Eoran hummed, sympathetic and worried... but for a reason that would soon drastically change.

Perhaps it was that hope, or perhaps it was those bloodslick hands sloshing around his innards that stirred the incapacitated commander back to the realm of the living. In a flash, Brint’s eyes snapped open like he was defibrillated by touch, bright and acuminate and unmoving on the boy whose legs were split across his body.

“Sejan, what the fuck are you doing?” He asked, calm amid his resuscitation despite the palpitation of his body’s interior.

Fight or flight eyes looked back at Brint in frozen terror, absolute and all consuming. "I'm…"

What? What was he doing?

"I… I—I just…"

He couldn't have—
He shouldn't have been—
Why was he even fucking asking?

"Lie down. Don't move. I'm saving your life. Tell me… tell me where it hurts."

Brint watched Kasse for a minute that felt longer than it was, obviously assessing the boy: his reaction, his posture, his terror pinprick sharp on the stale air, traveling through unseeable droplets of humidity in the manner of a ravenous illness.

Without averting his eyes, the older man wrapped his fingers around Kasse’s forearm and directed it down the length of his gore-smeared side. He pushed him through the taut muscles of his abdomen, down to the ridges and divots of his punctured hip where that bone-abundant mess had originated.

He was seen,
Brint saw him
and he did not recoil.
Now, two men knew what Kasse was
but he didn't know what the man under him would so with such

sensitive information.

He expelled an audible sigh that shivered off his lips when Brint grabbed him, directed his touch through his body and down, past his waistband and deep into his hip

illium
iscium
pubis

Kasse looked to Eo. His mind was overwhelmed. He was running along too many what-if paths towards self destruct and he didn't know how to reconcile the newly understood ride-or-die makeout pact with his friend and how Brint's intense scrutiny and the sureness of his touch made him feel sick inside, made his stomach lurch—

...but not in a bad way.

"Okay, here," he said gently, leaning over Brint's groin, free hand gripping him by the opposing crest of his pelvis. "This is gonna hurt—but we're here. I'm here."

Eoran stood by dumbfounded, in shock and frozen like a voyeur who would not be caught in his peeping tom vigilance if he didn’t move. Breath controlled to the bare minimum needed to redden the persistent rushing of his blood, the boy’s hand remained upturned with a second communion to the sacramental show that was his teammates twisted within another on the carmine stained floor.

“Yeah, I feel you,” the sergeant said, sound a rumble in the back of his mouth, reverberating in sub-sound tones like the words were a secret to be shared between only them and their narrow airspace. “Do your worst.”

Even in the dare, Brint kept his hold on the wayward adjunct. He let Kasse’s fingers stroll unrestricted in his skin, but still, he wanted to walk the path with him.

And Kasse couldn't take his eyes off him.

Fear pulped the boy’s throat till his breath ran away from him, a marathon rasp in his ear. He'd never been so terrified in all his fucking life and yet here he was, hunched over his CO like his mouth was deep throat pulling those stilted tones from Brint's chest. How was it that Brint was under the edge of Kasse's razorbacked utility and his breathing was so calm while the ghost himself was

neurotoxic
erratically charged
close to hyperventilating.

Despite his trepidation, Kasse snapped away the first spine lodged in Brint's hip joint, withdrew it as a figment, and laid it on his CO's chest as a solid.

"One," he whispered because he didn't know what else to say.

"Fuck," Brint exhaled, anguish slowly eddying into the dulcet throbbing of relief. He was calm because it was easy for him—Brint was a white man in a war zone, a conqueror with a kill switch, a man in a field of monstrosities. People were expected to die in the field. War was an animal that macerated evidence of inhumanity in its diligently manducating jaw, it laid waste to questions of methodology because the end goal was fucking death and as long as bodies were broken down to their barest components to make way for the tanks, then he was doing an acceptable job with the task he’d been given.

Of course Brint was calm. Of course he was. When he got back to base, all he had to do was worry about getting better and filling out an after action report. He had nothing to fear. He had nothing to hide.

He wasn't a wright kid with a record—he was a center balance upon which the safety of that preternaturally gifted boy tottered. He was the system that could tear Kasse's life completely apart.

"Fuck—" Again, eyes softening in his waking autopsy.

“Fu-c—k,” Kasse uttered in echo, anxiety breaking his curse apart till it showed out chokehold bright, his mirror heart strapped tight in the slats of his collapsible throat. “Two.”

Brint’s softening cut the mesmer tether between them and the PFC ripped his eyes away to look up at Eo. There was an apology on his lips but he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done to warrant it, didn’t know why he felt like it needed to be said. All he knew was that all this felt unreal. There was a tangle of nerves coiling and twining and condensing under pressure of duty that he didn’t want in his body anymore and fuck if it wasn’t the one thing inside him that he couldn’t tear out and toss to Eoran, all that miplaced lust as lightless and destructive as a dying star.

“Three.”

If he could focus his intention past Brint, past the way he took his wrist like a lover when he raked through his furnace coal bellows, pulled his half conscious sighs from the embers stoked through his in-and-out gaze once green, now dark in the crematory of Kasse’s touch.

“Four.”

What was this? Why couldn’t he stop this?

“F-five—”

Kasse dropped his head, forehead to their CO’s ragged sternum, tears welling in his eyes because he couldn’t fucking help himself.

“—six, FUCK—Eo, where is Bravo? Do you see them? I have to be out before they get here—”

He screwed his eyes shut when he shuddered, free hand sliding up the older man’s hip, up his side, balling into Brint’s fatigues.

"I—hold on," Eoran stuttered in step, swept into a fumbling action that made him cross the room and carefully poke his head out the window into the dangerous day. The horizon was clear, but maybe his vantage point was wrong.

"That's enough," Brint meanwhile said, made quiet by proximity, grip tightening on Kasse's arm. "Leave something in there for the docs, so I can corroborate my report." There was a kindness in those words—the same one that earlier granted Kasse his fraternization in free-spoken speech, the same one that trusted the boy to go off on his own, to form plans and enact them despite his lack of command. It was the same one that now had him releasing his hold and ruffling the black stain of hair atop Kasse's head with comfort and care. Brint had all the power in the world in his hair-submerged hand, but he was not an unkind man. Those boys had bled alongside him, after all.

"Nothing yet," Eoran announced from the window, sure he would hear the commotion of another team before he would ever see them. Still, there wasn't even that—just juddering silence, the disquiet of his war torn heart. “I can go keep watch for them on the street…?”

Glancing back to the boy at the window, Brint’s teeth worked the inside of his cheek, turning the suggestion over in slick flesh and spit.

The revenant, future hangman, ghost all but ready to evaporate off this plane relaxed so slightly, leaned into his CO’s touch like any comfort would do in the drought he found himself suffering. If he closed his eyes, if he focused on the simple automatic notion of breathing, then this small kindness could be enough, just enough, to convince him that when they got back to base he would be okay, that Brint might be willing to keep him safe—

But what would it cost?

When Eoran suggested he leave, Kasse was shorn from the delusion of his safety astride Brint, sitting up like shots had been fired directly into his head.

“No.” Kasse’s response was chilling in its stark remand, yelping and torn and limping in its tattered reverberation from the boy’s mouth to his best friend’s ear. His need was evident, his fear well known. “Don’t leave. You can’t leave.”

Looking down at the man still beneath him, bloody hands barely leaving their mark on that uniform soaked through, the PFC laid himself out plain. He surrendered his predator snarl and let his fear of capture breathe life into his gin trap reality.

“Please don’t tell. You can’t tell,” he begged, urgency of his quaver a portent to the tears that immediately followed, streaking hot down the blood and dirt smeared across his face. He was frozen in the storm swallowing him whole, unable to see a way out. “Please, Brint—I’ll fucking die. They’ll kill me, I’ll fucking die. Please.”

"Breathe, kid." The words were too easy for him to say, given from a perspective that had no idea how to empathize with what Kasse was currently working through. Brint sat up with a groan and scooted himself back to lean against the wall so he didn't have to support his own weight on a hip that was still wrecked. "I won't tell. You've saved my life twice today, so I'll save yours tomorrow, and the day after, and even the day after that. Sit down and relax. You're going to agitate whatever wounds you got, and if they take a turn for the worse, then there's not much I can do about it." The sergeant leaned back into the wall, closing his eyes as the chill of splatter-splotched concrete met the back of his skull. "We'll all just wait here. Bravo will radio if they can't find us. We’ll radio them in ten for a position update if they’re not here."

Eoran nodded and worked his way back, dawdling only to inspect the minifridge feebly chugging along the sporadic electric pulses of the township's failing power grid. He pulled the last can of soda from the inside and brought it back to his teammates, positioning it between the three of them. The can was already beading with condensation.

The Toriet boy took a spot close to his friend, brushing gently against him, expression muted by his affection tumefied around the pain pooling in his center. He didn’t know if things would work out, or be okay, or what the future would bring him or them, but he knew he didn’t want to tip any precariously balanced scales with words. Eoran just watched, enamored, silent, and patient for the time being.

As though he’d been running on the fumes of distress alone, Kasse all but collapsed before Eo. He laid on the filthy floor, uncertain in how binding Brint’s acquiescence truly was, but he found the words comforting nonetheless. He stretched his arm out, reaching into the blindspot built of the bloodwright’s shadow and curled his fingers around Eoran’s own, only now assessing his wounds. His temporary digits combed absently through his body to extract splinters of a dead man’s bones with nothing but soft grimaces to betray that he felt anything at all anymore.

Eoran lifted their hands into his lap, his palm an overturned pillow on which to cradle his friend's bones, precious and invaluable. As they waited, his fingers played secret songs of adoration on the protrusions of Kasse's knuckles, strokes plodding and fluid, unspoken and unseen.

Eoran turned his head to watch the open door of the ruined apartment. In the distance, there was a smattering of sound: gunfire chirped like nightbirds out to collect the day's last insects before the setting sun stole them away. It wouldn’t be too long, now.