Across the room, the last bloodwright standing was the very picture of her father’s rage but so much quicker, long distance devastating. She was no longer a girl, no longer Riki, replaced by a snarling feral shriek of grief when she laid another cluster of darts so locust plague thick across her sightline that nine of them struck true, no less than five shredding through her target’s thigh. They found bone to attach themselves to, crude projectiles transformed into living barnacles in lapsed time, calcifying tongues flaying muscle from femur, digging into hairline fractures till they could taste the marrow of the sergeant’s bones.

How she forced his surrender when her grandmother, now descending the loft, made him drop his weapon, made him bend the knee.

“My family is dead—my father, my uncles, my brother, my world is all dead—” the girl screamed at this man who tried so vainly to kill her too. She kicked his weapon away, whipped her tiny fist across his face until he hit the ground. Her spinning rage turned her toward the pair of boys across the room in their sobbing embrace and she stopped cold.

They were too much like her,
their faces like her brothers
contorted and despairing
but they were
so alone
in a way she would never understand and always pity.

Riki was a child of war, tragedy’s daughter, but at least she was free.

“This isn’t even your war, this war is at odds with your blood. If I kill that man you can run. Why don’t you run?”

“Don’t talk to those traitors, Riki,” her grandmother chided, burled hands gripping at a shoddy rail that wobbled intermittently in the elderly woman’s unsteady descent. “Look at how they cower before Varonian, how they run from his long shadow. They’re no better than the pale one—at least he has the sense to give up!” Despite her age, her words were a whip; a fast and incessant accompaniment to the malicious spinning of her ossein tapestry inside those two prone soldiers.

Eoran groaned. What mattered in the extended suffering of this moment split between him and Kasse?

What choices did he have?

Time was a salver slowly tipping, falling forward in an unstoppable motion, at an unchangeable velocity toward what, he became more and more certain, would be a hard stop—a floor, ceiling, a barrier, break. Tunnel vision all subtraction, he saw only what he wanted to see, heard only the sounds closest to him, the pieces of his friend left ringing in his ear and filling the illogical synapses behind his eyes with syllables veiled in the ache of arsenic stain, a black sort of bereavement.

Eoran hated it. He loathed the sound of that pain, the pain in that stroking touch, the touch that wrapped him in the deep, foreboding loneliness of a body’s weight. Bones on skin on bonestuffed skin, the Toriet boy took a deep breath. The sweat shared between them filled his lungs like geosmin swollen on a stormswept gravesite yet to be filled in, crisp and pungent, muggy like a potters field relenting to the first heaving breaths of autumn.

But Eoran adored Kasse. He saw him in a fit of long form losing and he felt so guilty for being so incapable of taking care of himself. He never felt more of a burden than he did in that moment. How could he do this? How could he ever have thought he was cut from a cloth brave enough to be a competent soldier?

Forehead to forehead, Eo tilted his chin until his lips pressed into those of the boy above him. What good were secrets when he was gathering up what meant the most to him to take to his grave? He sucked in another breath, broken by footfalls on attic stairs and then floor. He stole his friend’s air like it was made for him, would choke Kasse in his relentless grip if it meant that he’d get to linger with him longer.

“They gave you away. I know you’re a wright,” Eoran told the shape of that mouth in a harrowing growl from the depths of his throat, “I am too. My utility’s internal, but I can’t fucking do this, I can’t handle this—”

On the other side of the room, their commanding officer made no sound. He had no way of mitigating any of the damage he’d taken so he gave into it, sinking into the combinate depths of his injuries, the blood loss from his gunshot wound, the violet painscape of the needleknit fragments that perforated his side, the lightning-fast punch of the girl’s overclocked fury.

“Blood-tongued jackals!” The grandmother spat at the boys. “Are you not men enough to evaporate your sisters? Which of you is the cowardly ghost?!”

How his words
faltered, how his
lungs ceased to
breathe, how his
whole fucking
world just

collapsed.

He couldn't say anything in response—what was there to say? This was all so clear now. On the brink of Eoran's dying, Kasse understood how stupid he truly was. How did he ever believe that Kasse Sejan, break and enter ghost raised by Port Haven’s gutters, was more important than this? What kind of selfish vain fucking child was he to deny Eoran his side of the narrative behind their mutual furtive glances, their second hand staring, their constant proximity—

who the fuck was he?

Kasse was succinct when he fell victim to his partner's gravity. He kissed Eoran with the feverish desperation of an apology, wrapped him up tight in his arms to keep him close. He caved to the will of his best friend's mouth as he laid his hand upon those bleeding wounds,

pressed into and through those bleeding wounds

hunting between their quantum separations for the mangled bone-shard sculptures that already branched through so much of him. That pale young phantom of a soldier pulled them out one by one and tossed them bloodied and brittle to the blood soaked floor between where the boys laid dying and the Nana stood hunched in her judgement.

When Kasse broke off the kiss to permit Eo the freedom to suffer, his eyes snapped up to Riki and the old woman. Kasse's ashen gaze was more protective mongrel than traumatized boy, held Eoran tight in that feral anguish liable to bite. Just like a wild dog brought up ‘round humans, he only understood one word on the woman's lip, head tilting when he heard her call him ghost.

Riki grabbed her grandmother's shoulders, trying valiantly to drag her toward a back stairwell. "If I can't talk to them, neither can you—their backup is already coming, Nana, we have to go. Come on—Nana!"

“You’re a slave to a country that hates you for what you are,” the elderly woman said even as she began to turn, “I hope they strip the meat from your bones and the love from your heart and leave you as empty and broken as you’ve made us.” Her rearward shuffling sealed the words like the curse they were, hatched in esoteric movement and crossed with the residual spittle of her aged acrimony.

Eoran, meanwhile, intended to keep Kasse falling in the way his stranglehold grip pleaded that he stay, the way he wrung emptiness from the sand-stained colors of that boy’s cover. He breathed in frantic shudders, cherry-picked and pitted by those hands scouring the underside of his anatomy. Eo’s chest rose in threadbare offering—the more the calcifications were removed the more human he felt, but he could only convey that sentiment in a strangely inhuman way. Eoran fed the vibrancy of his pain back to the boy above.

It was a bizarre sensation to slowly be acquired, one Eoran barely understood that he needed to control. His body always hummed in a subtle allure; he didn’t realize that was something that could be transmitted until he felt himself seeking some equilibrium between the melding of their molecules.

In the throes of his blood soaked game of hide and seek and destroy, Eoran reclaimed Kasse’s lips,
took his mouth the way he wanted to since they got off the truck,
since they got on the truck,
since they last ate together,
since they said goodnight three days ago,
hushed and wishful that Amstead's dumb land grab would soon be over,
since they introduced themselves to one another
in the dark bowels of a buzzing aircraft

when Eoran earned the contours of that wild boy's name

piece by piece

and held it in his throat

with hope that he'd never have to let it go.

"Oh fuck—" Kasse's sharpened moan was a razorblade in his guts and he bled for the kiss Eoran reaped from his mouth. "—is this you? Are you in me?"

The agony was a beacon.

"Like I'm in you?"

Every stab of pain shouted his name in Eoran's colours, his coy inflections battered till broken, starvation trickling from his mouth in breathless sighs. Kasse, in their moment of standstill—this moment still justified by the ghost's vandal dredging of the bloodwright's prurient seek-and-destroy target zones and their excruciating markers—lapped the hunger from his best friend's lips, loving and slow, the way he'd wanted since the moment he first laid eyes on Eoran in the dispatch plane.

When Eo's anguish ebbed from his system, Kasse pulled out of his friend's body, bloody hand sliding up his stomach, up his chest, unhindered by the filthy fatigues that should have been a barrier.

Fuck, what was he doing? They were in enemy territory, their CO was out cold and all Kasse could think about was how smooth his friend would taste in the back of his throat.

"Eo, fuck..." He was begging on a tremble, kiss more insistent, teeth more depraved. "I can't stop. All I've wanted for so long was to breathe with you, be with you. Don't make me stop."

Eoran was poised to strip him bare. He held the distress of his friend’s tongue between his teeth and savored the sweetness of their mutual suffering until he began to rot in its excess and had to let him go.

“Kasse, I—” The boy stuttered in the mire of his greedy heart with lips reluctant to leave.

For a moment, Eo looked at him with violence in his dark sight eyes, with a stark expression that promised to rake that feral thing’s flesh over the kicked up coals of his body until he was nothing but a slick of soot—soiled and stained, black like a sticky tar smear spread all over that burning boy’s immortal flame. His hands made demands that he would fucking have him in the way they held and pulled, so willing to rip the both of them from reality, split the fabric of their time from actuality and conduct the vile massacre that made his body squirm to fit the shape of the very carnal want that befell him.

And yet, despite the ruthless nature of his lust, so heightened by the ebbing flavors of his life’s potential end, Eoran’s rational mind seemed perfectly fine double-crossing his need for immediacy.

“Kasse, I don’t hear Brint. We can’t—” Eo began to say, lungs gasping for air in the murky pool of sudor suspended between them, “We can’t let Brint go. He’s been good to us. I don’t hear him, is he already dead?”

Kasse's mind tunneled. His focus was always direct, pinpoint precise on where he was going and where he had been. Now, however, there were two potential corpses at the cruel dual-mouths of his wormhole vision: there was Eo and there was Brint, and fuck he'd only been able to think about Eo.

"Shit," Kasse breathed, easing Eo off of his lap before he scrambled through the puddle of bloodwright accumulating around his yearling splayed legs. Gods, his chest hurt and he was bleeding too, but at his core, Kasse was a pack hunter, but now his pack was annihilated.

Checking for vitals and coming back positive, the boy looped his arms around the CO's chest, groaning as the larger man's shoulder blades dug into his chest wounds. He drug him across the dusty floor like prey, all the violence and chaos collected in footpaths and snaketrails and tallies and abstracts all documented in

so much blood.

Laying Brint down, Kasse was immediately searching their CO. The radio went to Eoran as Kasse straddled the sergeant's knees, tearing at his undershirt to make yet another tourniquet.

Eoran fussed with the clunky contraption's knobs as he tucked the handset against his ear. Unsquelched, the boy leaned back on a wall with a short series of exhales. Even in the freneticism of his worry, Eoran's voice managed to steady itself under the weight of his communication's importance. He relayed a concise string of half-coded jargon requesting a medevac and detailing scenarios escalating up their chain of command—from three to six, nameless to actual, soldier to unit commander. He confirmed the orders he was given and placed the handset down on the floor. The young soldier leaned his head back and closed his eyes, arms hugging his own, damp torso.

"Bravo team is nearby," Eoran announced, "They've been given orders to sweep toward our position. Alpha team is further behind, but on the way. We've been designated the rendezvous point, so we're to stay put for now." Head flopped aside, he looked upon Kasse again, briefly watching him work on Brint's wounds. "How are you? Do you want me to try and find you food?"

"Back right pocket," the boy replied to his friend, looking up at Eoran as he pulled the strip of cloth tight around Brint's leg. Kasse wasn't going to have much of an undershirt left when support arrived. For a moment, brief in its ghosting, the older boy smiled low, incandescent despite the quiet.

Eoran knew.

The older PFC hadn't realized just how much he just needed someone who knew.

The bloodwright smiled back, subdued and tender, wasting precious time in the silence of his expression and the moment he took to dawdle in languid observation of that boy who held his fondness. His gaze fell from Kasse’s storm-laden eyes to the ministrations of his hands—he followed the angled length of the adjunct’s lithely built arms unfortunately hidden beneath the sleeves of his uniform before he looked away.

Though it was an arduous task, Eoran pushed himself up the wall to standing. He circled around behind Kasse and retrieved a packet of biscuits from the velcro pocket on his rear, offering them in an upturned palm. Lip haunted by the phantom of his friend, his teeth took the delicate flesh there in a ponderous hesitation.

“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Eoran’s eyes appraised their CO, his bandages, his breathing.

"I don't know." Already that quantum boy had his hands on Brint's bones, feeling at what sort of skeletal vine ruptured his systems, taken control. He was dissolving sharpened edges, nettle spine's grown from calcified extensions of bloodwright bone. Looking up, Kasse took one of the energy biscuits offered with his mouth, not really considering how it must have looked: he truly was some stray dog taking food directly from his friend's open hand. Around a mouthful of sticky nutrient-dense cardboard, the boy was listless in his concentration. "I hope so. I really fucking hope so."