Eoran briefly thought on the question, then shook his head. “No.”

He leaned back, but his torso remained turned toward the unfamiliar boy. In the stuttered space of all his glancing, Eo was resilient, tempting eye contact from the stranger’s strident flickering.

“Do I get to know your name now?”

"No. You get parts. Starts with a K," the boy replied before briskly continuing, almost without space enough for breath. "Why do you even want to be here. I mean do you want to be here or do you have to be here—cause it's different."

The boy whose name started with a K flickered less, strayed less.

“I chose to be here, but don’t want to be here. I just wouldn’t leave right now,” Eoran replied. “It’s not that I like being in the army—shit sucks, for real. I hate all the running and being yelled at, and how all these guys think saying ‘you people’ is a sympathetic way of addressing someone who looks different but was born in Amstead just like them... But it’s not much better in Port Haven, is it? I want to see the Ossa my parents rant and rave about. I think this is the only chance I’ll ever get. I’m tempting Varonian with my life no matter the angle, right? Die out here a traitor to my heritage or like a dog in the streets of Holm. What does it matter either way?”

"A," the interrogator offered in reward, setting a precedent for the rules of their impromptu game. "If you die either way, wouldn't you want to be with your crew—your family, whatever—rather than a plane full of people you don't give a fuck about?"

“Oh, so either the plane crashes or trenchants eradicate my entire bloodline in one fell swoop?” The Toriet boy pulled a face as the circumstances of each option grew clearer, features contorted by a strain of disbelief. “Who are you to say I don’t give a fuck about the people on this plane—that guy over there and his friend right beside him; Poole, four heads down,” Eo indicated with a quick flick of his fingers. “You, and the guy you ushered off...”

"Fuck that guy—I don't know him. Don't want to. S'why I'm talking to you," he scoffed indignant, like this topic, these other people were irrelevant. Eoran didn't earn a letter this time: he didn't answer the question. But maybe the fault laid with the interviewer.

"I have a friend who's alone without me and I don't want to be here—but it's sort of her fault I'm out here at all. Tryna figure out if I really want to get out and find my way back home or if I should stay here and keep having this conversation with you."

Surely that stray boy was discussing a longer timeline with the language of immediacy.

His eyes, though: they lingered. Quicksilver alleycat and his mercurial attention span was curious now, pressed by the holes being poked through the backdrop of his thought experiment, the tangential admission of a bloodline with a reason to be afraid of trenchants.

Eoran drew his line of sight away from his companion. He turned to carefully observe the rest of their compatriots to gauge interest—did they care that these two Ossan-looking kids were having a conversation? Was anyone actively listening? Finding nothing immediately alarming had him switching back, but the young private leaned closer in his return. Proximity was a product of confidentiality. Amiability was a surface-level front devoured by the sudden gravity of their conversation.

"Are you serious? You think you're going to have a home to go back to if you desert the army? This machine runs on blood, they'll get it either way." The depth of Eoran's mineshaft stare was so austere; he was endless, impenetrable, empty. "Look, I don't know shit about you and I'm only kinda into the pressure of this 'be interesting or I'm out' game of hypotheticals you've got going on, but I'd hate to get the rest of your name from a newspaper article going off about how people that look like you and me are just traitors to their country."

The Toriet boy straightened and receded slightly. "Last night, when I heard there was another Ossan, I was so excited to meet you. I wanted to get deployed with you, I wanted to sit here. Does that sound weird? Whatever, just—maybe I'm misunderstanding what's actually happening here, but I don't want to be part of whatever scales you're stacking in weighing your options. It's not my place to convince you, so if you want to keep talking, I'm here. I can wait around, or I can fuck off. You looked really alone. Maybe that was my fault for assuming."

That boy, so ready to flee the forest fire threatening their perimeter, seemed to settle down, hands finally leaving the hand loops of his Amstead issued pack.

He leaned in too close, like he didn't know how to properly escalate proximity between strangers, to catch the vortex of Eoran's eyes, to find himself submitting to the whorl of that endless stare.

"I was alone ‘cause I wanted to be," he offered succinctly with a lopsided grin, equal parts osprey and yearling. "Now I'm not. You act like I could go someplace right this second." The low-raised thing laid his arm out behind Eo, along the edge of the bench's low back, his grey eyed observation now prolonged. "S. Two of them."

"You talk like you're going to. I'm just trying to keep up." Eo offered in response, shoulders falling in tandem with a breath exhaled. He was slipping in the silver of the caged thing's gaze, hangman tempted by his letterbox lure. "How many more pieces are there?"

"One," the boy responded like a preparatory breath. Rummaging through his pocket, the wilder of the pair pulled out a roll of hard candies, with a look on his face that said I definitely stole these from commissary.

He pressed a paper wrapped sweet into the other boy's hand—giving, not offering, not waiting for him to accept. "You scared of breaking the rules? You act like they got a hook in you. Afraid of letting people hear."

"Yeah, they do have a hook in me. I need to get paid, my family needs the money.” Eyes affixed in his enduring observation, Eoran’s head tilted again. “Trust is tricky, right? I'm going into warzone alongside these guys, I don't want to give them any reason to doubt me. I'm just like them—skin and bones, blood and guts. But I look like the enemy, I speak their language... so I need to be careful.”

The Ossan boy's fingers were wrapped around the piece only as long as it took him to dump the thing back into the other private's lap. His returned glare deemed the placation unacceptable, but his body language assured that he could dance around the issue indefinitely. “I don't want candy. I want that letter.”

"It's not candy or letter, they're independent things—you can have candy and letter, fucking one-track Eo-Ra-N, always on that objective, huh," K-A-S-S- fired back, the rowdy Ossan in his blood shooting off as he grabbed Eoran by the wrist and wrapped Eoran's fingers around the contentious sweet. He pushed the whole package back at the boy, settling back into the corner so he could watch him more keenly, popping one of the fruit candies into his mouth. "And I get it. Of course I do. I just know no one's listening to us. They don't wanna get involved with a street kid and a foreigner. They think we're talking in words they can't understand about shit they don't wanna get involved in. Too worried about looking racist to listen too close-like. Yet. It'll change when we're out there."

Cheeks hollowed out from sucking on the cheap confection, the boy tilted his head, an unspoken, particularly shitty know-it-all proclamation of You know I'm right clear despite the rising cacophony of excited soldiers.

Still, Eoran was radiant in his fuck you, pay me recoil, his blistering desire unsated, his understanding of the rules established between them suddenly unsure, his answer unrewarded. He kept the sweet but was doubly scorned. That boy’s frustration traced his features in embers, a conflagration stoked by his measured breath, smothered in the rise and fall of his chest.

"If I can have candy and the letter, then why do I

Quit stalling," he lamented, sulking glance turned aside, "I'm never going to get to know you if my answers aren't even worth a letter anymore."

"Why do you need a name to know me?" The question was stark, callow in a manner absent from his prior string of conversation. "You see me, you've touched me, we've argued already—am I meaningless if you don't know my name?"

"No, but how am I supposed to get your attention if I don't have something to call you? How are you supposed to acknowledge me if you don't know I’m talking to you? When I shout 'hey' across a base or out in the field, how will you know it's meant for you?" Eo looked back, bare and forthright. “How can you touch me but not want me to know your name?”

"Those are some long term plans you got." A wry observation escaped that enigma of a boy as he leaned into his elbows, thoughtful. The boarding process was almost complete and already the engines were cutting back the range of intelligible conversation. He leaned closer, somewhere between reward and requisite, hand on his new friend's neck when he gave Eoran his hard won bounty.

"E."

"Kasse," Eoran tried, testing the syllable on his tongue—the taut K, the lingering double S. He was pretty sure he was only thinking as far ahead as the day would take them, but maybe that was a long time for some: people who counted energy bars, who wanted to be alone and wanted to escape. Focus drawn to his lap, the boy fussed with the sweets, smile evidencing the satisfaction taken in receiving his prize of a vowel. "Thanks for the candy, I actually really like these."

"They're the best thing in the commissary," Kasse replied as he split the roll in two, handing half of it over—waiting for it to be accepted this time. "S'why they keep them on the shelves behind the register—it's the good shit."

Maybe it didn't seem like a lot, didn't seem important, didn't seem like much of a gift to boys who came from homes, came from houses, came from parents, from schools and some vague expectation of safety, but Kasse offered the sweets as a bond. This was a promise.

Five letters and half a roll of sugared pastilles was his stray dog oath to remain, to always lead his tamed friend out of the wilderness the same way they went in:

together.

"I wasn't really gonna go anywhere," the mixed boy lied as he shoved a candy into his face. "I was just fucking with you."

“Hmm, okay.” Eoran accepted the words like he accepted the promise, with open mind and open hand. He tucked the sweets away for later, slipping them into the long, flat pocket atop his chest, his heart just beneath all those layers of scratchy camouflage and drab cotton underthings. For reasons unsaid, he felt the need to keep them close—easily accessible for when he wanted them most. Eo seemed fine to let the significance of Kasse’s gesture stand in the wordless shifting of his lithe limbs.

“You can call me Eo, by the way. Most people do instead of saying my name in full.” As the growing roar of the four massive propellers hacked and slashed at the air beyond the riveted sheets of dinged cowling, the Toriet boy drew himself close enough to leave his words in his friend’s ear. “Was that the only thing you were fucking with me about?”

"Iunno," the boy hummed in taunting satisfaction, side-eyed graceful, tucking the candy into his cheek as he strapped in. His fate was decided. He was in this shit now. "I fuck around a lot."

Eoran smiled. Ever delayed by his own proclivities, the boy was just starting to situate himself face forward when a superior began their final walkthrough. The PFC made quick work of the machine’s strange system of restraints, however, and was ready when those boots finally crossed his line of sight.

The Ossan boy settled back for the long, loud ride both glad to have made a new friend, and nervous about where the coming hours and days would take him. He was quiet and present, observant eyes making record of all moments passing in flashes of light from that lone window—the way Kasse looked in sun and shadow, how the light draped upon him, traced him sweeping strokes lent from breaks between thick patches of cloud cover.

At first, Eoran’s glances at Kasse were frequent, witnessing that boy, reaffirming their overlap. Later he would learn to relax. Eoran would grow more skilled at being surreptitious, quicker, efficient, unobtrusive, but he was always after the same thing: to make sure Kasse was still there. To make sure Kasse was not a ghost.