonder was if Da had gone through this exact thing. To have it all turn on you at the worst possible moment. I laid in the mud and decided he must have, and every DeGroot before, in a third law of physics sort of way. Like Wayland at his smithy. Arachne at her loom.

“Tavish!”

Jane’s voice was hoarse, choked by the smoke that surrounded us. It came closer, but even when his arms slipped under mine and he began to drag me out of the pit, it wasn’t close enough. A layer of warbling fog between use as he demanded I keep moving, a tall order as anything.

My whole body screamed in pain. I tried to lift myself, speak as another bomb came down so close, but even moving my jaw sent fire up the side of my face. My vision was red blood and endless black.

“We need to go,” he shouted, as though underwater. Might as well ask a mountain to nicely step aside. When I replied he cursed, then swung my upper body over his shoulders. I screamed as weight pressed against my wounded side. “No, you’re coming with.”

I didn’t know why he said that. I still don’t. I never asked him about that day, as he carried my barely-living body across that last half kilometer to sanctuary while the very air tried to kill us. Maybe I’d been screaming for him to just let me die.

If so, I never properly thanked him.

Waking isn’t like they make it sound in the stories, with a gasp and a head laid back on a clean pillowcase. It is fighting. Fighting so hard you lose track of time, waking, then sleeping, then waking again and wondering if that first ‘awake’ was real or if you just dreamed it. Life came back to me in parts, finding out that it’d been months since my ‘insane friend’ dragged me back here.

And the war was over too. That was a real kicker. I wondered, vaguely as I laid back and tried to fight off unconsciousness, if Jane regretted spending the last moments of the World War hauling my sorry arse out of a hole.

The first time I could move my arms, I did something I’d been dreading ever since I'd first pulled myself from the reaching darkness into the blinding light of the field hospital. My hand cautiously felt up the side of my face, touching the bandages there. I didn’t have to ask a nurse to know that my eye was gone—not just whited-over, but removed entirely. The side of my being that’d been facing the impact was lacerated, barely functional, and to rub salt in the non-proverbial would I slid a hand down my leg to feel it end abruptly at the calf.

I groaned. If I could fall further backward against the bed I would, but sitting took too much effort. Instead, I marinated in shock, listening to the sounds of the hospital shutting down, the reports discussed loudly in halls, the arguments about how to get us all home.

“Oi, s-sir,” I said one time when an officer came close enough that I could grab at his sleeve. “The one who brought me in…the American sergeant…where is he?”

He snorted. “Right. Him. First of all lad, he’s not a sergeant. We’ve been on the wire with the Americans and they don’t know who the fuck he is either.”

My guts, barely kept in place as they were, writhed in knots. “What?”

“Whole bloody mess,” the officer sighed, blowing air enough to move one of the sweat-stiffened locks on his forehead. “If he’s a spy he’s a strange one, as no one has any record of him in their ledgers, or proof he’s a citizen let alone served. We’re trying to arrange some way to send him back so they can try him for…whatever law he’s broken, I don’t know.”

“But he’s.” My mouth was dry, from days of water and prune juice in tiny cups. “He’s special operations. That’s why they wouldn’t have a record of him.”

The officer gave me a look of such unimaginable pity, that it finally hit me. I swallowed, sitting back, the horror of my idiocy crowding out the pain that always hung at the edges of my periphery. And so when the passing man left, the world’s biggest fool lay in bed and closed his eye.

I practiced long, moving about on the crutches. It was almost easier than re-learning how to see with no depth perception, though several times the issues did compound and left me clattering into walls. Easier, since they kept saying I could get a fake leg eventually, that right now I just needed to rest and heal.

But the eye though. There was nothing to be done for it. This was as good as it was going to get.

I wrote letters to Mum and Da. I cried a lot reading the ones they sent back. It wasn’t so bad. Lot of the lads in the beds next to me cried a lot too.

The months stretched, and the hospital was almost completely decommissioned now, only a few stragglers who they hadn’t arranged to send home. I found that same officer, the one who knew the most about Jane.

“I want to see him,” I explained for the tenth time.

Lieutenant Hill, having been worn down by a DeGroot’s stalwart determination in doses of acid-tinged weeks, took off his cap and rubbed at his thinning hairline. “You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, you know that lad?”

“Aye, I’ve been told that a lot.”

Hill slapped his cap back on and gave a look like his fillings were trying to bore out of his head. “Fine, but none of this comes back on me.”

“Of course not, sir.”

For as long as we’d been there, Jane had never tried to leave. Only with the padded layer of retrospect could I see that was odd; for of course I’d never felt the need to leave that hospital, abandon those I’d fought to get back to. But Jane had been, technically, a prisoner. If I’d wondered at the time, I would have assumed that with the fighting stopped his journey could never end the way mine had: returning where I was supposed to be. But now. I wonder if that wasn’t all it was.

When I stood with him for the first time since death had greeted us both on that plain, it truly seemed like there was nothing to keep him from leaving. A prisoner was a poor descriptor. (As Hill had lamented: simply no one knew what to do with him.)

Jane wouldn’t meet my eyes eye.

“You weren’t on a secret mission.” It didn’t need to be said, not with how he frowned, let the still-present helmet wobble over his features as he turned away. They’d tried to take it from him. It hadn’t gone well. “What were you doing? Really?”

“Earning my stripes,” he growled.

I sat. Standing with one leg grows tiring, crutches or no, and they’d provided him a few chairs he’d never bothered to use.

I scowled until his defensiveness turned to shame and he faced his hands. “I didn’t mean to…”

“I honestly believed it,” I said. “That it was special somehow, something bigger than us. Lord how much I wanted things to matter-”

He reached, like he was going to touch my shoulder. I wanted him to, badly in that moment, this man I had followed through hell on a delusion because I’d been that desperate to believe in something. He stopped after barely a second.

“I am. Sorry. Tavish.”

I’d thought I’d hallucinated that, when he’d called my name after the bomb came down. Convinced myself I’d never been fully real to him. It was my turn to glance away. “…Thank you. For saving my life.”

Then. Reaching again. Stopping near my chair as he looked me over with something much deeper than regret, a profound hesitance, fear of me maybe. I lifted my good hand and put it on the jut of wrist bone beneath his skin, lean from the years on rations. He lunged forward and hugged me.

“I am sorry,” he said again, so close as I seized in surprise. “It was meant to be just me who had to go through it. You…you were not part of the plan.”

I never am, but didn’t say. Instead, “you’re coming back with me.”

“...What?” He pushed himself off my shoulders.

“To Ullapool,” I said. “Everyone around here is dying for someone to take you off their hands, and if they do find some way to send you home the big wigs are just going to lock you up for stolen valor or something.”

“My valor was earned, maggot-”

“Jane.”

He stopped, just short of me losing him again. Unbeknownst to me, it’d already happened dozens of times in those months, when he’d considered slipping out the window and disappearing into the wilderness again. But he’d made a choice not to leave. To not leave me.

And so he said, “fine. But only until this all blows over”

“I think Mum likes you,” I said.

We were in the grasses outside of home, the bluebonnets had come back again, just like they had for every season. Generation upon generation, fading and growing once more.

“She threw one of your fancy, wall-mounted cartoon bombs at me,” Jane complained.

“Aye, but she missed, didn’t she?”

“She’s blind.”

“She can still hit a pillock on his oversized helmet if she’s truly radge with him.”

We lapsed into silence, our back against warm grass, the sun on our shoulders, lifted just so by the incline. My crutches were by me, bending down stalks like the softest of beds, but I wouldn’t be needing them for much longer hopefully. Da knew somebody who knew somebody. The tradition of losing body parts encouraged one to accrue a backlog of unspent favors with those sorts of professionals.

“Mr. Ross down at the food market says he needs someone to sweep up every now and again,” I informed Jane when the thought came to me. “Though, if he’s gone so far as to admit that, it probably means the old place is actually one melted ice cream short of falling apart.”

“I don’t need anyone’s charity,” Jane grumbled.

I shrugged. “Then actually do the sweeping instead of just pretending to. Doesn’t count as charity then.”

A few minutes. The wind sprung so wildly that if the bluebells were real bells we would have been in the epicenter of the most beautiful choir known to god or man. I rolled until my face was pressed into his shoulder.

“Alright,” he said.

We’d never spoken of what had happened in that foxhole. When the world was ending and all we’d wanted in our last moments was a flicker of comfort, a brief sharing of misery that can only truly be known between two people who have resolved to die together. A time when face against neck had become more, and then more than that. We’d never spoken of it, no, but when I reached over and turned his mouth towards mine, it proved that it’d never truly left our minds.

#dnadbnbweek #demosolly #tf2 fanfiction

14 notes · View notes